The Winter Show: Art Wonders for Sale

Seventeenth-century riding spurs, an Art Deco sofa from a luxury liner, a luminous Rockwell Kent painting of Greenland …

O f all the castes in the art world, I like the dealers the most, and that’s one reason I look forward to the big art fairs. Yes, they’re in trade, and while many curators and academics blanch at the very thought of making money by selling something, I admire dealers for their humor, stamina, connoisseurship, and loyalty to their artists. They don’t get the credit they deserve for fashioning taste and advancing careers.

The dealer Allan Stone was both a genius and a whirlwind. I learned so much from him, Ivan Karp, Richard Yorke, Stuart Feld, Dick Feigen, John Driscoll, Eric Shrubsole, Guy Wildenstein, and Tom Colville, among others, living and dead. I especially enjoy the Winter Show, once called the Winter Antiques Show, which starts January 22. I got a preview earlier this week.

The dealers have been heroic and entrepreneurial throughout the COVID crisis. They don’t have the luxury of the lucky-ducky lockdown lazies in vast parts of the museum world who bar the doors from their raison d’être — buyers, in their case — and sit in their slippers and still expect paychecks. Not for them are webinars, Zooming, and planning exhibitions that’ll probably never happen. Art dealers are often small businesses. In the face of the Chinese coronavirus and the never-tried-in-human-history lockdown strategy, they need to hustle, and they have.

Robert Aronson, based in Amsterdam, is the best dealer of Delftware. His is a multigeneration business. His knowledge is encyclopedic, and he knows where the best blue-and-white porcelain is, in every old manse, chateau, and hole-in-the-wall, and he knows the owners, from grandees to hobbits, across the Low Countries. Aronson is offering a pair of blue-and-white candlesticks from 1710, decorated with scrolls, vines, and flowers, made by the Metal Pot, the Tiffany of Delftware. The decoration is Chinese-inspired. They’re eight inches, not very big, but the octagonal base, knob, and shaft give them presence.

Aronson’s virtual booth shows the advances that dealers have had to make in these insane times. The photography is nice, and digital images show the candlesticks spinning slowly so visitors to the site can see the candlesticks in the round. Aronson does two 45-second videos, one on the factory and the other on artificial lighting in the 17th and 18th centuries. The candlesticks are $32,000, for the pair.

There’s only so much dealers and art-fair organizers can do since our masters have tried to abolish, based on quack science and politics, human touch, travel, and high-end art shopping. A sloppy kiss from a three-year-old accompanied by “I love you” and a crayon drawing are heartwarming, but fondling rare silver or porcelain, and mulling over buying it for personal delectation . . . Well, I say ditch the kid.

My point is that technology can’t reproduce looking at the object, touching it, seeing it in context with other things, talking to the dealer, pausing, walking away, and wondering whether a love affair with the object will kindle. Or the chemical rush when I’m mulling over a work of art in a booth, love ascending to just a low simmer, the temperature rising by the moment, and some clod picks up the object of my ripening desire and asks the dealer, “Oh, this is nice . . . what do you want for it?” That’s the stuff of impulse buying, and sometimes pushing and shoving.

I think the Winter Show is the oldest art show in New York, starting 63 years ago as a show primarily for antique furniture, silver, sculpture, ceramics, and textiles. There are still plenty of great things in these media as well as good paintings, so “antiques” seemed too narrow in its name. “Antiques” might scare young people, some believed. A nabob told me a couple of years ago that the word “reeks of Americana.” I looked at him, reminded him that I’m getting as old as a piece of Americana, and did think of how my attic smells.

As always, I’ve seen beauty after beauty at this year’s show. The organizers pick some of the world’s best specialist dealers and ask them to bring their own best. Most things are new to the market. In terms of technology, each virtual booth this year can show details of, say, a piece of furniture. Each dealer offers about ten objects. The links to the individual dealers’ websites work. I was able to navigate the site, and I’m easily flummoxed by technology.

I’ve felt guilty over all the digs I’ve delivered to Louis Comfort Tiffany. A week or two ago, I wrote that I didn’t like his lamps, and in November, right as the Christmas season began, I suggested that he had swiped John La Farge’s stained-glass technique. All true, but he was a brilliant entrepreneur and gathered the best designers. He had a keen sense of American taste for dazzle and was very open to using new techniques for new special effects.

S. J. Shrubsole has a silver-and-enamel coffee pot Tiffany exhibited at his booth at the World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. This world’s fair celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s defining voyage and showed Gilded Age America to all and sundry.

Tiffany was a pioneer in mixing materials, in this case silver and enamel, and playing with these materials to get an exotic look. Here, the silver’s darkened and the colors on the enamel dulled to give the pot the look of a long-hidden, precious antique. The chasing likely took many dozens of hours by a single craftsman — each jot and tittle is hand-hammered. The look is vaguely Asian. The darkened silver makes even the subdued enamel palette pop.

It’s a visual shot of caffeine. It’s Victorian, so the pot’s heavy on pattern. It’s $110,000. Tiffany’s shop probably produced five or six of this model.

Young bourgeois boys are not, I’m told, allowed to play with toy guns since it’s said to inspire belligerence. Does our hubristic, ignorant war on hormones — “boys will be boys” is not a cliché for nothing — make a visit to Peter Finer bad parenting? That’s the best dealer in antique arms and armor. They’re London-based.

Of course not! I’d tell that slobbering three-year-old to forget about his sloppy kisses, likely infectious, and his crayons, and revel in Finer’s sublimely engraved weapons, made of rich materials and used by the highest worthies for combat as well as ceremonial wear.

I loved the pair of English rowel spurs from 1630. Riding a horse was an everyday activity for many, and almost all spurs were simple, but these display wealth and good taste and are an accessory to elegant boots. The rowels are five-pointed stars mounted on a snazzy inverted U-shaped neck. The iron buckles were chiseled to make a pattern of recesses. Molten silver filled the recesses, just slightly embossed. Charles I owned a pair like these. They’re $12,500.

Parents, if you’re fixed on safety above adventure and want your child to live — helmeted, masked, with bubble-wrap underwear — in a state of pacifism and fear, these are fine. Just teach your child to cry “retreat” when he wears them.

Maison Gerard, the New York decorative-arts dealer, has a theme this year: objects from the SS Normandie, the French luxury ocean liner commissioned in 1935. It was briefly — the Queen Mary overtook it within months — the fastest and biggest liner in the world. On its maiden voyage in 1935, it crossed the Atlantic in four days, three hours, and two minutes — a record. It was the Concorde of ships. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich, and Noel Coward, all defining high style, traveled on the Normandie.

The interior was done in Art Deco style. Lalique produced the mirrors, mirror frames, and glass columns for the grand dining room, which was said to be a modern Versailles Hall of Mirrors. Maison Gerard is selling lovely bits of the decoration. I liked the 13-foot-wide sofa, with its original tapestry upholstery, in beautiful condition, for $120,000.

The Normandie, like the Concorde, was a financial flop. Most of its cabins were first-class spaces. The decoration was an acquired taste. Sleek can seem slick as well as intimidating. The Queen Mary, its British competitor, had a touch of cushy, fusty Old England and accommodated the rich as well as the steerage types like me.

The ship was seized by the British in 1940 and eventually was renamed the Lafayette and transferred to the Americans. Moored in New York in 1942, the Normandie was badly damaged in a fire set by friends of the then-jailed gangster Lucky Luciano. His pals wanted him sprung. In an effort to pressure authorities to release him, they committed arson throughout the harbor, disguised for the benefit of the media as enemy sabotage. Much of the interior was salvaged, though, and while lots of Normandie furniture and glass is on the market, Maison Gerard is offering some of the best.

Far more prosaic is H. Blairman & Sons’ English cedar-and-walnut chest of drawers from the 1920s. It was made for the unique Rodmarton Manor in Gloucestershire. It’s a big Arts and Crafts country house built by the Biddulph family between 1909 and 1929 and expresses the most rigorous, all-encompassing application of the Arts and Crafts creed anywhere. The house and materials were locally sourced. Local craftsman produced the furniture, house, and fittings. Everything is handmade. No machines were used. The family committed in 1909 to spend £5,000 yearly, over $1 million in today’s money, to build and furnish the house. This engaged many of the working-age men in the area.

The chest is $32,000. The Biddulph family still owns the house and gardens, listed as “Grade 1” (meaning “of exceptional interest”) by the British government. But this chest flew the coop at some point. It’s spartan, in contrast to, say, the Tiffany coffee pot or the Normandie sofa.

Not every work of flat art is a painting or a work on paper. A few months ago, I wrote about Andrew Raftery’s sumptuous, handmade contemporary wallpaper. A wall is a big surface. Why not cover the whole thing, and in technicolor? Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz is a scholar and dealer in antique wallpaper and, in my opinion, the world authority. She’s offering a pair of 5-by-9-foot panels of French wallpaper, mounted on linen, from Les Chasses de Compiègne, from 1812–15. It was originally a set of panels, each depicting a different scene that would have been installed in a room. It was designed by the hunt-scene specialist painter Carl Vernet and produced by Jacquemart, with Zuber and Zuber the top wallpaper makers in Empire-era France.

Once Vernet painted the scene, it was exactingly transferred to wooden blocks. Each color — and there are dozens of them — was then individually printed on the paper to create a dazzling, miniaturist look. Blending the colors and matching them to the exact design were exacting feats. Thibaut-Pomerantz is offering two panels, one a horse scene and the other a picnic, at $75,000 each. Provenance is always important. These panels belonged to Jacquemart’s competitor and rival, Jean Zuber. They’ve decorated the dining room of Zuber’s chateau since the 1810s, so they’re new to the market. The colors are fresh and the details sharp.

It’s like Edsel Ford ditching his Thunderbird for an Imperial.

Thomas Colville has a striking, bracing painting by Rockwell Kent (1882–1971), Fall Evening, Greenland, from between 1931 and 1933. Kent is a troublesome artist. Moody, peripatetic, and various, he can’t be put in a box, and I think that’s fine. I’m always reevaluating him, though. His big paintings of Maine’s Monhegan Island from around 1904 are observant, nuanced, and precise, which means he conveys the magic of the place. They’re as powerful as George Bellows’s urban excavation scenes from the same time. He and Bellows were contemporaries. Those Monhegan pictures are so bewitching that I’ve been unable to look at his later work and not judge it lacking.

Fall Evening changed my mind. He did it on one of his long visits to Greenland, where he lived and worked in a small fishing village north of the Arctic Circle. His paintings from this period aren’t lush and dense like his early work but tightly finished and with hard, cold light. Coastal Maine is a cantankerous place, rocky and stormy, but the Arctic is different. It’s frozen, spare, and lonely, but it managed to put on the kind of psychedelic light show we see in his painting. His work in the early 1930s is still observant, nuanced, and precise, but the magic of his subject could not be more different.

The picture’s splendid. It’s the kind of general subject that the Hudson River School painters did — I’m thinking of Kensett especially — so it fits nicely in American art history. It’s so modern, though. It’s an Art Deco take on Hudson River painting. Fall Evening has been in a private collection for the past 40 years, so it’s fresh to the market. Colville is asking $685,000.

On Saturday, I’ll focus on a handful of dealers I’ve never written about, all part of my effort, a drop in the big art-media bucket, to highlight intensely focused specialists, dealers outside New York and London, and exquisite, small objects that are easy to miss.