Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2022 från Art & Antiques

ABSTRACT PAINTER Dorothy Fratt (1923-2017) spent most of her career in Phoenix. Until now, she has received limited critical and art historical attention beyond Arizona regional circles. But, as the art world has sought to reclaim women artists working in abstraction, Fratt’s work has been shown in recent exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. It also has been included in auctions at Christie’s alongside the likes of more well-known women artists of the era including Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell. Her history echoes that of other female abstractionists: an artist who sought to navigate the challenges of family and career, who found joy in teaching but sometimes sacrificed time that could have otherwise been spent on her own work, and who charted her own course eschewing the prescriptive labels ascribed…

THE RUSSIAN émigré is one of the great romantic figures of the 20th century. Writers, artists, composers, ballet dancers, all fleeing Soviet censorship and control over a culture seen as bourgeois at best—and aristocratic at worst—made their way from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Paris and New York, where they found themselves atop dizzyingly high society, or were forced to make their way as waiters, bellhops and washerwomen. Books and films about Russian aristocrats and refugees abound. Amor Towles’s hugely entertaining 2016 novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, is, perhaps, only the most recent entry in the genre. Elliott Erwitt, a child of Russian émigrés whose story is a story in itself, was one of the most influential American photo-journalists and photographic artists and is the subject of a new exhibition,…

“IT IS HARD to determine to which country belongs the glory of having formed Giuseppe De Nittis,” wrote an art critic in 1884. The writer continued his encomium, elaborating on how De Nittis’s style could not be placed, “for he passed for French in London and for English in Paris, for Italian in Italy.” His inimitable work, which collapsed aesthetic binaries, belonged “not even to impressionism of which he was for a brief moment made the brilliant champion.” De Nittis, whose name no longer carries the star-power of the French impressionists, was once renowned among them. As an Italian in Paris whose untimely death cut his career short, De Nittis has been largely overlooked—but “An Italian Impressionist in Paris”, an exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., reconstructs his…

Positioned between the mysterious shadows of Ad Reinhardt and the exuberant, frenetic, but controlled brushstrokes of Willem de Kooning, Robert Richenburg (1917-2006) found his sweet spot. He created intense fields of color that he then obscured in a thick and opaque coating of black, which was scraped, etched into and peeled away to reveal a blinding plasma like presence just below the surface. He painted at least 60 of these canvasses, and noted collectors bought up the works. But Richenburg notoriously turned his back on this avenue to lasting success and followed many fascinating and various directions; some successful, others less so. His decision to do this was based partly on a conscious rejection of the “rules” of an art world that demanded consistency, but also on a restless spirit,…

ONE OF THE world’s most pure and vivid pink diamonds fetched US$57.7 million (HK$435.2 million) at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in an unprecedented single-lot live auction, setting a world auction record price per carat for any diamond or gemstone. Estimated to sell for around US$21 million (HK$170 million), The Williamson Pink Star brought in nearly twice as much as the original estimate and boosted the per carat price sold at auction for any gem to just above $5 million. The new record-setting amount exceeded the previous $4 million per carat price tag achieved for the Blue Moon of Josephine, a blue diamond sold in 2015 at a Sotheby’s auction in Geneva. Known as The Williamson Pink Star, the rare 11.15 carat cushion-shaped gem is the largest flawless pink diamond ever to…

Artist Jacob Lawrence was one of the great visual storytellers of the 20th century, and a few years ago I had a chance to see his epic Migration series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Through 60 narrative panels, done in casein tempera on hardboard all the same size, 18 by 12 inches, Lawrence told the story of the Great Migration. This event started during World War I when there was a labor shortage up north and African Americans were eager to leave the South, where racial discrimination still reigned, and sought a better life for themselves and their families. “I do not look upon the story of the Blacks in America as a separate experience to the American culture,” the artist said in 1943, “but as…

If an artist’s studio is an extension of the artist’s creative mind—the space where the artist’s art is conceived, worked out and brought to fruition—then preserving and restoring artists’ studios ought to be a top priority. In the last few decades, with programs such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios coalition, and the realization across the board that studios do indeed offer extraordinary insights, this idea has come into its own. With astounding foresight, Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole’s widow, children and sister preserved his “New Studio” keeping it just as he left it for decades after his untimely death in 1848, at the age of 47. As artist Jasper Cropsey wrote after a visit in 1850, “it seemed as if Mr. Cole…