I have seen works by Western Pennsylvania painters such as George Hetzel or Joseph Woodwell fetch three or four times higher than their estimated value at auction. But one week ago, such misvaluation might have reached a record as the item was auctioned 1000 times higher than the estimation.

A cracked and damaged claret jug listed for auction at £200 was sold in Lawrence’s auction at £220,000. But the expert said it is a 1000-year-old Egyptian antique worth £5 million. It is in fact one of the six jugs available nowsdays made for the rulers of Egympt’s 11th century Fatimid dynasty. It is, according to an expert, the Holy Grail of Islamic art. Records have it that the last of its kind to be sold on the open market was in 1862 when it was bought by the Victoria & Albert Museum.

A hansome pair of Joseph Ryan Woodwell paintings sold at auction this weekend. Wiederseim auction house had estimated the paintings would fetch between $200 and $300, far short of the $2400 they ended up bringing. The last Woodwell painting I know of to come up at auction was in October of '06. That painting, somewhat larger than the ones this weekend fetched $4100. Still, this weekends offering was a pair and they appear very representative of Western Pennsylvania.

The pair of paintings show a river scene, perhaps the Niagara River, and a wooded landscape with a small cabin. The description read "Pair of oil on canvas landscape paintings signed "J. R. Woodwell" and dated 1861. 7.5"x9.5""

Woodwell would sometimes travel with George Hetzel to the area known as the Scalp Level, an artists retreat near Johnstown. Unlike Hetzel, Woodwell's compositions featured clear signs of human life. Woodwell studied in Paris in the 1860's and adopted impressionism.

Woodwell exhibited at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, National Academy of Design, Art Institute of Chicago, and Panama Pacific Exhibition of 1915. He worked in Pennsylvania, California, and Niagra Falls. He was an original trustee of Carnegie Institute and chairman of the Fine Arts Committee during the last two years of his life.

Woodwell was born to Pittsburgh cabinetmaker Joseph Woodwell. His daughter, Johanna Woodwell Hailman would also become a well-known Pittsburgh artist. A portrait of him by Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins is in the Carnegie Museum of Art.

The pair of paintings was won by a floor bidder.

There are several great places to view works by Woodwell in Western Pennsylvania. The Westmoreland Museum of Art has a few and if you're ever in the Carnegie Music Hall there are several hanging in the lobby (one similar to the pair sold at auction) along with other Western Pennsylvania paintings often missed by visitors to the museum.

On the comment I made that two hundred pairs of shoes are way too many for one person, not to mention the headache of storage place, my friend, who is going to move to NYC answers: When the right shoes with the “right price” shows up, I can’t resist it.

Such response may apply to museums too. Not only does deaccessioning happen once a while, possibly against the will of the unaware donors, but also they stores a huge collection that may never be hung on a wall. Yet no matter how over-loaded the collection may appear, there is always something to buy.

Before the echoes of Marion True’s scandal of trafficking illicit antiques at Getty Museum ebb out completely, LA again is under the spotlight of looting artworks. Yesterday, federal agents raided four Southern California museums and a Los Angeles art gallery as part of a multi-year investigation into alleged illegal smuggling of Southeast Asian and Native American artifacts. (See the news here)

To counter the criticism related to artifacts with ambiguous or undocumented provenance, curators like Marion True or Carlos Picon at Met have argued that museums are the places “to humanize, to educate and refine a practical and laborious people” and by showing a piece in public a young child who walk into the institution can see the beauty “as much as somebody who knew why it was created six millennia ago”. Antique pieces recovered in their original countries, on the other hand, remained uncatalogued, unrestored and surrounded by “plastic and bad design and things that have no aesthetic quality at all”, thus justifying ownership should be favored toward those who can utilize artifacts to influence people more.

However, the rhetoric fails to make sense when museums look at their own storage rooms which are piled with collections that have little chance of being shown. In a recent trip to NYC, I happened to visit the Visual Storage Rooms in both Brooklyn Museum of Art and New York Historical Society. Paintings are hung on a sliding wall made of metal wires. Visitors only have to the luck to view those on the first wall and the rest are totally blocked. Among them, I have seen works by Gilbert Stuart, Rembrandt Peale, Edwin Frederick Church, Eastman Johnson and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.

The Met, with its two-million-square-foot building, is probably one of the most spacious museums in the world. However, it has more than two million works of art. In other words, one piece of work can only be allocated with less than one square foot space for display. Thus what is on view is only a small part of it enormous collection.

The display at the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) is much smaller compared to the Met, but I even felt much more spacious when walking around in the gallery, partly because it is less crowded, partly because the way art works are presented. Since the emphasis of CMOA is more on the modern and contemporary eras, those gigantic artworks with idiosyncratic, defining or defiant (depending on your perspective) style do need their own space to breath. (Well, if a painting cannot draw one into it, at least it should be big enough to devour him.) But part of its 19th century collection which can be harmoniously put together is given equally respectful space. In each of the two display rooms, paintings on one wall are displayed in a salon style, while on the other only a few hang abreast.

It is certainly reasonable for CMOA to present one of the trophies Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod Afternoon on a separate wall itself, but it would be much better if one of William Coventry Wall’s paintings can be united with the rest instead of showing its over-meticulosity, mannerism and dull colors through comparison with Alfred Sisley’s “Saint-Mammès on the Banks of the Loing” on the left.

Increasing display area may “unearth” some fantastic works that deserve being appreciated in public, however, unless CMOA extends its building tremendously, the majority would still stay in the darkness. After all, the museum collection always expends. In 2001 alone, 80,000 negative films by Charles "Teenie" Harris were acquired by the museum. But unless one searches the database (which has digitized and categorized more than 500 of them), he can and will find nothing inside the museum.

In both Brooklyn Museum of Art and New York Historical Society, PCs with database search tools are available for visitors to explore artworks behind layers and layers of walls. CMOA can definitely benefit from at least showing part of its storage and providing on-site computerized information.

Furthermore, it is true that displaying such a storage room may require fundamental structural change in the museum; at least CMOA can provide insightful information for those who are interested into works or artists not on view in a more proactive and human-friendly way .

With the new technology in large LCD display and interactive multi-media computer program, the information processing and presentation can be conducted much better than by simply using a single out-dated computer. To engage visitors, walls-size touch-screen LCD can be used to attract visitors into CMOA’s broad treasure. The program should not be just a search engine based on item numbers, it should utilize artificial intelligence and multi-media to “learn” what the visitors are interested and bring both detailed information of a particular artwork (in pictures, words, audio or video) and works which are similar into visitor’s attention (like those similar products shown at the bottom of the webpage if you search one product in Amazon.com). The initial database does not have to contain everything in storage, but as it grows, regular members may be surprised by the depth of the collection and family may be grateful for bring the antiquity live in the format of the most state-of-art technology. The data collected from the interactive search engine can also be used to analyze what visitors are looking for and shed light into future exhibition topics. Above all, physical space is always limited, but information can be processed and displayed with no constraints.

Acquisition and deaccessioning are both activities involving artworks, but essentially unless displayed (either physically or electronically), artworks in neither activies reach the general public. After the scandal of FBI raiding four museums in LA area, one may ask: Is it really that the willful ignorance of the provenance of artworks ethnically more unrighteous than the neglectful blindness to the accessibility of art works to the public?

Feb. 10, 2:00–3:00 PM
Member only, reservation required

From CMOA website:

To realize the ambition to collect “the Old Masters of tomorrow,” in 1896 Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie International. Tour the collection and discover how artworks purchased in the Internationals reflect not only changing aesthetics, but also political and social issues of the day.

Gallery Crawl in the Cultural District
Friday, January 25th 5:30 - 9:00 pm

More can be found at
http://www.pgharts.org/education/gallerycrawl.aspx

The day of the opening reception of Douglas Cooper’s new exhibition “Stairways to Heaven” at the Concept Gallery happened to be gray, cloudy and cold, typical of Pittsburgh weather in January.

Inside the Concept Gallery, the reception was crowded and light warm and amicable. Yet no viewers would fail to recognize those six foot vine-charcoal drawings displayed where they had been minutes ago.

In almost all drawings (It is hard to determine whether we call them paintings or drawings since the vine charcoal on paper is covered with transparent acrylic vanrish. The indefinite gray-degree of vine charcoal provides arresting contrast of light and shadow), Cooper chose the most idiosyncratic subject: hills and stairways. The hills arch up from the Ohio-river valley and take the huge proportion for the foreground. They would have looked cartoonish if in a small format, but such disproportioned compositions in ambitious sizes challenge and confront each viewer without even giving them a chance to take them light.

Viewers browsing through from one end to the other would possibly grasp more than one story lines. Here the linear perspective is only used to distinguish the foreground and the back but within the foreground multiple perspective were chosen to skew and slant different parts. Such angularity was chosen carefully: they were confronted at some places (mostly at the top of buildings) with others but later tension got released when different angled walls merge into the ground.

Even though most of the viewers can identify almost immediately the scenes through some iconic buildings or geographic features, they may be confused if they take the reality for granted. Cooper’s Pittsburgh is mixed with reality and imagination, past and present: here day light of the grand vista view fades away as soot-polluted air forces foreground houses lit with electricity; Mellon Area, the doomed Igloo, is grounded beside long-gone smoky chimneys; even school buses and cars greet each other obsolete and new.

There is a kind of Gershwinian spontaneity in these drawings: Like those stories in the traditional Chinese paintings with parallel perspectives, the narration seldom focuses on one specific point. Pedestrians climb the stairway, cars bump into the view and landscape is ever-changing with the wind blowing the smoke. Instead it is the hustle bustle city living (regardless old or new) that was on exhibition.

In the book “The Culture of Cities”, Lewis Mumford says:

“Cities are a product of time: buildings and monuments and public ways, more open than the written record leave an imprint upon the minds even of the ignorant or the indifferent. Through the material fact of preservation, time challenges time, time clashes with time. Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city until life itself is finally threatened with suffocation.”

Pittsburgh had reached its climax before its industry backbone experienced a sharp turn. The resurrection is taking gentle touches on the faces of the city, but over years, changes have been made to cover almost every facets of the city living except its reputation. Cooper, a native Connecticut who has been in Pittsburgh for more than two decades, wove the nostalgia for industrial glory into the modern immediacy, by doing so he is telling a series fairytales orchestrated with time and space that manifest the ideal urban milieu.

Almost accidentally, before I went to the opening reception, I visited Gilliland Gallery in Ligonier where two types of Pittsburgh painters were presented and cherished. The first group is scalp-level painters headed by George Hetzel. While the industrialization was beginning to make the permanent mark in Pittsburgh, those painters retreated to the unspoiled rural forest near Johnstown for inspiration. The other is Christian Walter who loved as much the gray-skied western Pennsylvania landscapes as working-class people and industry scenes. But the WPA era scenes of Pittsburgh have a striking darkness, machine-coldness and oppressing harness: viewers can be impressed, but not as for living potential. Unlike either of the two types, Cooper made it clear that the hustle bustle city living can be exploited as having been at once timeless and immediate.

Coming out of the Concept gallery the cold night had almost fallen. Regent Square was lively with stores and restaurants. But there were not many people in sight. The light beams from the cars clashed angularly and lit up the few pedestrian who walked in a hurry to the next warm stop. Different sounds, different colors and different lights collaborated to sing the utmost motif of the city-living symphony. It was neither loud nor pure; but the sonority sounds pleasing, as those hanging inside the gallery.

GoAntiques caught my eyes once because of a painting attributed to Gainsborough. I had seen that painting before from some seller on ebay auction and dismissed such a stretch of an attribution. But when it reappeared in GoAntiques, at one time I thought I was wrong. After all, big auction houses have experts and appraisers and have the chance to look items in person. Well, that makes it acceptable to pay the extra buyer's premium.

But a close look at GoAntiques shows it is an "eBay" type of online service within the eBay live auction. They gather information from different sellers around different places and sell them through online-only live auction effort.

Thus the traditional screening of consignment does not apply to this no-brick-no-wall auction house. Worst of all you still have to pay buyer's permium.

You may find that the live auction window show "floor bids", but those are actually online absentee bids.

More can be read through here if you are interested:

http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?threadID=1000330755&tstart=240&mod=1170087605511

Be aware: there are more than one online-only auction houses now. (For example, Universal is another one.) This does not mean that they can not be trusted. But additional caution should be paid to avoid scams or shilling bids.

Check the auction house's website if you are not familiar with the one that you are interested. Another easy way to identify them is to see whether they allow in-house pick up and if you cannot pick up items in person, what are the avaiable local shipping and freight companies who work closely with them.

More reading about GoAntiques? http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m12/i23/s01

Even when Met was packed like a sardine can, visitors at Frick Museum can still walk leisurely with enough space and time to ponder. A lot of rooms inside the Frick Mansion are still kept as what they were like when Henry Frick was alive. Knowing that all these extraordinary art works were amassed through one man’s pocket and placed inside the magnificent building brings to the amateur collectors both awes and sour reminder of the heights to which the combination of fortune and passion can rise.

Of all the portrait paintings, one impressed me the most: Portrait of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein, the younger.

Holbein’s sitters always enjoy relative flat light which allows their feature revealed with extreme delicacy. If one has just passed works by Rembrandt, Holbein’s works would look tremendously accurate yet lack of dominant power. (How can one pass Rembrandt without stopping and holding his breadth?) But that is who Holbein, the younger was: the supreme portrait master without bravura, flourish or facile virtuosity. He only pleases eyes of those who seek nothing of exaggeration, who would not be beguiled by affectations and mannerisms.

In the portrait of Sir Thomas More, one can instantly sense the extremely subtlety and accuracy of the modeling of the head. But the more time he can spare at studying it, the more he can conceive. A close look at the clothes will reveal how masterful Holbein’s handling of detailed accents was. The color of the velvet does not differ too much from that of the fur collar; but the texture of each material is dazzling true that one could almost feel the as silky of the velvet as fuzzy soft of the fur. But if one stands five feet away, nothing can distract him from seeing the character. All the accessories, stressed and related perfectly with one another, merge with the whole drawing, thus making the figure at the first glance formidable.

An appeal to the human beings is just one of the essentials of a masterpiece of portraiture. If Holbein’s careful selection of essentials which add almost a narrative sense of nobility and eminence is too forceful for the first impression, then his understanding of the beauty of human countenance and personality portrayed the truth of the sitter. True, one may feel the need to bend down his knees in front of the portrait, but NOT because of More’s rank or statute, but of his paramount deep thinking.

Here is the amazingly incongruity that have been layered down through Holbein’s skill, intelligence and heart. On the one hand, More looks almost unapproachable. Holbein chose the three quarter view and let More stare ahead without any hint of communicating. Thus viewers can sense the seriousness of the moment without the chance to disturb the contemplation of the thinker. On the other hand, Holbein showed the humanity side of the sitter with almost cruel accuracy of physical aging. Holbein’s observation was full of homely, tender feeling. He didn’t hesitate in registering the wrinkles and wears in More’s face with such delicacy. More’s unshaved face indicates he was not aware or did not care about his immortality image, nor did the painter want to flatter his sitter. In fact it is this sincere peculiarity that captured the unique quality of the character who preaches the world of harmony, orders and disciplines. More is not immortal: he was tired, worn at the moment, but nevertheless kept focused and concerned. Holbein, understanding and penetrating the strong mind of the intellectual, painted with equal mind-forcefulness and imbued More with radiating humane glow.

At the moment when he was to be beheaded, More said “I die … the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” I stood there long enough and tried to decipher his mind in vain. More’s eyes possess such tremendous fortitude and determination that nothing could bend or stop. In this painting, Holbein reached his peak with austerity and reticence that have not been surpassed. To some extent, Holbein painted not only his personality, but his tragic fate.

Q. I have a tansu chest i think it is very old. How can i get to know the value of it without dragging it to an antique shop?

A. In order to get the best idea of how to find the value, you may have to drag it out, but an antique shop may not be your best bet. If you were to go the antique shop route, you'd be wise to find one where you can be reasonably sure they have an adequate knowledge of Asian antiques.

Another route would be to hire an appraiser. You can find an appraiser with a knowledge of Asian antiques at the Appraisers Association of America web site.

If you don't want to incur the expense of hiring an appraiser, you might consider sending a photo to an auction house that deals with Asian antiques. Skinner in Boston may be a good option.

I do not have much knowledge in the area of Asian antiques, but from some preliminary research it appears the smaller chests are generally more valuable than the larger clothing chests. Some of the most prized chests are apparently made entirely of something called keyaki wood or kiri wood. Auction records for tansu chests reveal a wide range of values from less than $100 to $30,000. Most fall in the range of $100 to $500. The only way to know for sure is to have someone knowledgeable in Asian antiques (ideally more than one) to look at it.

If anyone out there has any knowledge on this subject, please email us! If you have an items you'd like to write to us about, please send a photo and email to urbanantiques at gmail.com

As I was walking through a painting gallery over the weekend, a friend asked me if I had a favorite artist. It's not a question that brings an easy answer. It would be almost as hard for me to tell you my favorite color, though I may come up with one. I don't generally see the world in this way. I think there are so many elements in the world, so many paintings, so much music, so many colors that they come and go each making some impact on us and then fading away or becoming a more significant bulding block in who we are and the way we see things. Sometimes the way we see things at first leaves one impression and then with further contemplation, something completely different. The perception can change with time. The immediate perception itself doesn't change, however. What changes is our perception of the immediate perception. Our perception morphs from that immediate perception into something else, a perception that includes that immediate impression and everything we've thought about it since and what together it means to us at any given moment.

So I have described the immediate perception, and at any moment the current perception. A third element to our impression of a painting is our memory of that perception, which can vary from an immediate perception as much as any memory can vary from the actual event. What we think about the immediate perception differs from a memory in that we are not necessarily thinking about a memory.

I wasn't thinking about this all at once when I, after a few moments of pause, gave my answer of George Inness. Yet in pondering my answer, I think this is what I like most about Inness-- that sense of an immediate impression, perception or perhaps the most accurate word would be feeling. To me, many of the works by Inness provide this sense of how we feel about something the first time we see it. Not the thing itself, but that feeling of what it is that we get even before we look at it completely. As soon as we look at it completetely we destroy it. Its almost as if we have to be walking one way, turn our head quickly, breathe in and then shut our eyes. We let the world with a breathe in and then hold it in our breasts to be forever not what it is, but what it is to us. That's George Inness.


The other type of Inness painting I think is the ones that seem to depict memory, and sometimes a memory of that first feeling we had when we set our sites on a place in time. The specifics don't matter the way they seem to in a Dali, in fact if they are there in our memories, they aren't what they were physically anyway. It's our minds that can see the world somewhat, but not entirely independent of what exists. It's our memories that keep it in existence long after that fleeting moment in time has passed.

These feelings, first impressions and the memories of them would have been lost to eternity had they not been painted by Inness. More, they seem to let us inside Inness himself and enter our phsyche almost as if it was an impression on our mind or a memory therein.

Inness himself may have recognized the changing nature of impressions and images in our minds. As an image enters our mind covering over or somehow changing another memory or idea, so Inness enjoyed most painting not on a blank canvas, but on other work. He is also said to have never considered a painting finished and always reserved the right to rework it even after it had sold, almost as if the paintings were a recording of his changing idea of an impression on canvas.

So my answer for now is George Inness.

Images: Close up from work at Toledo Museum of Art (top) Close up from work at Buteler Museum of American Art (bottom)

The talk given by Ellen Lippert, which was titled “Winslow Homer: Saga and Salesman” provided a unique angle about the artist whose wood engravings are on the current exhibition at Hoyt Institute of Art. All prints are loaned from Butler Museum of American Art, whose collections have time and again amazed me by its breadth and depth. (Who would expect a town losing more than 50% of its population still holds a world-class museum?)

In general, wood engravings may not be eye-catching if they are placed in prestigious museums. Not only do they lack color, but also they are not original drawings. Based on conservation standards, prints can usually be displayed under light for no more than fourteen weeks before they are sent back to the dark storage rooms. Therefore it is actually very rare to see a comprehensive collection of Homer’s engravings displayed in one instalation.

Although Homer quit working as an illustrator in 1870’s and never went back, those engravings (made by someone else) covered quite a time span of his career. There are works as early as the civil war era and some date to the late 1870’s (such as “breeze up”). But the works done for the Harper’s Weekly highlights the exhibition. After all these works were done by Winslow Homer who came out of the Bufford’s workshop with fine lines that are quintessential to a wood block artist.

Some early double-paged prints seem to be directly detached from the magazine so that some have holes in the middle while others bear visible creases and wrinkles. Additional new copies of the magazine contents are displayed beside those prints. But looking through those wood engravings from Harper’s Weekly, one can easily feel unimpressed. Those B&W pictures are far away from his powerful Proust’s Neck crushing wave scenes. They were strict in both techniques and subjects; the figure drawings are more primitive and tightly controlled. (His late marine paintings, in contrast, grow into their own world.)

But a close examination of the works shows the opposite: In my mind, such a unique experience as a frontline illustrator defined Homer as a painter.

In the first place, viewers are naturally drawn into the contents of the pictures. Homer didn’t beautify or glorify the war and the soldiers. He did depict the battle scenes: A Bayonet Charge was one of the most disturbing drawings of all, in which soldiers from both sides, running out of the bullets, fighting as close to the enemy as to death. But most were not. It could be because of the propaganda purpose, or censorship burden; however, no matter for what reason behind it he added a glow of humanity for the soldiers. In “A Card Game”, there was a Bruegelian merrymaking atmosphere, even though viewers know there must be some grin battle looming ahead of the short feast. “Sleeping on their Arms”, was published in 1864, but no victory could be sensed. Instead the harshness was suffused into the winter scene. Sleeping soldiers were tired, so were the few on duty. However, the comradeship sparked out of the bald trees and bare sleeping ground. Above all, Homer focused on the soldiers who underwent the crudeness and threatening that readers stayed back could not imagine.

Those pictures provided no clue that his later style would be from the content perspective. Throughout his career, Homer was gradually drawn to the mighty nature that eventually all human were obliterated from his paintings. For him, moon, rocks and waves provided enough dramas for a soul of solitude. However, as a painter, Homer’s growth was more linear than disruptive. If one can move away from what was drawn in the picture and focus on how they were drawn instead, he can easily feel the linkage among his paintings: the design.

Several of Homer’s late works bears remarkable directness no matter what the subjects are. In “After the Hurricane”, the slightly tilted human figures were isolated from the sea by the wreck. There were no devastating nature scenes, but the image was effectively narrative by Homer’s choice of the boat which was placed with the opposite diagonal angle and his choice of body gesture which recalls classical reclining figures. The relative close distance brings up both dignity and sorrow from the tragedy. In “Right and Left”, viewers witness the process of the death from the two ducks. Such closeness can be valid only if viewers take the imaginary duck’s point of view, thus Homer brings down the viewer into the action. Then the hunter, no matter how small he has been drawn, takes the substantial meaning to balance the picture. Even in those Proust’s Neck pictures, the directness and boldness of paint brush cannot disguise his marvelous composition which is at once both natural and authoritative. Back to those civil War pictures, the soldiers were drawn in groups and forms of human figures gave away to more important overall composition. In most cases, he brought up the view closer so that there was a strong sense of narrative. Although he used lines succinctly and efficiently, he gave great detail to the center of the story and used airy perspective to render the background if necessary. No other early works than his most successful drawing “The Sharpshooter” could more effectively demonstrate Homer’s consistency as a designer. Here, we see the sniper from the bird angle, just like how we perceive those ducks. In both cases, Homer chose the perspective that were the most impossible yet the most narrative. High in the air, we observe of the sniper, in silence and in awe and expect the inescapable death execution, which he painted again more than 40 years later.

Secondly, although there was no record of how close Homer were to the battle scene, no one could walk out of the most bloodiest war in history without being changed. Civil War was the last war in history that infantry still marched out of the trench toward the enemy and the casualty lined up with every step they made. At the same time, the long-distance weapon was also first brought up to the military so that battle killing can be as remote and cold-blooded as murder. Homer’s “The Sharpshooter” differs from the rest in that here the soldier was drawn with a machine-like coldness. He can be observed, but not approached. He can be drawn, but not depicted. The gun, the half-shaded face showed a moment of deadly silence. Almost out of nowhere, now human can be killed without blood-shed or desperate cry's. Life has never become more fragile than ever before.

After the civil war, Homer’s ostensible subjects changed: soldiers became peasants or fishermen. But the nature didn’t grow more amenable. Instead, it still keeps its mighty power, as deadly as the rifle in the sharpshooter. Against this rugged nature, those ordinary people bear the same reticence and solitude as those soldiers. They are unnamed, uncharacterized, and unassuming, because in front of the unconquerable nature, the fragile humans struggle.

No classical, allegorical or historical topics interested Winslow Homer. Instead he chose the unpredictable commune between human and nature. Death or the hint of death (such as in “Saved” or “The Wreck”), which Homer may have witnessed as early as in war period, surfaced time and again in his paintings. In those paintings, the human beings, no matter how mundane, are depicted as hard-working, taciturn and serious in spite of all foul or malicious may happen ahead. He is now regarded as one of the most authentic American painters. And he deserves it.

Heinz Hall yesterday was literally sold out yesterday because of the star fiddler Joshua Bell. The concert featured Samuel Barber, John Corigliano and Modest Mussorgsky (orchestrated by Maurice Ravel). The center piece is the concerto “the Red Violin” which enjoyed its Pittsburgh premiere yesterday night.

The new designated principal guest conductor Leonard Slatkin is known an expert for American repertoire, who has left some defining performance for Charles Ives and Aaron Copland. But his control of texture and breadth works the best with Samuel Barber. The second essay for orchestra sounded at once meticulous and intimate. Barber’s immense romanticism and lyricism may sound anachronous in the 30’s and 40’s; yet when people begin to look back from the 21th century, Samuel Barber filled in the position that transitioned the European grand style into American’s own cosmopolitan sound. In the second essay, the melodies were woven with scintillating humorous bursts. The concluding fanfare from the majestic third theme was almost Wagnerian. Under Slatkin’s baton, such climax was both anticipated yet astounding.


John Corigliano gave a long talk about his works, which although bears the name of the corresponding movie, is much complicated than the original soundtrack. It is true the music in the movie “the Red Violin” was one of the most important elements, but nonetheless the music took a more supportative role while here the music has to stand alone and justify itself.

John Corigliano is a powerful composer. Within 30 minutes, audience can hear different characters, different techniques, different orchestration yet the solo sections themselves would enchant even Paganini. The Anna's theme slides up the scales and then curls around gently the beautiful melody, almost like yearning. In particular, when such melody reappeared in the third movement, it almost bears an irresistible melancholy as if from a traditional repertoire in the romanticism period.

But in the whole, I felt the opposite. John Corigliano built the skeleton based on the Chaconne structure which takes the lower register from the powerful brass. It swept through the whole orchestra makes the solo violin almost inaudible. His tendency of using percussion (especially those of indefinite pitch) disintegrated the piece into patches, each of which enjoyed its own moment of energy, sweetness or sorrow; yet none can survived in the gulping power of those scorching noise. Even a piano, a celesta and harp were mainly used for percussion effect, which in the end was submerged with the violin sound.

While the second movement was interesting and unique, a fleeting effect with uncommon harmony; the last movement brought the whole piece together. The main racing melody with string crunches started the movement and the initial Chaconne sealed in the end with a wood block. In the middle of the last movement, another romantic melody surfaced up from the solo violin. It was Mahlerian, dream-like sensitive, but again it was only a sparkle, gave in when the modernity poured in. It was at the time that I realize that there is more Charles Ives than Samuel Barber in John Corigiliano’s music.

The second half featured Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”. The only way that I can think of to link the three works in one night’s program was that they were kind of all composed by gay composers. For the last one, there is more Maurice Ravel than Modest Mussorgsky.

Lawrence Loh said the piece was one of the top 25 most requested classical works, which translated in my mind, should be banned from the performance. Slatkin’s treatment of “the Old Castle” was more restrained, more or less coherent whole way through. But in the end, when drums, timpani, triangle, cymbal all shone out of the orchestra, I was bored and unmoved. The beautiful promenade has been abused and cheaply used.

It was not the sentimentality but the orchestration that failed to impress me. The piano version by Mussorgsky was more suggestive than descriptive; yet Ravel masterful orchestration with sensational usage of brass and wood section leaves no room for brooding. Music should be not commensurate as literature or paintings. It is more abstract, more mind-malleable than any other art form.

In 1958, Richter played Pictures at an Exhibition in the legendary Sofia recital. The piano sound was poorly recorded, not to mention lack of the variety of texture as in the orchestra version. He played the Gnomus with such extreme violence. But such staggering struggle to bring about the anger and the unfair added additional credibility for his performance. True, Ravel brought up condiments, but also he buried down psychological meaning underneath.

An appreciation for colonial American artifacts and antiques perhaps started around 1876 with the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Later while the likes of Andrew Mellon, JP Morgan and William K. Vanderbilt were collecting the masters of Europe which would be the foundation stones for the Met and the National Gallery, three others would begin to build a permanent treasure of American paintings and art.

No less known, those three were Henry Ford, Henry Francis Dupont and John D. Rockefeller. Their collections would result in Colonial Williamsburg, Winterthur and the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. While European collections may have included a room here and there, entire buildings were included in some American collections.

One amusing anecdote is revealed by Harold Sack in the book American Treasure Hunt. Henry Ford had just purchased the Wayside Inn of Sudbury, Massachusetts, immortalized in Henry Wordsworth Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn. Ford had approached Israel Sack, Harold’s father and a prominent American furniture dealer. Sack was given the task of furnishing the inn. Ford had eyed a highboy at auction, but lost it to another bidder, a Mr. Dillon. Ford approached Dillon, provided his name and added that he had recently purchased the Wayside Inn. Ford asked Dillon if he agreed the highboy belongs in the Wayside Inn. Dillon agreed and suggested Ford instead sell the Inn to him.

Today all three of these institutions offer opportunities to learn about these collectors and their collections, and perhaps more importantly about the early country, its people and its craftsmen. Both Winterthur and Colonial Williamsburg offer educational opportunities to learn about American decorative arts.

One item I found particularly rewarding was a cd I picked up at Winterthur, “Music from An American Country Estate.” I can’t find it on Alibris, Amazon or the Winterthur online store now, however they may have it if you call. It consists of recordings from private performances in the mansion and you can even hear the enunciator ring!

Rockefeller, DuPont, Ford and others pioneered the collection of many artifacts that not only help us to know our own story as a nation, but have allowed us to appreciate the culture that emerged in what was to become the United States and know the quality of craft that was being produced here. While some sense of this can be appreciated at large museums like the Met, a visit to Williamsburg, Winterthur and the Henry Ford Museum can make the picture of the collector as well as the collected more complete.

Finally, before you go, click on this link to see a short video of the Rockefeller’s enjoying tea at Williamsburg. click here

January 8 - February 29, 2008

Main Galleries: Winslow Homer: The Illustrator (1857-1888)
Explore Winslow Homer’s career as a commercial illustrator. Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Opening Reception: Sunday, January 13 from 2-4 pm

Also the website has a booklet about the artist in pdf format.
http://www.hoytartcenter.org/pdf/Homer.pdf

New York has never seemed to be so crowded before.

At Armani Exchange, one of the upper-scale apparel stores lined in SOHO area, I was literally squeezing in to try a coat on. I was puzzled by the untold shoppers who grabbed jackets or jeans as if they were displayed in dollar-trees. In the end, I quit without buying the coat. It was not the price tag (though it IS more than I would have expected), it was the crowd that made me feel I was wasting money on something cheap.

Later on, a similar scenario happened in Metropolitan Museum of Art. To view a small-scaled painting by Vermeer in the special exhibition titled “The Age of Rembrandt”, I had to see it through a wall of human heads.

The show, although championed by Rembrandt, includes works by Dutch painters in their golden ages. They were NOT new or special: All works are collections of MET, except they are rearranged following the order of acquisition. Thus it is quite a task to find all five Vermeer in the total of 12 galleries, not to mention through flocks of visitors. In the case when the view of pictures are half blocked by people, the donor’s names, which are, in some cases, placed above the painting in huge font, attracted my attention more easily. In fact, the exhibition is not about the golden age of Dutch painting, it is a nostalgia gesture of the past golden age of patronage. I am not sure that Vanderbilt should like the idea of having his name shown prominently above masters’ works, at least he would not enjoy J. P. Morgan’s name is equally mentioned; after all, in the age that fortune had been amassed in an unbelievable speed for these few starring magnates, the art trophies can only belong to one person in the end.

On May 29, 1913, New York Times published an article titled “J.P. Morgan’s Art to Remain Here”. In a letter from Morgan to the Trustees of the museum, it reads “It is my desire that the objects of art left by my father should be exhibited for the benefit of the public as soon as may be. I know that it was in my father’s mind to make a load exhibition of the of them in the new south wing which is to be built, ….” The south wing construction, at that time, has not been approved yet; but Mr. Morgan made it clear that there is NO question of breaking up the collection or sending part of it elsewhere so that the public will see the entirety of the collection (bronzes and jewels etc.) which was believed unsurpassed.

The first batch of Rembrandt from J.P. Morgan happened even earlier. In June, 1906, the Rudolph Kann art collection including eight Rembrandt, four Rubens and six Van Dyck were bought through J. P. Morgan for $5,500,000. Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, the second director of the Met at that time, was summoned to France to give consultant to Mr. Morgan. Although he didn’t tell the reporter whether Morgan bought the entire collection for the museum or not, the great businessman conducted his purchase in his dominant, forceful way, for he must for sure know such great collection would never depreciate.

In today’s perspective, J.P. Morgan’s presidency of Met coincided and clashed with his own desire of collection. If Marion True, the former antiquities curator of Getty Museum, was accused based on several artifact of minor value in her vacation home, then by normal ethnic code, the way that J. P. Morgan summoned the MET expert cross Atlantic for his service would have caused a shocking scandal. On the other hand, without the fortune of J. P. Morgan, the Met (which is about 80 years younger than Louvre) could have hardly achieved today’s status. By 1920, a tablet to J. P. Morgan was installed in the northwest pier supporting the central dome of the main Fifth Avenue Hall. It reads: “Erected by the museum is grateful remembrance of the services of John Pierpont Morgan, …. He helped to make New York the true metropolis of America; his interest in art was lifelong, his generous donation to it commanded world-wide appreciation: his munificent gifts to the museums are among its choicest treasures. ”

In the same year, William K. Vanderbilt contributed “the Noble Slav”, an early work by Rembrandt. Considering the drawing and print department of the Met grew up through Cornelius Vanderbilt’s initial donation with 670 works in 1880, and even more some of the1920 donation had been loaned to the Met during Corneliu’s last year, W. K. Vanderbilt’s generosity was probably just forced under the shadow of his father’s legacy.

The golden age of patronage didn’t last long. By the First World War, the starring collectors such as Altman, Huntington, and Morgan have gone. And after the two wars, the focus of art in US had been shifted from European masters to domestic newborn. The older generation collectors like Cornelius Vanderbilt who only collected European works were perpetually constricted by the dichotomy between highbrow and lowbrow, between academic pedantry and pavement slang. For them, the rise of American Art as a defining force was not within their sight. It was after the Second World War that Henry Luce brought public attention to the American Art and called Jackson Pollock the greatest living painter in the United States. Through his efforts (which can be seen through not only Met, but also Brooklyn Museum of Art and New York Historical Society), the most of the collection legacy in the 20th century should be called American Century.

Such patronage system can seldom be found nowadays. The new generation of philanthropists such as Bill Gates or Warren Buffet are more focusing on health improvement and poverty reduction in global perspective. Money has flown more toward humane activities and research instead of art forms. On the other hands, enthusiastic art collectors such as Ronald Lauder are assembling art for their own galleries. Thus it is specially nostalgia for the Met to show its homage to the hands which didn’t hold the brush, but signed the contract.

Of course, the Met won’t label the exhibition as “$ matters”, instead it claims that such arrangement has its own benefit for it shows from a historical point of view a change of public tastes (or maybe more precisely a change in magnates’ tastes). However, I found it implausible. The availability of works by Dutch masters has always been limited. Thus the acquisition sequence doesn’t reflect too much about the taste change in social context, more likely it reflects what pieces were available in the market at certain time (mostly due to 3Ds: death, divorce or debt). Thus all five Vermeer are separated just because they were not bought together. Or because Benjamin Altman donated all of his collection to the Met upon his death, the works got united together even though certain works appear much weaker than others.

But in regardless to the awkward arrangement, Rembrandt stands out. Under the immaculate brushes of Dutch painters, one can always sense a yearning for seeking, something deeper than the oil surface. For Frans Hals it may mean amicability and accessibility of characters, for Aelbert Cuyp, it may be the tranquility and homecoming-like comfort; but only Rembrandt searched as a real thinker, who pursued something opposite: problematic, unsolved yet true.

One may have to pass numerous master pieces at Met without or with only one glance; but almost no one would hurry up in front of Rembrandt’s Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. (Interestingly, that is the only painting by Rembrandt which was actually bought by the museum) The curator’s audio tour interprets the painting as contemplation of immortality. Aristotle, well-dressed with shining gold-chain, loses his minds besides the bust of the blind Homer. He is, as the talk indicated, not communing with Homer. Instead he is asking himself: Will I obtain such immortality centuries after? The answer falls in the darkness between the figures.

Yet for Morgan and Vanderbilt, they knew they would.

A list of things to do in New York City doesn't commonly include house tours. Of the five major early east coast cities (also including Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Charleston), it's probably harder to get a sense of the distant past in New York than the others. From about the time of the Erie Canal, New York has been immersed in a continual process of renewing and rebuilding, a process that has made the city what it is, but has largely confined the past to museums.

Perhaps the best place to get a sense of New York around the time of the Erie Canal is the Merchant's House at 29 East Fourth Street near Washington Square, in what was known as the "Bond Street Area." read more