The first comprehensive survey in over thirty years of American Gothic Revival furniture, decorative arts in all media (porcelain, glass, silver, lighting), paintings, works on paper, architectural renderings, and architectural elements. Through examples produced in America, or specifically for an American market, In Pointed Style explores how Americans of culture and taste embraced a new architectural style that was already sweeping through England. Finding its expression in both public buildings and private homes, the decorative vocabulary of the Gothic Revival was applied to furnishings and vernacular objects. The fashion for Gothic vanished with the Civil War, and today, this style is largely overlooked and poorly understood. In Pointed Style sheds new light on this brief era.

In Pointed Style: The Gothic Revival in America, 1800-1860

David B. Warren

Elizabeth Feld

Stuart P. Feld

Hirschl & Adler Galleries

Very Rich &amp; Handsome, American Neo-Classical Decorative Arts, is a multi-media survey exhibition (and accompanying book) of furniture, metalwork, silver, lighting, ceramics, and glass made in America or specifically for an American clientele between 1810 and the early 1840s. Illustrating the strength and breadth of American artistry and workmanship, this exhibition visually reminds us of the indigenously American Neo-Classicism that Hirschl &amp; Adler Galleries has previously explored through comprehensive exhibitions and publications over the last 24 years. Very Rich &amp; Handsome, the sixth exhibition in our series, has been curated by father-daughter team Stuart P. Feld and Elizabeth Feld.

Very Rich & Handsome, American Neo-Clasical Decorative Arts

Arts & Photography

For nearly three decades, Hirschl &amp; Adler Galleries has been quietly gathering works by the enigmatic Magic Realist artist Thomas Fransioli (1906 1997) in anticipation of organizing a retrospective of his work the first in over five decades. Works by Fransioli, dating from the late 1940s through early 1970s, will be accompanied by pictures by other Magic Realists, including John Rogers Cox, Louis Guglielmi, Zama Vanessa Helder, Edmund Lewandowski, and Andrew Wyeth. Thomas Fransioli s cityscapes are crisp and tidy. Buildings stand in bold outline, their forms squarely defined by stark light and long shadows. Saturated color permeates every corner of his canvases, from vibrant oranges and greens to smoky terra cottas and granites. Even the trees that line Fransioli s streets, parks, and squares are sharp and angular, exactly like those in an architect s elevation rendering. But Fransioli s cities often lack one critical feature: people. His streets are largely deserted, save for parked cars and an occasional black cat scurrying across the pavement. People make rare appearances in Fransioli s compositions, and never does the entropy of a crowd overwhelm their prevailing sense of order and precision. People are implied in a Fransioli painting, but their physical presence would detract from the scene s bleak and surreal beauty. Magic Realism neatly characterizes Fransioli s artistic viewpoint. The term was first broadly applied to contemporary American art in the 1943 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, American Realists and Magic Realists. As exhibition curator Dorothy Miller noted in her foreword to the catalogue, Magic Realism was a widespread but not yet generally recognized trend in contemporary American art.... It is limited, in the main, to pictures of sharp focus and precise representation, whether the subject has been observed in the outer world realism, or contrived by the imagination magic realism. In his introductory essay, Lincoln Kirstein took the concept a step further: Magic realists try to convince us that extraordinary things are possible simply by painting them as if they existed. This is Fransioli, in a nutshell. His cityscapes exist in time and space, but certainly not in the manner in which he portrays them. Fransioli and other Magic Realists of his time was also the heir to Precisionism, spawned from Cubism and Futurism after the Great War and popularized in the 1920s and early 1930s. While Fransioli may not have aspired to celebrate the Machine Age, heavy industry, and skyscrapers in the same manner as Charles Sheeler, his compositions tap into the same rigid gridwork of the urban landscape that was first codified by the Precisionists. Fransioli was born in Seattle,and received a degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1930. He worked with John Russell Pope on plans for the exhibition galleries at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., which was the beginning of his interest in painting. World War II interrupted a promising career in architecture. Fransioli served in the Pacific Theatre from 1943 - 1946, and was among the first American soldiers to survey Hiroshima after the atomic bomb s detonation in August 1945. He returned to civilian life and took up painting, basing himself in Boston, but working up and down the eastern seaboard. During the 1950s, Fransioli was represented by the progressive Margaret Brown Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston, and then later by Kennedy Galleries in New York. His work was the subject of a retrospective of about 50 pictures at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, in 1954. Today, his work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Currier Gallery, Manchester, New Hampshire; the Nelson-Atkins Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri; Art Museum; and in a number of important private collections.

An Architect's Dream: The Magic Realist World of Thomas Fransioli

Robert Cozzolino

Arlene Katz Nichols

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Books by Stuart P. Feld