The National Academy of Design

Editorial Staff Art

The National Academy of Design, Feb. 1980By Barbara Ball Buff When Philadelphia ceased to be the capital of the United States in 1800 artists who had been attracted to the city by the prospect of portrait commissions from public figures turned to the booming port of New York. There newly wealthy merchants eagerly sought to have their portraits painted and …

The chateau of Bouges in France

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

By MADELEINE JARRY; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January 1980.  The charming village of Bouges is situated in the center of France, between Chateauroux and Valencay. Grouped around the chateau in the village are several low houses with slate roofs, where those who once served the chatelains lived. The last private owners of the chateau, M. and Mme. Henry Viguier, gave …

Folk art rising

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | Although the American Folk Art Museum received a great deal of press attention upon the closing of its award-winning building on Fifty-Third Street last year, the really big story was to be found in its immediate resurgence. Beginning with the hugely successful red and white quilt show at the Park Avenue Armory and …

Southern California modernism engages colonial New England

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | An advertisement placed by the Los Angeles department store Barker Brothers in the Los Angeles Times on November 13, 1929, records the earliest appearance of Porter Blanchard’s Commonwealth pattern, the first American flatware pattern to embrace modernism in both form and ornament (Fig. 3). Nine months later Barker Brothers featured Commonwealth again, in …

The discovery of William Black

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | When the late southern decorative arts expert and author John Bivins Jr. published his 1968 book on early North Carolina firearms, he noted that, “among surviving implements…of early America and the South, few art forms have stirred the imagination more than the American longrifle.”1 Created by craftsmen working in rural communities, long rifles …

City Barnes

Gregory Cerio Art

Architecture, by Greg Cerio | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | Let’s set aside any recap of the Sturm und Drang that accompanied the move of the Barnes Foundation from its home in suburban Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, to central Philadelphia, as well as the uproar over the legal legerdemain that erased many of the strictly defined codicils in the …

The glitter of Night Hauling: Andrew Wyeth in the 1940s

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | How do we account for the strangeness of Andrew Wyeth’s art of the 1940s? How, that is, beyond discerning the surrealist undertones, finding the magic realist affinities, or seeing that Wyeth followed in a Brandywine tradition whose oddity was firmly established by Howard Pyle-lone pirates on desolate shores; magicians and curly-shoed dwarves; Revolutionary …

The boy who loved ANTIQUES

Editorial Staff Opinion

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | “While my childhood friends were engrossed in Boys’ Life, Mad Magazine, and racier fare, I eagerly anticipated next month’s issue” When my friend Betsy Pochoda invited me to write a brief celebratory essay marking the ninetieth anniversary of The Magazine Antiques, she extracted a promise that I would take a personal approach and …

Past, Present, and Future at the Huntington

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | Its name, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, pretty well covers what this singular institution in San Marino, California, is all about. But it hardly begins to tell the story. The creation of Henry E. Huntington, a man with forward-looking business sense and retrospective tastes in art and literature, the Huntington today is …

Last Chance Exhibits

Editorial Staff Calendar, Exhibitions

  Last Chance Exhibits It’s the last chance to see these exhibits! May 27, 2012 GREENWICH LOST AND PRESERVED May 27, 2012 Greenwich Bruce Museum Address: Bruce Museum, 1 Museum Drive Greenwich, CT 06830-7157 Phone: 203.869.0376 For more information go to http://www.ctvisit.com/events/summary?eventid=14714   DRESSING UP, STANDING OUT, FITTING IN: ADORNMENT & IDENTITY IN MAINE, 1750-1950 May 27, 2012 Maine Historical Society …