Shimmering: Copleys Portrait of Mrs. H

In case you make Eye Candy your first stop on the Arkansas Times home page, note: Max has an item on his Arkansas Blog about the New York Times’ rave review of Crystal Bridges, which it describes as a “a big, serious, confident new institution.”

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The article describes Copley’s “Portrait of Mrs. H” as “shimmering,” and goes on to single out other important works. The writer, Roberta Smith, says the museum needs to fill a particular hole:

There is one huge blind spot in the collection up to 1900, and it is a very serious one in my book: the almost complete lack of paintings by largely self-taught or folk artists. This country’s folk art is as great and as original as any other art it has produced; its uncanny fusion of abstraction and representation, and of primitive and modern makes it the American equivalent of Sienese painting in the early Italian Renaissance. Leaving it out is like looking at the story of American art with only one eye.

In one of Eye Candy’s many helpful posts for Crystal Bridges, I wrote about Sotheby’s “American Paintings, Silver, Folk Art and Sculpture” auction in September, and there suggested she might want to pick up William Edmondson’s “Angel with Cape Surround” in case she needed Eye Candy’s assistance in collecting outsider art. Someone bought it, for $98,000; perhaps AW has it stashed somewhere for future exhibition. Alas, the whirligig I also suggested did not sell at all.

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William Edmondsons Angel with Cape Surround

  • William Edmondson’s “Angel with Cape Surround”

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