April 2021

Art & Antiques

For Collectors of The Fine And Decorative Arts

Art & Antiques1 min read
Art & Antiques
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF John Dorfman CREATIVE DIRECTOR Mark Snyder ASSOCIATE EDITOR Sarah E. Fensom EDITOR-AT-LARGE Jonathan Lopez ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR Eric Hernandez ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR Emma C Dryden CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Randall Cordero Ted Morri
Art & Antiques2 min read
Real or Unreal
WHEN WE speak of “realist” art, we had better be sure we know which reality we have in mind. The term is often applied to 19thcentury works that strove to depict nature and the human world in a way that would be most recognizable to those who viewed
Art & Antiques2 min read
Deco Days
When the Japanese designer Katsu Hamanaka arrived in Paris in 1924, he opened a workshop dedicated to objets d’art of shagreen, ivory, and precious woods. In Tokyo, he had studied with the celebrated lacquer artist Katsutaro Yamazaki, and in France,
Art & Antiques2 min read
Leaves of Color
Francesco Marmitta was born in Parma in the 1460s. He was the son of a wool and wax merchant and became an acclaimed painter, goldsmith, engraver of gems, and illuminator. Today, his work is in several high-profile collections. Virgin and Child Flank
Art & Antiques2 min read
Voluntary Simplicity
THE CELEBRATED landscape painter Gregory Kondos turns 98 on April 3. In celebration, Caldwell Snyder Gallery is presenting an exhibition of rare artworks by Kondos this month at its San Francisco gallery location. The show includes a selection of oil
Art & Antiques1 min read
A New Leaf
MONTAGUE Gallery opens “Intersections,” an exhibition dedicated to new work by the master glass artist Dante Marioni, on April 9. The show, which runs through May 22, features works from the artist’s acclaimed Maze and Print series. Marioni is a sort
Art & Antiques2 min read
Sense of Exploration
MAKING UP the bedrock of Zaplin Lampert Gallery, a mainstay of Santa Fe’s art scene for nearly 35 years, are “explorer artists,” the stalwart painters and photographers who ventured into the American West during the 19th century. In fact, the gallery
Art & Antiques1 min read
Reflections
“THE POND,” A solo exhibition of Thomas McNickle’s work, is on view at Jerald Melberg Gallery through April 24. Followers of the Charlotte, N.C.- based gallery’s programming will likely be familiar with McNickle’s sumptuous paintings—the artist has b
Art & Antiques2 min read
Object Lessons
IN 1969, “OBJECTS: USA,” a survey dedicated to American craft designers, opened at the National Collection of Fine Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. The show was the brainchild of visionary gallerist Lee Nordness and featured works
Art & Antiques1 min read
Getting a Glimpse
“MATTHIAS Reinmuth: rise” opens on April 12 at Edward Cella Art & Architecture in the Thomas Lavin Showroom at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. The show, which runs through June 4, is the German painter’s debut exhibition with the gallery an
Art & Antiques1 min read
Freeing the Canvas
THE RINGLING Museum in Sarasota, Fla., is currently presenting an exhibition of the work of Sam Gilliam. Drawing mainly from local collections, “Sam Gilliam: Selections,” on view through August 15, features some 30 unique works plus limited edition p
Art & Antiques1 min read
In Black and White
“TO THIS DAY, I would rather look at black and white than anything else,” wrote Michael West in 1981. The painter, born Corinne Michelle West in 1908, was one of the few female members of the New York School and chose to go by “Michael” to avoid the
Art & Antiques1 min read
Visual Joy
“KARL BENJAMIN: Selected Paintings 1967–1978” is on view at San Francisco’s Brian Gross Fine Art through May 8. Benjamin, a giant of Southern California postwar painting and a vanguard of hardedge abstraction, was in a period of radical experimentati
Art & Antiques2 min read
Looking Westward
SCOTTSDALE ART Auction, one of the largest Western, wildlife, and sporting art auctions in the Southwest, will have more than 400 works of art for sale this month, split between two afternoon sessions, one on April 9 and the other on April 10. On off
Art & Antiques1 min read
Creative Pair
JAMES CALK and his wife, Betsy Havens, are both painters, though in different styles. Calk’s work is gestural abstraction with a suggestion of landscape, executed with a bright palette and thick impasto. Havens, a figurative artist is as inspired by
Art & Antiques4 min read
Tête-à-Tête Of The Titans
ALEXANDER CALDER and Pablo Picasso barely knew each other, and only met four times in their lives. Their works are, at least superficially, very different. Nonetheless, an exhibition now at the de Young Museum in San Francisco makes the case for comm
Art & Antiques1 min read
Seeing Red
THOMAS ARVID is known around the nation as the premier painter of wine. The Detroit-born, Atlanta-based artist came to his subject by way of the color red. In the 1990s, when he was teaching himself to paint, he was drawn to the color, making hyperre
Art & Antiques1 min read
The Nature of Things
THE ABSTRACT sculptor Mel Kendrick is getting his first retrospective, at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. “Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things” runs from April 10 through July 31 and features more than 60 s
Art & Antiques5 min read
Radical Portraiture
ALICE NEEL PAINTED some of the 20th century’s most evocative portraits. Over the course of her seven-decade-long career, she rendered stirring representations of friends, lovers, colleagues, and the diverse groups of people who populated her longtime
Art & Antiques5 min read
The Rose And The Nightingale
WHILE PERSIAN (or Farsi) is the national language of Iran and originated there, it is also an international language. Today, its reach extends into Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and in previous eras it had an even bigger footpr
Art & Antiques5 min read
A Painter-Explorer
ONE OF THE most iconic bodies of work depicting the American West was made by a European artist who spent less than two years in America and then never returned. In 1833–34, the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer acted as official artist of an expedition up t
Art & Antiques9 min read
The Purist
Clyfford Still sold approximately 81 works during his lifetime. He had only 15 exhibitions. But neither statistic is due to a lack of demand for the pioneering Abstract Expressionist painter’s bold and uncompromising work, nor to a dearth of output.
Art & Antiques8 min read
Castles In Spain
Spain once exerted a magnetic force on the American imagination. After losing most of its New World colonies in the 1820s, Spain entered a long period of political and economic decline during which it came to seem like a backwater of Europe, a land t
Art & Antiques7 min read
All Too Real
“For Modernism, we may take it that abstraction is the law and that realism is the criminal,” wrote the art historian Linda Nochlin in the early 1970s. At that time, abstraction had already lost some of its dominance, but the point was and still is s
Art & Antiques4 min read
A Country Gentleman
IN 2017, WHEN he turned 80, David Hockney decided to move to rural France. The artist, who had long split his time between his native England and Los Angeles, had been traveling in Normandy and felt the impulse to move there for a while. He was cravi
Art & Antiques2 min read
Sir Winston Churchill, Tower Of The Koutoubia Mosque, 1943, Oil On Canvas.
TOWER OF THE Koutoubia Mosque, which is considered Winston Churchill’s most important painting, set a world auction record for the artist and former British Prime Minister at Christie’s Modern British Art Evening Sale in March. The painting came on t

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