Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2020 i Art & Antiques

THE SANTA FE Art Auction will hold its Signature Sale on November 14. The sale will be presented in the auction house’s new 13,000-square-foot headquarters in the heart of Santa Fe’s Baca Railyard District. Headlining the sale is a collection of paintings by the celebrated Western painter Gerard Curtis Delano. The quality of the cache, which includes 12 works, is a rarity. “We couldn’t be more enthusiastic about this collection of paintings by Gerard Curtis Delano,” says Gillian Blitch, President and CEO of the Santa Fe Art Auction. “While we have offered many classic Delano paintings in the past, these are the best we’ve seen and we are sure the Western market will react accordingly.” The Orange Cloud (oil on canvas), a standout, features two Navajo women talking on horseback,…

“VISIONARY,” a solo exhibition of Cathy Hegman’s paintings, is on view at TEW Galleries in Atlanta through December 4. The Mississippi-based Hegman painted all of the work in the show this year. In her artist’s statement about this body of work, she writes of watching fireworks on New Year’s Eve last year and saying, “This will be the best year yet—it is inevitable because we will all see so much more clearly in 2020.” She continues “I could not have been further from reality. This year has been, in the words of a song by the Temptations, ‘a ball of confusion.’” The general tumult of this year aside, Hegman’s December 31 prediction came true in many respects for her own work, and a heightened sense of clarity accompanies the paintings…

SEPTEMBER GRAY Fine Art Gallery in Atlanta, the nation’s premier gallery for contemporary African American and African diasporic art, will present a virtual exhibition of work by Danny Simmons, Jr. and Jamele Wright, Sr., starting on November 20. Simmons, who terms his style “neo-African Abstract Expressionism,” has been inspired by shamans and aboriginal artists. “Throughout my career,” he explains, “I’ve been looking to capture the spiritual essence of making art or the power of spirit within the lines and markings I put on canvas and paper. I honestly believe artists can be conduits of a universal spiritual force.” Wright’s textile-based work focuses on what he calls “the Black American vernacular experience.” In a manner influenced by hip-hop, he samples found materials, Georgia red clay, and Dutch Wax cloth to explore…

“DAN DAILEY: Character Sketch” is on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., through November 29. The exhibition focuses on figurative work by the prolific glass artist and features 33 pieces spanning Dailey’s 40-year career. Dailey uses the medium of glass to articulate his perceptions and thoughts about humanity, and in a host of works in the show, the human figure takes center stage. Dubious (2011), a blown, sandblasted, and acid-polished glass and metal piece from the series Individuals, features a bust of a figure with its hand lifted to its face as if in mid-thought, while Perspective (2011, blown, sandblasted, and acid-polished glass, metal), also from that series, shows an ovoid figure cleverly bent at the neck, its head resting on the surface on which it…

The history of the fascination of Surrealist and abstract artists with the indigenous art of the Arctic is a long one. It starts in the 1930s, when George G. Heye, founder of the Museum of the American Indian in New York, decided to deaccession some of the less-prized Inuit and Northwest Coast pieces in the museum’s collection. He allowed the dealer Julius Carlebach, a friend of Max Ernst and a close associate of the Surrealists, to sell these at reasonable prices, and the buyers included such luminaries as Ernst, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Kay Sage, Roberto Matta, and Enrico Donati. The works, especially the Yup’ik masks from Alaska, made a deep impression on the artists, with their evocative and bizarre imagery, asymmetry, and suggestions of the transformation of animal into…

AN EVOLVING AND unfixed conception of cinema is at the heart of “expanded cinema,” and at heart of the Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibition “Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver’s Cinematic Illumination” (through February 2021). The single, large-scale work that makes up the show was originally conceived as a one-time event staged at Tokyo’s Killer Joe discotheque in 1969. Using 18 slide projectors with colored gels, Gulliver projected single frames—taken from 16mm images of mass media and everyday life—on the walls of the dance club. Composed of 1,500 images, Cinematic Illumination had as its goal to meld the huge, single-frame projections with the music, dancing, and atmosphere of Killer Joe. While creating an intoxicating nightlife experience, Gulliver was also deconstructing and rethinking the traditional mode of moving image projection. His multiple single-frame…

RENA BRANSTEN Gallery in San Francisco is currently hosting a solo exhibition of new paintings by Hung Liu. Titled “The Sun Also Rises,” the show is on view by appointment through November 14. Liu, who was born in Changchung, China, in 1948 and emigrated to the United States in 1984, centers her recent work around the photographs of Dorothea Lange. With some works in the show, she employs a new method of composing “ensemble paintings” in which people and objects from Lange’s photographs are isolated and digitally printed on shaped wood and as aluminum cutouts. Liu paints these elements and adds other components of oil on canvas, effectively creating new compositions and narratives. Through these works, Liu reframes Lange’s depictions of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl era, tracing…

ON DECEMBER 5 at 9:00 a.m. (EST) the Hillsborough, N.C.-based Leland Little Auctions will hold its Important Winter Auction. Headlining the sale are more than 30 lots from the personal collection of noted antiques dealer and fine art consultant James H. Craig and his partner Randy S. Johnson. Craig, a Juilliard-trained violinist, ran an antiques dealership in Raleigh, N.C., for decades and consulted for numerous institutions and private collections, including the White House, the Mint Museum, and the North Carolina Executive Mansion. In 2007, the Mint Museum mounted “Personal Preferences: Paintings from the Jim Craig and Randy Johnson Collection,” an exhibition of more than 65 of the couple’s 170-painting collection. Several of the works featured in the show will be featured in the sale. One highlight is The Prospector, a…

JOHN MORAN AUCTIONS of Monrovia, Calif., will hold its “California & American Fine Art” sale on November 17. The auction features a dazzling selection of paintings, with many coming to the market for the first time. With an emphasis on landscape painting, the sale will showcase vistas of the West and beyond. One of the sale’s most engrossing views comes from inveterate California painter Granville Redmond. Landscape with poppies and lupine (oil on canvas), which is estimated at $80,000–120,000, depicts a mountainous slope covered with a thick carpet of orange flowers. Of Redmond’s paintings his close friend Charlie Chaplin said, “There’s such a joyousness about them all. Look at the gladness in that sky, the riot of color in those flowers….” His sentiment is perfectly applicable to this particular work. Offering…

ANNIE LAPIN’S paintings are like portals. Step inside, and you find yourself in a disquieting landscape, unfamiliar and yet eerily familiar at the same time. They shimmer with possibilities, almost in a quantum state, to the point that if you look, turn away, and then look again, you could swear that something has moved. In her works, which are basically acrylic on canvas with some mixed media elements, the compositions are discontinuous, so that fragments of landscape are interspersed with passages of pure color and form, so that it’s impossible to categorize the paintings as figurative or abstract. In some of them, one part of the image overlaps another, creating an illusion of frames within frames, as in a classic trompe l’oeil painting. But Lapin doesn’t really see herself as…

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Emile, his treatise on education, “Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.” For young painters living in the wake of Rousseau, learning the visual truth of nature was of vital importance. The transforming patterns of weather, season, and hour; the changing temperaments of a clouded sky; the growth of endemic flora and fauna in a given region could not be better learned from a master, no matter how accomplished, than from the natural environment. Nor could even the most sensitive artist truly perceive these details within the walls of the studio. For painters in late 18th- and early 19th-century Europe, learning in the field literally meant learning in the field. Painting oil sketches en plein air was an essential part of an…

The celebrated painter Leo Valledor was born in San Francisco in 1936 to Filipino American parents and grew up in the city’s Fillmore District. He decamped for New York in 1961, becoming a founding member of the historic Park Place Gallery and showing alongside Mark di Suvero, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, and others. He returned to San Francisco in 1968, and that is where “Leo Valledor: East-West Series 1968–71, ” an exhibition opening at Brian Gross Fine Art on November 12, begins. The show features a series of eight paintings that Valledor created in the years following his homecoming. These works are characterized by broad fields of uniform color framed within painted borders. A study in the expansive, optical qualities of color, the series found Valledor trying to develop a…

THIS YEAR, DUE to Covid-19, Intersect Art and Design will replace SOFA Chicago’s 2020 edition with the inaugural edition of Intersect Chicago, a virtual art fair. The fair will run online at sofaexpo.com from November 6–12, starting with an invitation-only VIP Preview Day on November 5. An intersection of art, design, objects, and lifestyle, the show will feature daily focuses: glass, contemporary art, design, ceramic and craft, Outsider art, figure, and public art/sculpture. Highlights include a cherry wood sculpture by Elizabeth Turk titled Bush Wren. The arresting piece, which was made this year but looks as though it would be at home in the collection of a Renaissance court, is available through Hirschl & Adler Modern. Heller Gallery will feature Amber Cowan’s Old Quilt on Dresser Tray (2020) a flameworked…

ROBERT L. B. TOBIN, who died in 2001, was a San Antonio, Texas, collector and performance advocate who put together a collection, spanning four centuries, that chronicles the collaboration between artists and the theater. He bequeathed these artworks to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, which last year mounted an exhibition titled “Picasso to Hockney: Modern Art on Stage.” Now through January 17, a version of that show is on view at the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio. “Picasso to Hockney” reveals how visual artists embraced the modernist ambition of a “total work of art” that would combine painting, music, drama, and dance. In the service of cooperation between the arts, artists emerged from the studio to apply their skills to the applied arts of set, costume, and…

STAYING TOGETHER isn’t always easy. In the case of Titian’s poesie, the six mythological paintings he made in the 1550s and ’60s for Philip of Spain, breaking up took but a few decades. Dispersed piecemeal from the Spanish royal collection, only the Prado’s Venus and Adonis (about 1553–54) stayed in Madrid. Perseus and Andromeda (about 1554–56) left Spain first and was brought to London by the artist and art scout Anthony van Dyck some time after 1623. It eventually entered the Wallace Collection in London. The Rape of Europa (1559–62) also decamped for Great Britain but was acquired by the American collector Isabella Stewart Gardner from the Earl of Darnley with the help of the art historian and connoisseur Bernard Berenson in 1896. The painting’s impact was immediately and passionately…

ALTHOUGH ARGUABLY ALL ART IS ABSTRACTION, the idea of painting “abstractly,” that is to say, without creating representations of external objects, dates back to around 1910. The “non-objective” painting practiced by Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Frantisek Kupka, Robert Delaunay, and others in Europe and the U.S. at that time was revolutionary but remained limited in its appeal. The public was largely bewildered and most modernist artists continued to retain some elements of figuration in their work. After World War II, however, abstraction, in the form of Abstract Expressionism and related schools, became the dominant mode of art making and conquered the art market. This triumph was short-lived, and the 1950s proved to be the high-water mark of abstraction in art. In the 1960s and ’70s, new approaches arose including Pop…