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Old Masters
Market: Miami Madness
By: A&A Staff It’s a sign of the season: As the cold weather sets in up north and the snowbirds head south, art invades Miami. This year Art Basel Miami Beach, the flagship event of December’s contemporary art week, is back for its eighth edition, along with—count them—17 satellite fairs and associated events. That’s a…
Market: Smart Sets
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley Last September at Bonhams’ Knightsbridge location in London, an old television set with a 15-inch screen that no longer works sold for almost $30,000. While it comes with some spiffy extras (its oak-veneered cabinet also contains a record player, a radio and a minibar), it commanded £18,000 ($29,400) on an estimate…
Talking Pictures: The Scholar-Dealer
He is America’s preeminent dealer in Dutch Old Master paintings. But with his soft-spoken manner, gray-flecked beard and disarmingly rumpled suit, Otto Naumann looks more like a college professor than a businessman.
Essay: Poetry of the Moment
When Robert Frank’s landmark photography book, The Americans, was first published in the United States in 1959, it was not warmly received, to put it mildly. His photographs—off-kilter, sometimes out of focus or unflattering but always remarkable—were seen by some in that nationalistic, Cold War-era as an all-out condemnation of the country.
Exhibitions: In the House
During its relatively short life, the Bauhaus school was the site of thousands of conversations and experiments in which artists, designers and architects came together to collectively decide what contemporary art should be.
The Thinker
In September 1931, Alexandre Kojève addressed a letter to his uncle, painter Vasily Kandinsky, one of the pioneers of abstract art, comparing his capacity to continually discover new forms to Picasso’s. “But unlike him, you never allow yourself the role of ham actor,” quipped Kojève, a Russian emigré philosopher living in the Parisian suburb of Boulogne.
From Russia with Love
The Taos School of painting is known for its part-academic, part-modernistic depictions of a startlingly beautiful landscape and for its celebration of the picturesque qualities of New Mexico’s indigenous people. It often takes the unjaded eye of an outsider to see a place this way, and in fact, none of the Taos painters were actually from Taos (see Art & Antiques, Summer 2009).
From the Editor: Fifty Years Ago—and Tomorrow
As 2009 comes to a close (and not a moment too soon, for many in the art world), we are being asked, from several quarters, to cast our minds back 50 years to 1959. That’s not for nostalgic reasons, but in order to understand where we are today. According to author Fred Kaplan, 1959 was “the year everything changed.”
Collecting: Made in the Shade
Mezzotint allows artists to portray the world in all its many shades of gray. The printmaking technique, invented in 1642, renders the infinite subtleties of the tones that lie between black and white in a manner ideal for reproducing oil paintings. “Most reproductive techniques until then relied on line,” says Sheila O’Connell, assistant keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum. “Mezzotint allows smoother transitions between line and shade.”
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