Latest Feature Articles
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Hyper-Realistic Sculptor, Carole Feuerman Masters the Subtle Human Gesture
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Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Shows Photographs of Music Legend, Elvis Presley
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Massachusetts’s Fuller Craft Museum’s Powerful Ceramic Figurine Exhibit
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Delhi Photographer Captures the Myriad Faces and Moods of India
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OPEN 14 – Venice’s International Exhibition of Sculptures and Installations
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Dutch and Flemish Masterworks on Display at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts
Delhi Photographer Captures the Myriad Faces and Moods of India
Posted on 23 January 2012 | By Sushma Bahl
JJ Valaya, Paradox 9 (2011)
The idea of contemporary India, and a quintessential one at that—a conglomerate of many Indias, with its fluid social fabric and multitudes of people—is the paradox that confronts the photo-artist, JJ Valaya, an accomplished designer and pioneering fashion guru. Through his viewfinder, Valaya captures the fascinating multiplicity of a burgeoning city where he has lived and worked for decades, tantalizing us with loving and nostalgic glimpses of this place he knows so well: glamour and grime; sophisticated and commonplace; classical and popular; rich and poor; old and new—whether spontaneous or carefully-planned—all are framed by the photographer’s eye in different parts of Delhi, India’s capital city. artes fine arts magazine Read more
OPEN 14 – Venice’s International Exhibition of Sculptures and Installations
Posted on 12 January 2012 | By Edward Rubin
Each year, OPEN generously peppers the beautiful island of Lido with unexpected, imaginative artistic surprises and is one of the most entertaining sculpture and installation exhibitions in the art world. Essentially an outdoor walking tour with a few in-hotel installations, OPEN begins the moment you disembark from the vaporetto onto the Piazzale St. Maria Elisabetta. It continues along the shop and restaurant-laden Via Lepanto, morphs into the lushly planted promenade of Lungomare G. Marconi, and ends overlooking the beach, at the very chic Hotel Westin Excelsior, the infamous hangout of the Venice Film Festival crowd. This year, Madonna and George Clooney were all the rage, followed closely by lusting hordes of screaming acolytes.i
Left: Tarshito (Italy), Applauses (2007) Made at Tarshito studio with Isabella De Chiara, Roma e Agnieszka Blazy, Polonia, Angela Ferrara,Bari; Martinelli Corato, and Bari, metal structure and ceramic hands. Photo: Edward Rubin. artes fine arts magazine Read more
Dutch and Flemish Masterworks on Display at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts
Posted on 27 December 2011 | By Susan Schopp
She was born in Belgium, he in the Netherlands; they both live in the United States. Between them they’ve assembled the finest private collection of Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings in the world. Unlikely though it might seem, Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection, currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, is the first time that the van Otterloos have seen their collection displayed in its entirety.
(Left) [IMAGE 1] Godfried Schalcken, Young Girl Eating Sweets (detail), 1680-85, oil/panel, 73 x 61″. Collection Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo. Image courtesy Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts fine arts magazine Read more
Hyper-Realistic Sculptor, Carole Feuerman Masters the Subtle Human Gesture
Posted on 26 December 2011 | By Richard Friswell
Carole Feuerman, Grand Catalina (2005-11) oil paint on resin (o/r), 62x38x17"
My first encounter with Grand Catalina (2005-11) came unexpectedly, as I thumbed through the pages of the gallery section of an art magazine. Her uplifted face, eyes closed, suited and capped for laps in the pool, skin still moist with droplets of water as she appears to slip from the water, riveted me in an unexpected moment of intimacy with this life-like image. Lashes and brows neatly arrayed, the pouting lips appeared ready to gasp for a breath of pool-side air. If her eyes were to finally open, I wondered if she would be surprised to see me—a stranger, so close by!? The work conveyed a sense of strength and capability, while also offering an alluring vulnerability and sensuality. In the few moments that I studied the image, I imagined that this larger-than-life-sized figure, seemingly brimming with self-assurance, would have no difficulty managing whatever the world handed her, once she finally emerged from her momentary reverie. artes fine arts magazin Read more
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Shows Photographs of Music Legend, Elvis Presley
Posted on 19 December 2011 | By Amy Henderson
Alfred Wertheimer, Going Home (1956) Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Wash. D.C.
From December 24th to March 8th, 2012, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will host Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer, a collaborative exhibition developed by the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, and Govinda Gallery, and made possible through the support of the History channel. The idea of images of a pop culture icon displayed in such hallowed halls may raise the eyebrows of those whose sense of the Portrait Gallery is of a museum dedicated to the “art of portraiture,” or as an august arena for the presentation of such notable figures as the presidents. But–just as he did when he electrified the nation in 1956—Elvis at 21 will inevitably alter the beat of everyday Gallery life.
In photographs taken by Alfred Wertheimer in 1956, Elvis at 21 documents the explosive rise of a 21-year-old singer named Elvis Presley. A young freelance photographer, Wertheimer was hired to take publicity shots of Presley, but then “tagged along” and was able to capture Elvis’s transit to superstardom. For this exhibition, Wertheimer took his negatives to pioneer printmaker David Adamson, and the resulting 56 large format pigment prints provide a stunning storyboard of fame. fine arts magazine Read more
Massachusetts’s Fuller Craft Museum’s Powerful Ceramic Figurine Exhibit
Posted on 15 December 2011 | By Richard Friswell
One thing becomes immediately clear upon entering the Fuller Craft Museum’s current exhibition, Fresh Figurines—these works, gathered from wide-ranging sources under the skillful eye of curator, Gail Brown, will redefine your notion of figurative porcelain. This is NOT your grandmother’s safe and sentimental collection, sitting behind glass in the corner hutch! While not quite a send-up of a centuries-old tradition of three-dimensional image making, the porcelain pieces on display are politically and socially edgy—part satire, part provocation, part self-reflection—while all the time referencing their historic vocabulary in 18th and 19th century European romanticism and 20th century middle-American kitsch.
Left: Chris Antemann (detail), A Tea Party (2010), porcelain, decals, luster. Kamm Teapot Foundation Collection. artes fine arts magazine Read more
University of Connecticut, Benton Museum Shows Contemporary Landscape Paintings
Posted on 14 December 2011 | By Stephen Kobasa
Barkley Hendricks, 'Black River from the Elgin Road View' (2005), o/c. Courtesy the artist & Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.
Before even seeing it, I made a judgment on this show. And I was right. The landscapes that Barkley Hendricks has made are revelatory in ways so precise and disarming that they trained me instantly. An enlarged capacity to respond to them was guaranteed simply by looking.
Eleven of these scenes share a single tight space in the gallery. Not crowded, the varied shapes of the canvases obviously invite congregation, like an assemblage of mezzotints on a Victorian parlor wall. Each tondo and oval and lunette is like a shifting image in a lantern slide show, introducing a distant country to a dazzled audience. artes fine arts magazine Read more
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, with Comprehensive Exhibit of Edgar Degas Nudes
Posted on 12 December 2011 | By Richard Friswell
Edgar Degas, La Toilette (1884-86) Private Collection. See End Note #1
“I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine…of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament—temperament is the word—I know nothing.” ~Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas, best known in the public imagination for his more sentimental, impressionistic works—ballet scenes, race tracks, opera and music hall scenes—was, first and foremost, a student of the human figure. With the current exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), Degas and the Nude, a first-ever sweeping survey of some of his best and also least-known figurative works, here is an artist who still has the capacity to shock and surprise. Pulled from the extensive holdings of the MFA, The Musee D’Orsay, in Paris and dozens of other private and public collections, Degas and the Nude offers a retrospective of his work over a fifty-year time frame, from his days as a classically-trained student, to his ‘modern’ work at the turn of the 20th century. Much to the dismay of many late 19th century critics and the Parisian public-at-large, Degas, the radically-inventive artist, challenged a then, time-honored establishment’s approach to representing nude subjects, as he relentlessly strove to capture the most intimate and disarmingly candid moments in their private lives. artes fine arts magazine Read more
Colorado’s Littleton Historical Museum Grand Canyon Photo Exhibit
Posted on 6 December 2011 | By Lindsey Koren
The Kolb Brothers Hanging, Grand Canyon (1904). Photo by Ellsworth & Emory Kolb, courtesy Cline Library, N. Arizona Univ.
The Grand Canyon is wild and unforgiving. But it is also one of the most stunning landscapes on Earth—a place for recreation, reflection and reverence. A beautiful Smithsonian exhibition allows us to marvel at this natural wonder without camping equipment, emergency rations or rappelling ropes.
Featuring 60 framed photographs, Lasting Light: 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photography is a collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the Grand Canyon Association. The exhibition is now midway through its national tour, and can currently be seen at the Littleton Historical Museum, Littleton, CO, on view through February 23, 2012. If you can’t swing a visit to see this natural wonder in Colorado, perhaps you can catch a glimpse of the canyon’s beauty when the Smithsonian traveling exhibition comes to a venue near you. The exhibition tour continues through 2013, and the full itinerary can be seen at www.sites.si.edu. ARTES Fine Arts Magazine Read more
Pennsylvania Museum, Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, with Antique Toy Collection
Posted on 1 December 2011 | By Autumn Miller
Lehmann-Made Tut-Tut, No 490 (1913). Coll. of L. J. Buehler, 1999. Gifted to Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, New Castle, PA
“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” ~Charles Baudelaire
“Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!” ~Charles Dickens
We may be shopping for the children in our lives, reminiscing about the holidays of our youth, or analyzing our portfolios, hoping that the decision to invest in Barbie instead of G.I. Joe this season turns out to have been the right one; whatever the case may be, whether or not they are a part of our daily lives, the December holiday season is upon us. This is the time of year when toys find themselves at center stage. artes fine arts magazine Read more
