By Dan Hofstadter Mark Rothko insisted that his contemplative art was the stuff of high drama. Why? Mark Rothko liked to hold forth. As a listener, you may have found his harangues enlightening, infuriating or “banal,” as Clement Greenberg did, but never funny. They weren’t stand-up. Yet the chief virtue of Red, John Logan’s play [...]
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view more advertisersMelody Rodgers, Gallery #10A
The Manhattan Art & Antiques Center 1050 Second Ave. New York, NY 10022
Tel: 212-758-3164
Website: www.melodyrodgers.com
Featured work: An art nouveau pin crafted of glass on metal, circa 1910.
Throckmorton Fine Art
145 East 57th Street, 3rd Floor New York, NY 10022
The Dawn of Modernism: Early Twentieth-Century Mexican Photography July 8th – September 11th, 2010
Featured work: Tina Modotti, Telegraph wires, ca. 1925-28 Platinum print.
Sundial NYC, Gallery #54
The Manhattan Art & Antiques Center
1050 Second Ave. (Between 55th & 56th St.) New York, NY 10022 212-593-2323
Featured work: A beautiful French gilt and silvered bronze and black marble animated “Helmsman” clock by Guilmet.
Questroyal Fine Art, LLC
903 Park Avenue (@ 79th St.), Suite 3A & B New York, NY 10075 tel: 212-744-3586
Featured work: George Bellows (1882–1925) Flaming Breaker, 1913 Oil on panel 15 x 19 ½ inches Signed lower left: G W Bellows; inscribed on verso: Flaming Spray Breaker Geo Bellows 146 E 19 NY A 187
Sakai Antiques, Inc.
The Manhattan Art & Antiques Center (Between 55th & 56th St.) New York, NY (212) 486-8900
Featured work: By Sandro Botticelli A fine silver-gilt and enamel case. 4.75in x 3.5in x 1in High. Circa 1880. Depicts 1482 painting, Primavera, Uffizzi Gallery.
Traditions and Transgressions
July 2010By Aline Brandauer In Santa Fe, contemporary art moves forward in conversation with the past. In a place as saturated with diverse artistic traditions as New Mexico, the creative process is bound to involve a complex dialogue with the past. Absorbing Native American, Spanish and Anglo-American influences, New Mexico’s cultural producers cannot escape tradition; they [...]
Continue reading...Finders, Sleepers
July 2010By Sallie Brady Leveraging luck and sleuthing skills, savvy dealers discover hidden treasures. Miscatalogued, overpainted, lost amid the ephemera of a pokey country auction—a hidden masterpiece is the holy grail of every any good art and antiques dealer. It’s the fantasy that keeps them awake nights, the dream that their hunch on a “could it [...]
Continue reading...The Rest is Noise
June 2010The Futurist Luigi Russolo was a lousy painter, but as a composer he was way ahead of his time. Reminiscing in the late 1950s, Igor Stravinsky recalled an evening in 1915 when he first heard the Futurist music of Luigi Russolo. “Five phonographs standing on five tables in a large and otherwise empty room emitted digestive noises, static, etc.,” he said. “I pretended to be enthusiastic and told [the Futurists] that the sets of five phonographs with such music, mass produced, would surely sell like Steinway grand pianos.”
Continue reading...A Woman of Valor
June 2010This month, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, which originated at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last fall, comes to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. With a broad selection of works, some of them never before shown, and a series of installations that demonstrate Gorky’s work process, the exhibition illuminates the development of the artist’s unique style.
Continue reading...Help Wanted
June 2010In the old days, most directors of major art museums could settle in and look forward to decades-long tenures. The job was unique and prestigious—the qualifications were a background of serious scholarship as a curator and the ability to be a reassuring pillar of the community—if a little sleepy at times. Fast forward to 2010: Museum directors are hustling more than they ever had dreamed they would have to, grappling with the perils of the Great Recession and with increasing demands on their time.
Continue reading...Otherworldly Masquerade
June 2010There is something inherently uncanny about masks. The placement of a false face over a real face, the displacement of identity, the fixed expression, all conspire to unsettle or even frighten the beholder. The sense of the weird is especially strong in masks that were intended to represent unearthly beings and to allow humans to temporarily assume the identity of denizens of the spirit world during religious or magical ceremonies.
Continue reading...A Haunting Humanism
June 2010Nearly a century ago, much of Europe waited with trepidation for war to break out. In August 1914, the conflagration that would become World War I finally erupted, and the German artist Otto Dix was one young volunteer who eagerly headed to the front. An avid reader of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century philosopher who had championed an ideal “superman” or “overman” who would overcome the limitations of mere humanity as it had evolved thus far, Dix would soon find his illusions shattered.
Continue reading...Walking Into History
April 2010It was a thrilling victory, but a narrow one. Once the currency conversions were worked out, it was clear that Alberto Giacometti’s L’homme qui marche I (Walking Man I), offered at Sotheby’s in London on Feb. 3, had made history, fetching £65 million, or $104.3 million, to claim the title of “most expensive artwork sold at auction” from Picasso’s Garçon à la pipe (Boy With a Pipe), a 1905 painting that fetched $104.1 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2004.
Continue reading...From the Editor: Wings of Eagles
March 2010Take a look at the forbidding Aztec warrior at left, encased in an eagle suit, and then look at the Roman bronze eagle on page 70. Not exactly birds of a feather, art-historically and stylistically speaking. But according to the curators at the Getty Villa, they had a lot in common, at least in the minds of the 16th-century Aztecs and Spaniards who are the subjects of a fascinating exhibition that opens there late this month.
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