Peter Trippi is editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur, a bi-monthly magazine for collectors of representational paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints. He’s also the president of Projects in 19th Century Art Inc., the firm he established in 2006 to pursue a range of research, writing, and curating opportunities, including the recent traveling exhibition, Lawrence Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity. Topics include:
Lawrence Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity Exhibition
- From obscurity to resurrection: “The resurrection is only partial, let me be clear. Interestingly, Alma-Tadema has been doing just fine on the commercial market.”
- “His pictures, the major ones, now sell in the millions of dollars, at Sotheby’s and Christie’s and Barnham. In fact, there is respect for him, and that has been the case since the 1970s, on an ever-growing basis.”
- “A lot of museums around the United States, Canada, Western Europe own his pictures, but they don’t really know what to do with them.”
- “We decided to tackle him in a new way, and the paintings that we selected reflected that different vantage.”
The Divide Between Collectors and Museums/Galleries:
- “The likability factor of some art is worrisome to some intellectuals. They feel like [some art] is just too accessible to be good.”
- “Alma-Tadema certainly was criticized that way over many decades. People felt that they were well-crafted pictures, but they were too likable, too charming for serious museum display or exhibition. Therefore, they were kept in storage and not really talked about.”
- “It denies the public a chance to see things that they enjoy. Now, balancing that is a little tricky… there is a kind of line where you need to track the balance between popularity and quality.”
Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine:
- How to get featured in Fine Arts Connoisseur and their “Three to Watch” features
- Why do some artists make it and others don’t?
- “I’m very much a curator on paper. I am thinking about how this is all going to look together and also what is the message of the article.”
- “We don’t just do features on individual artists. We also do themes, and we do a series of hidden collection articles… We’re trying to get people interested in the passions of other people.”
- “Coming to my own little world, with the magazine, absolutely, we want to encourage collectors to collect more discerningly.”
- “Our role is to go one notch down on the fame chart, not on the quality chart, and put in front of our readers those names–whether they’re historical or contemporary–because that’s more of a service.”
- “We’re telling stories, highlighting individuals who are not so familiar. We don’t need to replicate what the mainstream media is doing already.”
- “I felt that this was right because it was very much going to be advocating for quality in the kind of art areas that I support, personally.”
Legacy:
- “All of the issues of legacy are in flux enormously, right now. Part of that has to do with this huge generational shift. As the baby boomers come into legacy planning, there is this frenzy of anxiety about how that’s going to all be rolled out.”
- “How do the works of art get preserved, as people grow ill and pass away? And how does the next generation take care of them and celebrate them, and so on?”
- People who are working today, in their prime, need to be thinking one step ahead as well, because there’s this tidal wave occurring now with that generation of baby boomers.
- “The art world, as interconnected as...
