17th Anniversary Preview

17th Anniversary 10 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com Clive Devenish Antiques clivedevenishantiques@comcast.net www.clivedevenishantiques.com phone (510) 414-4545 Baseball Americana Babe Ruth “Goudey” #181 Baseball Card, ca. 1933 “Darktown Battery” Mechanical Bank by J. & E. Stevens Co., Cromwell, CT., ca. 1888 Established 1976 M any artists of the early twentieth century were drawn to explore landscapes and communities that were newly accessible by means of the automobile. Authors Stephanie Heydt and Katherine Jentleson in their article Cross Country: The Power of Place in American Art, 1915–1950 , also point to expanded horizons made possible through grants, Depression-era government agencies such as the WPA, an increase in commissioned works, and artist colonies (see pages 176–183). Among the artist colonies Heydt and Jentleson discuss are the commu- nities in Woodstock and Lake George in New York State, as well as patron Mabel Dodge Luhan’s artist retreat in Taos, New Mexico. A number of art- ists who participated in these communities also traveled to the coast of Maine to the art colony in Ogunquit, established by artist and teacher Hamilton Easter Field in 1911. Artists in this latter group, who included Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Elie Nadelman, and Robert Laurent, were also collectors of folk art, finding commonality in the distorted and abstract manner of the work of self-taught artists. Edith Gregor Halpert and her husband, artist Sam Halpert, vacationed in Ogunquit in the summer of 1926. She, too, was drawn to the work of folk artists. When she returned to New York and opened her Downtown Gallery later that year, she initially represented avant-garde modern artists, expanding to include folk art a few years later with her American Folk Art Gallery. During this time, she befriended collector Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who became one of Halpert’s regular clients. A founder of the Museum of Modern Art, Rockefeller’s interests grew to also include folk art. With the assistance of Halpert and curator Holger Cahill, Rockefeller went on to form one of the most important collections of American folk art, the basis of which formed the museum that bears her name, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, part of the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. This year the museum, the oldest continuously operating institution devot- ed to the field, inaugurates its 60th anniversary with a loan exhibit at the Winter Antiques Show in New York. Three articles in this issue are devoted to the museum and loan show (see pages 188–205). Folk art has also been influential in the lives of the collectors whose painting graces our cover. It was a chance encounter that was the impetus for a decades-long commitment to the material and to New York’s American Folk Art Museum, about which you can read in this issue’s Lifestyle (pages 142–157). Enjoy, Johanna McBrien Founding editor Photography by Ellen McDermott Letter from the editor