When he was designing the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth the great American architect Louis Kahn said that he wanted it to resemble “a friendly home.” That might surprise anyone familiar with Kahn’s museums—the Kimbell, the Yale Center for British Art, or the Yale University Art Gallery—but I think he was simply saying that he wanted his building to wall …
Editor’s letter, November/December 2014
In the nineteenth century there was an oft-repeated tale about the young Thomas Coleentering New York from the far reaches of rural Pennsylvania and being met with hosannasfrom the city’s artists. Like most oft-told tales this one turned fact toward myth (to beginwith, Cole had arrived from nowhere more obscure than Philadelphia), and yet it suggests somethingintriguing and durable about …
Editor’s letter, September/October 2014
On our cover, the cacophonous world in which we live–digital and artisanal, ephemeral and timeless–is rendered, ironically, in the disciplined quiet of limewood by the master carver (and prose master) David Esterly. Carving, Esterly has observed in his book The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making, is a metaphor for many things. I’d count among them the …
Editor’s letter, July/August 2014
Here is a curious turn of events: British folk art, although obviously many centuries old, is just this summer receiving its first ever museum exhibition. Robert Young, who with his wife Josyane has carried aloft the standard of European folk art in their handsome London gallery for several years now, discusses Tate Britain’s exhibition in this issue with his customary …
Editor’s letter, May/June 2014
Here is the conventional wisdom about our world: contemporary art, in the ascendant for decades now, is on an ahistorical rampage, wielding its industrial strength newness and sowing disdain for beauty, mastery of technique, and anything that smacks of pastness. While this may be true of a segment of the art market and its press, artists are quite another matter. …
Editor’s letter, March/April 2014
The photographs by Charles Marville in this issue and on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art strike me as an important early chapter in the story of our modern lives. Marville’s job was to photograph Paris before and after Baron Haussmann erased its centuries old densely wound streets, replacing them with the broad new avenues and alluring vistas that …
End Notes: Photographer Bill Gekas
We enjoy exploring the ways in which contemporary artists look to the past to inform their work. We are especially intrigued by the photography of Australian Bill Gekas, whose primary inspiration for these images of his daughter is clearly the Dutch old masters. Digital photography is his tool, but his evocative images are also the result of astute borrowing and …
Editor’s letter, January/February 2014
Is it too soon to propose a quota on installations of contemporary art in period settings? Yes, I know, everything is mashable these days, but not all these border crossings of present into past deserve a visa. I recently went in search of a silver box in one of the period rooms of a major museum (it wasn’t there). What …
Wendell D. Garrett Award
We at ANTIQUES are pleased that Gerald W. R. Ward has been named the first recipient of the Wendell D. Garrett Award by the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, which established the prize as a testament to the accomplishments of one of its most illustrious alumni—and the indelible voice of our magazine for more than forty years. Like Wendell, Gerry …
Editor’s letter, November/December 2013
Are New Yorkers the most parochial people on the planet? I sometimes think so, especially when it comes to art, where we have an absolute genius for overlooking the important in busy pursuit of The Important. We are a city of zeitgeist sniffers, way too hungry for whatever fad diet the art market is currently dishing out. Luckily our plat …