Innehållsförteckning för May 2023 från Art & Antiques

A remarkably detailed book of hours (c.1490–1500) created at the dawn of the French Renaissance in Lyon, France, has surfaced after 35 years in a private collection. “The resurfacing of this manuscript, published but in a private collection for nearly three decades, prompts a re-examination of the styles of its collaborating artists and their importance for development of Lyonnais painting,” states Tomas Borchert, Associate Art Director at Les Enluminures, a gallery (with locations in Chicago, New York, and Paris) that specializes in manuscripts and miniatures from the Middles Ages and the Renaissance. Just like all books of hours, it is a Christian devotional book used to pray at home at eight different times or hours of the day. What sets this particular example apart from others of its genre is…

THIS MONTH, Mnuchin Gallery is hosting a major exhibition of sculptures by one of the most influential sculptors working in the 20th century: “John Chamberlain: Five Decades +.” Consisting of pieces created between 1960 and 2011, the exhibition will give viewers the chance to watch the evolution of this important artist and his style throughout his career. His earliest works on view, from the 1960s, are created out of found—or as he called them, “chosen”—pieces of lacquered automotive steel that Chamberlain would intuitively fit together until they achieved the composition he found “just right.” One of these, Untitled (1962), is a tight, twisted composition in blue painted metal that combines graceful curves with jagged edges. Yellow Nunn (1975), a work in yellow and orange chromium-plated and painted steel, achieves what Chamberlain…

THIS MONTH, Los Angeles’ new Lisson Gallery hosts its debut show, “Carmen Herrera, The 1970s: Part 2.” Consisting of works from one of the least-explored period of Herrera’s career, this show features her seven Days of the Week (1975-78) paintings. These paintings display Herrera’s vibrant, abstract style through the use of geometric shapes and bold colors—in Blue Monday, the canvas is divided in two rectilinear blocks of color, with blue on the top and a deep black on the bottom. In addition to the seven paintings, visitors can view Herrera’s large-scale sculpture Angulo Amarillo, which is situated outside the gallery. It’s part of a larger series of outdoor sculptures that Herrera conceptualized decades earlier, but was only able to bring to life in 2019, three years before her death at…

THE SAINT Louis Art Museum’s “Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape” ably handles the work of two major figures in the modernist canon, providing visitors with a unique opportunity to view their creative approaches to the landscape genre. The paintings, all created in two small villages northwest of Paris, sing in concert with one another, providing a shared meditation on place and memory, landscape, and abstraction. The show, which will be open to the public through June 25, 2023, features 24 major canvases, 12 by each artist, highlighting Claude Monet’s late career compositions and Joan Mitchell’s work as an expatriate after 1959. The resulting narrative never privileges one approach and avoids the trappings of a master pupil narrative. Instead, in the words of organizers, the exhibition insists on a kind of…

THROUGH JULY 30, the Springfield Art Museum will host “Holding Space: Contemporary Enamel Vessels,” an exhibition of enamelware by 10 contemporary artists. Featuring vessels crafted by artists from across the United States as well as the U.K., the show is organized around a core body of work by Missouri-based artist Sarah Perkins. “The title is purposefully evocative as it is meant to represent the primary themes of the exhibition: the museum is holding space in our galleries for these artists and our guests, and each vessel is capable of holding space within it,” says curator Sarah Buhr. Focused entirely on vessels—cups, bowls, lidded jars—“Holding Space” is deeply rooted in both functionality and the human experience. The vessel, after all, is one of the oldest forms of craft, used across all…

THE TYPICAL exhibition of Taos painting is an “either or” proposition. Either it is an exhibition of the members of the Taos Society of Artists, whose heyday spanned the decades between 1910 and 1940, or it is an exhibition of the first generation of Taos Moderns, who flourished from, roughly speaking, 1930 to 1960. “New Beginnings: An American Story of Romantics and Modernists in the West,” which is composed of Tia Collection treasures on view at the Dayton Art Institute through May 21, 2023, departs from the “either or” by hanging the more academic, romantic, and famous Taos Society paintings alongside the Taos Moderns. The romantics and moderns shed new light on one another; the usual “either or” becomes a visually breathtaking “both and.” Furthermore, the exhibition combines artworks by…

IT TAKES AN especially curious and dedicated individual to develop a collection that reflects the highest levels of excellence and innovation in any artistic discipline. And while the art of collecting is deeply personal, it is also a forward-looking endeavor infused with optimism. In the realm of design, I think of nonconformist collectors such as Helen Williams (Drutt) English, whose collection of international studio jewelry is now housed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the late John P. Driscoll, who gifted a trove of superb American works on paper to the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State. In the company of these prescient collectors is Dennis Freedman, recognized for assembling one of the world’s outstanding collections of post-war avant-garde design. An exceptional selection of more than 50…

Louis Comfort Tiffany’s father, Charles Lewis Tiffany, was one of the co-founders of Tiffany & Co., a name we still associate the with finest decorative arts, silver, jewelry, and glass. But son Louis had other ideas. He wanted to make a life as a painter. Tiffany, born in New York City in 1848, studied with two of the best American painters of the age: George Inness and Samuel Colman, second generation Hudson River School painters whose interest in the effects of light, as opposed to the representation of reality, caused them to be called Luminists. Light would become Tiffany’s passion. At age 20, Tiffany made a journey to Europe to further his education, working with Léon Adolphe Auguste Belly in Paris. Belly was known for Islamist genre scenes—then described as…

AN EXHIBITION of new works by contemporary realist painter Christopher Clamp, “Far From Home,” will open at Charlotte’s Jerald Melberg Gallery this month. In “Far From Home,” Clamp’s still lifes of everyday, vintage objects are rendered with a tenderness and degree of detail that conveys not only what the object is, but a sense of what it means—or, perhaps, meant. As the artist says in the press release, “Objects, no matter how ordinary, hold a magic and a power that can transport us to different times and realms, depending on how they are arranged, used or treated. ‘Far From Home’ also refers to the effect nostalgia can have. Memories can comfort and they can also emphasize how much distance there is between then and now.” In Cat’s Game II (2023),…

“SELECTED WORK,” an exhibition of works on paper by the Spanish-American artist Esteban Vicente is on view at Tayloe Piggott Gallery through May 28. Vicente, an anarchist from a military family who fled Spain in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, painted in the abstract throughout his career. Painting daily, and always in natural light, his works explore light and color in nuanced ways. Vicente was a primary member of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, and close to artists like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollack. He was also instrumental in organizing the legendary 9th Street show of 1951, an invitational in Greenwich Village that was a critical turning point for the acceptance of Abstract Expressionism as a movement in the U.S. The works on view at Taylor Piggott…

Much to the consternation of the Poles and their star astronomer Copernicus, because of Galileo, the Italians have long been credited with the discovery of the idea of outer space. This national fascination with astronomy, as well as with other branches of science, has found its way into Italian art over the centuries and particularly in the 20th century, with such schools of aesthetics and ideas as Futurism—and the far lesser-known Spazialismo. The largely long-forgotten painter Edmondo Bacci (1913–1978), a mainstay of Spazialismo, is being re-examined in a one-person retrospective at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection that will run through September 18, 2023. While his work is visually resonant with many contemporaneous artists such as Miró, Pollock, Frankenthaler, and a host of Italians such as Virgilio Guidi and Alberto Burri, it…