Who’s the greatest American artist of the late 19th century? I think you have to leave John Singer Sargent out of the running: though he had American citizenship, he was born in Italy, trained in France, and spent most of his life in Europe. Sargent aside, I suspect that most art historians would award the crown to either Thomas Eakins or Winslow Homer. You can make the case either way, but I prefer Homer, and much of the American art public agrees with me, or so it seems based on the crowds for the recent Homer exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Winslow Homer exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, photo by author. Roberta and I attended the show a week before its closing, and the place was packed. You needed Roller Derby-style elbow armor to see everything, or at least an enormous amount of patience. (Roberta asked a guard when the best time to see the show was if you didn’t want to feel as if you were on the subway at rush hour. “Wednesday afternoon, 4:00 PM to closing,” was his answer.) It’s not surprising. Generations of schoolchildren grew up seeing reproductions of Snap the Whip, The Herring Net, The Gulf Stream, or half a dozen other Homer paintings in textbooks or as illustrations on the wall of their classrooms. Union soldiers in the Civil War, deer hunters in the Adirondacks, elegant young ladies playing croquet, fishermen earning a cold and brutal living — Homer captured all aspects of American life. There’s a subject in his work to interest almost anyone. Most of the works...
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...
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,...
In this time when the world seems full of darkness, both natural and political, I have been distracting myself by reading Orlando Whitfield’s new book All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art (Pantheon Press). The fraud was committed by Whitfield’s American friend, Inigo Philbrick, whom he met at Goldsmith’s, a college of the University of London. From the earliest days of their friendship, Whitfield was fascinated by Philbrick’s ability to soak up art market information and to form highly advantageous art-world relationships with seemingly effortless ease. Whitfield portrays himself as a sort of Robin to Philbrick’s Batman as they begin a gallery together. In short order, however, Philbrook has moved far ahead of his friend, leaving their joint effort to work for one of London’s premier contemporary dealers. He is raking in the big bucks, his cellphone constantly buzzing with the details of complicated transactions involving artworks which trade for millions of pounds. It’s a world of Billionaires and Beautiful People who spend the year traveling on their private jets to art fairs around the world. Their only respite seems to come in December after the close of Miami Basel, when they all knock off to go skiing in St. Moritz. Artworks are bought, sold, and then resold for enormous prices, even though the buyers often do not even see the works in person; instead, the works are moved from the seller’s space to the buyer’s space at some duty-free warehouse outside Geneva. Whitfield occasionally gets invited to a reception like a poor relation, or he enjoys lunch with his friend at an exclusive club, reminiscing...
Leaving aside the World War II years, which were more than just an “era,” there have been two periods in the past hundred years that have caught the popular imagination. The more recent was the Sixties in America, particularly the Summer of Love in 1968. Psychedelics, shaggy hair, and tie-dye shirts with bell-bottom pants all found their way into mainstream aesthetics and became a world-wide influence. The other period was the Roaring Twenties. The French called that period les années folles, the Crazy Years, and the center of that craziness was Paris, where French modernists escaping conformity, White Russians escaping Bolshevism, and rich Americans escaping Prohibition made a clean break with the strictures of the preceding war-blasted decade to concoct a heady scene from which emerged a new artistic style – clean, luminous, and merciless – which became known as Art Deco. Two of the best-known practitioners of the style in Paris were from Eastern Europe. One was the noted designer Romaine de Tertoff, better known as Erté. The other, Tamara de Lempicka, is currently the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz in Poland or Russia in 1898 (her birthplace is a matter of dispute), Lempicka was the daughter of a wealthy lawyer with roots both in Warsaw and St. Petersburg. Raised in Warsaw, she began making art at an early age. At 17 she had a brief term at school in Switzerland, but left to travel with her grandmother on a long tour of Italy, where she became familiar with Old Master art, including that of Bronzino...
