A Second Look Rewards, at the Winter Show

Part 2 — because the art is that captivating — of my review of Manhattan’s historic art fair  

T his is my second story on the Winter Show, the art fair running this week at what used to be Barneys at 660 Madison Avenue. Last week I wrote about works for sale from the Gilded Age, the era in America of gigantic fortunes and a bold, new aesthetic confidence. We’re in a new Gilded Age today, not in taste, sadly, since most of the new gazillionaires don’t seem to have good taste. They seem to flock to trophies like the Andy Warhol Marilyn, expected to hit $250 million at Christie’s in May.

“C’mon, man,” to borrow the most profound thing we’ll ever hear from a certain empty suit in the Oval Office. Stick with the Winter Show, you plutocrats, for quality at, mostly, reasonable prices. With 80 dealers, all connoisseurs, there’s something for everyone who’s discerning. If, oligarchs, magnates, and high-tech fat cats, you admit you know nothing, then the dealers there, among the very best, are good teachers.

For hot-and-heavy drama, nothing at the fair beats Pierre-Jacques Volaire’s Eruption of Vesuvius from the Atrio del Cavalier, from around 1771. We’ve all been to apocalypse movies, a genre I enjoy. Humanity exists on the edge of a cliff, or the base of a volcano, a valley on the eve of a Great Flood, and, alas, among a zillion germs and viruses. I found this painting the day after I saw Thornton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth at Lincoln Center. It’s a black comedy about disaster and carrying on.

This painting is an early and spectacular example of apocalypse art. Pompeii and Herculaneum had just been rediscovered, making the eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79 an international art and culture story. For those in the hood, though, Vesuvius was always something to keep tabs on. Volaire (1729–1802) was in Naples when Vesuvius erupted in 1771. Already a specialist in moonlit nocturnes, this explosion gave him a new angle. Volcanology was just developing as a scientific field. Empiricism forged the Enlightenment, so Volaire loaded the foreground with people, who also bolster a documentary sense of “you are there” among the painting’s viewers. It’s a splendid red thing. The picture has been in a private collection since 1923. It’s $950,000.

In these parlous times, leading a noble life isn’t enough. We all need, for insurance and to thwart evildoers, prophylactic ceramics like the fine pair of Chinese unglazed pottery lokapala guardian figures from the Tang Dynasty. The figures, still with traces of their original color, wear elaborate suits of armor as they stomp grimacing demons. They are more than a thousand years old and mean business. Ralph M. Chait Galleries is offering them for $65,000. Lokapala guardians are divinely empowered to repel evil from eight different directions.

Chait is America’s oldest dealer in antique Chinese porcelain, opening in 1910, when Ralph Chait, a new London émigré, was only 18. He built a business that itself built dozens of world-class collections. His grandsons keep the tradition going. Everything they sell could easily belong to a museum.

As the climate kooks aim to destroy the oil industry, and since wind and solar power are the stuff of unicorns, best to have fireplaces in reserve, and a fireplace needs a chimneypiece. James Graham-Stewart has got one. It’s marble, made in Rome around 1800, with a frieze decorated with Roman gods and goddesses and jambs carved with torchières in the manner of Piranesi. Best also to have the Roman gods and goddesses on your side if confronted by Millennial social-justice warriors flush with their own righteousness. They’d surely be spooked by classical references, ignorant as they are about anything that either predates them or isn’t victim chic.

The chimneypiece is fresh meat, too, coming to the market for the first time. It was made for Londonderry House, the London home of the Marquesses of Londonderry, the Irish aristocrats, and has been in the family since that time. The third marquess, who served in the wars against Napoleon, redecorated the double-fronted Park Lane mansion in the early 1820s, probably installing the chimneypiece then. The family used the house for its London high-season base and family events until 1962, when it was sold, demolished, and replaced by a hotel.

When aristocrats depicted in, say, Downton Abbey say they’re headed for London for the season, they mean places like Londonderry House. Graham-Stewart is asking “in excess of £100,000.” The carving is lovely indeed and based on a Greco-Roman wellhead now in the Capitoline Museum. At six feet across, it has wall power. The patina of the marble is rich and warm.

And once you’ve got a good fire going, you’ll need a classy fire screen like the copper and brass Arts & Craft beauty in H. Blairman and Sons’ booth. It’s from 1891 and designed by W. A. S. Benson (1854–1924). Benson designed and sold lots of things but was the go-to English Arts & Crafts man for lighting. Fire screens protected from flying embers and excess heat, but copper screens particularly cast a special glow when backed by a nice fire. This one’s priced at $38,750. Blairman is 135 years old this year and still family-run. The firm’s highly respected for knowledge and quality.

Since I’m on English topics, and having just written about warm, glowing things, Robert Young’s Charles II oval drop-leaf dining table made from nut-colored oak and walnut impressed me mightily. Its top is thick, richly patinated, and well burnished and has two swing-action gates supporting the leaves. It’s the seasoned athlete of early English country-house furniture and costs $25,000. Young deals in English furniture, not the fancy Regency or Chippendale variety but handsomely scaled and structured country pieces.

Day & Faber from London is a first-time exhibitor. I saw three things there that are, together or separately, fabulous. I know James Tissot (1836–1902) for his High Victorian genre paintings of young women, an acquired taste. Lots of flounce and flowers, I thought for years, until I read Nancy Marshall’s monograph, which puts him in context and shows us how much sparkle he has.

Among the chrysanthemums and roses, taffeta, and serene beauties was enough mystery to pique any fan of Hitchcock and even Cindy Sherman. The face that launched a hundred such Tissots is Kathleen Newton’s. Tissot met Newman — a ravishing, tall, erudite, Irish, blue-eyed blonde — in 1877. They shacked up fast. For five years, until her death at 28 from TB, she was his model. I can’t help sensing his affection for her, which was manic.

Her face-in-focus and abstract torso, in combination, seem modern. She’s got Hollywood looks, too, and I’m thinking of studio photography of the young Ginger Rogers or Bette Davis. The portrait first struck me as idealized, even generic, but the ideal has to start somewhere, and Newton actually looked like this. It’s $300,000.

I enjoy learning about artists I don’t know. Day & Faber had lots of those, and the owners are so nice, I didn’t feel like a hayseed. I’d never heard of Giovanni Costetti (1874–1949), the artist who drew the very beautiful chalk portrait of Arrigo Levasti in 1906. Costetti had a busy career as an illustrator, portraitist, and critic working in a modernized Pre-Raphaelite style. His vocal anti-Mussolini opinions cost him his career in Italy in the 1920s, but he pressed on in exile. Levasti (1886–1973) taught philosophy in Florence. As a young man, he hiked throughout Europe, his trip informing his books and articles. Costetti’s drawing conveys a ruddy-faced man-on-the-move, Kerouac-style. At $6,000, it’s the best deal in the art fair.

Next to it is something apposite but just as fine. It’s a powerful black-chalk drawing by Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (1736–1810), taking as a model the head of a full-length Francisco de Zurbarán painting of St. Francis. Boissieu bought the Zurbarán illegally in the chaos of the French Revolution after the painting wandered from the Royal Monastery in Lyon, where it had lived since the 1660s and where Boissieu lived. I wouldn’t call the drawing a copy. Dense chalk isn’t usually a medium for fineness, but Boissieu compels it to do detail work. It’s different, even more intense since it focuses on the saint’s face. It’s $12,000.

A discerning collector ought to buy all three. Together, in three objects, they comprise a survey of a dozen art movements from Spanish Baroque to Italian modernism and beyond. Levasti, who called himself a mystic, lived into the 1970s. What a trio! I could look at them over and over.

Éclat comes in many forms. It can be big, Norwegian, wool, and fabulous like Frida Hansen’s 1903 tapestry “Will the Maidens Ever Find Their Way Home.” Hansen (1855–1931) isn’t known today in America or the U.K., but in her day she was an Art Nouveau star giving the old art of tapestry a different spin.

I wouldn’t call it folkloric. Her figures are big and direct but elegant, her palette refined, and her design sense clever. Her border’s decorated with seaweed, and lovelier seaweed is hard to find. Her greens and yellows are calibrated to give each motif depth as it seems to float or linger just below the water’s surface. Her blues are sublime.

Hansen’s tapestry was once well known but, as her work went out of style, it was lost until Peter Pap, a dealer in rare carpets and textiles based in Dublin in New Hampshire, discovered it among the estate of a Maine rug dealer. It’s a rare, captivating thing. He’s asking $1.75 million. Hansen made the tapestry, every step of the way. It’s of the same quality and inventiveness as a painting by Munch, her contemporary, but it’s in wool and it’s not depressing.

Éclat can also be something moody and funky like Thomas Colville, who’s offering a rare painting by David Gilmour Blythe, The Cobbler’s Shop. Blythe (1815–65) was a Pittsburgh painter of everyday life but an outlier. You’ll find no family scenes, no bourgeois parlors, and no young romance in his work. His palette is brown and his subjects downscale, even hardscrabble. His figures look real, inelegant, but such is life. More than its fair share of American 19th-century art is sappy. His isn’t. He painted courtroom and prison scenes and children who look poor. His work is rare but strong. Like Elihu Vedder, Lily Martin Spencer, and Charles Deas, he’s an eccentric. Colville is asking $350,000.

Or, it could be jewelry. Didier is a British firm specializing in jewelry designed by artists who are also painters, sculptors, or architects post-1945. I love what they’re selling, in part because most people don’t know that Louise Bourgeois, Jean Arp, Man Ray, Ettore Sottsass, Louise Nevelson, and even Picasso and Giacometti designed jewelry, too. Their jewelry expresses their aesthetic but is very different in scale and materials. It makes a statement, too. I look at it as sculpture that moves.

Nevelson’s a kick-ass artist. She was born in Ukraine in 1899 but grew up in Rockland in Maine. She’s known for her black, hacked abstract sculpture made from wood. In my opinion, she surpassed her sculpture contemporaries Calder and Theodore Roszak in vision and achievement. She leaves Alice Neel in the ample dust of Spanish Harlem. Johns and Rauschenberg? Withered by her piercing glare.

Nevelson made lots of jewelry and was, as a personality, distinctively high-style. Didier is offering a unique, large pendant and torque from 1976 made from pieces of wood, two covered with 14-carat gold leaf, one painted matte black, one covered in white gold, and the other a stained teak. It’s $145,000.

Though Nevelson died in 1988, she’s still remembered for her fierce presence and, of course, her art. She sneered and snorted when called a feminist, thinking of herself as an artist who happened to be a woman. I won’t say Didier has the best booth, since they’re all good. It’s very different, though, and it taught me new things about artists I thought I thoroughly knew.

The Winter Show runs until April 10. A ticket good for a day is $30, with money benefitting the East Side House. There’s a good lecture program running with the fair and a booth honoring the 100th anniversary of The Magazine Antiques, the premiere decorative-arts journal in America.