This Week's Events: Depression-Era Art, Turner's Seascapes, French Art Deco Furniture, Naples Art, Antique & Jewelry Show & More
Florida
Naples Exhibition Center
Naples Art, Antique & Jewelry Show
February 24—28, 2017
Naples Exhibition Center
850 Goodlette-Frank Road, Naples, FL 34102
For information, call 561.822.5440 or visit
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This week is the sixth iteration of one of the highlights of the Naples social calendar, an antiques bazaar featuring 60 exhibitors of international renown. The Naples Art, Antique & Jewelry show offers treasures for every taste and sensibility, from those with an appetite for antique instruments (who may fancy a Georgian wheel barometer from 1830) to those in want of a gilded bangle (such as a diamond-encrusted "lizard" offered by J.S. Fearnley). Also in attendance at this year’s show are David David Gallery,Rehs Galleries, Ed Weissman Art & Antiques, M.S. Rau Antiques, and Kenneth James Collection. The catalogue for the 2017 Naples Art, Antique & Jewelry Show is available online.
London, United Kingdom
Royal Academy of Arts
America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s
February 25—June 4, 2017
Royal Academy of Arts
Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1S 3ET
For information, call +44 (0) 20 7300 8000 or visit
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 signaled the end of prosperity and the beginning of a new age defined by bread lines, shanty towns, and the Dust Bowl. It also heralded a period of creative ferment, as artists invented new formal strategies to chronicle the depredations of the Great Depression. This loss of innocence, this journey into the pit of despair and back again, is the subject of a blockbuster show at the Royal Academy of Arts, one of the landmark events of the year.
America after the Fall: Paintings in the 1930s brings together forty-five seminal works, including Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930), which has never before traveled outside North America. The result is a who’s who of America’s most celebrated artists: Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and Charles Sheeler (1883-1965). They each speak a different visual dialect, from hard-nosed realism to metaphysical abstraction, but these artists are united by a desire to build a new national identity out of the wreckage of the Great Depression. Ironically, it was precisely this period of hardship that allowed the superpower-to-be to chart its own path on the world’s stage. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked, “Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.” Browse more works in the show here.
New York
The Frick Collection
Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages through Time
February 23—May 14, 2017
The Frick Collection
1 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021
For information, call 212.288.0700 or visit
In the nineteenth century, the British port was a site of encounter: between land and sea, civilization and the natural world, the British crown and its possessions abroad. This is the subject of a new exhibition at The Frick Collection that assembles some thirty works by the Romanticist painter Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), who approached the seascape with vigorous brushwork and chromatic exuberance.
The exhibition is anchored by Harbor of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile and Cologne, two monumental works painted by Turner in the mid-1820s that are restricted from travel and have not been exhibited outside the Frick for the past century. As a whole, the works on display are not so much a record of British imperial might as a flight of fancy: many of them depict imagined scenes set in ancient Carthage and Rome. Learn more.
The Jewish Museum
Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design
Through March 26, 2017
The Jewish Museum
1109 5th Ave at 92nd Street, New York, NY 10128
For information, call 212.423.3200 or visit
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From Bordeaux to Paris, from a family of shipbuilders to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Pierre Chareau (1883-1950) came from humble origins to become one of the preeminent designers in the Art Deco style. A new show at the Jewish Museum investigates his role as an epoch-defining craftsman, a favorite of the French-Jewish intelligentsia and a patron of the arts with a sizable collection of his own, including works by Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920).
Among the highlights is the ensemble pictured above right, in which a spiraling telephone table made of walnut and patinated wrought iron is topped by a lamp made of triangular alabaster shards. This piece captures the essence of Chareau, who updated a national tradition of lavish interiors to meet the demands of modern life, with all of its gadgets and gizmos (like the telephone). The exhibition is a hodgepodge of media, with 180 rarely-seen works from major public and private collections in Europe and the United States, and helps to explain Chareau’s popularity among contemporary collectors. A major player in this space is the Los-Angeles-based Edition Modern, the only purveyor of Pierre Chareau reproductions in the United States. Click here for more.
The Morgan Library & Museum
New Acquisitions
The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
For information, call 212.685.0008 or visit
http://www.themorgan.org/
At first glance, Martin Puryear’s Drawing for Untitled (1990) is little more than a lollipopped-shaped smudge. But, in fact, this is one of the artist’s signature motifs, and this drawing laid the groundwork for the sculptures of the late 1990s and 2000s that would define his career, such as the 45-foot-tall That Profile (1999), on the plaza at the Getty Center.
This month, The Morgan Library & Museum cemented its status as one of the most important repositories of drawings in the world by acquiring Drawing for Untitled and two other works: David Hockney’s Celia, Paris (1969) and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Seated Camaldolese Monk (1834). The three drawings illuminate the possibilities of the medium of works on paper, from the meticulous study of a cleric in repose (Seated Camaldolese Monk) to the loving portrait of a muse (Celia, Paris) to that enigmatic bulbous blot (Drawing for Untitled).
Washington
Bellevue Arts Museum
The Contact: Quilts of the Sierra Nevada by Ann Johnston
February 24—June 11, 2017
Bellevue Arts Museum
510 Bellevue Way NE, Bellevue, WA 98004
For information, call 425.519.0770 or visit
The sublime spectacle of the California Sierra Nevada range has inspired generations of American artists, from Albert Bierstadt (Among the Sierra Nevada, California, 1868) to Ansel Adams (Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, 1944). In a new show at the Bellevue Arts Museum, in Washington, Ann Johnston adds to this tradition by taking full advantage of the textiles medium with a series of quilts depicting the serpentine rivers and bald peaks that characterize this landscape. This exhibition is infused with the spirit of the frontier and evokes the collision, or “contact,” between gold-hungry pioneers and the primeval landscape of the Sierra Nevada Range. This is a subject Johnston knows well: her family has held a mining claim near Tioga Pass since the nineteenth century.