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Multifaceted Antiques Show Only Burnished by Adversity

January 21, 2002

By ROBERTA SMITH




It's strange how making the best of things sometimes makes
them better than usual. This feat has been achieved by the
48th Annual Winter Antiques Show with its unplanned
relocation to the New York Hilton on the Avenue of the
Americas at 53rd Street.

The move was necessitated by last fall's mobilization of
the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue at 67th Street.
The art and antiques fairs that call the armory home were
thrown into disarray, and the cancellations included the
prestigious International Fine Art and Antique Dealers
Show.

But the Winter Antiques Show prevailed, building itself
from scratch at the Hilton in half the usual time and
without benefit of the armory's ground-floor drive-in
accessibility. Until Sunday it occupies two huge ballrooms
connected by escalators on the hotel's third and fourth
floors.

The two-tiered floor plan and traffic flow are trickier.
The slightly drafty, big-as-all- outdoors spaciousness of
the armory is definitely absent. But the dealers have taken
great care with their presentations. The booths are
handsome and unusually solid, like a series of connecting
rooms in stylistically clashing houses. Much of the
material is superb, starting with a little loan show of
five imposing high chests from the Winterthur Museum, their
cabriole legs akimbo, their broken-pediment scroll tops
running the gamut from plain to fancy and culminating in
one with open fretting forming slightly relaxed triangular
grids.

And true to its name, the show even managed an impressive
display of unusually seasonal winter weather just in time
for the opening night gala, which continued the tradition
of benefiting the East Side House Settlement.

Absent the International show, this is the season's chance
to range under a single roof across several continents,
dozens of centuries and scores of styles in an atmosphere
akin to a regional debating competition. After all, if East
Hampton in summer is high school with money, then a good
art fair might be described as high school with money and
taste. Or maybe the first year of college: roaming an art
fair can be like knocking around the halls of an
institution that is part museum, part art history seminar
and all marketplace, a place in which art's commodity
status and the less tangible, more pleasurable reasons for
its commodity status, are in full display.

For a clear-eyed view of art-as- commodity and of the
fluidity and power endemic to cultural exchange, start with
the Martyn Gregory booth just inside the entrance. It brims
with interesting China trade paintings that often sum up
the economic realities in crystalline, Caneletto-like
panoramas of European style architecture. It is New
Orleans? Maybe Venice? No, it's "A View of the American
Settlement at Shanghai" or "Canton: The Western Factories"
or a tiny, exquisitely lighted harbor view of Whampao,
which shows a deep-water anchorage eight miles down the
Pearl River from Canton. Don't miss a tiny portrait by Chen
Shi Feng of an American gentleman relaxing with a cup of
tea from 1861; it is a beguiling mix of East, West,
academic and naïve.

In addition to the China trade, the show's recurring themes
include the contrast and overlap of folk art and highly
skilled art. Leigh Keno, specialist in American antiques,
is showing an impressive high chest of his own. But he also
has a marvelous carved, painted 18th-century figure, 13
inches high, of a man in a waistcoat, and a small tiger
maple table painted with a landscape. Between these
extremes is a Federal giltwood mirror whose wiry
decorations have a definite folk feeling, especially
compared with the more conventionally sculptural giltwood
mirror on Mr. Keno's main wall.

Along the painted furniture trail, don't miss the
exquisitely lavish examples of Chinese lacquered furniture,
again made for European tastes, at Devenish and at Mallett,
or the early-18th-century Italian armoire with painted
decoration in a manner of Jean Berain at Foster- Gwin, one
of the show's first-time participants. (Also of interest
are a pair of comically fierce 18th-century faience lions,
once owned by Tony Duquette, and four French wall
candelabras from the 1940's but made of bits of Baroque
glass and crystal gloss and crystal.)

For American painted furniture, stop by Olde Hope Antiques,
Giampietro or Courcier & Wilkins, where a small painted
table with bulging corners and turned legs disrupts the
sphinxlike serenity of several exemplary Shaker pieces and
some Connecticut basketry. (Its boisterousness is echoed by
one of the show's centerpieces: an enormous wool rug of a
map of Cape Cod from 1944.)

At Robert Young Antiques, a London dealer of European folk
art and another first-timer, there are two outstanding
painted marriage chests. One is a two-door cupboard from
northern Austria on which delicate trompe l'oeil plaques
painted with flowers are surrounded by dark green
marbleizing so clunky it creates a forestlike mass.

The other is a truly ravishing painted chest from Jersey in
the Channel Islands, with cabriole legs and tulip and rose
motifs in pale red and blue finished with feathery white
lines. It will make you think of French peasant furniture
as well as Pennsylvania German decoration, but its
similarities to certain early 18th-century Connecticut
chests attributed to a Jersey immigrant named Charles
Guillaume have especially intrigued scholars.

The Young and Courcier Wilkins booths are among several
where every object on display rewards scrutiny. Of similar
caliber, but more monographic in focus is Elle Shushan's
brocade-lined display of American and European miniatures
(note the portrait by Mrs. Moses B. Russell from 1845); the
cache of illuminated pages and several books of hours at
Les Enluminures; and the display of English silver at S. J.
Shrubsole, which is capped by a rare silver-gilt
Elizabethan tankard.

Approaching museum quality is the profusion of American and
English schoolgirl needlework (85 pieces) from the 17th,
18th and early 19th centuries at Stephen and Carol Huber;
one of my favorites is a 1710 embroidery in silk and
metallic thread of four flowers that resembles a botanical
study.

The quality in the non-European booths is high. At Donald
Ellis, among a series of impressive Eskimo masks, don't
miss a cluster of startlingly modern ninth-century Peruvian
votive plaques of ceramic painted with geometric motifs.
Throckmorton has a Nasca shaman's poncho in red, yellow and
blue feathers, an unusually realistic Aztec head in basalt
and four Indonesian tie-dye ceremonial wedding cloths whose
luminous colors and central soft-edged rectangles can evoke
the work of Mark Rothko. Equally engrossing is the American
Indian material nearby at Morning Star, including several
earthenware storage jars, especially the example of circa-
1840 blackware (in the booth's far upper right corner) from
the San Juan Pueblo. In between Throckmorton and Morning
Star is another outstanding newcomer, Rupert Wace Ancient
Art, with a display that roams the ancient world and
culminates in the most expensive piece in the show, a
Hellenistic hollow-cast bronze male nude, possibly
Poseidon, about three-quarters human size, beautifully
muscled and intact down to its inlaid eyes. Priced at $4
million, it is being sold by the British Radio Pension Fund
and is said to be the last such work of its quality in
private hands.

What else? Plenty. At Mallett, an enormous silk needlework
of the life of David may catch your eye. At Barry Friedman,
a pair of jangly Czech Cubist-flavor chairs vie for
attention with an astounding water basin by Rupert Carabin
in wood and glazed ceramic, replete with a bulging water
bag topped off by a nymph. At the Fine Art Society, three
works by Walter Sickert flank a large 1884 painting of
Niagara Falls in winter by Paul Calderon Cameron, finished
off in fat but careful white brush strokes. At Associated
Artists, center stage is held by a rare Herter Brothers
side chair from the spare- no-extravagance William H.
Vanderbilt commission, a giltwood concoction with mother of
pearl inlay. An inadvertent Gustav Stickley fest is formed
by Geoffrey Diner and, three aisles away, Cathers &
Dembrosky, where one high point is a monumental table lamp
in brass, iron and hammered amber glass. And winning the
award for overcrowded clarity is Roger Keverne's display of
things Chinese, from Han lead- glazed jars and vitrines of
carved jade and Song celedon and blackware, to 18th-century
cloisonné wall vases that quote earlier ceramics or
bronzes, or both. Mr. Keverne's booth is one of serveral
here that could take up your entire visit if you let them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/21/arts/design/21ANTI.html?ex=1012618853&ei=1&en=9caec205fbf41c73



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