Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2021 i Art & Antiques

ON MAY 6, New York gallery Debra Force Fine Art opens “An Adventurous Spirit: Julian Alden Weir.” Weir (1852–1919) was an American impressionist painter who was part of the Cos Cob Art Colony near Greenwich, Conn., and a founding member of “The Ten,” a group of recusant American artists who eschewed establishment art organizations for their own unified exhibition in 1898. Weir, the second to last of 16 children, was surrounded by art since childhood. His father, Robert Walter Weir, was a professor of drawing at West Point Military Academy whose students included James Abbot McNeill Whistler, and his brother, John Ferguson Weir, was a painter and profes- sor of art and design at Yale Art School. The latter, who brought Hudson River School artists like Thomas Cole, Asher B.…

THE ARIZONA STATE University Art Museum in Tempe, Ariz., is presenting “José Clemente Orozco: The Final Cut” through June 5. The exhibition is dedicated to the last five years of the life of Orozco (1883–1949), famous as one of “Los Tres Grandes,” the mural masters of modern Mexico. “This is a focus that no other exhibition on Orozco has ever presented,” says curator Julio César Morales, who has collaborated closely with the artist’s family in Guadalajara, Mexico. The works on view are darkly expressionistic, sometimes grotesque and even horrifying. One, a 1945 India ink drawing on cardboard, depicts a distorted human figure and is titled 2…The truth, twisted, deformed, altered, mutilated and daubed. “As we begin a new year in the aftermath of a pandemic and social uprisings,” says Morales,…

THIS SPRING, Heritage Auctions is hosting an array of fine art auctions, several of which boast lots from the Estate of Kenneth Hill. A lifelong collector, Hill worked by day as a pharmacist, beginning in the early 1970s, and over some 35 years oversaw the development of software to help digitize the pharmaceutical industry, founding several companies. The collector was based for many years in Miami, where he filled his home with marine paintings, ship models, and antique furnishings. He also amassed an eclectic collection of Versace furniture, linens, and porcelain dinner services and artworks by painters like Antonio Maria de Reyna Manescau and Felix Ziem. Later relocating to Fort Worth, Hill acquired works by Montague Dawson and Franz Richart Unterberger, as well as a variety of silver, china, antique…

MAGAZINES AS we know them evolved in the 1920s and ’30s, amid the social change that followed World War I. In the United States, Henry Luce and Briton Hadden created Time, the first great news weekly. Time presented news analysis, broad perspectives, and a witty voice that took readers far beyond the bare facts of the newspaper headlines and spawned many imitators. In France and Germany, pioneering editors like Lucien Vogel, Stefan Lorant, and Kurt Korff created pictorial magazines such as Vu and Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. These aimed to satisfy the public’s increasingly ravenous appetite for images of news events and daily life, combining words and photographs to create the first true picture stories. Luce himself turned imitator when he launched Life in 1936; it was a distinctly American version…

HOKUSAI’S GREAT WAVE made a splash at Christie’s Japanese and Korean Art sale in New York in March, setting a new world auction record for the celebrated Japanese artist. The famous work—a woodblock print from Hokusai’s Fugaku sanjurokkei series (Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji)—has been celebrated since it was introduced to Europe in the mid-19th century. It’s no surprise, then, that the highly recognizable print went for 10 times its low estimate and edged past Hokusai’s previous auction record, set by a book of prints of Mount Fuji that sold for $1.47 million at Sotheby’s Paris in 2002 (that book came to auction from the estate of French art dealer Huguette Berès). Hokusai created the work when he was in his 70s and going through a rough period. His wife…

NEUE AUCTIONS of Beachwood, Ohio, will hold its May Modern Online sale on May 15. The sale includes a wide range of paintings, sculptures, works on paper, furniture, art glass, ceramics, enamel work, and jewelry. Its lots are drawn from seasoned collectors and regional estates, including the late Cleveland concert promoter Mike Belkin and his wife Annie. Among the highlights of the sale is Untitled, an ink on paper by Franz Kline. The circa-1950 abstraction is signed in the lower right corner by Kline and is estimated at $20,000– 30,000. Claude Venard’s boldly colored oil on canvas, at Still Life with Sculpture, is estimated at $3,000– 5,000. A French post-Cubist painter, Venard had a unique style of paint application emphasized in this work by its thick impasto. A fine enamel…

ON MAY 15, Selkirk Auctioneers & Appraisers is holding its Modernism & Contemporary Auction in its St. Louis, Mo., salesrooms. Among the highlights of the more than 250-lot sale is Cry of the Frogs by Paul-Émile Borduas, a work of gestural abstraction that is richly colored with the dark greens and browns of nature. Borduas, a French Canadian artist, was a leader of the avant-garde movement in Québec and the main author of the Refus Global (Total Refusal) manifesto of 1948. Cry of the Frogs is fresh to the market, having been purchased by a relative of the present consignors in 1953 from Passedoit Gallery of New York. Also fresh to the market is the landscape painter Wolf Kahn’s Long Lagoon, which was purchased from Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New…

THE AMERICAN West—generally defined as the land which lies to the west of the 100th degree of west longitude and east of the Pacific Coast—has long had a tight grip on the imagination, not only in this country but in Europe and, thanks to the movies, around the world. The appeal of the West is multiform, partaking of history, myth, and the aesthetic virtues of the landscape itself. Long before the filmmakers got to it, painters, sculptors, and photographers were giving their all to the West, documenting and romanticizing, often at the same time and in the same artwork. In general they brought a profoundly European sensibility to the tasks at hand; many of the artists were in fact European born, and many of those who were born here were…

In 1977, when asked to discuss his influences, Willem de Kooning pointed to one above all—Chaïm Soutine, the Russian-born Parisian painter who died in miserable circumstances in 1943. In some ways, it seems like an unlikely affiliation. The two artists came from different backgrounds, worked in different periods (despite being only a decade apart in age), and had no personal contact with each other. Furthermore, Soutine was a figurative painter, while de Kooning was a member of the Abstract Expressionist group. So why did de Kooning place so much importance on his encounter with Soutine? And what exactly was the nature of that encounter? Answers to these questions are being offered by an exhibition at the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia, an institution that is intimately linked with Soutine’s reputation in…

Married couple and celebrated French artists François-Xavier Lalanne and Claude Lalanne were first referred to as “Les Lalanne” in an October 1966 exhibition at the gallery of Greek art dealer and collector Alexander Iolas in Paris. The couple had held their first joint exhibition, “Zoophites,” at Jeanine Restany’s Galerie J in Paris two years earlier, and there was a lot of buzz surrounding them (not just because François-Xavier debuted La Mouche, a giant brass fly, at the show). Their engrossing organic forms, rendered with surreality, humor, and an eye for traditional French craftsmanship, were a welcome respite from the cold, monochrome modernist works that pervaded the 1960s. More often than not a package deal, the two artists would go on to develop and show their sculptures and highly imaginative decorative…

IN MARCH, Momentum Gallery in downtown Asheville, N.C., opened its new, expanded 15,000-square-foot two-floor space in a renovated century-old building. This month, the work of several artists will be on view there. Samantha Bates’ painting is inspired by the wilderness, which she conveys through patterns made up of tiny dots and dashes. In Abiding Roots, she portrays a dense thicket of forest with the roots exposed. Bates says, “The work in my solo exhibition deeply investigates the nature that made me who I am—the land that built my childhood, surrounded life-changing milestones, and shapes my days. The pieces hope for a longer kind of looking and reward extensive time with an unfolding experience. The language and material of my marks call to painting and drawing but also weaving, stitching, puncturing,…

NIKOLAI ASTRUP (1880–1928) is one of Norway’s most important painters. Unlike his contemporary Edvard Munch, however, he is little known in the United States. Munch’s work externalized both personal and generational turmoil, creating an angsty, expressionistic style that seemed to speak more broadly to fin de sìecle Europe than Norway alone. Conversely, Astrup’s richly colored, sweeping paintings delved deeply into the landscape and folklore of his native land. In the latter’s work, angst becomes longing—for beauty, for connection, for tradition, and for magic, but mostly for the place itself. The viewer feels from his paintings not the desire to share the Norwegian countryside more readily, but rather for the artist to immerse himself more fully in a Norway he was already so familiar with. Funnily, it’s in that way—Astrup’s longing…

JASPER JOHNS once described his basic working method as follows: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. [Repeat.]” This delight in creative repetition is evident in his use of the same motifs over and over—flags, targets, maps, hands, letters, numerals—not only in different works or series but even within the same work, as when he placed two slightly different American flags next to each other in one frame. He has also depicted recurring images across media—painting, sculpture, and printmaking—saying, “I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between the two.” Because printmaking is all about replication, and because it gives an artist so many ways to make variations on a theme, in a sense it is the medium most perfectly…