Just a few postings ago I talked about art buyers missing a big bet by limiting their search parameters to Hudsoniana in the Hudson Valley of New York. The dominant mindset has always been to comb the valley and the nearby Berkshires and Taconics for pastoral art to hang in country homes. But these locales [...]
Read More...New York’s Hudson Valley and the nearby Berkshires and Taconics are alive with art galleries. When people buy second homes in these
scenic treasuries they look to local galleries to provide them mementos of their new environment. They’re missing a huge bet.
If I were a fledgling or even a seasoned collector of contemporary and recent [...]
Have you ever wondered long after a party about that certain somebody you didn’t meet but can’t forget? This is the subject of Gatecrasher, my short story in the June issue of The Country and Abroad. The beautiful woman whose image accompanies the story is my mother, the artist Juanita Guccione.
Read More...Do you remember The Gates (inset) in Central Park in 2005, that hydrology of orange banners installed by Christos and Jeanne-Claude? I don’t think anybody mentioned it at the time but it had a precedent among the Arabs. They used to hold great poetry competitions in which the poems were painted on vast banners. [...]
Read More...(A Cartography of Peace, Jean L. Connor, Passager Books, 78 pp, paperback, French flap, $13.95)
A life well examined is a bequeathal to humanity. So, when Jean Connor writes in a poem called Riding to Hounds and Other Papers of “friendship and similar perils” we’re aware of being handed an exquisite legacy.
These gracious and [...]
Whatever happened to the smoking pipe? Remember how filmmakers used to shift scenes by having someone fill a pipe, light a cigarette or walk over to the whiskey wagon and pour a stiff one?
When I was a boy I thought that sporting a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and smoking a pipe (inset, [...]
I recently took part in a deeply rewarding discussion of late-life writing. Sponsored by Passager journal and press, housed at Baltimore University, the panel at Rehoboth, Delaware, explored not only the challenges facing elderly writers but the elderly’s special strengths.
We were all writers on the panel, Shirley Brewer and I were guests, and Passager’s [...]
Paintings come to mean different things in different times.
Recently the ArtDaily Newsletter wrote about The Courtauld Gallery’s collection of Impressionist masterpieces. The report featured an
image of Pierre Auguste Renoir’s La Loge (The Theater Box), an 1874 oil painting.
The Impressionists were celebrated for their modernity, their study of society. What impresses me, studying an [...]
Everything is an authorized version of something else. Everything and everyone has a back story. It’s because of this that we might usefully give more thought to championship, not in the sense of winners but in the sense of championing someone else.
We could ask ourselves why certain artists (I use the term here to [...]
There are certain gewgaws, doodads and gimcracks I can’t seem to resist. So over the recent holidays I bought two green-flame candles at The Museum of Modern Art. (More about MoMA later). It turns out the flames are lovely in the near-dark, my usual state, but almost invisible in a brighter environment, and the wicks [...]
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