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 [...]

The museums of Washington, DC are renowned for their exhibitions of eminent artists. Only infrequently however–in that city of policy and politics–do three exhibits appear in tandem, showcasing the work of artists who contributed to altering the definition of art in the twentieth century. This spring and summer, viewers are offered an opportunity to observe [...]

Place, memory, and emotion are closely intertwined in the paintings of Charles Burchfield (1893–1967), at a exhibition currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Thoroughly grounded in the landscapes and neighborhoods of Western New York, Burchfield meticulously observed and freely interpreted places that others might overlook—sites not conventionally scenic or remarkable—transforming them [...]

 The Exquisite Corpse has lived many lives!  But first, a brief explanation is required…  The early 20th century was an era of experimentation in the visual arts, music, literature, design and architecture—particularly in Europe. The world was swept up in scientific and industrial innovations of the period. Many believed that civilization stood poised on the [...]

  What’s going on?    The dismaying dearth of intellectual rigor in our popular culture has been parried with an overly- zealous esotericism among the architectural elite. This clique of influential architects has been given a much louder voice by their precocious benefactors than befits their numbers and yet their stamp upon the contemporary architectural landscape has [...]

 When it comes to matters of art, progress rarely takes a straight, clear, and single-minded path. Sewell Sillman’s career, however, suggests a different model—one that allows for stops and starts, for backtracking and bounding forward—in our consideration not just of Sillman as an artist but of his connection to the people, places, and events of [...]

 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 [...]

 Alongside Giacometti, who is an absolute point of departure, the man most frequently invoked by Henri Cartier-Bresson amongst the friends we have in common is the publisher Teriade, the wise and ever-vigilant older figure whom he always considered his surest guide. In 1973, Teriade, who had admired and supported Henri from the beginning of his [...]

  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 [...]

The fourth of five children born to James and Ruth Porter, Fairfield Porter grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, just north of Chicago. His father’s mother had owned the land that later became Chicago’s Loop area, and the Porters were very comfortable; Fairfield never had to work, except for some years in the forties. His chief [...]