Innehållsförteckning för March 2022 från Art & Antiques

FROM MARCH 16–25, Asia Week New York, with treasures from 26 international galleries and six auction houses, including Bonhams, Christie’s, Doyle, Heritage Auctions, iGavel, and Sotheby’s, will return to Manhattan. At the same time, 16 museums, from the Met and the Asia Society in New York to the Peabody Essex in Salem, Mass., and the Denver Art Museum, will also be presenting exhibitions and lectures dedicated to Asian art. “Everyone is excited to connect with the collectors and curators who have made New York such a major international destination for Asian art activities,” says the event’s new chairman, Dessa Goddard. The art on display ranges from the classical to the modern, and many works highlight the power of women as subjects and creators. For example, Egenolf Gallery Japanese Prints of…

THE SANTA FE Art Auction will present its annual Prints, Multiples + Works on Paper sale on March 12 at their 16,000-square-foot showroom in the Baca Railroad District of Santa Fe, as well as online (starting on March 1). The range of works in the show stretches from classic etchings to modern pieces. The works on offer capture the spirit of the West—its land, people, and wildlife. Highlights include Barbara Latham’s woodcut Five Men and a Horse (est. $500–700). Latham, who died in 1989, was a native New Englander who traveled to Taos, N.M., where she created paintings, prints, and illustrations for children’s books that depict the local landscape and people. The work in the sale features a group of men gathered around a horse with mountains in the distance.…

AS PART OF Asia Week New York, Onishi Gallery in Chelsea will mount an exhibition titled “The Eternal Beauty of Metal” from March 16–23. Dedicated to contemporary artists who come out of the Japanese tradition of metal working, the show takes its title from the philosophy of Osumi Yukie, Japan’s first female Living National Treasure in metal art, who has written that there is “something particularly meaningful about the way that metals can substitute the permanent for the fleeting and transitory, conferring eternity on phenomena that would otherwise have a limited lifespan.” The works on view are vessels made from gold, silver, platinum, copper, lead, and unique Japanese alloys, worked in techniques including casting, chiseling, hammering, and overlay. The 18 artists in the Onishi exhibition use traditional methods to express…

AMERICAN ART has a vast sweep that is hard to contain in a single exhibition, but “An American Place: Selections from the James and Barbara Palmer Collection,” on view from January 29–April 24 at the Palmer Museum of Art at The Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa., paints a picture of American art from after the Civil War through the Civil Rights era. To celebrate the museum’s 50th anniversary, this show—named for Alfred Stieglitz’s seminal gallery “An American Place”—captures the dramatic changes the country experienced in that era, while highlighting artists from groups that were once marginalized. In 2013, the Palmer Museum of Art published a multi-author catalogue celebrating the promised gift of the private collection of James and Barbara Palmer to the museum that bears their name. Edited…

From the 9th century to the 19th century, silversmiths in Burma (now known as Myanmar) made luxury objects for the royal courts, replete with complex religious symbolism from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. The mid-19th through early 20th centuries, the period of the British Raj, saw the emergence of what is known as the Burmese Silver Age. Unlike most Asian silversmiths of the time, those in Burma made their wares chiefly for domestic consumption. Much of the production consisted of drinking cups, boxes for betel and lime, and begging bowls (known as thabeik bowls), rather than tea sets and similar Western-oriented objects. The technique used to make Burmese silver involved the use of very high relief and great density of ornamentation, so that the objects appear encrusted with foliage or…

LEON DABO (1864–1960) was a French-born American painter who had an extraordinarily long career, from the early 1890s through 1954. His father, Ignace Schott de Dabo was a mural painter and stained-glass artist who emigrated with his family to America in 1870 to escape political unrest in France, settling in Detroit. Leon Dabo became a muralist, too, working on ecclesiastical and other public commissions under the direction of John La Farge in New York. In the first years of the 20th century, Dabo gained recognition as a painter, primarily of landscapes in the Tonalist style. In 1913 he exhibited in and helped organize the famous New York Armory show, which introduced Americans to European Post-Impressionism and modernism. During World War I, Dabo returned to France as an intelligence officer in…

FOR YEARS, Arthur Kern was the “mystery man” of the New Orleans art world. After earning his B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees in painting from Tulane University in the mid-1950s and studying at the McCrady Art School on Bourbon Street, he was featured in solo shows at Ruth White Gallery in New York and included in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962. Then, he made a drastic change of direction. In 1967, at the age of 35, he consigned his remaining paintings to a bonfire and embarked on becoming a sculptor. At the same time, he withdrew from the art market to a studio off Tchoupitoulas Street where he worked on developing a sculpture technique based on casting wax molds with a special polyester resin. While…

“HEAD OF A lioness, mind of a man, bust of a woman, torso of a child, grace of an angel, and discourse of the devil.” Thus did the art dealer Julien Levy, impresario of the Surrealists in 1930s New York, describe the artist Leonor Fini. His evocation of a hybrid, fantastical creature, at the same time beautiful and frightening, squares with much of what her contemporaries said about her. Fini, whose paintings conjure an imaginative universe in which female power and sexuality reign supreme, was both a maker of art and a subject of art. As one of her biographers put it, “She was her own best muse.” With her outrageous yet fashionable outfits, penchant for tart and quotable remarks, and fierce independence of mind, Fini was a legendary figure…

POSTWAR ART history is often written as if it were a New York story, but what about Tokyo, Seoul, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro? A much more inclusive and diverse view of the period is being presented at the Dallas Museum of Art, in a current exhibition, “Slip Zone: A New Look at Postwar Abstraction in the Americas and East Asia” (through July 10). Drawing on the deep holdings of the DMA and supplementing them with works from important local collections, the curators—Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art; Dr. Vivian Li, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art; and Vivian Crockett, former Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art—examine the abstract artists’ new practices, which included non-traditional materials, erasing the…

The Ainu are an aboriginal people originally from the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido and Sakhalin Island in Russia. Their origins are mysterious, and their language is related to no other on earth. While most Ainu today are assimilated into Japanese culture, their ancestral culture is completely different. They derived their food from fishing and bear-hunting and practiced an animistic faith that included the belief that everything contains a god or spirit, called kamuy. The bear, in particular, had profound religious significance for the Ainu, to the point where they are said to have engaged in arctolatry, or bear worship. The basic item of Ainu clothing was a short robe called attush, made from the bark of an elm tree. The example shown here was made in Hokkaido during the…

THROUGH JUNE 18, the Fairfield University Art Museum in Fairfield, Conn., will present “Adger Cowans: Sense and Sensibility.” Cowans, a photographer and abstract painter, was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1936 and studied photography at Ohio University with Clarence H. White, Jr. and Minor White. He graduated in 1958 as one of the first Black students to get a degree in photography there. Gordon Parks, with whom Cowans worked at Life magazine, referred to him as “one of the most significant artists of our time.” For the Fairfield show, guest curator Halima Taha has selected more than 50 photographs from Cowans’ prolific career, during which he documented the Civil Rights movement, jazz musicians, Hollywood celebrities (everyone from Diahann Carroll to Henry Fonda to Duke Ellington), motion pictures (he worked on…

MORE THAN 400 works of Western, wildlife, and sporting art will be on the block at the Scottsdale Art Auction on April 8 and 9. Taking place in the arts district in Scottsdale, Ariz., the auction will highlight the beauty and expanse of the West through works by prominent painters and sculptors. Many of the works in the sale will showcase the majesty and thrill of Western wildlife, including Bob Kuhn’s acrylic painting Belly Rub ($100,000–175,000), depicting a brown bear scraping its ample midsection against a twisted fallen log. The painting captures both the power and the winsomeness of the American West’s fauna. Henry Farny’s watercolor The Hunter (est. $30,000–50,000) shows a lone Native American figure, ornamented with necklaces and a blanket around his waist, standing on a rocky ledge…

Painting is a mercurial discipline. Creating a work of art from the combination and manipulation of pigments, liquid binders, and tools manipulated by the hand to metaphorically convey an idea, memory or a place is a slippery endeavor. Only by delineating the boundaries of the creative project over time can an artist establish a fertile field for the cultivation of endless variations within this condition of unpredictability. In the art of Sean Scully, such boundaries create something akin to the shifting borders of an agricultural plot, within which the intentions, ambitions, materials, and labor of the farmer intersect, hopefully resulting in a productive harvest. Scully’s commitment—working with the interplay of vertical and horizontal bands of layered color within the painting’s frame—has provided a place to contemplate, respond to, and expand…