The Magazine Antiques articles from August 2008

The Magazine Antiques archives from August 2008

Editor's letter.
August 1, 2008... At the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum this month, visitors who come to see House Proud, an exhibition of watercolors of nineteenth-century interiors, will be supplied with magnifying glasses to help them examine every painted detail down...

Current and coming.
August 1, 2008... Art and politics Two exhibitions this summer highlight some of the myriad ways art and politics impacted each other in the United States during the twentieth century. At the Wolfsonian in Florida, A Bittersweet Decade: The New Deal in...

Museum accessions.
August 1, 2008... Old Ironsides Portraits of well-known men were the first category of paintings done in the American colonies; but not far behind these depictions came portraits of ships. At first they were usually single vessels done for their owners, but...

Report from Europe.(Black is Beautiful)
August 1, 2008... Black is beautiful A little-known aspect of art history is being illuminated in an exhibition at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam. In Europe over the past seven hundred years, black people--for the purposes of the exhibition defined as people...

The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam.(Book review)
August 1, 2008... The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam, by Ian Kennedy and Julian Treuherz, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008. I don't like the the term "train buff," but I do love trains. Whenever circumstances have permitted, I've ridden the sleek...

A massive 1830's pierced and carved doorway treats classical ornament with yankee exuberance.(Discoveries)
August 1, 2008... You might expect an object exquisitely edged in carved oak leaves and trimmed with seven-pointed stars, French horns, fleurs-de-lis, and plump rosettes to be the work of an ebeniste with a British penchant for the mighty oak. Instead we are...

Historic houses.(LANDMARKS & MUSEUMS OF THE WEST)(Directory)
August 1, 2008... ARIZONA Phoenix (Scottsdale) TALIESIN WEST 12621 Frank Lloyd Wright Blvd. 85259.Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and studio, is situated on 600 acres of pristine desert in the foothills of the McDowell Mountains....

Antiques.
August 1, 2008... Of all the great things that the English have invented and made a part of the credit of the national character, the most perfect, the most characteristic, and the one they have mastered most completely in all its details, so that it has become...

Asa new discoveries Ames.(Critical essay)(Cover story)
August 1, 2008... Sometime between 1849 and his death in 1851 a young carver named Asa Ames in Evans, Erie County, New York, decided to have his picture taken (Fig. 2). He opted for the daguerreotype process rather than a painted portrait, and he purchased a...

Watercolors of long-vanished houses and gardens.(Windows on the post)(House Proud: Nineteenth century Watercolor Interiors from the Thaw Collection)
August 1, 2008... Earlier this year the New York Times ran a report on the "new" trend of homeowners hiring celebrated photographers to document their houses. Once at the mercy of shelter magazines to showcase their interiors, these people have bypassed those...

Miller's tale: the Indianapolis Museum of Art gets a modern design collection.(R. Craig Miller)
August 1, 2008... F. Scott Fitzgerald's oft-quoted (and uncharacteristically inaccurate) observation that there are no second acts in American life is given the lie yet again by R. Craig Miller, the veteran decorative arts curator who, at the unlikely age of...

Frank Lloyd Wright's Zimmerman house.(Critical essay)
August 1, 2008... The house on the corner of Heather and Union Streets in Manchester, New Hampshire, is surprising. It's a low-slung arrow, as taut as an Army cot. When Frank Lloyd Wright designed this Usonian house for Isadore J. and Lucille Zimmerman in 1950,...

John Hewson and the French connection.(Critical essay)
August 1, 2008... The British-born John Hewson (Fig. 10) was one of the earliest and finest chintz printers in the United States, most widely recognized for the beautiful cotton he block printed with an amphora vase holding a bouquet of garden flowers (see Fig....

Exhibitions symposiums lectures.(EVENTS)(Calendar)
August 1, 2008... ARIZONA Phoenix Phoenix Art Museum: "Art for the Cure: Hungarian Modernism from the Nancy G.Brinketr Collection": August 30 to October 26. "Edward Weston: Mexico': August 9 10 November 15. CALIFORNIA Los Angeles J.Paul Getty...

Calendar of shows August 2008.(Calendar)
August 1, 2008... August 2 East Hampton, NY, 22nd ANNUAL HISTORIC MULFORD FARM ANTIQUES & SALE. "A Jean Sinenberg Prestige Show". Location: Mulford Farm, Main Street @ James Lane, East Hampton, New York. Outdoors/under tents. Rain or shine. Early Preview...

Associations.(THE BROWSER AUGUST 2008)(antique dealers)(Directory)
August 1, 2008... www.bcaada.com Berkshire County Antiques and Art Dealers Associations--an "Antiques Mecca" of 56 stores and galleries offering a wide variety of American and European antiques and art. AUCTIONS www.cdartauction.com If you are...

Metal garden structures.(Design notes)(Battle Hill Forge)
August 1, 2008... Woven wattles are one of the world's oldest methods of making fences. Composed of staked set in the ground and interwoven horizontally with strips of split wood, vines, or other flexible vegatation, wattle enclosures have been used by farmers...