Summer 2017 Preview

Summer 10 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com Clive Devenish Antiques Incline Village, Nevada Oversized Ladder Fire Truck 32" Marked “Brooklyn” clivedevenishantiques@comcast.net www.clivedevenishantiques.com phone (510) 414-4545 Established 1976 L ast November, interior designer Suzanne Lovell and her team were presented with the Acanthus Award for Excellence in Interior Design by The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. The award was for their work on the residence featured on this issue’s cover and on pages 92–101. Applauded by the Institute for an “interior that is at times background to the owner’s collection and at others assertive in distancing itself from conventional interior types,” Lovell credits their success to the firm’s in-depth knowledge of architecture, decorative arts, and art. These principles were instilled in Lovell by her early exposure to traditional materials at home and in museums, and to her architectural training under a Bauhaus-trained architect. Each project is created through the eyes of historical accuracy attuned with the interests and personalities of the clients. In this case, the project “background” was a circa-1923 apartment by one of Chicago’s leading architects of the time, Howard von Doren Shaw. Working closely with the client, her team updated the classic lines of the interior, integrating their art and sculpture collection with Art Deco and modern furnishing sourced from leading dealers and auction houses. The combination of sophisticated materials, colors, and classic forms has resulted in a comfortable living space of timeless design. Talented designers are usually also masterful colorists. Louis Comfort Tiffany, celebrated for his exquisite design sense, “painted” with colored glass to create dazzling leaded-glass windows, lampshades, vases, and decorative material. Perhaps less well known are his glass mosaics. An exhibition, the first of its kind, at the Corning Museum of Glass, organized with the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass in Long Island City, New York, explores more than thirty years of Tiffany’s innovations in creating mosaics (pages 106–113). American artists have long favored the immediacy and flexibility of watercolor, enabling them to creativity capture a blurred atmosphere of impressionism, the translucency of water, or depict brilliant reflections from the sun. The medium gained broad respect with the founding of the American Watercolor Society in 1866. Perhaps its biggest proponent was Winslow Homer, who “rode the watercolor movement from its beginnings to its crescendo of popularity,” as Kathleen Foster notes in her article, “Homer, Sargent, and the American Watercolor Movement” (pages 114–122). Foster presents the generational stars of the movement, noting that by the time of Sargent’s death in 1925, the art of watercolor was well established and had been adopted and adapted by young moderns including Prendergast, Burchfield, Hopper and others. I hope you enjoy these and the many other fascinating stories we have for you in this issue. Johanna McBrien Founding editor Photography by Ellen McDermott Letter from the editor