Fine Art Connoisseur January/February 2019

collect with a higher purpose

What if a painting in your collection that you no longer hold in high regard turned out to be — years from now, when the kids are settling your estate — the most valuable picture you owned? There are smart professionals out there who pay close attention — to artists, to artworks, to career trajectories, and to who is buying what — so they can help collectors make wise decisions. Those advisers have a fairly high rate of success. Yet even they are often unfamiliar with plenty of contemporary artists, even the ones who may ultimately become some of history’s most important. The time I’ve invested in the art world has taught me a couple of essential lessons. First, even the best, longest-lived artists tend to produce during their careers just a…

something to keep an eye on

It’s a matter of debate how the art market is faring today, but one thing we know for sure is that the world’s approximately two dozen “super-galleries” are going from big to bigger. Operating not only in New York City and London but also in other money centers like Hong Kong and Los Angeles, these mega-firms offer eye-wateringly expensive cutting-edge contemporary and classic modern art. Examples of these galleries include Gagosian, White Cube, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, David Zwirner, and Lévy Gorvy. Extremely effective at grooming rising stars and getting their artworks into museums’ collections and exhibitions, they have earned their success. And some of them are behaving like more than galleries — in fact, like foundations and museums. For example, Hauser & Wirth (H&W) has established the Hauser & Wirth…

favorite

JONATHAN LIPPINCOTT Design manager, Farrar, Straus and Giroux; curator; writer Photo © David Masello Although Jonathan Lippincott designs books, curates art exhibitions, writes about art, and lectures about artists, he still doesn’t know the exact difference between abstraction and realism. This inability comes into particular focus when he looks at one of his favorite paintings, John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson housed in the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati. “While anyone would immediately say this is a realist portrait of a man in a chair in a living room, I also see passages of the work that are as painterly and brushy as anything de Kooning ever did,” says Lippincott, who, as the longtime design manager at the publishing firm Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is used to noticing the…

celebrating our museums

Strictly speaking, a museum is a place dedicated to the muses — the nine (female) divinities of the arts, history, science, and literature who were revered by the ancient Greeks. Though most of us don’t worship those goddesses anymore, the subjects they symbolized live on and are still brought to life daily in the vast array of museums found all over the world. Like so many good things, museums emerged during the Italian Renaissance, specifically in 1471, when Pope Sixtus IV opened the Capitoline Museums in Rome to show off the ancient sculptures he owned. His successor Julius II launched what we know as the Vatican Museums in 1506, but it must be noted that only invited guests — usually of the higher and artistic classes — could enter such venues…

2019 museum exhibition calendar

JANUARY Ongoing Charles M. Russell Collection Permanent Exhibition, C.M. Russell Museum, MT Ongoing The Bison: American Icon, Heart of Plains Indian Culture Permanent Exhibition, C.M. Russell Museum, MT January 7-March 17 “Frum We Ownt Yeye” Gullah Geechee Culture From Our Own Eyes, Brookgreen Gardens, SC January 26-March 30 Birds In Art, Brookgreen Gardens, SC January 26-April 20 Masterpieces from the Museum of Cartoon Art, Bruce Museum, CT FEBRUARY Ongoing through February 10 Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, Peabody Essex Museum, MA February 2-May 5 Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, Peabody Essex Museum, MA February 2-June 2 Buried Treasures of the Silk Road, Bruce Museum, CT February 9-March 24 Masters of the American West, Autry Museum of the American West, CA February 15-May 12 Hopper to Pollock: American Modernism from the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, NC February…

three to watch

Art has been a mainstay in the life of KATHRYN ENGBERG (b. 1994) since childhood. As a third-generation artist, she regularly spent time in her mother’s and grandmother’s studios watching them paint, and trips to museums and art projects were a standard part of growing up in her hometown of Salisbury, Maryland. By the time she reached adolescence and young adulthood, Engberg was developing into an artist all her own, and those around her continued to nurture her talent. After high school, Engberg attended the Grand Central Atelier (New York City) and graduated from it in 2016. Today she is a core instructor at the school, passing on to the next generation the 19th-century academic approach that was taught to her by founder Jacob Collins and his colleagues. Some of the…