Innehållsförteckning för October 2020 från Art & Antiques

THE RELATIONSHIP between art-making and art writing has always been a fraught one, perhaps especially in the late 19th and 20th centuries. With the rise of modernism and the avant-garde, art writing vastly increased in volume, if for no other reason than that there was so much to explain. The new art was puzzling to many viewers, as well as to older critics and even artists, so both its visual language and its intentions needed instruction manuals, so to speak, not to mention vociferous defense against the legions of detractors. One of the first and most formidable of the this generation of critics was Félix Fénéon, who combined the roles of explicator and advocate with great success. Fénéon’s importance to the rise of modern art is being explicated, defended, and…

IT ISN’T EVERY day that an art critic who never painted a picture gets an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. But Félix Fénéon richly deserves the show he is now getting, 76 years after his death. He was the man behind the scenes of the Neo-Impressionist movement, the explainer of Seurat’s Divisionist technique, editor of a magazine that was virtually the house organ of the Parisian avant-garde, a legendary art dealer who organized history-making exhibitions, and a collector who parlayed his friendships with the greatest modernists into a trove that was truly nonpareil. But while he certainly deserves it, Fénéon would not have appreciated it. As a confirmed anarchist, he was given to secrecy; although a widely published writer, he famously said, “I aspire only to silence.” Toward…

The magnificent Imperial carved zitan “dragon” throne seen here once belonged to Aixinjueluo Pujun, the last heir-presumptive of the Qing Dynasty. The piece, which has passed through the descendants of the Chinese imperial family, will find its way to Christie’s New York on October 14 for the auction house’s Exceptional Sale. Pujun’s great-grandfather was the Emperor Duoguang, and his grandfather was Prince Dun (also known as Yicong). His father was Prince Duan (also known as Zaiyi), an ultra-conservative politician who upheld the anti-foreigner sentiments brewing in China at the time. He opposed the Hundred Days’ Reform movement of 1889 undertaken by the Guangxu Emperor and supported the conservative Dowager Empress Cixi. When the reform was crushed and the Empress had the Guangxu Emperor imprisoned in his palace, Pujun was chosen…

THE SEARCH FOR the sublime in nature, pursued by the Romantics in Northern Europe and the Hudson River School in this country, goes on in the work of Eric Aho. Aho, a 54-year-old New Englander, isn’t a landscape painter in the literal sense of the word. He doesn’t document specific places, and he doesn’t paint en plein air. Much, though not all, of his work is abstract. But whether abstract or figurative, Aho’s painting is deeply rooted in his experience of nature and conveys nature’s power to affect human beings. And paradoxically, while embarked on the centuries-old pursuit of the sublime, he delights in the sheer physicality of paint, just as earthy as the landscape it represents. What is the sublime, according to Aho? Not quite a religious experience, as…

ON NOVEMBER 15, Wayne Thiebaud will turn 100 years old. On October 11, The Crocker Art Museum, in the celebrated painter’s longtime city of residence, Sacramento, Calif., opens “Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings.” The exhibition features 100 objects, created over the course of more than 70 years. Drawn from the Crocker’s holdings and the collection of the Thiebaud family and foundation, the works in the show represent every medium and period of Thiebaud’s practice—from early Ab-Ex influenced works to his iconic desserts, and up to his most recent series of circus clowns, begun in 2014. The Crocker has had plenty of preparation for “Wayne Thiebaud 100,” the largest survey of the artist’s work in two decades. The museum hosted Thiebaud’s first solo show, “Influences of a Young Painter—Wayne…

In 1896, after eight years spent living in Paris, Anders Zorn returned to Mora, the small town in Sweden where he had been born and raised. His portraiture, deft and full of life, had won him an international reputation among the upper classes on both sides of the Atlantic, and his plein air paintings had earned him the Légion d’Honneur prize at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. But Zorn, who had grown up poor, felt a deep connection to the rural life of Mora and the Dalarna province as a whole, and after his return dedicated himself to painting the land, its people, and their folkways. He had strong ideas about the virtues of country life and old customs, and although the house he and his wife built for…

UNCANNY IMAGES of the apocalypse, the gates of hell, witches and magi will surely resonate with visitors to the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, S.C., this month—possibly because Halloween is coming up, possibly because we live in chaotic times that are just about as obsessed with the end of the world as 15th-century Europe was. Troubled times produced troubling artworks, but they were also visually stunning and intellectually rich, speaking a symbolic language deeply rooted in religion and mythology. “Charleston Collects: Devotion and Fantasy, Witchcraft and the World’s End” (October 9 through June 27, 2021) presents around 27 works (about one-third paintings and two-thirds prints) by artists of the Northern Renaissance, from the Low Countries and Germany, spanning roughly 1440–1590. The exhibition, which is entirely loaned from the collection of a…

THAT THERE SHOULD be an intersection between graffiti art and abstract painting isn’t as unlikely as it might sound. Urban walls—graffiti’s canvases—are constantly covered and recovered with advertising imagery, posters, signage, and lettering of all kinds. Due to a combination of change, neglect, and decay, these layers coexist and coalesce, resulting in a sort of layered abstraction. The artist José Parlá has taken this accidental phenomenon and given it intentionality. Parlá, who started out as a graffiti tagger, now creates wallsized abstract paintings that are inspired by and often closely resemble these urban palimpsests. These works revel in visual effects and celebrate the dynamism of hiphop culture, but they do more than that— like the walls that inspire them, they tell stories about changing neighborhoods, exploring issues like gentrification, redlining,…

ARTHUR GROVER RIDER was born in Chicago in 1886. After attending the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, he relocated to Paris and studied painting at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1911 he heard a lecture by the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla and was so inspired by it that he moved to Spain, pursued further studies at the Werntz Academy in Valencia (Sorolla’s native region) and befriended Sorolla. Rider spent nine summers painting alongside Sorolla on the Valencian beaches, sharing the older painter’s passion for the sea, fisherman, boats, and the complex effects of sunlight on water. When Sorolla died in 1923, Rider was in the funeral cortege. Rider returned to Chicago but began making trips to California, where he found natural surroundings reminiscent of…