ART ADVISORY BOARD
The Art Advisory Board is comprised of individuals with deep experience in the art world. This team of twelve members (and growing) has been gathered together by Peter Hastings Falk, our founding editor and curator. Our board members include museum curators, art critics, art dealers, art historians, art professors, collectors, and artists. Each member of this team has been known to and respected in the art world for many years. And each has over the course of many years proven sensitive to recognizing the highest accomplishments of visual expression. Each is well versed in the movements and “isms” that define art history — especially the formalist and conceptualist precepts of the twentieth century. Each is highly attuned to composition, color, style, and technique. Equally important, each is perceptive when it comes to reading meaning, content, and conceptual intent. Each is passionate about art and balances their aesthetic preferences with their intellectual backgrounds. Together, they form a trusted sounding board, providing valuable feedback.
In short, our mission is to recognize quality of vision and an ability to express that vision consistently with skill and integrity. Our team is scattered about the country and all are proactive in identifying great candidates and making recommendations. Some are identified below while others have requested we respect their privacy. In most cases our board members make the initial contact with artist estates and late career artists, encouraging them to apply directly to us via email with résumé and images.
PETER HASTINGS FALK, Editor and Chief Curator
Since the 1980s, Peter has earned the reputation as a leader in art reference publishing and as one of the country’s leading experts on American art. He is best known as the author of the biographical dictionary, Who Was Who in American Art. Lauded by critics as “the most significant research tool ever published in the field,” the massive 3-volume opus won the Wittenborn Award for the best art reference book published in North America, given by the Art Libraries Society. It also won the American Library Association’s “Outstanding Academic Title.”
His publications also include a series of important reference books on American art, such as the Exhibition Record Series, which William Gerdts, dean of American art historians, calls “the most important basis for art historical research in late 19th to mid 20th century American art.” Four other continuing series include monographs on American artists, catalogues raisonnés, conservation and art forensics.
Peter is also a pioneer in the publishing of auction indices tracking the art market. In 1981 he published the first index to photographs sold at auction, entitled The Photographic Art Market. In 1991 he expanded that scope to create the largest index to fine prints sold at auction, entitled the Print Price Index. And in 1993 he expanded further by documenting all fine art mediums sold at auction in his “blue book” for the market, Art Price Index International. During this process he established new editorial conventions for documenting information in art auction catalogues, which remain the standard today. Accordingly, during the 1990s he served as the Editor-in-Chief of the three major online art information companies, developing their databanks of auction price records and artist biographies. These include ArtNet.com (founding Editor-in-Chief), AskART.com, and Artprice.com (Lyon, France). In 2000, Artprice acquired his company, Sound View Press, and he has remained their Consulting Editor. During the early 2000s, his monthly feature, “Market Watch,” ran in Art + Auction magazine.
Even with these publishing milestones, Peter’s first love has been a niche on which he focused in 1976: the discovery and management of artist estate collections and the collections of late career artists. Rediscovered Masters was created, as per its mission statement, to expand the reach of this highly specialized service. The objective is to illuminate and reinforce the contributions of those artists whose visual expressions he sees as compelling contributions to the scope of art history. His whole approach is built upon a scholarly foundation, which is why his past “rediscovery” exhibitions have been held in many museums and leading galleries around the United States.
Peter is also well known as an appraiser for insurance claims, estate taxes, charitable donations, and equitable distribution. He has provided expert testimony on a number of high-profile litigation cases involving the value of artworks that have ranged from the Old Masters to the Impressionists, from the early Modernists to important Contemporaries. He has been a key appraiser for cases regarding the repatriation of Nazi-looted art. In 1994 he served as an expert witness in helping to ultimately win what the media referred to as the “Warhol War” — the highly publicized trial over the worth of the extensive collection of art produced by Andy Warhol.
In addition to appraising, Peter has advised corporate and private collectors — and charitable trusts and foundations — in developing best-practice programs for both collection-building and deaccessioning. Among the issues addressed are tax-efficient distributions to heirs and the creation of philanthropic opportunities with maximum impact. Integral to this process he works closely with leading attorneys in art law as well as with accounting experts to establish foundations or trusts for artists in order to arrive at the most effective solutions for issues such as the reduction of federal tax liabilities, tax-preferred cash flow, optimization of intergenerational wealth, and philanthropic gifting of the art.
Peter is listed in Who’s Who in America and has lectured throughout the United States and Europe for various organizations. He is a member of the American Association of Museums (AAM), the National Association for Museum Exhibition (NAME), the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA), the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association (CRSA), the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS), the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA), the Association of Art Editors (AAE), the Association of Online Appraisers (AOA), and others. He earned his undergraduate degree in art and art history from Brown University in 1973 and completed his graduate work (architecture) at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1976.
More Falk Art Reference Titles
Who Was Who in American Art (1985; 2nd ed. 1999)
Dictionary of Signatures & Monograms of American Artists: Colonial Period to Mid 20th Century. (1988)
The Battle to Bring Modernism to New England: The History and Exhibition Record of the Boston Society of Independent Artists, 1927-1961 (2005) by Theresa Dickason Cederholm/Edited by Falk
The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Vol. I (1988)
The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Vol. II (1989)
The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Vol. III (1989)
The Annual Exhibition Record of the National Academy of Design: 1901-1950 (1989)
The Annual Exhibition Record of the Art Institute of Chicago: 1888-1950 (1991)
The Annual & Biennial Exhibition Record of the Whitney Museum of American Art: 1918-1989 (1991)
The Biennial Exhibition Record of the Corcoran Gallery: 1907-1967 (1991)
The Annual Exhibition Record of the Carnegie Institute: 1896-1950 (1998)
The Photograph Collector's Resource Directory. Photographic Arts Center, New York (1981)
Falk Artist Monographs (by period):
1850s-1900s
Alfred R. Waud, Artist-Correspondent of the Civil War. Back in 1975, my research of the Waud Collection led to its discovery in a log cabin near the Vermont State Forest. This event inspired me to focus on this special niche, because I quickly realized that the life works of the most important artist-correspondent of the Civil War had been preserved. Waud also documented America’s expansion into the Wild West. This collection of more than a thousand on-the-spot drawings of battles was of such importance that I knew it should remain intact. Indeed, it is now permanently in the Historic New Orleans Collection. In 1982 a miniseries for television called “The Blue and the Gray” was based on Waud’s experiences in the war as the hero of the storyline.
Frederic S. Dellenbaugh, Explorer of the West. Dellenbaugh was one of the great American artist-explorers. He was the first artist to actually descend into the Grand Canyon. He was the artist and topographer for the 2nd Powell Expedition in 1871–72, and he later wrote many books about his experiences that captured the public’s imagination, including The Romance of the Colorado River (1902) and A Canyon Voyage (1908). This was another collection and archive that was of such historical importance that it could only be placed with an institution for scholars to study. Since 1977, it has resided at the University of Arizona Library.
Frank Rinehart: Platinum Prints of American Indians. Edward Curtis is certainly the photographer most famous for exhaustively documenting the tribes of Native Americans, in 1906. However, it was earlier, in 1898, when Rinehart produced a series of exquisite platinum prints of the Native American personalities who attended an important Indian Congress held in Omaha. In 1978, I discovered a rare and large collection of Rinehart’s prints, from which I curated an exhibition at the Prakapas Gallery in New York. The discovery made the cover of the Sunday magazine of the New York Times.
Ellen Day Hale. Hale was a highly accomplished first-generation American Impressionist, but she sublimated her own career to that of her brother, Philip Hale. After her death, her paintings, drawings, and prints were relegated to the attic for the next fifty years until I curated a successful rediscovery exhibition at the Richard York Gallery in New York, in 1981.
Milton J. Burns, Marine Painter. Burns was one of the few American marine painters who really did live the life of a sailor. His escapades at sea provided inspiration and subject matter for his friend Winslow Homer. Burns’ works were frequently reproduced in Harper’s Weekly and other magazines. This monograph was published for the retrospective for which I was guest curator at the Mystic Seaport Museum, Connecticut, in 1984.
Minerva J. Chapman. Chapman moved freely from Impressionism to miniature painting throughout her career, most of which was spent in Paris where she was well known. She was one of the first American women, along with Mary Cassatt and Elizabeth Nourse, to be elected to the prestigious Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. This monograph contains two essays, an exhibition checklist, and a record of her miniatures on ivory. It was published for the retrospective for which I was guest curator at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 1986.
Mary Foote, American Impressionist. One of the most brilliant of women portrait painters of the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, Mary Foote lived and worked at Giverny alongside Frederick MacMonnies. But, jilted, she sought therapy from Carl Jung. The result was that she dropped painting, became Jung’s principal assistant, and translated his papers into English for publication. I discovered her small but remarkable collection and curated an exhibition at the John Pence Gallery in San Francisco, in 1994. Her archive is now part of the Jungiana Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Frederick Trap Friis, Swedish-American Impressionist. This talented painter who settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, was added to the roster of American Impressionists when I wrote this monograph for the rediscovery exhibition at Shannon Fine Arts in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1990.
Annie G. Sykes, Impressionist Watercolors. One of the leading women artists of Cincinnati at the turn of the century, Sykes was recognized for her colorful, Impressionist-inspired watercolors. Throughout her long and successful career, her themes included landscapes, floral still lifes, and the figure. Our book was published in hardcover concurrently with the rediscovery exhibition at the Spanierman Gallery in New York, in 1998.
F. Luis Mora: America’s First Hispanic Master [1874-1940]. ARTConvergence works closely with art dealers, and they often bring their discoveries to us for assessment. One such dealer, Lynne Baron, owned a significant part of the Mora estate collection and wanted to give the artist his first full scholarly treatment. We helped her with research and then edited and published her book concurrently with the Mora retrospective at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 2008.
1900s-1930s
Lester G. Hornby, Painter-Etcher. Hornby was one of the founders of the art colony at Rockport, Massachusetts. One of the best of the master etchers in the Whistlerian tradition, he is known for his scenes around Cape Ann, Paris, and throughout France. This monograph contains the checklist of 340 known prints. It was published for the joint retrospectives that I curated at three New York galleries, in 1984.
Eliza Draper Gardiner: Master of the Color Woodblock. Gardiner, a disciple of Arthur W. Dow, was one of the Provincetown Printers and a pioneer in the art of color woodblock printing during the first decades of this century. This monograph (which contains a checklist of her prints) was published for the retrospective for which I was guest curator at the Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island, in 1987.
Frank S. Herrmann: A Separate Reality. This American painter was a life-long friend of Alfred Stieglitz and a founding member of two important secessionist groups of the avant-garde in Germany. This monograph served as the exhibition catalogue for a retrospective for which I was guest curator at the White Plains Museum, New York, in 1988.
Natalie Van Vleck: A Life in Nature and Art. Van Vleck was, during the early 1920s, among the earliest of our country’s modernist women artists. Despite emerging as a very talented student of Max Weber, by the early 1930s she locked all of her modernist works in a closet, which was never opened until after her death. This fascinating life story also contains a checklist of 193 known oils, watercolors, pastels, and prints. It was published for a retrospective for which I was guest curator at the Flanders Nature Center, Connecticut, in 1992.
Rudolf Scheffler. Scheffler was one of the finest architectural artisans of the twentieth century. However, until this exhibition, his paintings — strong examples of American Post-Impressionism — remained a private and unseen side of his life in art. This monograph was published for the retrospective for which I was guest curator at the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1989.
Sears Gallagher, Master Watercolorist. One of the great watercolorists and etchers of his era, Gallagher’s work was largely unknown until we presented his work to the Spanierman Gallery in New York, which since 2000 has admirably returned the artist to prominence.
1930s-1950s
Clifford Jackson, Of Landscapes and Symphonies. Wayman Adams’ best student, Jackson painted bold Post-Impressionist landscapes from the 1960s to the early 1980s. This monograph served as the exhibition catalogue for the retrospective for which I was guest curator at the Adirondack Center Museum, Elizabethtown, New York, in 1989.
George Marinko, Pioneer American Surrealist. Here was one of America’s seminal masters of surrealism during the 1930s. Nearly all of his early masterpieces are held in in major museum collections, but he died virtually forgotten. This monograph served as the exhibition catalogue for the memorial exhibition for which I was guest curator at the John Slade Ely House, New Haven, Connecticut, in 1989.
Aaron Sopher, Satirist of the American Condition. The great benefactor of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Etta Cone, called Aaron Sopher “the Rowlandson of Baltimore.” Upon her death, she bequeathed to the Museum her major collection of works by Matisse, Picasso . . . and 142 drawings and watercolors by Sopher. He drew his inspiration from artists such as John Sloan and satirists such as Daumier, Grosz, Hogarth, and Rowlandson. Before his death in 1972, he had become, like H. L. Mencken, an institution in Baltimore. This hardcover book was published for the retrospective for which I was guest curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, in 1991.
Clara Stroud and Ida Wells Stroud. This mother-daughter pair from Cape May, New Jersey must be ranked among the most important to come from that state in the first half of the twentieth century. Our essay on their lives and works was documented in 2004, and the collection was then “repatriated” to a gallerist in New Jersey.
1950s-1980s
Simeon Braguin. In 1991 the curator of the Yale University Art Gallery mounted a solo exhibition for Braguin, an 84-year-old artist who for decades had purposefully been painting in relative isolation. This abstract painter masterfully balanced geometric shapes in hues of pastel colors. His dynamic compositions may be compared to those of Richard Diebenkorn, his palette to that of Milton Avery, and his playfulness to that of his favorite artist, Paul Klee. Beginning in the 1930s, he earned critical notice in New York, rising to become the art director for Vogue magazine. But painting always remained a very private side of his life. We manage the estate collection for its owner, Yale, with the objective of bringing recognition to the artist. Moreover, sales of works that we consign to prominent galleries go toward Yale’s acquisitions fund to support its collection of works by emerging artists. This monograph was published for exhibitions at the Spanierman Gallery in New York, and more recently at the Wally Findlay Galleries in New York and Palm Beach.
One Small Grain of Sand Unstained: The Life and Art of Rex Ashlock. Ashlock was integral to the Bay Area Figurative Artists as well as the New York School. In 1957, after twenty years in San Francisco and Berkeley, he moved to New York, teaching at MoMA, and he became friendly with many of the abstract artists of the first generation of the New York School. However, he became reclusive, though always painting, and returned to San Francisco in 1980. Here is an artist who may well have felt like a grain of sand left behind in that curious and continuous sifting between art history and art promotion while never losing his dignity in the struggle to render a vision of art, unstained. My monograph on Ashlock was published in 2004 to accompany ongoing consignments to galleries and auction houses.
The Magnificent Obsession of Etienne Roudenko. One of the most fascinating discoveries in the history of twentieth-century art is that of Etienne Roudenko. The obvious first impression of these works is to recall Jackson Pollock, the greatest of the Abstract Expressionists. But were there other artists making drip-action paintings before Pollock? When Pollock was a toddler, Roudenko was studying art in Moscow. He was also a Cossack cavalryman who was assigned to teach the Czar’s children how to ride horseback. When the bloody Russian revolution erupted, he escaped in 1918 to Paris and painted with the masters of modernism. Stalin’s secret police nearly captured him, but using money he earned as a steeplechase racer he escaped to South America. He continued his own modernist painting, and worked as an art restorer and a copyist. In the 1950s, Roudenko moved to New York, and it is here that he really became obsessed with painting in a style just like Pollock’s. He lived like a hermit, painted like a madman, and died in his tiny apartment in 1987. Ever since our discovery was made, and our essay distributed with gallery consignments since 2004, art experts, museum curators, and collectors have expressed amazement at the similarities between the two men.
The Cosmic Visions of Ed Nelson. In 1961, Ed Nelson experienced an epiphany that launched an obsessive study of what he called the “spiritual atoms world controlled by magnetic light.” He determined that atoms in the material world were controlled by magnetism while planetary worlds were “controlled by the differential movement of magnetic light” or the “proto-plasma” of light. He assumed the “brush name” of Melvin E. Nelson and signed with the initials “M.E.N.,” which stood for “Mighty Eternal Nation.” He also believed that aliens had constructed a huge subterranean base below his sixty-acre property. Every night, typically between midnight and 3 AM, he recorded his observations. In pursuit of his own cosmology and exploration of space, he developed various electronic inventions and gadgets. Through astral projection, he sketched Earth from a heavenly perspective, recording the various types of energy rings that encircled our planet. Astonishingly, it was through these calculations that he accurately predicted the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 and its devastating tsunami. Nelson’s expressions, which interweave the scientific and the spiritual, were monoprints created with pigments ground from natural rocks and minerals found on his farm. I presented a lecture on Nelson in 2008 at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and my essay was published in Folk Art magazine that year. Subsequently, others have written articles about Nelson, and his estate collection is represented by Cavin-Morris Gallery in New York.
Arthur Pinajian: Armenian-American Modernist. The story of this hermit went unnoticed until March 2007, when the New York Times featured a story titled, “Closing on a House, and a Life’s Story, Told in Art.” Fortunately for American art history, the buyer of the artist’s cottage in Bellport, Long Island, also became dedicated to preserving its large art collection of abstract paintings that had been destined for the Dumpster. The first art historian on the scene was William Innes Homer, Professor Emeritus and former Chair at the University of Delaware. Homer was stunned by what he found and joined with me to form a team of art historians to conduct research into the life and art of this extraordinary artist. Our book was published concurrently with the discovery exhibition, which began its tour in 2010 at the Woodstock Art Museum (New York), then traveled to the Armenian Library and Museum of America in Boston, and ended in 2011 at the Zorayan Museum in Los Angeles. Successful gallery exhibitions have taken place in Los Angeles and are scheduled for New York.
Alfred W. Nicholson: Poetic Landscapes and Fantasies. In the history of American landscape painting, the visionary artists who pursued the paths of fantasy and mysticism are few. Albert Pinkham Ryder stands out, followed by Robert Loftin Newman, Ralph Albert Blakelock, and Louis Eilshemius. Nicholson clearly follows in the footsteps of these important predecessors. His work is fascinating because of its duality. In his poetic landscapes he captured the atmosphere and spirit of real places where he spent hours studying nature. But he also produced total fantasies, still inspired by the landscapes he loved and their mystical qualities. Currently, I am researching the artist’s life and works toward producing a full biography. Here is that rare successor in a historic line of those few American painters who, in solitude, passionately executed their personal and often mystical visions of nature — yet who often cared little about self-promotion and became neglectful of their legacy.
Fuller Potter: Surviving Pollock. By 1945, Potter was developing his own style of Abstract Expressionism. In 1948 he met Jackson Pollock, also an alcoholic. That emotional collision compelled Potter to join Alcoholics Anonymous and move with his family to a forty-acre farm in Connecticut, where he built a studio. From that point onward, he became a reclusive but incessantly active painter, musician, and writer, and filled notebooks every day with his philosophical musings. In 1958 a New York gallerist persuaded him to allow a solo show, and he received positive reviews in the New York Times. However, the commercial art world had little appeal for one who had chosen to remain among the most private of painters. Whereas Pollock was interested in the unconscious, Potter became obsessed with the unseen energies of the universe. He wrote and illustrated how his pursuit of painting and music had become a spiritual quest, and he strove to be a “spaceman discovering the intergalactic aesthetic reality of the interstellar artists’ mind world.” Potter was bursting with creative energy until his death in 1990, at age eighty.
1980s-Contemporary
In Warhol’s Shadow: Horst Weber von Beeren. The secret behind the Warhol enterprise in New York is that while he was busy with his “factory” members at the Union Square studio, or his entourage at Studio 54, the real action was going on in a workshop in Tribeca. There, an unknown artist named Horst Weber was the master printer who actually produced many of Warhol’s canvases, limited editions, and unique works on paper, using screenprinting. This fascinating behind-the-scenes look was captured in my essay that was later used in a course at the Pratt Institute in New York.
A Nexus of Cosmology and Art History in the Paintings of Igor Gorsky. This late career painter has given the brush-off to Clement Greenberg, the preeminent advocate of Abstract Expressionism. And he has assaulted the drip-action paintings of Jackson Pollock, canonized as the ultimate defiant painter who changed the course of art history. His attacks are launched not simply to be blatantly irreverent but also to share with us how gestural abstraction can retain its power yet reveal to us new cosmology. This essay was produced in 2007 for a solo exhibition catalogue at the Westwood Gallery, New York.
Contemporary Iraqi Art: The Iraqi Phoenix. In 2006, I was curator of the first exhibition of Contemporary Iraqi Art in America, held at the nonprofit Pomegranate Gallery in New York. This exhibition was a cultural ambassador, promoting the spirit of rebirth and resilience in Iraq. Mass media coverage included the television networks, newspapers, and art magazines. The nine original artist-members are residents of Iraq, for whom the war and its aftermath served as catalysts for opening their creative vision to a new mode of expression. Often, that expression also bears an underlying social edginess even though the exhibition itself is nonpolitical and draws its artists from all Iraqi religious groups. The feeling common to these works is that they are not only beautiful and vibrant but also strongly reflect the irrepressible creativity of a new nation with new hopes.
Donald Leeds: Blue Paintings. For more than six years, this late career painter explored a new direction in abstraction. He pursued a single theme — monochromatic Prussian-blue abstract oil paintings — utilizing a limited vocabulary of landscape elements and a complex oil-glazing technique. This essay was produced in 2007 for a solo exhibition catalogue at the Westwood Gallery, New York. An upcoming essay will focus on his recent work, which reveals a new approach to image deconstruction, one that simultaneously pushes back toward resolution. He often spends more than one hundred hours deconstructing and then recreating the geometry and color of the final image. These images require movement from the observer. As viewers move back and forth as well as at angles, they play with how they see and comprehend an image.
Joan Thorne. Art historian Barbara Rose states that Thorne is one of the most important women abstract painters to emerge in the 1970s. She exhibited in two Whitney Biennials, won the coveted Prix de Rome, and enjoyed a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery. She was represented by major galleries. But, like Louise Bourgeois, she spent a significant amount of time abroad, losing track of the gallery scene. While she remained immersed in her painting, she needed to re-start the promotional process. Going “Off-Broadway,” our monograph was published concurrently with the 2010 rediscovery exhibition at the Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg, New York. Reviews from the New York Times and Art in America helped to make the show a success.
Lin Evola-Smidt: Peace Angels. I was honored to be named Project Manager (for the documentary film, book, and traveling exhibition) for the Peace Angels project of the Art of Peace Charitable Trust, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The Trust works closely with each city’s crime prevention and intervention services to collect all types of illicit weapons, which are then melted down and transformed by casting them into compelling and inspirational sculptures called Peace Angels. The concept for turning weapons into sculpture was devised in 1992 by the sculptor Lin Evola. Immediately after September 11, 2001, she placed her eight-foot Renaissance Peace Angel monument at Ground Zero, and that work is now a promised gift to the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Shortly afterward, her original Peace Angels Project evolved into the AOPCT, and she has secured endorsements from the United Nations and many world leaders. Going forward, the Trust plans to expand her vision and goals by assembling an international roster of prominent artists to create their own sculptures and monuments to peace by using confiscated weapons as their working medium. With Evola and other artists, the Trust plans to reach out to major cities worldwide and encourage the making of monuments that stand as symbols of a powerful culture-changing mission to reduce the proliferation of illicit weapons, provide their owners with job training, and sustain the prevention of violence.
The Monoprints and Carved Wooden Sculpture of a Pop Rebel, William Kent. In 1966 the annual exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art focused on Contemporary Sculpture and Prints. The Director invited sixty-six printmakers, featuring Pop Art movement stars such as Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, and James Rosenquist. Neither the Whitney’s director nor any of the artists knew that one of their peers — William Kent — was not only completely self-taught but was, indeed, the only self-taught artist in the entire show. Kent exhibited at the Richard Castellane Gallery on Madison Avenue, whose founder was a pioneer promoting Pop Art. Beginning in 1962, his annual solo exhibitions drew positive reviews from New York Times critics. He had invented a new medium, the “slate print,” which attracted museum curators, and these prints were exhibited at many prestigious museums: Wadsworth Atheneum (1963), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1964), the DeCordova Museum (1964, and again in 1966), the Brooklyn Museum 15th Annual Print Exhibition, 1964, and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual (1966). However, when Castellane closed his gallery in 1966, Kent withdrew from New York, never to return. He went on to carve hundreds of large Pop sculptures in wood. Kent’s life and works are the subject of a major book in preparation.
PETER SELZ, Senior Advisor
“Identifying excellent artists who have not as yet received the full recognition they deserve — coupled with the process of creating serious attention for them — is important work. I am pleased to be working with Peter Hastings Falk on the Rediscovered Masters project.”
— Peter Selz
Peter Selz is Professor Emeritus of Art History, University of California, Berkeley. He was one of the first art historians to examine German Expressionism as a political phenomenon rather than from a formalist perspective. The story of his career as a pioneering scholar and curator can be found in his Beyond the Mainstream: Fifty years of Curating Modern and Contemporary Art [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997] and in Paul Karlstrom’s Peter Selz: Sketches of a Life [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012].
As Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art during the 1950s-60s his exhibitions included a number of important retrospectives, including retrospectives for Mark Rothko in 1960, Jean Dubuffet in 1962, Max Beckmann 1964, Alberto Giacometti in 1965, and the first Rodin retrospective in the United States. He then became the Founding Director of the Berkeley Art Museum at the University of California.
For more than sixty years he has helped artists at critical moments in their careers, including Jean Tinguely, Leon Golub, Bruce Conner, Nathan Oliveira, George Rickey, Fletcher Benton, Eduardo Paolozzi, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and many others. He is most recently curating exhibitions by William T. Wiley, Enrique Chagoya, and Yisrael Feldsott. Since 1993 he has served on the acquisitions committee of the Museums of Fine Arts, San Francisco.
ROBERT C. MORGAN
Robert C. Morgan is an internationally renowned art critic, curator, artist, writer, art historian, poet, and lecturer. He holds an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1975), and a Ph.D. in contemporary art history from the School of Education, New York University (1978). Dr. Morgan lives in New York, where he lectures at the School of Visual Arts and is Adjunct Professor in the graduate fine arts department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He is Professor Emeritus in Art History from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Robert Morgan is the author of more than 2,500 essays and reviews, and is contributing editor to Sculpture Magazine, Asian Art News, The Brooklyn Rail, and New York correspondent for Art Press (Paris). His books include Conceptual Art: An American Perspective (McFarland, 1994), Art into Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Between Modernism and Conceptual Art (McFarland, 1997), The End of the Art World (Allworth, 1998), Gary Hill (Johns Hopkins, 2000), Bruce Nauman (Johns Hopkins, 2002), Clement Greenberg: Late Writings (University of Minnesota, 2003), Vasarely (Braziller, 2004), and The Artist and Globalization (Lodz, 2008). His writings are translated into 18 languages, including Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Serbian, Hebrew, Farsi, and Finnish.
Since 1979, Dr. Morgan has curated over 70 exhibitions in the various museums, cultural spaces, and galleries in the United States and abroad. In New York, Dr. Morgan curated “Logo Non Logo” (with Pierre Restany, Thread Waxing Space, 1994), “The Sign of Paradise” for Mike Weiss Gallery (2005), “Neutral” (2005) for the Lab Gallery, “Silent Exile” for 2 X 13 Gallery (2006), "The Optical Edge" for Pratt Manhattan Gallery (2007), and “Hong-wen Lin” for the Taipei Cultural Center (2009).
Robert Morgan was the first recipient of the Arcale awarded in international art criticism in Salamanca, Spain (1999) and the first Critic-in-Residence at the Art Omi International Artists Workshop (1992) in Ghent, New York. He had been a recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1980, 1986, 1987), a Rockefeller/NEA grant (1988), and a Francis Greenburger Fellowship (1993). In 2005, he was awarded an Edward Albee Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship as a senior scholar to research “The Traditional Arts and the Korean Avant-garde” in the Republic of Korea. In 2008, he received a research grant from the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy. He has been invited to lecture at several Biennials and Art Fairs, including Gwangju (2000, 2004), Shanghai (2002), Lodz (2004, 2006), Asian Conemporary Art Fair (2006, 2008), Tehran Sculpture Biennial, the Islamic Republic of Iran (2007), Singapore Art Fair (2008), and Istanbul Biennial (2009). He was inducted into the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg in 2011.
As an artist, he has shown in many solo and group exhibitions. They include the ICA, Boston (1972), The Whitney Museum of American Art (1976), Franklin Furnace, NYC (1976), Artists Space, NYC (1976, 1977), McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina (1980), White Columns (1983), Printed Matter (1984), Cologne Art Fair (1990), Antoine Candau, Paris (1990), Eric Stark Gallery (1992), Construction in Process, Lodz (1993), Nine Gallery, Gwangju (2006), Gaya-Fusion. Ubud, (Republic of Indonesia (2006), Amelia Wallace Gallery, SUNY Old Westbury (2007), Wooster Art Space (2007), Bjorn Ressle, NYC (2009), Sideshow, Brooklyn (2009), and The Lab Gallery, NYC (2009). His work has been reviewed by Art in America, The New York Times, Arforum, Art News, The Brooklyn Rail, artcritical.com, ArtNet, and Wolgan Misool (Korea). His works are included in several public and private collections.
WILLIAM INNES HOMER In Memoriam
We were deeply saddened at the passing of our first champion, William Innes Homer [1929-2012]. It was he who made the discovery of the long-lost collection of Arthur Pinajian. That collection will always remain featured on our site as a tribute to his singular vision and his passion for bringing the accomplishments of significant artists to light. He was the dean of American art historians, having been professor and chair emeritus of the University of Delaware’s Department of Art History, a program he made one of the country’s most prestigious. An internationally recognized expert in both European and American painting from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, Dr. Homer was the author of many critically acclaimed scholarly books and articles, including major books on Georges Seurat, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Henri, and Thomas Eakins.
ANTHONY S. KAUFMANN, Publishing Advisor
Tony is the owner of Abaris Books, which is best known for The Illustrated Bartsch. At 104 volumes and counting, it is the world’s most highly-regarded – and most extensive – reference series on the documentation of Old Master prints from 1400 to about 1850. In addition, he has published more than a dozen volumes on the works of Albrecht Dürer, a 10-volume catalogue raisonné of the Drawings of the Rembrandt School, a 2-volume set on The Mastery of Drawing by Joseph Meder, and many other important reference works.
Under his Janus imprint Tony has published a dozen dual-language books of classical philosophy and metaphysics. He is also the managing director of Opal Publishing, an e-publisher, and Eastbridge Books, which specializes in Asian studies.
Tony received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College in 1964, his B.Lit. from Oxford University in 1967, and his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970. He began his law career as a litigator for Mudge Rose of New York, from 1970-1973. From 1973-1978 he was a litigator and corporate attorney for Botein Hayes also of New York. From 1978-1983 he was assistant general corporate counsel for Grolier, and from 1983-1988 he was President of Grolier International businesses.
