I was on a business swing through the Midwest recently and visited the Art Institute of Chicago to view Salvador Dali: The Image Disappears, the first exhibition at the museum to be devoted to the work of the artist most associated in the public mind with Surrealism. It was a strong show, displaying works from the 1930’s, a pivotal decade in the artist’s career. Paintings like the one below, included in the exhibition, would make his name. Salvador Dali, William Tell, 1930, Collection Centre Georges Pompidou, ParisImage courtesy Wikiart. Born in the Catalonian region of Spain in 1904, Dali received a thorough grounding in Old Master techniques in Madrid at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Intelligent, articulate, a tireless networker before the term was even invented, and an exhibitionist with a talent for attracting notice, he went through brief Cubist and Futurist phases after art school before becoming a proponent of Surrealism, a style in which his classical chops could be put to full use. He would become the most important member of the movement. Art historians and certainly Andre Breton, the founder of the movement who later expelled Dali from its ranks, would disagree with the above statement, but in terms of popular recognition, the verdict is in. The person in the street may not be able to define the term “surrealist,” and they may not have heard of Max Ernst, Hans (Jean) Arp, or Yves Tanguy, but everyone knows the name Dali. St. Petersburg, Florida, is not generally noted as an artworld hotspot, but over 400,000 people visit the Dali Museum there each...
In a famous 1929 essay, Virginia Woolf wrote, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf was right, of course – any novelist needs peace and quiet in which to work. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who reportedly wrote at a corner of the kitchen table while her seven children cavorted nearby, was an obvious exception, although I find the story as dubious as that of the Chinese peasant woman who interrupts her plowing to give birth in the field and then picks up the reins again. For painters, the need for a physical space – call it a studio or whatever you will – in which to create art is paramount. Oil paints take time to dry before revisions can be made. A session must be ended for the day when the light changes, and the easel must be left undisturbed. The physical needs of a painter are much more difficult to satisfy than those of a writer. Traveling through the Berkshires recently, Roberta and I visited a site which reflects the truth of Woolf’s perception. The Frelinghuysen-Morris House and Studio in Lennox was the home of two abstract artists who were dubbed “the Park Avenue Cubists,” George L.K. Morris (1905-1975) and Suzy Frelinghuysen (1911-1988). Entrance foyer to Frelinghuysen-Morris House, Lennox, MAPhoto courtesy Frelinghuysen-Morris House and Studio. Born at the tail end of The Gilded Age, the artists, who married in 1935, grew up in privilege as members of New York and New Jersey families who had produced generations of statesmen and diplomats. After graduating from Yale, Morris rejected his...
Often (though not nearly as often as dealers would like) when you’re visiting an art fair or antiques show, you will see a small red dot placed on the label of a work being offered. That dot means that the work has already been sold and thus is no longer for sale. It’s funny how a tiny red sticker can arouse longing in the human heart. There is something about forbidden fruit that tempts us. I guarantee that if you hold an exhibition of paintings, all by the same artist, all the same size, and all of the same subject, and put a red dot next to one of them, visitors to your show will point to the painting with the dot and exclaim, “Oh, THAT’S the one I would have bought! Do you have any others just like this?” Dealers can play upon this yearning for the unobtainable. Long ago I knew a dealer down South who would invite a wealthy collector to his home for a formal dinner. During the course of the evening, the dealer would give the collector a tour of his private collection. There would always be a spectacular painting in the place of honor above the fireplace. Let’s say it was a Mary Cassatt. When the guest exclaimed about what a lovely Cassatt it was, the dealer would agree, “Yes, I’ve never seen a better one.” “What would you take for it?” the guest would demand. “Oh, Bill,” the dealer would demur, “That’s not for sale! It’s in my personal collection,” lingering lovingly on the word “personal.” “But what would you take?” the...
I like to say that the only truly original artist was the man or woman who drew that first mastodon on the cave wall. All other artists have been stealing from that person ever since. Wayne Thiebaud, currently the subject of a wonderful exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, would agree with me. The exhibition, “Art Comes From Art,” foregrounds a practice grounded in his statement, “I believe very much in the tradition that art comes from art and nothing else.” Thiebaud still gets mentioned in discussions of Pop Art, but, as Timonthy Burgard, Senior Curator at the de Young Museum points out in the exhibition’s accompanying video, Thiebaud has none of the irony that suffuses the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, or Tom Wesselman, and his paintings have none of the flatness that characterizes Warhol’s silk screens, Lichtenstein’s Ben Day dots, or Wesselman’s collaged works. Thiebaud was in love with oil; all of his subjects are caressed with delicious impasto. Installation view of Wayne Thiebaud Art Comes From Art exhibition, 2025.Photo by Gary Sexton. Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Thiebaud was from a working-class background and first studied art at a trade school in Los Angeles. Following service in World War II, he attended state colleges in San Jose and Sacramento. His first art mentor was the head of the advertising department at the Los Angeles firm for which he worked. Thiebaud was never ashamed of his roots in commercial art; indeed, as he once quipped, “I don’t care much for Pop Art. It’s too...
A few months back, I wrote about a current touring exhibition of works by Tamara de Lempicka. As I said then, the Art Deco style of the Roaring Twenties (which the French call les années folles) evokes an image of tuxedoed men with pomaded hair squiring sleek women wearing evening gowns and dripping in diamonds to parties from Paris to the Riviera. But the Art Deco period had its notable practitioners in America, too, and I was recently called upon to appraise some works by one of the most noted of them in his time, an artist whose reputation has only recently begun to rise after a long period of obscurity, Robert Winthrop Chanler (1872-1930). Chanler was born in New York, NY in 1872, a scion of several noted families of America’s Gilded Age, including the Astors and the Delanos. His mother, Margaret Astor Ward Chanler, died when he was three, and his father, John Winthrop Chanler, died two years later, leaving Chanler and his siblings, dubbed “the Astor Orphans” in the popular press, to be brought up by guardians and privately educated by tutors at Rokeby, the family estate on the Hudson River in Barrytown, NY. He showed an early interest in art and at 17 accompanied his brother to Rome. The stay in Europe was ostensibly to complete Chanler’s education, but another impetus was his family’s concern for his already-evident propensity for what a biographer has called “inappropriate female attachments.” Chanler subsequently went to Paris to stay with another brother and also lived with families in the French countryside and in Wales. Returning to Rome in 1891,...
