A Look at the 59th Winter Antiques Show

The NY Times takes a look at the 59th annual Winter Antiques Show in NYC.  The show has 73 dealers exhbiting at the Park Avenue Armory.

The NY Times reports

As usual, the 73 exhibitors offer much beyond the gilded mirrors, grandfather clocks and crystal chandeliers favored by Newport’s “summer cottagers.” Here you can find Japanese scrolls, medieval French books of hours, Chinese porcelain, Roman mosaics, Scandinavian ceramics, Italian glassware and a surprising quantity of humble-looking folk art and Americana.

This being inauguration week, many dealers are devoting special attention to presidential portraiture and ephemera. At Hirschl & Adler a porcelain vase bears a portrait of Thomas Jefferson. And among the historic documents at Kenneth W. Rendell Gallery is a signed letter from Abraham Lincoln to Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, dated 1862 and concerning tactics for the Peninsula Campaign of the Civil War.

The all-American booth of Adelson Galleries includes the expatriate John Singer Sargent, whose unstarchy approach to the society portrait is fully apparent in the sparkling “Portrait of Dorothy Vickers.” Here too is a visionary landscape by George Bellows, with white mannequinlike figures frolicking beneath a salmon-colored sunset.

For striking folk art, look to the fair’s northeast corner. An unidentified artist’s 1830 painting of a girl in a red dress, at David A. Schorsch-Eileen M. Smiles, exudes the magnetism of an Alice Neel portrait. Across the aisle Frank & Barbara Pollack have a fascinating early-19th-century drawing by Hannah P. Badger, an instructor at one of the nation’s earliest coeducational schools; it shows female students poring over books and a globe in a tidy classroom with a colorful checkerboard floor.

Allan Katz Americana has a large selection of sculptured trade signs, like the giant lace-up boot that once marked an Albany shoe store or the pinstripe-suited man advertising a tobacco shop. (Back in his day, around 1900, the shop owners pumped smoke through the man’s cigar.)

At this fair 20th-century furniture is outnumbered by older pieces. But Lost City Arts has a real showstopper, a sinuous vermilion wood desk and matching tri-legged chair from 1965 by the furniture designer Wendell Castle of Rochester.

Most dealers advertise their specialties in focused displays — see “Glass Past” for a clean and stunning example — but a few try to mix it up. At Jonathan Boos spiky Bertoia metal sculptures accompany postcard-sized paintings by Oscar Bluemner, Arthur Dove, George Tooker and others. At Geoffrey Diner, meanwhile, a Warhol “Jackie” has been cast adrift in a dark-walled booth of Tiffany glass — bait, perhaps, for a new generation of robber barons.

Source: The NY Times