Clean, Luminous, and Merciless

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. ...

Old Guys

I ran into Robert Simon at an Appraisers Association reception recently. Bob is one of the preeminent dealers of Old Master art in America, and I took the opportunity to ask him about the current state of the Old Master Market. I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have...

What To Do With Norman?

When Norman Rockwell died in 1978, Time Magazine art critic Robert Hughes briefly discussed the artist’s place in American art.  Hughes acknowledged that Rockwell in his last years had moved beyond the soda-fountain-American-flag-and-Mom’s-apple-pie subject matter...

Back Up All You Want

“Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,” the painter Ad Reinhardt once famously opined, and it’s true that the physical accommodations that sculptures demand have made them problematic for many collectors.  They take up so damned...

Evil Into Art

Can something horrible be made beautiful?  It’s a question that came to mind after Roberta and I recently visited The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, a project of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI).  EJI is a non-profit organization founded in 1989 to provide...

Kid Sister

O’Keeffe’s art is currently having a moment. Not Georgia O’Keeffe’s – that’s as popular as it’s ever been. No, I’m talking about the art of her little sister, Ida Ten Eyck O’Keeffe (1889-1961), which scored a huge success at Christie’s last week. Born in Sun Prairie,...