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Old Masters
Market: A Different Light
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley Vilhelm Hammershøi was a mysterious Danish artist who made mysterious, haunting paintings. He preferred the restrained light of his native Copenhagen and let it infuse his images, many of which depict dwellings where he and his wife, Ida, lived around the turn of the 20th century. She was his favorite model,…
In Perspective
By: The Editors UPCOMING AUCTIONS High Gloss: A trio of Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann furnishings—a piano, a bookcase and a double bed—will headline one of the two Art Deco sales at Sotheby’s Paris on June 4. The boat-shaped bed, from 1928, is made of amboyna veneer, tulipwood and gilt bronze, and is estimated at €60,000–80,000 ($78,000–104,000). Fine…
Exhibitions: A Monumental Show
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounts a Saint-Gaudens exhibition, it tends to be a major event. Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which opens June 30 and continues through Nov. 15, will be the fourth such exhibition in the Met’s history and the first since…
Talking Pictures: A Holland-America Line
By: Jonathan Lopez On Feb. 6 the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., announced that it had acquired Bagpipe Player in Profile, by the 17th-century Dutch artist Hendrick ter Brugghen. A sophisticated image, it depicts a rustic musician in antique costume, seated, the brawny mass of his exposed right arm offering a poignant contrast to the…
Critic's Notebook: A Painter of Modern Life
In 1967, at the height of Beatlemania, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Bandappeared to wide acclaim. With more than 11 million copies sold in the U.S. alone, it was one of the most successful albums of all time. The cover, designed by the British painter Peter Blake, displayed 70 famous faces, including Edgar Allan Poe, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Carl Jung, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, Lenny Bruce, Mae West—and one painter, Richard Lindner.
More Than Murals
Despite the standard art-history-book summary of Mexican modernism, there actually is much more to this colorful subject than the works, emblematic though they might be, of Los Tres Grandes (The Three Great Ones)—Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. Their epoch-defining murals painted in the decades following the 1910–20 revolution that ousted the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz gave enduring expression to a proud people’s still-emerging sense of national identity.
Cubist Cottage
Of all the towns that could have played host to New England’s first modernist building, Lenox, Mass., is among the least likely. When Mrs. Astor’s 400 finished summering at their extravagant, ironically named “cottages” in Newport, R.I., they would shift to Lenox, in the Berkshires, for several more weeks before returning to Manhattan in the fall.
Traveling Collector: Pleasures of Parma
Parma—the name alone conjures a feast for the senses. Great wheels of pungent Parmigiano Reggiano and haunches of glistening pink prosciutto are universally known by the city’s name. But there’s a lot more to Parma than cheese and ham. Historic art treasures and a lively contemporary scene make this charming small city (population 170,000) in Italy’s Emilia Romagna region a pleasure for the eye and mind as well as the palate.
Books: Photos Trouvés
There might appear to be a great, even unbridgeable, distance between the perfectly composed, austerely graceful black-and-white photographs of Walker Evans and the colorized postcard views that were printed by the millions and mailed all over America in the early decades of the 20th century. But Evans, who began amassing postcards as a 12-year-old boy and kept at it his whole life, didn’t see it that way.
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