19th Anniversary

The Brooklyn Museum added to its holdings in contemporary art with Do Ho Suh’s 2003 installation The Perfect Home II (gift of Lawrence B. Benenson) and the purchase of a large-scale untitled abstract painting, while the Whitney Museum of American Art was the recipient of approximately four hundred artworks in a variety of media from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, which has been in the process of winding down its activities. The gift was one of the largest single artist donations in the museum’s history (Fig. 8). The Museum of Modern Art acquired a number of important collections, including a gift of ninety works of contemporary Latin-American art and the purchase of a collection of 324 early European Modernist works on paper. A quiet trend has been the number of major gifts to college and university art museums. With good reason: Give a Jackson Pollock to the MoMA, and it likely will go into storage, because the museum has eighty-six of them. Give a Pollock to the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, and your gift will go on display right away. In fact, a purchase (made possible by donor funds and a partial gift from the previous owner) brought Pollock’s Composition with Masked Forms (1941) to the museum. The work anticipates Pollock’s drip paintings begun in 1947. A gift of fifty-plus artworks by Marcel Duchamp (Fig. 9) and by contemporaries and later artists he influenced, such as Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn, Man Ray and Tristan Tzara, was donated to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., by Barbara and Aaron Levine, who are themselves major Duchamp collectors. Founder Michael A. Mennello promised the Mennello Museum of American Art in Orlando its largest gift ever of fourteen paintings and five sculptural works valued at nearly $9 million. Included are artists from the Ashcan School of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Arts Students League in New York including John Sloan (Fig. 10), George Bellows, Robert Henri, and others. AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART Civil rights activist and art collector Peggy Cooper Cafritz donated her collection of six hundred and fifty works of contemporary art by artists of African descent to the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C. Most of the artworks went to the Studio Museum, and include pieces by Nina Chanel Abney, Derrick Adams, Sanford Biggers, Nick Cave, Noah Davis, and Kerry James Marshall, among others. Collector and scholar Gordon W. Bailey donated thirty-two paintings, sculpture, and mixed-media pieces by such artists as Sam Doyle (Fig. 11), Georgia Speller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth and Purvis Young, to the California African 2019 Antiques & Fine Art 117 Fig. 6: Ruba Rombic toilet bottle, Reuben Hailey (1872–1933), designer, Consolidated Lamp & Glass Co. (1893–1932), 1928–1932. Glass. Carnegie Museum of Art, James L. Winokur Fun and the Elizabeth A. Drain Fund (2018.19.A–B). © Public domain. Fig. 7: Iguchi Daisuke (Tochigi, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan, b. 1975), Shutoginsaiko; Ash-coated and silver slip vessel, 2017. Ash-coated stoneware with silver slip, 18 x 11¾ x 11⅜ in. Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection; Purchase, Tabriz Fund (2018.004).