Main de roman, an exquisite little sculpture could easily have been overlooked at this spring’s edition of TEFAF New York, but it stood out in L’Arcen Seine’s gallery booth as a memorial to Les Lalanne, the sculpting and design duo who created a universe of lyrical and iconoclastic objects in stubborn defiance of art world trends for over half a century.
Boston Strong
As the Carolyn and Peter Lynch art collection travels to the Peabody Essex Museum, we look at a small part of it at home on Commonwealth Avenue
Highland Fling
A strikingly original new hotel in Scotland marries contemporary art and traditional furnishings
Curious Objects: Is it real? A Caravaggio Rediscovered
If you find an Old Master artwork in your attic, how can you be sure it isn’t fake? This month Ben and Michael consider the case of Judith and Holofernes—a painting attributed to Caravaggio that’s being sold on June 27 by French auctioneer Marc Labarbe—calling expert Eric Turquin and art critic James Gardner to the stand.
Folk Art: Opening eyes in Santa Fe
Once we abandoned the benign condescension about folk art several decades ago, it became possible to see the field for what it really is: a perpetual boundary breaker.
Homage to Verrocchio
An exhibition in Florence celebrates the Renaissance master who taught Leonardo
The Golden Spike and Powerful Pics at the Crocker
Andrew Russell’s “East and West Shaking Hands” is the most famous transcontinental rail photo, but Alfred Hart’s stereograph captures the moment.
Northern Lights
If fin de siècle Nordic cultural ferment—and contemporary global anxiety—is often summarized in shorthand by Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), to enter the former home of Stockholm banker Ernest Thiel (1859–1947), a museum open to the public since 1926, is to dwell in the plush, cool parlors where such paintings were first revered as windows into the human psyche.
Folk art flashbacks
Stacy Hollander recently relinquished her long and laudable curatorial career at the American Folk Art Museum, a constant through the many changes AFAM has seen over the years.
Terpsichorean themes at the ISAW
There is no way to know exactly what dance was like in antiquity. There are accounts of it in writings by ancient authors, such as Lucian (c. 120–192), a satirist of imperial Rome.