ARTES MAGAZINE

This is a tale of two historic homes in a beautiful seaside, New England town, and of how visionary zeal and coincidence braided history, friendship and a passion for things beautiful together in a most unusual way… On May 1, 1915 Alfred Vanderbilt boarded the Lusitania bound for Liverpool as a first class passenger. It [...]

“Every portrait is, in some sense, a self portrait that reflects the viewer. Because ‘the eye is not satisfied with seeing,’ we bring to a portrait our perceptions and our experiences. In the alchemy of the creative act, every portrait is a mirror.” In his opening paragraph of the chapter entitled, The Image as Reflection”, [...]

In 2007, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston acquired a spectacular twenty-eight piece silver-gilt toilet service made by the Augsburg goldsmith, Johann Erhard II Heuglin (master 1717-1757), around 1725-1730. It represents the height of the Baroque style in Germany.  Left: Twenty‑eight piece toilet service in original leather case marked by Johann Erhard II Heuglin (master [...]

 If you seek, without success, to diffuse the notion that art collectors historically secure trophy artworks without regard to underlying theory or cohesion, or if undeterred, you crave the sublime rush of particular examples by the most important 20th century European artists, or if your urge is simply to alleviate the chill of a nether [...]

  Oceanie is a masterful, two-part work by Henri Matisse, comprising ‘le ciel’ and ‘la mer’; both pieces realizing the artist’s self-described “dream of….an art of balance, purity and serenity…”     The pair of decorative, mural-sized compositions draws explicitly from ‘reveries’ of his 1930 experience in Tahiti, the exotic iconography of which would become the mainstay [...]

  A  visit to New York’s, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Old Masters Collection, provides the interested viewer with an opportunity to look closely at pictures painted on wooden panel, canvas, and occasionally, stone or metal. Here, we will refer to their collection and concentrate on the materials, techniques and physical history of European works from [...]

Eighteenth-century American artists relied on European art long before they set sail for the Continent. Mezzotints after French and English portraits were imported by the hundreds during the eighteenth century and supplied the colonists with what was often their only contact with fine art. John Singleton Copley wrote to Benjamin West on November 12, 1766:       [...]

Three years ago the newly hatched, Pinta Latin American Modern & Contemporary Art Fair, jumped bravely into the ever-growing, melange of art fairs and biennales. Opening at the Metropolitan Pavilion/Altman Building in New York City, “The fair’s primary aim”, according to its director, Diego Costa Peuser, was “to bring Latin American art to the world.” [...]

Recently, Diane Dewey, Contributing Editor for ARTES e-Magazine gave a presentation in which she described to the audience what she, as an appraiser, looks for when evaluating a work of art. These factors, that give value to art, are one aspect of the appreciation of an artwork. “When a work speaks to us we should [...]

Ancient pictographs depict China as the Land of the Middle Kingdom, suspended half way between heaven and earth and blessed by splendid isolation from the rest of the world. In this century, this sprawling nation of 1.3 billion sits squarely in the real world, striving to find a place and a voice in a vast [...]