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Specialists in the Field: Summer Reading List
Specialists in the Field is an informal summer segment of the blog in which we speak to specialists at Swann about their extracurricular activities. Unsurprisingly, their interests are generally...
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Abram Games’s Sultry Poster Causes a Stir
Our August 2 auction of Vintage Posters features the largest — and best — selection of war posters we have ever offered. As England prepared to enter World War Two, the government launched a poster...
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Daile Kaplan on The Thrill of Photographic Discovery
With the recent NPR coverage questioning whether an anonymous photograph actually depicts Amelia Earhart on a wharf in Jaluit Atoll, photography’s role as historic evidence is once again in the news....
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Isle Adam: Inspiration for All Artists
Shrewd perusers of our sales may notice a familiar eave lurking in the catalogue for our upcoming auction of Vintage Posters: the iconic orange roof of the beach house at Isle Adam, a popular resort...
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The Symbiotic Relationship Between Tattoos & Posters
An unusual lot in our upcoming auction of Vintage Posters features an unusual individual: Captain Costentenus, a Greek Albanian man tattooed from head to foot. Lot 2: Captain Costentenus, 1876....
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Modern Daguerreotypes & More
While we live in a digital age, faced with a tsunami of photographs on all manner of devices, many modern artists have returned to the earliest photographic techniques. These were delicate,...
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Specialists in the Field: Nigel Freeman at the Tate
Nigel Freeman, founder and director of our African-American Fine Art department, is in London this week visiting some familiar images. Two of the works in the Tate Modern’s latest exhibition, Soul of a...
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Barkley Hendricks, 1945-2017
We learned this morning the very sad news of the passing of Barkley Hendricks. We have lost one of the great American painters of this and the last century. Hendricks raised portraiture to a new level...
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Records & Results: Vintage Posters
More than 600 colorful advertisements and announcements crossed the block at our sale of Vintage Posters on Wednesday, August 2. The encyclopedic selection represented a century’s worth of development...
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Identifying Types of Photographic Prints
Keavy Handley-Byrne of our Photographs & Photobooks department has put together a cheat sheet for identifying some of the more common types of photographs we handle. A cyanotype print is made by...
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Black and White All Over: The Riddle of Classical Photography
The following was written by Vice President and Director of Photographs & Photobooks, Daile Kaplan: I love looking at photographs in both black-and-white and color iterations. Long before...
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Specialists in the Field: Sarah Shelburne at Dia: Beacon
One of the best parts of working at Swann is the ability to be surrounded by incredible varieties of art collecting and witness their intersection within our gallery. Our specialists (who are each, at...
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Mexican Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata
Some people made such an impact on history that we see them in multiple sales each season, across widely disparate genres. One such figure was Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who helped to lead...
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Specialists in the Field: Keavy Handley-Byrne & Diana Flatto at Magnum Manifesto
Specialists in the Field is our segment devoted to specialists incorporating their work into their lives and vice versa. Keavy Handley-Byrne of our Photographs & Photobooks department contributed....
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Who is Françoise Gilot?
The top lot in our September 19 auction of 19th & 20th Century Prints & Drawings is a masterful lithograph by Pablo Picasso of his muse, Françoise Gilot. The following notes from the catalogue...
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John Biggers Mural Damaged by Hurricane Harvey
As Hurricane Harvey roared through Houston last month, an unlikely victim was left behind: the monumental 1953 mural by John Biggers, titled Contribution of Negro Women to American Life and Education....
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Dearest Marlene: Letters & Photos from the Collection of Marlene Dietrich
Swann is honored to commemorate the legacy of Marlene Dietrich by offering for the first time select items that have touched her life and that of her family. Our May 4 sale of Autographs will open with...
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A Nineteenth-Century Honolulu Gossip Rag
The book arrived in Honolulu by ship from San Francisco on New Year’s Day, 1863, and soon caused a stir throughout the city. It begins by revealing the author’s intent to allow his colleagues “to see...
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Diary of a Syrian-American Woman, 1908
On a trip to her homeland, a young Syrian-American woman named Mary Arbeely kept a diary recording her attempts to connect with her ancestors while feeling deeply homesick. The diary, spanning November...
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Alma Thomas’s Journey to Abstraction
Alma Thomas is renowned for her brightly colored abstract works that seem to dance across canvas and paper, but how did she develop that iconic style? Two paintings that reveal her stepping stones...
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