ARTES MAGAZINE

October 12, 2010 Hirst out, Mehretu in Prior to the Lehman collection sale, Skate’s predicted that if the work, We’ve got Style, (the Vessel Collection – blue/green), right did not sell, it would be a nail in the coffin of Damien Hirst’s art market. Nailed in he is—the failure to find a buyer for Hirst’s work, number [...]

 Lafayette Maynard Dixon always claimed that he had little interest in fabricating visual fiction. For him, his Native American West had been needlessly over-romanticized by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran and George Inness. They had been mere interlopers with brushes and tourist visas in hand. “Painting, as I see it, must be human rather than arty,” [...]

In advance of his keynote presentation at the Art of Leadership symposium on October 5, 2010, at Bonhams in New York City, I spoke with Ben Genocchio (left) about the search for value in the art market during challenging economic times. “Who still has the money to spend on fine art and collectables today and [...]

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:       [...]