Displaying items by tag: copper

When the doors of the prestigious Winter Antiques Show opened at the Park Avenue Armory on January 23, 2015, David A. Schorsch and Eileen M. Smiles celebrated their fourteenth year of exhibiting with a new, larger booth and for the first time offering historic and aesthetic mineral specimens in addition to fine American antiques. The minerals and native elements (gold, silver and copper) have been selected for their merit as natural works of art and historic associations. Beginning with European royalty and aristocrats and then gilded age American millionaires, mineral collecting has evolved into a worldwide market of connoisseurs for mineral specimens exhibiting a beauty and perfection uniquely created by natures. The minerals on offer will range from tiny diamonds to a large and impressive Rhodochrosite. Held at the historic Park Avenue Armory, The Winter Antiques Show runs through February 1, 2015, www.winterantiquesshow.com

The gallery of David A. Schorsch and Eileen M. Smiles is located at 358 Main Street South in Woodbury, Connecticut. Telephone: 203 263-3131. For additional information please visit the website: www.Schorsch-Smiles.com.

An elderly Greek man was arrested for illegally obtaining a host of antiquities including more than a thousand coins of historical significance, police said on Monday.

Inside the 72-year-old man's house in Alexandria, a village in northern Greece, police found 1,061 copper coins, a thousand of which date from the Hellenistic period (third to first century BC), the Byzantine period (330-1453) and the Ottoman Empire.

Police said they were seized on Sunday, as well as 30 silver coins of the same periods, 16 copper rings and other jewelery of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine era.

The Cleveland Museum of Art acquired a rare enamel-on-copper copy of Titian’s (1485-1576) iconic 16^th century masterpiece Bacchus and Ariadne by the English enamel painter Henry Bone (1755-1834). The museum purchased the 19^th century work at Christie’s London on July 4, 2013 for $478,346. Curator John Seydl made the winning bid over the telephone from a London hotel in an effort to disguise the museum’s interest from other bidders.

The enamel measures 16 inches by 18 inches, which is exceptionally large for the medium typically used to execute portrait miniatures. The work includes an ornate gilt-wood and gesso frame and serves as a prime example of Bone’s innovative and widely admired enamel technique.

After being shipping to Cleveland, the Titian copy is expected to hang in the museum’s early 19^th century gallery, which features French and English art.  

The Boxer at Rest, an ancient bronze sculpture from the Hellenistic period, is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This is the first time the work has been exhibited outside of Europe as it typically resides at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome. The sculpture is on view in the Met’s Greek and Roman Galleries as part of the initiative 2013 – Year of Italian Culture in the United States, which is spearheaded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

 The Boxer at Rest was discovered on the Quirinal Hill of Rome in 1885 and displayed alongside another Hellenistic bronze in the Rotunda of the Baths of Diocletian. The sculpture, which features a boxer in repose, is believes to be from somewhere between 350 B.C. and 50 B.C. It was made section-by-section and later welded together; it features copper inlays to depict the boxer’s wounds, drops of blood, and lips. The ancient bronze statue sits atop a modern stone base that is a close approximation of what the ancient base looked like.

The Boxer at Rest is one of very few original Greek bronze sculptures preserved from antiquity. The work will be on view at the Met through July 15, 2013.

After receiving some criticism for its meager collection of 20^th century art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas made a number of major acquisitions. The works will debut at the museum later this month as part of the 20^th Century Art Gallery’s rotating exhibition schedule. Along with the newly acquired works, Mark Rothko’s (1903-1970) No. 210/No. 211 (Orange), which was purchased by Crystal Bridges in 2012, will be reinstalled.

Highlights from the museum’s recent purchases include Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) Hammer and Sickle (1977). The 6 x 7 foot acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas work is a part of Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle series. Crystal Bridges also acquired a major copper and Plexiglas sculptural work by the minimalist artist Donald Judd (1928-1994). Untitled 1989 (Bernstein 89-24) (1989) stands nearly 19 feet tall and is comprised of ten box-like elements made of copper and red Plexiglas. The sculpture is a prime example of Judd’s pioneering work.

In addition to the works by Warhol and Judd, Crystal Bridges acquired Max Weber’s (1864-1920) early modernist painting, Burlesque #1 (1909); Agnes Pelton’s (1881-1961) desert inspired oil on canvas work, Sand Storm (1932); and Marvin Dorwart Cone’s (1891-1965) Stone City Landscape (1936), which is executed in the Regionalist tradition.

The New York Public Library is currently hosting the free exhibition Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt, which spans Mary Cassatt’s (1844-1926) printmaking career from 1878 to 1898. In 1875, after having two works refused by the illustrious Paris Salon’s jury, Cassatt joined the Impressionist group at Edgar Degas’ (1834-1917) request. Cassatt created her earliest surviving prints a few years later in 1878, a year before she first exhibited with the Impressionists.

Cassatt, a legendary American artist who is well known for her tender paintings of women and children, had a bold approach to printmaking. She experimented with an array of print media, often repeating compositions and fervently reworking her copper printing plates in an effort to achieve the effects she desired.

Daring Methods tracks Cassatt’s evolution as a printmaker from her exploratory black-and-white beginnings to her mastery of the medium and her creation of technically striking color prints. The exhibition is organized chronologically to emphasize Cassatt’s development as a printmaker, illustrating the evolution of her subjects, compositions, and printing methods.

The show features 88 prints from the library’s archive, many of which have never been seen except on request. The works were donated to the New York Public Library in 1900 by Samuel Putnam Avery, a New York-based art dealer who worked closely with Cassatt.

Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt will be on view in the New York Public Library’s Print and Stokes Gallery through June 22, 2013.