Published six times per year, Fine Art Connoisseur is now a widely consulted platform for the world’s most knowledgeable experts, who write articles that inform readers and give them the tools necessary to make better purchasing decisions.

Fine Art Connoisseur, March/April 2025

Get this issue of Fine Art Connoisseur here.

ON THE COVER
KIT KING (b.1987), “The Tangible Manifestation of Change” (detail), 2017, oil on linen, cut and riveted to an aluminum and steel support, 50 x 36 1/4 in. (overall), Collection of Carl B. Bedell

FEATURES

• ARTISTS MAKING THEIR MARK: THREE TO WATCH
  We highlight the talents of Lisa Lackey, Rachel Personett, and LaQuincey Reed.
• DAUD AKHRIEV: WANDERING SPIRIT
  By Rose Fredrick
• CITY LIVIN’
  By Max Gillies
• MUSKEGON MUSEUM OF ART & THE BENNETT PRIZE: AN IDEAL PARTNERSHIP
  By Leslie Gilbert Elman
• KYLE MA: A YOUTHFUL VISION
  By Thomas Connors
• REDISCOVERING ROCKWELL KENT
  By James Lancel McElhinney
• WHY SELF-PORTRAITS NOW?
  By Paul Rosiak
• THE HIDDEN COSTS OF VALUABLE ART
  By Daniel Grant
• BREAK THE ALGORITHM: MAKING ART THROUGH A LIFETIME
  By Julyan Davis
• CELEBRATING AMERICA’S GREAT COLLECTORS
  The flourishing of contemporary realism becomes even clearer as we highlight outstanding collectors living throughout the country.
• OIL PAINTING HEAVEN: A POEM BY GREGG KREUTZ
• GREAT ART WORLDWIDE
  We survey 6 top-notch projects occurring this season.
• SPRING INTO ART
  There are at least 8 great reasons to celebrate the American West this season.

Fine Art Connoisseur‘s jargon-free text and large color illustrations are attracting an ever-growing readership passionate about high-quality artworks and the fascinating stories around them. It serves art collectors and enthusiasts with innovative articles about representational paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints — both historical and contemporary, American and European. Fine Art Connoisseur covers the museums, galleries, fairs, auction houses, and private collections where great art is found.

From the Fine Art Connoisseur March/April 2025 Editor’s Note: “The art collectors highlighted in this issue of Fine Art Connoisseur buy art with their eyes and hearts…”

Collecting Art for the Right Reasons

My favorite issue of the year is the one that highlights real-world collectors of contemporary realist art. This is that issue, and we hope you will enjoy “meeting” the individuals and couples who have so generously opened their doors. These folks now join 97 others we have profiled since 2015, and we are honored and grateful to welcome them to this community.

Why do we do this? First, people need role models, in any walk of life. We play tennis better after watching Coco Gauff, and we cook more effectively after Bobby Flay demonstrates the recipe. It’s harder with art collecting because there is no single way to do it, and unfortunately the best-known collectors are financiers and movie stars paying millions at auction for a Hirst or a Koons. Good for them, but that’s collecting warehoused-investment-assets with your ears, not art-to-live-with with your eyes. I’m far more intrigued by celebrities who collect items of comparatively low value: just for example, Tom Hanks buys antique typewriters, Angelina Jolie goes for medieval and Renaissance knives, and Claudia Schiffer seeks out mounted beetles, butterflies, and spiders.

Great, but this is a fine art magazine, and besides, buying anything when you’re a hundred-millionaire is not particularly difficult. The real trick is to buy wonderful “unbranded” art on a regular budget, away from the limelight and the art advisers who think about this stuff all day. The folks highlighted in this issue buy art with their eyes and hearts, living with and enjoying it, sometimes enhancing their lives further by getting to know the artists who made it.

The hardest step in this issue’s preparation is asking the collectors to choose just two artworks to illustrate in their profiles. That’s like choosing among your kids, but the collectors do it bravely, and they understand why we ask them to. It’s simple: we can dedicate only two pages to each collector, and if we were to fill them with seven or eight “favorite” images, there wouldn’t be room for the words. Besides, each artwork would look more like a postage stamp than a painting. And so we go smaller (in number) and bigger (in photo size), reminding everyone that these two images don’t represent the whole collection, only evoke it.

Our work on the collector profiles never stops, so it’s already time for us to plan next year’s edition. There are great collections — many still being formed — in every region of this country, and no one person could possibly know all of them. Though our research is well underway and we already have some terrific names in sight, I hereby invite you to send me suggestions or nominations of other collectors. Our criteria are simple: they must be U.S. residents (still living) who have collected, or are continuing to collect, superb contemporary realist art created any time after 1980.

Ideas are welcome from everyone: the collectors themselves, their friends, families, dealers, advisers, curators, etc. Please just send me an email (ptrippi@streamlinepublishing.com) and I will move it forward. Rest assured that our team is discreet; all communications with collectors will be virtual, and we will not turn up unannounced at their homes to take photos! The individuals selected will have an opportunity to fact-check everything, and in fact they themselves will provide the photos to be illustrated. That said, it’s our editorial team’s decision who goes in, and who doesn’t.

Thank you as always for your incoming suggestions, and please enjoy learning about this year’s fascinating collectors.

What are your thoughts? Share your letter to the Editor below in the comments.

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From the Fine Art Connoisseur January/February 2025 Editor’s Note:

Transcending the Circus

Well, you know I have to address it. For over a month now, people have mentioned it the minute they learn I edit a magazine about art collecting.

In November, the world fluttered yet again about the artist provocateur Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) and his latest sensation. The Italian’s conceptual piece, “Comedian” — a yellow banana duct-taped to a white wall exactly 63 inches above the floor — soared past its $1.5 million estimate to sell for $6.2 million (including fees) at Sotheby’s New York. The winner, Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun (b. 1990), beat out six other collectors after a five-minute bidding war. He won the banana (which he proceeded to eat on camera a week later), plus a certificate of authenticity and an instruction manual for how to replace the banana every time it rots. You really could not make this stuff up.

“Comedian” has been attracting attention ever since it debuted at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in December 2019. Any hopes that the subsequent pandemic might quash such nonsense in the art world were dashed, of course, and now its circus of vulgar novelty and conspicuous consumption goes on. (To be sure, there has always been a strand of absurdism in the arts: think of Marcel Duchamp presenting a commercial urinal as a Fountain in 1917, but that was over a century ago and jokes don’t remain amusing quite that long.)

David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, opined that “Comedian” “transcends geographies, language, understanding, cultural differences” and cited “its universality, the way it kind of pierces through the cultural zeitgeist to the very center.” In 2021, Cattelan himself said he does not see Comedian as a “joke,” but rather a “sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value.”

“Sincere” is not a word I would have conjured in this context, but I agree with both men that the visual and intellectual emptiness of “Comedian” perfectly reflect the emptiness of our “cultural zeitgeist.” If this is the only contemporary art that most Americans have heard about, no wonder they think art collecting is a racket, the loathsome love child of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Madison Avenue.

For decades, cynics have noted — quite correctly — that Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” (1503–06) is just a piece of wood covered in oil paint. It has no intrinsic or material value, only the incalculable value of its fame and history. Yes, but it also possesses beauty and meaning; it connects us with its maker and its sitter in powerful, sometimes perplexing, sometimes thrilling, ways. I don’t see anyone connecting powerfully with the banana, or with Maurizio Cattelan. He is justly admired as a brilliant skewerer of our era, and as a brilliant businessman. Yet Leonardo will be remembered for all time; his Italian compatriot will be forgotten within half a century — probably sooner — because satire and publicity stunts get stale so quickly.

This season’s frenzy of irony, cynicism, and commodification has not left me outraged or sad. Rather, it makes me cherish even more keenly the skill, thoughtfulness, and authenticity of the artists highlighted in Fine Art Connoisseur. There is no point in moaning about the global circus of cutting-edge contemporary art. Let’s ignore it and get on with making, viewing, studying, and buying the good stuff.

What are your thoughts? Share your letter to the Editor below in the comments.

Download the current issue of Fine Art Connoisseur here.

Sign up to receive Fine Art Today, the free weekly e-newsletter from
Fine Art Connoisseur magazine.

Published six times per year, Fine Art Connoisseur is now a widely consulted platform for the world’s most knowledgeable experts, who write articles that inform readers and give them the tools necessary to make better purchasing decisions.

Fine Art Connoisseur, January/February 2025

Get this issue of Fine Art Connoisseur here.

ON THE COVER
Jesse Powell (b. 1977), “China Cove, Point Lobos” (detail), 2023, oil on linen, 20 x 16 in. (overall), available through the artist

COLUMNS

• Frontispiece: Jacob Jordaens
• Publisher’s Letter:
• Editor’s Note: Transcending the Circus
• Favorite: Sarah Bracey White on Winslow Homer
• Off the Walls
• Classic Moment: Nicole Alger
• 2025 Collector’s Guide to Rocky Mountain Towns

FEATURES

• ARTISTS MAKING THEIR MARK: THREE TO WATCH
  We highlight the talents of Christopher Groves, Cody Kamrowski, and Allison Evonne Streett
• JESSE POWELL: PAINTING PERSONAL STORIES
  By Rose Fredrick
• A PLACE AT THE TABLE
  By Max Gillies
• NATIVE SON: JOHN WILSON’S CONSCIENCE-DRIVEN CAREER
  By Thomas Connors
• JULIUS LEBLANC STEWART: THE ENIGMATIC EXPATRIATE
  By Valerie Ann Leeds
• REVEALED: A RIBERA MASTERWORK REDISCOVERED
  By Timothy J. Standring
• A BANK HELPS CONSERVE OUR CULTURAL HERITAGE
  By Daniel Grant
• GREAT ART WORLDWIDE
  We survey 10 top-notch projects occurring this season.
• SELF-THROUGHTRAIT
  By William A. Suys, Jr.
• IN NEW YORK, ENTICING ENCOUNTERS WITH POLISH ART
  By Peter Trippi
• ART WARMS THE WEST
  There are at least 3 great reasons to celebrate the American West this season.

Fine Art Connoisseur‘s jargon-free text and large color illustrations are attracting an ever-growing readership passionate about high-quality artworks and the fascinating stories around them. It serves art collectors and enthusiasts with innovative articles about representational paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints — both historical and contemporary, American and European. Fine Art Connoisseur covers the museums, galleries, fairs, auction houses, and private collections where great art is found.

From the Fine Art Connoisseur November/December 2024 Editor’s Note:

Sharing Makes Us Stronger

The United States is fortunate to have a lively museum scene, with hundreds of thousands of artworks on public view at their home institutions and thousands more in circulation through traveling exhibitions. Even so, vast holdings of American art remain tucked away in museum vaults, inaccessible to art lovers due to financial and logistical constraints.

That’s a regrettable situation now being addressed in earnest. Earlier this year, Art Bridges launched its Partner Loan Network, fostering long-term collection-sharing partnerships among museums of all sizes nationwide. This initiative existed in another form for the past seven years, but now its scope has broadened. “By providing a platform for museums to share their collections, the Partner Loan Network offsets limitations to collection-sharing by providing logistical and strategic support to get artworks out of storage and share them with communities across the country,” explains Anne Kraybill, CEO of Art Bridges.

Art Bridges is a foundation created by the arts patron Alice Walton, whose family founded Walmart and still controls it. Art Bridges has its own collection of art, and it works closely with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, Walmart’s hometown.

Today the Partner Loan Network involves more than 200 institutions ranging in size from the gigantic Museum of Modern Art to the more modestly scaled Peoria Riverfront Museum. Art Bridges coordinates the preparation of the artworks to be loaned, including insurance, crating, and shipping, at no cost to participants, and additional grants to support educational activities are available. Over the past year, nearly 280 objects were rotated, enhancing the collections of 29 borrowing institutions.

A useful example can be enjoyed this season at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. On view there through December 8 is the exhibition “The Great Search: Art in a Time of Change, 1928–1945,” which takes its title from the 1939 World’s Fair held in New York City.  Organizer Holger Cahill, then national director of the Federal Art Project, spoke of the modern American artist’s “search that takes many paths” — a yearning desire to seek out new and enduring forms that would aid democracy.

Among the master artists represented in this year’s show are Milton Avery, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Andrew Wyeth. Though many of the works come from the Westmoreland’s superb collection, others have been loaned through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Art Bridges. Philadelphia holds a particularly outstanding collection of American art, yet simply cannot show all of it. Why not, then, share some of those treasures, especially with another great venue in the same state?

Collaborations like this will help move our field forward, especially in this time of soaring costs and understaffing. To learn more about the network, visit artbridgesfoundation.org, and enjoy some of the resulting projects now underway.

What are your thoughts? Share your letter to the Editor below in the comments.

Download the current issue of Fine Art Connoisseur here.

Sign up to receive Fine Art Today, the free weekly e-newsletter from
Fine Art Connoisseur magazine.

Published six times per year, Fine Art Connoisseur is now a widely consulted platform for the world’s most knowledgeable experts, who write articles that inform readers and give them the tools necessary to make better purchasing decisions.

Fine Art Connoisseur, November/December 2024

Get this issue of Fine Art Connoisseur here.

ON THE COVER
LOUISE SOLECKI WEIR (b.1961), “Sima,” 2023, ceramic with oils (unique), 18 x 14 x 9 1/2 in., available through the artist

COLUMNS

• Frontispiece: Mortimer Menpes
• Publisher’s Letter: Portraits of the Present, Intended for the Future
• Editor’s Note: Sharing Makes Us Stronger
• Off the Walls
• Classic Moment: Neill Slaughter

FEATURES

• Artists Making Their Mark: Three to Watch
  We highlight the talents of Rachel Burgess, Jennifer Cronin, and William J. Rushton.
• Go Figure
  By Max Gillies
• Jamie Wyeth’s Homages to His Wife, Phyllis
  By Chris Crosman
• Paulette Tavormina’s New Take on the Old Masters
  By Peter Trippi
• Belle Da Costa Greene, Trailblazing Librarian
  By Thomas Connors
• Old River, New Light
  By Rebecca Allan
• Bath: The City as a Work of Art
  By Louise Nicholson
• The Hedberg Collection’s Next Chapter
  By Peter Trippi
• Great Art Nationwide
  We survey 15 top-notch projects occurring this season.

Fine Art Connoisseur‘s jargon-free text and large color illustrations are attracting an ever-growing readership passionate about high-quality artworks and the fascinating stories around them. It serves art collectors and enthusiasts with innovative articles about representational paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints — both historical and contemporary, American and European. Fine Art Connoisseur covers the museums, galleries, fairs, auction houses, and private collections where great art is found.

Published six times per year, Fine Art Connoisseur is now a widely consulted platform for the world’s most knowledgeable experts, who write articles that inform readers and give them the tools necessary to make better purchasing decisions.

Fine Art Connoisseur, September/October 2024

Get this issue of Fine Art Connoisseur here.

ON THE COVER
Wendy Chidester (b. 1964), “Rem-Blick” (detail), 2024, oil on canvas, overall: 45 x 45 in., Springville Museum of Art, museum purchase, 100th Annual Spring Salon, in honor of the Springville High School 2023–24 student body.

COLUMNS

• Frontispiece: Thomas Rowlandson
• Publisher’s Letter: Turning the Tide
• Editor’s Note: Honoring the Past and Looking Forward
• Off the Walls
• Classic Moment: Lukas Freudenberg

FEATURES

• Artists Making Their Mark: Three to Watch
  We highlight the talents of Dustin Adamson, Mitch Shea, and Stephanie Paige Thomson.
• Going Wild
  By Max Gillies
• Dustin Van Wechel: Telling Animals’ Stories
  By Rose Fredrick
• Katie O’Hagan: Inspiration on Her Doorstep
  By Thomas Connors
• Kathy Anderson’s Artful Flowers
  By Daniel Grant
• An Object of Desire Casts Its Spell
  By David Masello
• Sustaining Howard Pyle’s Legacy
  By Leslie Gilbert Elman
• Great Art Worldwide
  We survey 16 top-notch projects occurring this season.
• Springville’s Salon Turns 100
  By Brandon Rosas
• Fall Into the West
  There are at least six great reasons to celebrate the American West this season.
• Favorite: Alasdair Nichol on Max Beckmann’s “Departure”
  By David Masello

Fine Art Connoisseur‘s jargon-free text and large color illustrations are attracting an ever-growing readership passionate about high-quality artworks and the fascinating stories around them. It serves art collectors and enthusiasts with innovative articles about representational paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints — both historical and contemporary, American and European. Fine Art Connoisseur covers the museums, galleries, fairs, auction houses, and private collections where great art is found.

From the Fine Art Connoisseur September/October 2024 Editor’s Note:

Honoring the Past and Looking Forward

Every issue of Fine Art Connoisseur reminds me how exciting the field of contemporary realist art has become, across the United States and among practitioners of every age. A key marker of this vitality will go viral on September 13, when all eyes turn to Washington, D.C., for the installation and illumination of the National World War I Memorial in Pershing Park, two blocks from the White House. More than 4 million American men and women served in uniform during the “War to End All Wars” (1914–18), and 116,000 of them gave their lives, a figure especially shocking when we consider that the U.S. did not join the conflict until 1917, three years after it started.

The memorial’s focal point is “A Soldier’s Journey,” the 60-foot-wide bronze relief encompassing 38 figures conceived and executed by the New York City-based sculptor Sabin Howard (b. 1963). It traces the progress of an individual American combatant, who departs home, endures appalling ordeals, and finally returns to his family. Here we see not only soldiers: also depicted and honored for their contributions and sacrifices are nurses, spouses, and children.

Sabin Howard and architect Joseph Weishaar have endured their own journey; planning for the memorial began well over a decade ago, the groundbreaking occurred in 2017, and then came the pandemic. Howard has spent years developing his vision in New Zealand, England, and suburban New Jersey, working closely with his wife, Traci L. Slatton, who helped formulate his ideas around the composition’s narrative element.

I eagerly look forward to attending the unveiling this month, and I encourage everyone to follow the media coverage, which will alert the general public to the fact that great realist art is still being made. Fine Art Connoisseur has long covered the achievements of Sabin Howard, who excelled at the New York Academy of Art after studying at the Tyler School of Art’s program in Rome. Fortunately, there are many more talents out there excelling, including the team of sculptors Howard gathered to develop this project.

I am excited to learn where all of these gifted artists will turn next, and I encourage you to learn more about this month’s unveiling at sabinhoward.com/WWIcc.

What are your thoughts? Share your letter to the Editor below in the comments.

Download the current issue of Fine Art Connoisseur here.

Sign up to receive Fine Art Today, the free weekly e-newsletter from
Fine Art Connoisseur magazine.

Published six times per year, Fine Art Connoisseur is now a widely consulted platform for the world’s most knowledgeable experts, who write articles that inform readers and give them the tools necessary to make better purchasing decisions.

Fine Art Connoisseur, July/August 2024

Get this issue of Fine Art Connoisseur here.

ON THE COVER
Will St. John (b. 1981), “Sol,” (detail), 2020, oil on panel, overall: 31 x 31 in., in the permanent collection of the New Salem Museum and Academy of Fine Art

COLUMNS

• Frontispiece: Edward Hopper
• Publisher’s Letter: Your Own Grand Tour
• Editor’s Note: AI As Our Ally
• Off the Walls
• Classic Moment: Peter Brown

FEATURES

• Artists Making Their Mark: Three to Watch
  We highlight the talents of Tyler Berry, Zofia Chamera, and Kelly Micca.
• Masters of Light and Shadow
  By Kelly Compton
• Scott Christensen & Quang Ho: Inspired by the West
  By Thomas Connors
• Nurturing Future Museum Patrons
  By Daniel Grant
• Painting in Lives
  By David Masello
• Favorite: Howard Zar on Leonardo’s “Lady with an Ermine”
  By David Masello
• A New Museum in New Salem
  By Leslie Gilbert Elman
• Rethinking Two Great London Museums
  By Louise Nicholson
• Contemporary Realism’s Future
  By Annie Landenberger
• In Buffalo, a Fresh Look at Nature
  By Rebecca Allen
• Great Art Nationwide
  We survey 14 top-notch projects occurring this season.
• Summer’s Here
  There are at least five great reasons to celebrate the American West this season.

Fine Art Connoisseur‘s jargon-free text and large color illustrations are attracting an ever-growing readership passionate about high-quality artworks and the fascinating stories around them. It serves art collectors and enthusiasts with innovative articles about representational paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints — both historical and contemporary, American and European. Fine Art Connoisseur covers the museums, galleries, fairs, auction houses, and private collections where great art is found.

From the Fine Art Connoisseur July/August 2024 Editor’s Note:

AI As Our Ally

I have written before about how wary we should be of artificial intelligence (AI) getting too mixed up with the making of art. I stand by those comments, and I sense that ever more people in our field have their guards up, too.

One aspect of AI that thrills me, however, is its capacity to help us better understand historic works of art. An exciting example came to light last year when it was announced that significant portions of a previously unrecognized painting of the Madonna and Child with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist were painted by the Italian Renaissance master Raphael (1483–1520). This discovery rolled out in the ideal manner: some humans got the hunch first, and then the computers proved them right.

To be specific, Dr. Larry Silver, professor emeritus of art history at the University of Pennsylvania, proposed that the 16th-century painting was made by Raphael’s studio assistants, with the all-important faces of the Madonna and Baby Jesus attributable to the master himself. Then thorough examinations of both the pigments and the provenance were undertaken by the London and New York-based firm Art Analysis & Research, which gave it the green light.

Finally, the painting was subjected to scrutiny by the Zurich-based firm Art Recognition, which has patented an AI system for authentication through analysis of brushstrokes. First, it designed a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) trained on a dataset containing images of all of Raphael’s known paintings, as well as a contrast set of fakes, comparables, and contemporaries. This allowed the system to identify feature series such as brushstrokes, variations in color, and high-level composition elements, which it proceeded to seek in 16 individual sections and across the painting as a whole. Indeed, it found that much of the surface was painted by artists other than Raphael, but the face of the Madonna was a 96.57% match with Raphael and Jesus’s came in at 96.24%.

“Through brushstroke artificial intelligence, we offer objectivity and accessibility to
clients, which has been missing in the field of art evaluation for many years,” says Dr. Carina Popovici, founder and CEO of Art Recognition. “Art history, provenance, chemical analysis, and other methods are all critical to the full understanding of an artwork, but attribution decisions should not be left solely to the subjective human expert’s eye.”

The Illinois cabinetmaker and artist Tony Ayers discovered this painting in an English antiques shop in 1995. The seller had acquired it from another dealer based in Kentucky, who had purchased it from the local Sisters of Charity. Later research showed it had been donated to them in 1837 through Bishop Joseph Flaget, and thus it is now called “The Flaget Madonna.” Before that, it was believed to be part of the Vatican collections. Ayers spent much of his adult life studying the painting with various scholars and scientists; after his death in 2023, his widow and friends continued his pursuit.

Art authentication has always involved patient sleuthing, and it’s thrilling to know that AI can aid in our efforts by diving more deeply — and more dispassionately — into the evidence. As long as humans remain in control of the technology, there is reason for us to expect many more memorable discoveries in the future.

What are your thoughts? Share your letter to the Editor below in the comments.

Download the current issue of Fine Art Connoisseur here.

Sign up to receive Fine Art Today, the free weekly e-newsletter from
Fine Art Connoisseur magazine.