Urban Art & Antiques

It never occurred to me when I visited the Brooklyn Museum’s Takashi Murakami exhibition in 2008 that Murakami may have been influenced by Keith Haring—not just artistically, but in the way he embraced merchandising. According to Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring, Murakami was among the visitors to Haring’s SoHo Pop Shop in the late 1980s. The anecdote is a reminder that Haring’s…

Some mysteries survive because no one can solve them. Others survive because every generation invents a new answer. In the summer of 1872, laborers digging near the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire uncovered a small, polished stone unlike anything anyone had seen before. About the size of an egg, it was covered with strange symbols, a haunting carved face, and two perfectly drilled…

With America approaching its 250th birthday, you’d think there might be an uptick in interest in historical portraits. If there is, it wasn’t reflected in this recent sale. A large, signed 1853 oil portrait by Bass Otis, depicting Thomas Amory II, after John Singleton Copley, sold for just $550 including buyer’s premium. For a mid-19th-century American portrait by a historically significant…

Portland is all about books. Internationally known Powell’s Books is just the surface. I’ve been to most of the bookstores, but haven’t been to any book events. This was the weekend to change that. Shop window posters around town announced the 20th Annual Rose City Book & Paper Fair, presented by the Cascade Booksellers Association, but I didn’t seriously consider going until my husband said,…

I know I saw at least a room of Alice Neel paintings, but I can’t remember where. And I can’t seem to line up my memory with any of the Alice Neel shows over the last 20 or so years. The closest is the show at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts March to June 2010, but it looks like the first time I set foot in Houston was later that year. And it’s often the case that I don’t always appreciate what…

Nineteen seventy-six is a year remembered well. While most years cannot be tied to a specific memory, America’s Bicentennial is connected to the experiences of many who grew up during the era. The celebration seemed to touch everything. There were special soda cans, cereal boxes, parades, speeches, coins, and commemorative products of every description. I do not remember most of those things…

In a quiet gallery, a painting hangs motionless on the wall. Yet for some viewers, it never feels still. Colors pulse. Shapes vibrate. A swirl of yellow seems to ring like brass, while deep blues hum like distant strings. The experience is unsettling, almost impossible to explain — as if the canvas itself contains hidden sound. For the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, this sensation was real.…

Arch Conspirators, John Sloan Pip: It is January 1917, and a small group of artists has just climbed inside the Washington Square Arch with blankets, lanterns, and what can only be described as a very specific agenda. Mara: That story comes from Urban Art and Antiques, and it anchors an episode about a single night in Greenwich Village that turns out to say something lasting about art, public…

It is a cold, clear wintry day, January 23, 1917 in New York’s Greenwich Village, and the city is in the middle of quietly changing its own mind. Washington Square Arch stands at the north end of the park like a piece of classical theater dropped into Manhattan by mistake. It is modeled on Roman triumphal arches, meant to celebrate George Washington and national unity. But by the early twentieth…