The Magazine Antiques articles from September 2008

The Magazine Antiques archives from September 2008

Editor's letter.(Editorial)
September 1, 2008... What connects Albert Sack to Dominique de Menil? You may well ask. This magazine has often been a miscellany of articles in recent decades, but the September issue has an unusually wide range of subjects--eighteenth-century American...

American Indian dresses.(Current and coming)(Identity by Design: Tradition, Change, and Celebration in Native Women's Dresses)
September 1, 2008... If you have not visited the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Hyde Center, housed in the grand 1906 Beaux-Arts style Alexander Hamilton United States Custom House designed by Cass Gilbert at Bowling Green in...

The Venetian hoax.(Current and coming)(Benjamin West and the Venetian Secret)
September 1, 2008... A dramatic but nearly forgotten episode in the history of painting is the subject of a small exhibition opening this month at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. In late 1795 Benjamin West, the American expatriate painter who had...

... and in Cambridge.(Current and coming)(Re-View)(Brief article)
September 1, 2008... Not to be outdone by Yale, the Harvard Art Museum has also embarked on a major building renovation and expansion project (expected to be completed in 2013) and is mounting a survey exhibition of some six hundred works from the university's...

Porcelain and propaganda.(Current and coming)(Fragile Persuasion: Russian Porcelain and the Fine Art of Propaganda)
September 1, 2008... An exhibition opening this month at the Hillwood Museum in Washington explores the ways that Russian porcelain has been used for the purposes of political and social propaganda from the late nineteenth century to the present. Though many of the...

Texas style.(Museum accessions)
September 1, 2008... Among the many legacies that Ima Hogg left to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, along with her house Bayou Bend, was a small pioneering collection of Texas furniture. Following in her path, William James Hill has recently bestowed eleven fine...

European heritage days.(Farther afield)(Calendar)
September 1, 2008... After the summer holidays and when the backpackers have flown home, Europeans from Iceland to the Ukraine celebrate their own histories. European Heritage Days, which became a joint action of the Council of Europe and the European Commission in...

The John Hancock desk, a tale of provenance.(Discoveries)
September 1, 2008... In the spring of 1990 the phone rang just as I was entering my office at the university and I instinctively reached for it. "I want you to come down to Aiken [South Carolina] and appraise John Hancock's desk. Come today or tomorrow. I'm...

The dealer's eye.(Christian Deydier )(Interview)
September 1, 2008... The multifaceted, multilingual Paris dealer Christian Deydier is also a world-class multitasker. In addition to his travels to obtain ancient Chinese bronzes and other treasures for his gallery, he dips into the field of twentieth-century...

Custom made Chinese porcelain dinner services.(Design notes)(de Gournays)(Company overview)
September 1, 2008... Chinese porcelain has long been valued by Westerners for its hard translucent white surface. Marco Polo, who claimed to have visited Kublai khan's court in the thirteenth century, was probably the first European to write about this porcelain....

Antiques.(Biography)
September 1, 2008... ... there is properly no history; only biography. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History," Essays, 1841 The full story of Paul Revere's Sons of Liberty Bowl is a truth borne out by Emerson's observation, a confluence of biographies that...

Gorham's "white gold" flatware.
September 1, 2008... Elephant ivory has long been coveted for its inherent beauty, natural resilience, and its capability of being finely carved. Homer mentions it often, in the Old Testament one hears of Solomon's throne of ivory, and Roman senators also sat on...

The real Menil: on the one hundredth anniversary of her birth, Dominique de Menil's Houston house testifies to the sure instincts of a consummate collector.
September 1, 2008... It would be hard to refute the art world consensus that the most admired collector of the second half of the twentieth century was Dominique de Menil (Fig. 6), the French-born heiress to the Schlumberger oil drilling equipment fortune, whose...

Sarah De Hart: early American silhouettist.
September 1, 2008... Sarah De Hart may have been the first person born in the United States to make silhouettes that still survive today (Fig. 1). She was born on February 13, 1759, into a wealthy and prominent family of Huguenot descent in Elizabethtown, now...

The lost generation of Danish design.
September 1, 2008... Nothing is harder to lose than a bad reputation, as a group of long-overlooked Dainsh furniture designers would probably agree. The furnishings and housewares that emerged from twentieth-century Scandinavia--particularly out of Denmark--had an...

Royal porcelain from the Twinight Collection.
September 1, 2008... Spotting a few plates from the Vienna porcelain manufactory in an antiques shop in the Camden Passage, London, in 1994 was the beginning of it all. Today, Richard Baron Cohen's Twinight Collection is the largest assemblage in private hands of...

Living with antiques: Stephen Gray's collection of arts and crafts furnishings.
September 1, 2008... The collector Stephen Gray lives on a beautiful, isolated country road in upstate New York. On approach the landscape seems unmarked by the passage of time and the old farmhouse gives little away, melding into its surroundings as if it has been...

An Americana odyssey.
September 1, 2008... The following excerpts are the first in our series from the memoirs of Albert Sack. Like all members of the Sack family beginning with his father, Israel (1883-1959), Albert Sack is known for the integrity, passion, and expertise with which he...

Exhibitions symposiums lectures.(EVENTS)(Calendar)
September 1, 2008... ARIZONA Phoenix Phoenix Art Museum: "Edward Weston: Mexico", to November 15, ** "One for All, and All for One: The Jumpsuit" September 6 to February 1, 2009. CALIFORNIA Los Angeles J. Paul Getty Museum: "Bernini and the Birth of...

Travel guide.(SEPTEMBER 2008)(Directory)
September 1, 2008... ALABAMA Huntsville TWICKENHAM ANTIQUES, Located in the Railroad Station Antique mall, 315 Jefferson Street, N., Huntsville, AL. Now in inventory are KY, TN AL, NC and SC antiques and a large assortment of American coin silver holloware...

Calendar of shows.(Calendar)
September 1, 2008... September 10-14 San Francisco, CA. SAN FRANCISCO 20th CENTURY ART AND DESIGN SHOW AND SALE (SF20). The first annual event devoted exclusively to showcasing the iconic designs of the last century premieres September 10 with a gala preview...

Revisiting a prodigy.(Endnotes)
September 1, 2008... Seventy-five years ago this month, and actually quite often in those early days. ANTIQUES broke one of the cardinal rules of magazine publishing. It ran a front cover that had absolutely nothing to do with the contents inside. By the time that...