The European Art Fair Dazzles at Park Avenue Armory

There are too many good fairs, and too many rich collectors, to say that the European Art Fair (TEFAF) is the best of its kind, but it’s certainly the best-vetted. Unlike almost all other art fairs, TEFAF requires a small army of curators and conservators to look at every object to confirm its authenticity and its quality. And in its spring edition, which ends its run at the Park Avenue Armory today, that attention to detail shows. Starting with Impressionism and ending with blue-chip painting, furniture, and sculpture from the last century, with some antiquities and contemporary art along the way for good measure, almost everything on display is museum-worthy.

Among the very best works the fair has to offer is a large 1927 painting by the Catalan Joan Miró (1893–1983) called Peinture (Oiseaux). There are many Mirós in the show from the 1930s and 1940s, but this picture feels so new and so bold that it has to count among the seminal works of the broad movement called Surrealism. Miró had just written the simple declaration — this was an era of manifestos and declarations — that he wanted to “assassinate painting.” He wasn’t kidding around. In his work, he managed to effectively kill off the tangible, tactile subject and depict the mind’s rambling, unconscious, ambiguous flights from reality, whether in dreams or fantasies. “Ouiseaux” is the French word for birds, which often figure in his work. Peinture (Oiseaux) has previously been in private collections in Geneva and Monaco, so it’s fresh meat in the marketplace. The New York dealer Nelly Nahmad is asking $15 million for it.

A visit to Wildenstein’s booth at the fair is like taking a bubble bath. You can’t help feeling cocooned in Old World luxury. For sale were only works by Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), the idiosyncratic French artist who, in my view, produced no bad art. Contemporaries such as Matisse, Picasso, Juan Gris, and even Vuillard had bad days. Bonnard did not. He had his own vision — warm, juicy colors, settings veiled in gauzy reverie, figures caught in fleeting moments — and he executed it with disciplined structure.

Owner Guy Wildenstein tells me that a booth devoted entirely to Bonnard made sense. “It’s a fair for modern art,” he said, referring to the period from the Impressionists to, say, 1968. “And it covers the art of today, so Bonnard is an obvious link.” So he is, though it would never have occurred to me had Wildenstein not pointed it out. Bonnard’s vision is so personal, so enigmatic, that he’s always fresh. The Fireplace — Gray Interior, from 1942, depicts a simple setting with Bonnard’s wife wedged in the background beyond a tall, narrow doorway, in her signature white 1920s pumps, there but not there. It’s a suggestive means Bonnard used to paint his longtime muse, who’d just died, and a great deal at $2 million. Wildenstein is one of Europe’s oldest galleries, dating from the 1870s. It acquires only quality work. I learned as a young graduate student from Guy’s father, Daniel, that since tastes wax and wane, the firm can hold great things for years in its vault until the right moment arrives.

Starting with Impressionism and ending with blue-chip painting, furniture, and sculpture from the last century, with some antiquities and contemporary art along the way for good measure, almost everything on display is museum-worthy.

There’s a wide range of prices at the fair. Bernard Goldberg Gallery’s fascinating, fine Avatar, by the important experimental artist Arthur B. Davies, goes for $350,000. The provenance, or ownership history, of this 1908 nocturne is strong, starting with Lizzie Bliss, one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art. By the standards of Davies, who typically painted idyllic fantasy landscapes, it is unusual. The dealer describes it as “reminiscent of ancient friezes and Renaissance battle scenes,” but let’s be honest. It’s an orgy. Though Davies played the part of a proper Edwardian gentleman, he was really a randy rake. He’d just found a new girlfriend, commuting between her home and his wife’s upstate. The two women learned about each other after Davies died suddenly in 1928.

Goldberg also has a small, exquisite nocturne by Oscar Bluemner, House in the Night, from 1929. Bluemner’s “spooky pictures” are his best, all figureless houses with rich painted surfaces. His bigger pictures sometimes don’t work. After seeing lots of them, a discriminating viewer feels a sense of sameness. The small oils and his watercolors, though, are always brilliant. At $700,000, House in the Night might seem expensive, but it’s a fair price and consistent with the market. The best Bluemners are rare, and this is a great one. Its first owner purchased it directly from a 1929 Bluemner show at the Whitney Studio Galleries, an exhibition space established by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney that very soon after the show evolved into the Whitney Museum.

Berggruen Gallery of San Francisco always has good things on offer. I loved Jackson Pollock’s 1946 Sun-Scape, painted on the cusp of his emergence as the poster child for America’s — and the world’s — post-1945 avant-garde. Pollock started in the late 1930s under the influence of new thinking on the subconscious, but also looked at the inscrutable ciphers and doodles of prehistoric cave paintings. In 1947, he went full throttle toward the seemingly uncontrolled, unthinking lines made by dripping paint. Sun-Scape, painted the year before that turning point, is a good deal at between $2  million and $3 million, cheap because it’s Pollock before he was really Pollock, but satisfying because it’s clear he was tantalizingly close. Movements aside, it’s a strong picture.

I tend to look at the very best furniture as sculpture, so I loved the decorative-arts-and-design side of TEFAF, too. Maria Pergay’s (b. 1930) flying-carpet day bed from 1968 is sublime. She had the idea in a dream where she was riding on a flying carpet. When she told her assistants the next day she wanted to make a day bed in its shape, she said, “They thought I was mad.” She drew her design quickly, and the stainless-steel result is fun, elegant, very snazzy, and perfectly comfortable. A Melbourne collector owns it. It’s offered by Demisch Danant at $360,000. I didn’t quite need to lie down when I heard the price, but it seemed expensive. Pergay is a brilliant designer, though, and the bed is an iconic thing.

Representing a different extreme of linearity are two Frank Lloyd Wright tall-back dining chairs from 1900, offered by Galerie Oscar Graf in Paris. They are part of a set of six designed for Warren Hickox’s dining room in Kankakee, Ill. Hickox owned the set until he died in 1952, and it has since been split up, with one going to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the others to distinguished private collections. The Hickox house was designed by Wright and is one of the Prairie Style’s finest examples. The chairs offer a very different kind of austerity from Pergay’s day bed, but both manage to evoke warmth and faithfulness to the character of their materials. I could only get a price range from the dealer — $500,000 to $1 million for the pair. Objects of the highest quality like this are rare, the name’s famous, and the provenance could not be better, so that valuation makes sense.

As great as the Pergay and Wright works are, though, nothing pleased me more than the bronze “Carapace” cupboard designed by the Dutch furniture maker Maarten Baas. It’s bronze, completely unique, and contemporary, from 2017. Baas is a young boundary breaker who famously designed grandfather and grandmother clocks with video faces of live characters writing hours and minutes on glass and then erasing them as time passed. A carapace is a turtle’s or beetle’s shell, but as a decorative feature it also protects and hides something precious — in this case, a bar. Though one may not instantly associate the Dutch with decadence, behind the dark, dour veneer of even Rembrandt’s burghers lived some of the age’s most sparkling, clever, and acquisitive souls. They were often the least flashy hedonists of their time, and in Baas their spirit still lives. The piece is sumptuous but it’s purposeful and frank, like a 1950s refrigerator. And with the Carpenters Workshop listing it for $220,000, I found myself thinking, “and it’s so practical!” and left the show dreaming of the bottle of Campari I saw tucked away on one of its shelves.