The Magazine ANTIQUES

1 month ago | themagazineantiques.com | Thomas Connors

For the unbeliever, the skeptic, the misanthrope, few movements could elicit greater disdain than the spiritualism that arose in the late 1840s and swept through American society into the 1920s. Its impulse—to penetrate the afterlife and communicate with the departed—is far from extinct, but the fervor of those early adherents and the spectacles its practitioners produced, often the work of illusionists and prestidigitators, are hard to fathom in this more skeptical age.

1 month ago | themagazineantiques.com | Katy Condon

That’s the idea behind a new exhibition at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: John Smart: Virtuoso in Miniature, on view to January 4, 2026. Taken as a whole, the show offers compelling commentary on global trade and colonization in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century England and India. But close study of any of the palm-sized portraits on display gives a lesson in contemporary fashion (including but not limited to wig care), social climbing aspirations, and artistic trends.

1 month ago | themagazineantiques.com | James Gardner

A new show opening in February at the Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrates (if a year late) the 250th anniversary of the birth of Caspar David Friedrich in 1774. The show originated (punctually) at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and it offers American art lovers some seventy-five works by the German master, as well as an assortment of works by predecessors, contemporaries, and followers, down to the present age. Friedrich occupies an ambiguous place in the history of art. Like J. M. W.

1 month ago | themagazineantiques.com | Eve M. Kahn

At home and in her professional life, the keen eye and advocacy of New York collector and retailer Kathryn Hausman have served to breathe new life into the arts of the Jazz Age, a century on. It takes some time for my eyes to adjust to the densely packed splendors at Kathryn Hausman’s New York town house. But once I am acclimated, I see recurring patterns, and it all makes perfect sense.

2 months ago | themagazineantiques.com | Elizabeth Pochoda

On visiting the Old Print Shop in New York, where lessons for the present abound in printed images from America’s political past. A few months ago, our guest editor, Thomas Jayne, suggested I visit Robert Newman of the Old Print Shop with a view to writing an article on prejudice in prints, especially those issued by Currier and Ives. Always ready for a bit of controversy joined to social justice, I was game.