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Old Masters
Beyond the Sea
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley When King George IV approached J.M.W. Turner in 1823 and commissioned him to paint Trafalgar, the most important naval engagement in British history, the artist rose to the task. He invested The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 with all the drama and tragedy the subject demanded, showing that the glory…
Market: Old Art City
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley Every July in London, Christie’s and Sotheby’s shine the spotlight on Old Masters. Christie’s will hold its evening sale on July 7 and will offer 19th-century works alongside the Old Masters, although these will be relatively few; Paul Raison, London head of Old Masters and 19th-century art for Christie’s, estimates that…
Market: East End Aesthetes
By: Jenna Curry Once a remote, picturesque haven for artists from Childe Hassam to Jackson Pollock, the Hamptons are now more likely to host collectors and well-heeled summer vacationers. In 2008 entrepreneur Rick Friedman organized the area’s first international fine art fair, ArtHamptons, which he describes as “a (casual) situation where a lot of the…
Market: The Rite of Spring
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley Watching the marquee spring evening sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in New York was like crossing a rope bridge in an action film: The fear of collapse yielded to the relief of avoiding the abyss. The shakiest moments came during Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern sale on May 5, when Pablo Picasso’s…
In Perspective
By: The Editors EXHIBITIONS Parade of piranesis: David Tunick spent more than 20 years assembling Giovanni Battista Piranesi 1720–78, an exhibition of the Venetian artist’s etchings that opened in May and will remain on display through the summer at Tunick’s Manhattan gallery. It includes the last available intact set of Magnificenze di Roma, a 1751…
Restoration Hardware
By: James Panero In September 2000 art conservator Marco Grassi was attending an estate auction in Paris with an old friend, a European private collector. In the warren of salesrooms at the Drouot Hotel, mixed in with the chipped crockery and worn sofas, was a small rectangular painting in a dusty glass case. It appeared to…
Talking Pictures: Revolutionary Road
“I should be photographing more steel mills or paper factories,” Edward Weston wrote in his daybook on Sept. 13, 1923, “but here I am in romantic Mexico … There are sunlit walls of fascinating surface textures, and there are clouds!”
Design: Wonder Child
“Suddenly, without any kind of warning, I found myself completely naked, in the heart of the city of Milan, on the morning of Oct. 24, 1907.” With this astonishment began the fantastic life of Bruno Munari, an artist and designer whose every moment was imbued with the wonder of a child emerging from the womb.
Traveling Collector: Hungarian Rhapsody
Many cities around the world have had the dubious fortune of living through “interesting times,” as the old saying goes. But what makes Budapest unique is that its tumultuous past is still writ large across the city’s face. Forged in 1873 from Buda and Pest, two separate towns that faced each other across a bend in the Danube, practically every vista in this beautiful metropolis seems to offer a lesson in cultural history.
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