The Magazine Antiques articles from February 2009

The Magazine Antiques archives from February 2009

The story of New Sweden.(CURRENT and coming)(Colony to Community: The Story of New Sweden)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... In 1638 a group of Immigrants from Sweden and Finland established the New Sweden Colony in the Delaware Valley to give Sweden a foothold in the growing fur and tobacco trades. A small exhibition that opened late last month at the New Jersey...

California modern.(CURRENT and coming)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury, the popular traveling exhibition organized by the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California, where it premiered in October 2007, reaches its final venue this...

Painting in Germany.(CURRENT and coming)
February 1, 2009... The influence of Germans on American art during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the focus of two exhibitions currently on view at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. The larger of the two, The Munich Secession and America,...

Skinner.(CURRENT and coming)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... In their February 15 sale of American furniture and decorative arts Skinner will auction another of the eight portrait miniatures of George Washington painted by Robert Field in 1801. As Eleanor Gustafson detailed in her Endnotes column in this...

Darwin and the arts.(CURRENT and coming)(Endless forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts)
February 1, 2009... The greatly anticipated exhibition "Endless forms": Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts will open at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven on February 12. A highlight of the global celebration of the bicentenary of...

Paris dealers.(FARTHER afield)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... From the stalls of the bouquinistes along the Seine to the rarified galleries of Saint-Germain and the Madeleine and out to the puces (flea markets) at the Porte de Clignancourt in the north and the Porte de Vanves in the south, Paris brims...

Regal.(FARTHER afield)(Galerie J. Kugel)(Directory)
February 1, 2009... Galerie J. Kugel displays its astounding (in quality, provenance, and extent) furniture, silver, paintings, objets de verm, carpets, ivory, jewelry, and scientific instruments from the Middle Ages and Renaissance through the early nineteenth...

Eclectic European.(FARTHER afield)(Galerie Camoin Demachy)(Directory)
February 1, 2009... Whether it be a baroque mirror, a Wiener Werkstatte cabinet, or a spare 1950s chandelier, Galerie Camoin Demachy, on the quai Voltaire across from the Louvre, sells objects of dramatic flair. Proprietor Alain Demachy believes, "There are no bad...

Art deco.(FARTHER afield)(Makassar France)(Directory)
February 1, 2009... Makassar, on the elegant avenue Matignon, abounds with luxurious art deco furniture, paintings, textiles, lighting, sculpture, screens, and ceramics. Emile Jacques Ruhlmann remains the preferred master of proprietress Monique Magnan. She also...

Fifties, sixties, seventies.(FARTHER afield)(Jousse Entreprise)(Directory)
February 1, 2009... A table by Jean Prouve that Philippe Jousse, then a photographer, purchased in the late sixties started him on the path to full-time dealing. Prouve (about whom he published the first major monograph) remains a staple at his streamlined...

European sculpture.(FARTHER afield)(Galerie Patrice Bellanger)(Directory)
February 1, 2009... Portrait busts by Jean-Antoine Houdon, bronze chenets by Eugene-Emmanuelle Viollet-le-Duc, terracotta models, works on paper, and even avant-garde pieces of the 1930s--every object at Galerie Patrice Bellanger has a raison d'etre, historical as...

Tapestries and carpets.(FARTHER afield)(Galerie Chevalier)(Directory)
February 1, 2009... Dominique Chevalier and Nicole de Pazzis-Chevalier, with their three children, are leading dealers in European tapestries and carpets: vibrantly colored examples from Aubusson, Gobelins, and Beuvais, as well as staggering Flemish, Brussels,...

Chinese works of art.(FARTHER afield)(Galerie Christian Deydier)(Directory)
February 1, 2009... Christian Deydier has expanded beyond the ancient Chinese bronzes that first earned him his reputation into earthenware and sculpture. So too, he has extended his geographical territory into points all along the Silk Road, occasionally...

African and Oceanic arts.(FARTHER afield)(Galerie Alain de Monbrison)(Directory)
February 1, 2009... On the rue des Beaux-Arts, arguably the global epicenter for the tribal arts market, Alain de Monbrison exhibits statues and masks from across the African Continent and Oceania with stark lighting that emphasizes their compelling forms. If the...

Quirky.(FARTHER afield)(Yveline Antiquites)(Directory)
February 1, 2009... Since 1954, Yveline Antiquites, on the tranquil Place Furstenberg, has been a favorite haunt of those in search of interesting and unusual pieces. Although not of great monetary value, every object, painting, and sculpture exudes charm and...

Flea market.(FARTHER afield)(Directory)
February 1, 2009... The flea market at the Porte de Vanves is smaller and less well known (thereby less picked over) than Saint-Ouen/Clignancourt. Every week-end more than 350 vendors set up their stands with furniture, porcelain, glass, silver, jewelry, pictures,...

Dealer profile.(Peter Pap)
February 1, 2009... At Peter Pap's booth at the Green wich Antiques Show in Connecticut, a woman is examining an enormous Mughal carpet with an unusual green ground that has been attracting passersby all morning. Looking down, the woman asks, "How much is it?" Pap...

Worth Avenue & West Palm Beach.(THE SCENE)
February 1, 2009... "Follow the money." What was good advice for Woodward and Bernstein is equally useful guidance for the antiques collector. When Henry Morrison Flagler established Palm Beach as a winter haven for Gilded Age society, important furnishings and...

Dealer interview.(ANTIQUES)(Ben Janssens)(Interview)
February 1, 2009... Can you describe the origins and evolution of TEFAF/Maastricht? In 1975 a number of the world's leading Old Masters dealers, such as Johnny van Haeften of London and the late Robert Noortman of Maastricht, believed there was a critical need...

Editorial.(ANTIQUES)(Editorial)
February 1, 2009... Walker Evans regarded every photographic image as essentially a reference, a ratification, a philosophy of authentication chat led him to begrudge the artiness chat he so disliked in the work of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Certainly,...

America in 3 by 5: Walker Evans's ability to locate drama in the matter of fact began with his passion for the picture postcard.
February 1, 2009... Walker Evans believed in picture postcards. The great photographer began collecting them as a boy, years before he ever snapped his first picture. Throughout his life he celebrated them, wrote about them, experimented with the format, and...

French furniture? Foreign artisans in Paris during the ancien regime.
February 1, 2009... Throughout the ancien regime, French manufacture of luxury goods was advanced by emigre artisans. In the furniture trade, the most influential were the German Kunstschreiner (or cabinetmakers) who contributed not only to the wide array of...

Master drawings from the collection of Horace Wood Brock.
February 1, 2009... Horace Wood "Woody" Brock defines himself as a collector of fine aristocratic furniture and decorative objects, especially English and French eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pieces--Louis XIV, neo-Palladian, rococo, chinoiscrie,...

His own private Wolfsonian: the collector Mitchell Wolfson Jr. has given a pair of New York pieds-a-terre the aura of wonder and surprise that distinguish his decorative arts museums in Miami and Genoa.
February 1, 2009... One supreme irony in the history of museums in the United States is that our grand national collection, the Smithsonian Institution, was endowed by a man (James Smithson) who had no interest in art collecting. But two more recent decorative...

Late Gothic coffers; Utilitarian boxes with devotional woodcuts pasted to the insides of their lids remind us that the secular and the sacred were inseparable in the fifteenth century.
February 1, 2009... Late Gothic imagination was wed to sacred purpose in every particular of daily life. At the close of the Middle Ages, devotion itself was an art, one that lent gravity to all the other arts and shaped the tenor of living. We moderns day-trip to...

The lure of provenance: the much celebrated collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge to be sold this month in Paris is almost as notable for its roster of previous owners as for the objects themselves.
February 1, 2009... There many never be another event to match this month's seven hundred lot sale of the collection of Pierre Berge and the late Yves Saint Laurent. What could well be one of the greatest private collections of the twentieth century, the result of...

Exhibitions symposiums lectures.(EVENTS)(Calendar)
February 1, 2009... ARIZONA Phoenix Phoenix Art Museum: "Elihu Vedder's Drawings for the Rubaiyat"; to February 8. * "Medievalism: Fashion's Romance with the Middle Ages"; February 21 to July 5. CALIFORNIA Los Angeles J. Paul Getty Center: "Captured...

Landmarks & Museums of the South.(HISTORIC HOUSES)(Directory)
February 1, 2009... FLORIDA PALM BEACH FLAGLER MUSEUM Cocoanut Row and Whitehall Way, 33480. Completed in 1902, Whitehall, Henry Flagler's Gilded Age estate, was hailed as more magnificent than any other private dwelling in the world. A National...

February 2009.(THE BROWSER)(Directory)
February 1, 2009... ASSOCIATIONS 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 ...

Calendar of shows.(Calendar)
February 1, 2009... February 4-8. West Palm Beach, FL AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL FINE ART FAIR. Rated 5 stars by The Art Newspaper, international dealers present fine art, decorative art and jewelry spanning all periods for a week of art exhibitions, cultural events...

A Dorflinger masterpiece: an exceptional cut-glass and silver pitcher exemplifies the staying power of high quality.(END notes)
February 1, 2009... Objects of high quality continue to bring strong prices," says Jason Woody of Woody Auction, headquartered in Douglass, Kansas, following the firm's sale late last year of the cut-glass and silver pitcher shown here. Made in the first decade of...