AFA 20th Anniversary

20th Anniversary 100 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com Left  Fig. 6: Anthony van Dyck (Flemish, 1599–1641), Queen Henrietta Maria, 1636. Oil on canvas. 41⅝ × 33¼ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Bequest of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman in honor of Annette de la Renta, 2019 (2019.141.10). Right  Fig. 7: Rosie Lee Tompkins, Three Sixes, 1986; quilted by Willia Ette Graham. Polyester, polyester double knit wool jersey, and cotton muslin backing; 97 x 81 in.; Bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo: Sharon Risedorph. © Estate of Effie Mae Howard. bought Corpus Christi (ca. 1490–1500), a small-scale wooden sculpture depicting the crucified body of Christ by Veit Stoss. The Museum of Fine Arts , Houston , which owns several small-scale paintings by French painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), purchased another from a Parisian gallery, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1833–34), for an undisclosed price (Fig. 4). The painting is the first version of the artist’s famed composition Femmes d ’Alger (1834), now in the collection of the Louvre in Paris, and a highlight of the historic Delacroix retrospective co-organized by the Louvre and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018. The Meadows Museum of Southern Methodist University in Texas is renowned for its collection of Spanish art, starting with the original 1961 gift of scores of paintings by Goya, El Greco, and other Iberian artists, from Texas oilman Algur Meadows (1899–1978). In the almost sixty years since that original gift, the Meadows Museum has been adding diligently to its collection, and in 2019 added four new works—some old and some newer, not all paintings. They include Manuel Ramírez de Arellano’s terra cotta sculpture Our Lady of Solitude (1769); Salvador Dali’s bronze sculpture Venus de Milo with Drawers (1936, cast 1971) (Fig. 5); a drawing by Ignacio Zuloaga, Portrait of Margaret Kahn (1923); and the painting Orchard in Seville (ca. 1880), by Emilio Sánchez Perrier. One of the biggest winners in the Old Masters realm was The Metropolitan Museum of Art , which received a bequest of 375 artwork s and $80 million from the late Jayne Wrightsman, who died in April at the age of 99. The bequest includes gifts to The Met’s departments of drawings and prints, European paintings and sculpture, decorative arts, as well as to the departments of Asian art and Islamic art and the Watson Library. Among the key donations were Van Dyck’s portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria (Fig. 6) and Delacroix’s Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe , as well as six canvases by Canaletto. The $80 million was added to the existing Wrightsman Fund, which supports acquisitions of works of art from Western Europe and Great Britain created between 1500 and 1850. Among other Old Master highlights in museum collecting during the past year was the National Gallery of Art ’s acquisition of a 1529 painting Venus and Cupid by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) and a circa 1560 painting by Florentine artist Maso da San Friano (1531–1571), Holy Family with the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, which entered the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Artworks and other cultural objects by women artists, African-American artist, Latino artists, and artists from other continents, specifically, South America, Africa, and Asia have been the focus of many museums. The San Francisco Museum