Innehållsförteckning för September-October 2023 från Art & Antiques

MOST AFICIONADOS of contemporary American art, especially those living in California, are familiar with the Hard-Edge school of painting, which includes artists Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin. In 1959 art critic Jules Langsner included them in a groundbreaking exhibition, “Four Abstract Classicists,” and defined the trend in the exhibition catalog. “Forms are finite, flat, rimmed by a hard, clean edge,” he wrote. “These forms are not intended to evoke in the spectator any recollections of specific shapes he may have encountered in some other connection.” However, many are unfamiliar with June Harwood, who was counted as one of these artists in Langsner’s next group show in 1964, “California Hard-Edge Painting.” The four artists of his first exhibition were now joined by seven more, including four…

In a diary entry from 1926, Expressionist painter and artist Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) ruminated on her continued position on the periphery of the art world, noting: “In the eyes of many, I was nothing but an unnecessary addition to Kandinsky. That a woman can have an original, real talent, that she can be a creative person, is easily forgotten. A woman standing alone—even one of my kind—can never assert herself without help. Other ‘authorities’ have to advocate on her behalf.” Münter well understood that her very ability to have a career was predicated on her association with her more celebrated former partner. Nevertheless, during the 14 years Münter and Kandinsky spent together, as well as the many decades after their split, the artist navigated an unflinching creative life all her…

Auction in the Rockies THE ANNUAL Jackson Hole Art Auction in Jackson Hole, Wy., will take place Sept. 16. Featuring works by both contemporary and 19th and 20th century artists, the auction will offer a wide range of paintings of the American West, landscapes, figurative works, Native American subjects, and North American and African wildlife. Notable wildlife works include Stairway to the Stars (est. $100,000-150,000) by Bob Kuhn. Kuhn, who died in 2007, was a celebrated realist painter who got his start illustrating for outdoor magazines in the 1940s and shifted to painting for galleries in the 1970s. In this work, a group of bighorn sheep are standing on a snowy mountain against a cold winter sky. Another wildlife piece, Lookout Tower—Timber wolves (est. $60,000-90,000) by painter and naturalist Carl Brenders,…

“WALTER SCOTT Lenox & American Belleek,” on view at Charlotte’s Mint Museum from September 23rd to January 21st of next year, tracks Lenox’s career and contributions to the ceramics industry in Trenton, New Jersey. The exhibition examines his position at three major pottery manufacturers, along with the parallel rise of American Belleek—first produced around the turn of the 20th century and regarded as an inventive take on products created by the Irish porcelain company. In an essay entitled “A Master Craftsman—Walter Scott Lenox,” which was published in The American Magazine of Art in 1925, author George Sanford Holmes describes Lenox (1859–1920) as that uniquely American innovator: equal parts artist, businessman, and starry-eyed idealist. The Trenton native was first drawn to the artistic potential for ceramics in his youth. Through hard…

A KEEN MUTUAL interest in natural forms—in the shapes and weathering of bones, shells, and rock formations—forges a strong link between American painter Georgia O’Keeffe and British sculptor Henry Moore in the new exhibition, O’Keeffe and Moore, opening at the Albuquerque Museum on September 30th and running through December 31st. With over 120 works on view, as well as recreations of O’Keeffe and Moore’s studios that include the natural objects they collected, the tools of their trade, and other furnishings, the exhibition is a major retrospective for not one but two titans of 20th-century Modernism. No other major Modernists relied so heavily on nature as inspiration. Indeed, O’Keeffe and Moore’s shared passion for natural objects—for their colors, sculptural qualities, and textures, along with the apertures (we might call them windows)…

Inka Essenhigh has always been a wizard with line. The whiplash fluidity and finesse of her draftsmanship made her an artist to be reckoned with ever since the 1990s, when she was starting out. And what she achieved with it was unique, her own take on the (then pervasive) manga-inspired fantasies that were part technological, part sci-fi, part decorative: pop with symbolist, surrealist, art nouveau, ukiyo-e intimations—and much more. Those strange—and strangely beguiling—early works dazzled, depending as they did upon glossy enamel paint, which had become her signature medium, their flawlessly lacquered, monochromatic surfaces providing a backdrop of futuristic beauty. By the early 2000s, she became more introspective, searching within herself for her subjects, changing her process from a kind of doodling or automatism to more meditative practices in which…