This Week’s Events: Festivities at the Armory, Jade Serpents, American Watercolors, Bejeweled Jellyfish and Photographs of Ruin
New York
Park Avenue Armory
The Art Show (Art Dealers Association of America)
March 1-5, 2017
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue (Park Avenue at 67th Street), New York, NY 10065
For information, call 212.488.5550 or visit
- On offer at Thomas Colville Fine Art, LLC: George Inness, Albano, Italy, ca. 1872. Oil on panel, 9.5 x 13.39 inches.
This week, seventy-two dealers will present an embarrassment of riches at the Park Avenue Armory during The Art Show, an annual gathering organized by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA). As with previous editions of this landmark event, many booths will be devoted to a single school or artist. Thomas Colville Fine Art will offer a collection of works by George Inness (1825-1894), a nineteenth-century painter who specialized in landscapes when he was not gallivanting overseas (he traveled to Europe in 1847, 1850 and 1854).
Another can’t-miss booth is a display from Galerie St. Etienne that will feature works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde and other artists associated with the North German Die Brücke group.
- Erich Heckel, Ostende, 1916. Watercolor and gouache on heavy off-white wove paper, 16 1/8 x 22 5/8 in. Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne.
Proceeds from The Art Show and the Gala Preview (February 28) benefit the non-profit Henry Street Settlement. In conjunction with the fair, organizers will sell Alexander Calder’s The Clove (1936), which was donated by the artist to the ADAA Foundation in 1971 and will be on public view at The Art Show for the first time since 1937. Bidding will conclude on Sunday, March 5, at 5:00 P.M.
The offerings at The Art Show will be limited to works from the nineteenth century onward, but fair-goers hankering after some Baroque or Rococo need not despair: The Frick Foundation (1 East 70th Street) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 5th Avenue) are both a short distance from the Park Avenue Armory.
Piers 92 & 94
The Armory Show
March 2-5, 2017
Piers 92 & 94
711 12th Avenue, New York, NY 10019
For information, call 212.645.6440 or visit
- Cerith Wyn Evans, Witness [After Iannis Xenakis], 2011. Chandelier from Luce Italia, an independent breather unit and flash player; 70 7/8 (height) x 47 1/4 inches (diameter). Copyright Cerith Wyn Evans. Photo copyright Cecil Mathieu. Courtesy Vranken-Pommery Monopole, Reims.
Across town from The Art Show is another essential cultural destination: The Armory Show, a conclave of high-wattage of collectors, dealers, luminaries and aesthetes on Piers 92 & 94, in the Hudson River. Established in 1994 by a quartet of New York gallerists—Colin de Land, Pat Hearn, Matthew Marks and Paul Morris—The Armory Show now draws nearly 65,000 annual visitors.
Staged in an industrial setting, this fair will showcase the inventory of some 200 galleries from 30 countries. Unlike other happenings in New York this week, this fair is strictly modern and contemporary, excluding any works made before 1900. Two of the highlights will be a display by Kayne Griffin Cocoran (Los Angeles) of a hypnotic, diamond-shaped light show by James Turrell and White Cube’s presentation of Cerith Wyn Evans’s polychromatic breathing apparatus, pictured above.
This annual gathering is also sensitive to pressing social and political issues, as reflected in What Is To Be Done?, a series of twelve solo-artist presentations curated by Jarrett Gregory. At a time of political upheaval, The Armory Show has staked a position at the intersection of artistic production and social justice.
This is not to suggest there will not be happenings of a more frivolous nature. After contemplating these weighty matters, fair-goers will find fresh-pressed juices and vegan sweets at a variety of eateries and cafes.
Pier 36
Art on Paper
March 3-5, 2017 (Preview on March 2)
Pier 36
299 South Street, New York, NY 10002
For information, call 212.518.6912 (press only) or visit
- In the holdings of Long-Sharp Gallery: Andy Warhol, Martha Graham Satyric Festival Song Unique (Black), 1986. Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board, 36 x 36 in.
Armory Arts Week 2017 would not be complete without Art on Paper, with takes as its raison d’être the love of reconstituted pulp (i.e. paper). This is only the third edition of Art on Paper, which launched in 2015, but this year’s fair has brought together 75 galleries, which will set up shop in Pier 36, a 70,000-square-foot facility next to the East River.
This is a heterogeneous mishmash of media, with drawings, photographs, sculptures and installations that all make use of paper in some fashion. Among the dignitaries in attendance: Somerville Manning, KOKI Arts and Long-Sharp Gallery.
Throckmorton Fine Art
Mythical Beasts: The Divinity of Dragons
March 3-April 22, 2017
Throckmorton Fine Art
145 East 57 Street – 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10022
For information, call 212.223.1059 or visit
- Serpentine Dragon Plaque Pendant: Warring States Period, ca. 475-221 BCE. Jade, 2 1/8 x 2 1/8 x 3/16 inches (thickness). Courtesy Throckmorton Fine Art.
The dragon is a protean beast, a millennia-old emblem of Chinese imperial might that is subject to countless variations (sometimes with the snout of a pig, or the head of a leonine, but always a sinuous reptile that brings with it power and prosperity).
This week at Throckmorton Fine Art, in New York City, we are presented with a menagerie of jade dragons executed over a four-thousand-year period. This show is a labor of love by Spencer S. Throckmorton, who has collected such objects since the 1990s and attributes his taste in jade to A Jade Miscellany, published in 1946 by Una Pope-Hennessy.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia Museum of Art
American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent
March 1-May 14, 2017
Philadelphia Museum of Art
2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia, PA 19130
For information call 215.763.8100, or visit
- Winslow Homer, Diamond Shoal, 1905. Watercolor on paper, dimensions unspecified. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Watercolor is often invoked as an American medium, one that corresponds to the vigor and vitality of a young republic seeking a new visual language. In the words of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “the watercolor movement tells a story of innovation, experimentation, and the creation of bold new ways of seeing the world.”
Building on this idea, a new exhibition at the museum tracks the story of watercolor as it ceased to be a marginal medium—a much-maligned art form practiced by women, amateurs and commercial artists—and was embraced by the mainstream. The catalyst for this transformation was the establishment in 1866 of the American Watercolor Society, an incubator of some of the most esteemed painters of the era. Before long, watercolor was a favorite medium of John La Farge (1835-1910), Thomas Moran (1837-1926), William Trost Richards (1833-1905), Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) and, of course, George Inness (1825-1894).
Foremost among the watercolorists were John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and Winslow Homer (1836-1910), who put his mark on the seascapes genre with depictions of naval vessels tossed by foamy sea-swells, as in Diamond Shoal, pictured above.
Richmond, Virginia
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
The Rachel Lambert Mellon Collection of Jean Schlumberger
February 10-June 18, 2017
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
200 N. Boulevard, Richmond, VA 23220
For information, call 804.340.1400 or visit
- Jean Schlumberger, Jellyfish (La Méduse) (Brooch), 1967. Moonstones, diamonds, sapphires, 18-karat gold, platinum. Collection of Mrs. Paul Mellon. Courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
For inspiration, the French-born artist-jeweler Jean Schlumberger (1907-1987) looked to the natural world, from the coiling tentacles of a jellyfish to the flamboyant plumage of a songbird.
A new exhibition at The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts showcases the bejeweled accessories of this highly influential jeweler, who began his career as a costume designer for Elsa Schiaparelli in 1930s Paris before managing a private salon at New York’s Tiffany & Co.
The show is organized around a half-dozen themes, a testament to the versatility of Schlumberger, whose name is synonymous with midcentury decorative arts. It begins with ready-to-wear bangles (bracelets, earrings, rings and clips), proceeds to underwater fantasies (including the diamond-encrusted invertebrate, pictured above) and concludes with a collection of objects modeled on sunflowers, butterflies, and other features of the garden.
Santa Monica, California
Peter Fetterman Gallery
Ellis Island: Ghosts of Freedom (Stephen Wilkes)
March 4-April 29, 2017
Peter Fetterman Gallery
2525 Michigan Avenue Gallery A1, Santa Monica, CA 90404
For information, call 310.453.6463 or visit
www.peterfetterman.com/gallery
- Stephen Wilkes, Huddled Chairs, 1998. Copyright Stephen Wilkes/Courtesy Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica.
In this new exhibition at Peter Fetterman Gallery, in Santa Monica, Calif., the photographer Stephen Wilkes takes us into what appears to be a post-apocalyptic landscape littered with crumbling plaster and moldering leaves. In one shot, pictured above, we see hundreds of chairs stacked in an alcove, perhaps a silent witness to some act of violence or loss. Is this is a vision of our dystopian future?
In fact, this is a defunct hospital complex on the south side of Ellis Island. Over the course of five years (1998-2003), Wilkes explored the rooms and corridors of this dilapidated facility, documenting “a spirited new vision of this gateway to freedom,” according to the gallery.
“Twelve million people passed through Ellis Island. Approximately one percent [was] turned away for health reasons. Wilkes’s powerful images of the underbelly of the island—a purgatory between freedom and captivity—ask us to reflect on the defining experiences of millions.”
