HAVE A QUESTION ABOUT ANTIQUES OR COLLECTIBLES?

Send me an E-mail
(Please, no questions
 about value.)

Instructions for sending photographs of your pieces with your question.
 

Which department store originated the concept of selling artistic home furnishings?

Macy's
Harrod's
Liberty & Co.
                     To see the answer

Arts & Crafts:
From William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright

by Arnold Schwartzman

The author focuses on a British craftsmen, such as William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who turned their backs on the mass production of the Industrial Revolution to form a ‘Round Table’ in order to establish a means of returning to hand-crafted products.

                                  More Books

 WATCH VIDEOS

How Was It Made? Block Printing William Morris Wallpaper

This video recreates the painstaking reproduction of a William Morris wallpaper design from 1875, a process that can take up to 4 weeks, using 30 different blocks and 15 separate colors.

Click on the title to view.

And look for other videos in selected articles.

Have Bob speak
 on antiques to your group or organization.

More Information

Can't find what
 you're looking for?

Go to our Sitemap

Find out what's coming in the
2024 Spring Edition

of the
THE ANTIQUES ALMANAC

"Art Deco World"

COMING IN
May

Share pages of this ezine with your friends using the buttons provided with each article.


Download our
Decorative Periods and Styles Chart
 

Read our newest glossary:

Antique Furniture Terminology
 from A to Z

courtesy of AntiquesWorldUK

Videos have
come to


The Antiques
Almanac

Expand your antiques experience.

Look for videos in various articles.

Just click on the
arrow to play.

FEATURED
ANTIQUE




Argyle Chair
Charles Rennie Macintosh

Art for the Common Man
by Bob Brooke


When most people think of folk art, they probably imagine art done by ordinary people without artistic training. And they’d be right. But folk art takes in much more than that. Elie Nadelman, a New York sculptor, and his wife, Viola, knew that, and to them folk art became a collecting obsession.



This summer, the New York Historical Society will celebrate their fantastic collection in an exhibition entitled “The Folk Art Collection of Elie Nadelman—Making It Modern.” On view from May 20 through August 21, the exhibit features more than 200 objects across a wide range of media including furniture, sculpture, paintings, ceramics, glass, iron, textiles, drawings and watercolors, and household tools.

The objects collected by Nadelmans made up the first public folk art collection in the United States, as well as the first ever to consider the European roots of American folk art.

What is Folk Art?
Generally, folk art is not influenced by movements in fine art. Although folk art usually excludes works done by professional artists, many 18th- and 19th-century American folk art painters made their living by their work, including itinerant portrait painters.

While tribal art, primitive art, tramp art, and popular art, such as the paintings of Campbell Soup cans by Andy Warhol are often lumped together as folk art, in fact, each is distinctive in its own right.

Folk art encompasses a range of utilitarian and decorative media, including cloth, wood, paper, clay, metal and more. If an artist cannot find traditional materials to use, he or she will often substitute new materials, resulting in contemporary expressions of traditional folk art forms. Elie Nadelman knew this from his own work and applied it to the objects he and his wife collected over the years.

But all folk art has one common characteristic—it’s colorful. Most folk artists learn their skills and techniques through apprenticeships in informal community settings, such as the art produced in villages in Bali, Indonesia, where the artists in each village specialize in one type of art, be it wood carving or painting or whatever. Above all, all folk art is simple and direct.

Today, collectors assemble their antique folk art collections based mostly on the individual pieces’ artistic merit. The people who created them never intended them to be art. Examples of this type of folk art include weathervanes, old store signs and carved figures, itinerant portraits, carousel horses, fire buckets, painted game boards, cast iron doorstops and many other "whimsical" antiques.


Elie Nadleman—Artist and Collector
Widely recognized for his elegant and spare modernist sculptures, Elie Nadelman is less known for his role as a pioneering American folk art collector.

Born in Poland in 1882, Elie Nadelman studied sculpture in Paris and Munich, both of which were a hotbed of avant-garde art and ideas, prior to World War I After immigrating to New York City in 1914, he established a reputation for his witty, modernist sculptures. In 1919, Nadelman married Viola Spiess Flannery, a European-educated wealthy widow. Shortly after their marriage, the couple began collecting folk art, which eventually became an obsession.

From 1926 until 1937, the Nadelmans displayed their collection, spanning 600 years and 13 countries, in their own Museum of Folk and Peasant Arts in Riverdale, New York. This museum was the first of its kind in the United States. In fact, the Nadelmans were among the earliest collectors to use the term "folk art" to describe common objects marked by bright colors, flat patterns, and simple forms.

But the stock market crash of 1929 took its toll. As the ensuing Great Depression enveloped the country, the Nadelmans began to sell off works from their collection to finance its upkeep. In 1937, they sold the entire collection of some 15,000 objects to the New York Historical Society.

The Exhibition
The exhibition offers new insights into the intersection of folk art and modernism, the Nadelmans' enduring influence on the history of American art collecting, and the relationship between American and European folk art. The exhibit of the Nadelman folk art collection not only recognizes Nadelman's eye for collecting a rich cornucopia of wonderful yet simple forms, it also reexamines folk art's influence on his own sculpture

The Historical Society included many of the objects from its Nadelman Collection,
supplemented by several pieces of Elie Nadelman's sculpture on loan for the exhibit.

Organized primarily by medium and evoking the displays in the Nadelmans' Museum of Folk and Peasant Arts, the exhibition will highlight new discoveries about objects in the Historical Society's Nadelman collection. The exhibition will also trace the provenance of many of the Nadelmans' purchases using data recorded on the curatorial cards of the Museum and Folk and Peasant Arts, which the family has kept and which were never studied.

Highlights include the regal chalkware bust of a woman, a prized piece created in the first half of the 19th century. It represents a folk art type that may have influenced Nadelman's work. Another piece that’s worth seeing is the monumental carved and painted wood statue of fire chief Harry Howard, created around 1855, which stands at nearly nine feet tall and celebrates one of the most famous figures in New York City's firefighting history.

Other exhibition highlights include objects from everyday life, such as an 18th-century Dutch baby walker, a kakelorum, a game of chance played with marbles from southern Germany from the latter part of the same century, and a spouted stoneware pitcher with cobalt blue flowers and vines from 1798, an outstanding piece of early New York City pottery and one of the Nadelmans' most prized pieces.

To learn more about this exhibition and to purchase tickets, visit the  New York Historical Society page.


< Back to Antiques News Archives                                    Next Article >

FOLLOW MY WEEKLY BLOG
Antiques Q&A


JOIN MY COLLECTION
Antiques and More on
Facebook

LIKE MY FACEBOOK PAGE
The Antiques Almanac on Facebook

No antiques or collectibles
are sold on this site.

How to Recognize and Refinish Antiques for Pleasure and Profit

Book: How to Recognizing and Refinishing Antiques for Pleasure and Profit
Have you ever bought an antique or collectible that was less than perfect and needed some TLC? Bob's new book offers tips and step-by- step instructions for simple maintenance and restoration of common antiques.

Read an Excerpt

Auction News
Get up to the minute news of antiques auctions around the country and the world.

Also see
The Auction Directory

Antiques News
Read breaking news stories from the world of antiques and collectibles.

Art Exhibitions
Search for art exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world.

Home | About This Site | Antiques | Collectibles | Antique Tips | Book Shop | Antique Trivia | Antique Spotlight | Antiques News  Special Features | Caring for Your Collections | Collecting | Readers Ask | Antiques Glossaries | Resources | Contact
Copyright ©2007-2023 by Bob Brooke Communications
Site design and development by BBC Web Services