AFA 22nd Anniversary

2022 Antiques & Fine Art 71 Laura and Richard Parsons (the former CEO of AOL Time Warner) donated forty works by self-taught artists—including Horace Pippin, Bill Traylor, Clementine Hunter, Gertrude Morgan, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, and Amos Ferguson (Fig. 5)—to the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, as part of the institution’s sixtieth anniversary. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston , received a gift of forty-eight photographs by Henryk Ross (1910–1991) (Fig. 6), which offer a rare glimpse of life inside Poland’s Lodz Ghetto during the Holocaust. Donated to the museum by collector Howard Greenberg, the group of gelatin silver prints was originally given by Ross to Lova Szmuszkowicz, later Leon Sutton (1909–2007), a fellow survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, who brought them to the U.S. when he immigrated to New York City in 1947. The prints represent a significant range of both official images, which Ross took as a photographer for the ghetto’s Department of Statistics, and the unofficial photographs that he took secretly at great personal risk, which documented the grim realities of life inside. Museum director Matthew Teitelbaum stated that “these 48 photographs serve as both memory and documentary evidence of the extremes of war. They are powerful and memorable.” As many museums looked for ways to make up for operating losses, one museum that faced some criticism for its plans to sell items was the Newark Museum of Art in New Jersey, which announced its intention to sell paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Frederic Remington, Thomas Moran and Thomas Eakins, in addition to an 1846 painting Arch of Nero by British-born American artist Thomas Cole. It was the Cole landscape that brought the greatest hue and cry, but the artwork did not go far. The Thomas H. and Diane DeMell Jacobsen Ph.D Foundation, a St. Louis–based organization whose aim is to “research and obtain American masterpieces,” purchased the work when it went on sale at Sotheby’s, and donated it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. An 1839 painting by Thomas Cole, Portage Falls on the Genesee (Fig. 7), was purchased by the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in California, in partnership with The Ahmanson Foundation . The painting once had belonged to William H. Seward, who served as secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln. Gustave Caillebotte was a relatively obscure figure in the history of French Impressionism until Kirk Varnedoe, who later became chief curator in the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, made the artist the focus of a 1987 monograph. The artist’s work is now highly sought-after, and the Cleveland Museum of Art purchased a drawing Study of a Man with Hands in His Pockets that shows the artist’s close friend Eugène Lamy in a casual pose and facing away from the viewer. Of even greater note is the purchase at a : Fig. 11: Paul Comoléra, Minton Ceramics Manufactory, Majolica figure of a peacock, 1876. Lead-glazed earthenware, H. 59⅞, W. 27½, D. 17¼ inches. (IL.2020.11.1). Impressed “1876” in a cypher; numerals and marks, inscribed “P. Comoléra.” Courtesy of the Walters Art Museum. Fig. 12: Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704–1788), Anne-Marguerite Perrinet de Longuefin, Mme. Rouillé, ca. 1738. Pastel on paper, 23¾ x 19 inches. The Frick Collection; Promised Gift from the Collection of Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard. Photo by Joseph Coscia Jr.