“What the world needs is whimsy. It’s the best antidote,” said folk art partisan Stephen Score, radiant before an A.L. Jewell & Co., molded copper horse weathervane with a luscious surface and an oversized hooked rug of storybook charm and innumerable puppies.
One of 45 dealers exhibiting at The American Antiques Show (TAAS), January 22′5, Score’s association with the sponsoring American Folk Art Museum goes back several decades. Over the years, Score and other veterans have seen good times and bad in the antiques trade, but 2009 is in a class by itself.
So, how did this year’s American Antiques Show go? Surprisingly well, say those involved.
Directed by Caroline Kerrigan Lerch and managed by Karen DiSaia, the show opened with a preview gala Wednesday, January 21, at its home of several years, the comfortable Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street. Opening night tickets ranged from $1,000 for the 5 pm entrance to $125 for the young collectors’ entrance at 8 pm.
Preview night ticket sales were down, causing some TAAS exhibitors to wonder if a single opening night time and ticket price would be better than a tiered opening.
“This is the American show. Shouldn’t we be egalitarian?” asked one prominent dealer. “If we opened at 6 pm and charged under $500 a ticket, there would be 400 people waiting to get in.”
“A terrific suggestion and one that we will look at hard. Our expenses are significant, so it’s a matter of how best to entice people and maximize profits for the museum,” said Barry D. Briskin, who co-chaired the opening night party with Joan M. Johnson and Elizabeth V. Warren.
Briskin added, “I am overwhelmed by the amount of great material on the floor and impressed by how hard our dealers worked. Lots of exhibitors sold very well. TAAS is one of the museum’s chief ways of raising funds, reaching its constituency, and educating the public about the American Folk Art Museum.”
“I did five times what I did last year,” said antique flag dealer Jeff Bridgman, who perhaps benefited from heightened public interest in political history. “I sold a rare and beautiful Civil War flag to a client decorating a house near West Point and a major political textile with the earliest known printing of the Declaration of Independence.”
“I sold three pieces of furniture and am on the threshold of selling several more,” said Jesse Goldberg of Artemis Gallery. A formal Federal furniture dealer in a show known for folk art, Goldberg is finding shows a good way of driving customers to his website. Updated weekly, it is the temporary repository of 70 pieces of furniture, all described, measured and priced.
“No question, people are shopping very carefully. We all came to New York with low expectations,” added Goldberg. “In my lifetime, there has never been a bubble in Federal furniture. Prices went up incrementally and they have gone down slightly, but they haven’t burst.”
Known for early New England furniture, Peter Eaton also did well, selling a small but stylish Litchfield County, Conn., chest of drawers, a Philadelphia Savery-style side chair, a New Hampshire button foot tea table, a veneered front Queen Anne lowboy, a tiger maple four-drawer chest, a Connecticut Chippendale armchair and some smalls.
“I try to sell nice things at fair prices,” Eaton explained. “I put four pieces on my website a week before TAAS and said they would be available at the show. I update my website every Friday and had tremendous activity between October and December. There’s a lot of pent-up energy.”
The show continued to improve for Eaton a week later when he sold three more pieces that had been in his booth in New York City. Clients called to buy a Queen Anne highboy, a New England corner chair and a Dunlop chest-on-chest. “That brought a total of ten pieces of furniture sold from the show,” he said.
Another net-savvy dealer, Russ Goldberger of Rye, N.H., tweaks his website with new inventory, educational features and sales incentives, from price reductions to incentives such as free shipping to layaway plans. Goldberger and his wife, Karen, sold an oval-top hutch table in salmon paint, game boards, decoys, children’s chairs and a windmill weight.
“Dealers have to be patient and work harder these days, but committed collectors will come back to things they love even before the stock market recovers,” said Goldberger.
“It wasn’t our best show, but we did fine,” said Jeff Cherry, a specialist in rustic furniture and art. “We probably sold 20 things, including our best pieces, on opening night. Normally we sell 30 or 40 things. We have already had two call-backs and overall did well enough.”
“He has the magic touch,” Trish Herr said of her husband, Don, a pewter aficionado who parted with a rare quart mug by Love of Philadelphia. An expert in Pennsylvania textiles, Trish featured a charming wool table cover appliquéd with tiny soldiers (ex-collections of N.C. Wyeth and Bill Guthman) and a cross-stitched rug, probably Mennonite, illustrated in Trish’s book on Pennsylvania textiles, Rags to Rugs .
“We sold four or five hooked rugs and a very good theorem,” said Tom Jewett of Jewett-Berdan Antiques, who saw a run on textiles. “People were cautious, but very interested.”
“Our sales varied widely in price and included some more academic pieces,” said Amy Finkel, the Philadelphia dealer in American and English needlework, whose opening night sales included a whimsical pictorial Easton, Penn., sampler and a more formal Philadelphia sampler, along with a work counterstamped with the name of its maker, Stephen Smith of Massachusetts. Aggressively priced at $28,000, a Burlington County, N.J., pictorial sampler notable for its color, quality and whimsy sold after the preview.
“I was really pleased,” said Joan Brownstein, a folk paintings specialist who sold 24 pieces, including watercolors, miniatures on ivory, a J.H. Davis portrait and her catalog piece, an early Nineteenth Century Fishkill, N.Y., theorem family record by Aurelia Austin. The Massachusetts dealer also parted with a caseful of Twentieth Century organic Modern pottery by Edwin and Mary Scheier. Brownstein’s repeated success with Scheier (she has sold three casefuls at different shows) demonstrates the appeal of some Mid-Century Modern material for Americana collectors.
Opening March 21 at Winterthur Museum, “Harbor & Home: Furniture of Southeastern Massachusetts, 1710‱850,” is the first comprehensive study of the early furniture of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and coastal Massachusetts between Boston and Newport. Organizer Brock Jobe, Winterthur’s professor of American decorative arts, enlisted the help of dozens of curators and dealers. One of his chief research partners, Sharon, Mass., antiques dealer Gary R. Sullivan, debuted at TAAS to rave reviews.
Known for American clocks, Sullivan sold six of them, including a musical tall case clock by John Eberman of Lancaster, Penn.; a Philadelphia bracket clock by Griffith Owen; a star-inlay clock attributed to Wood and Taylor of Florida, N.Y.; an ivory and whalebone decorated miniature clock from New Bedford, Mass.; and banjo clocks by Simon Willard and Daniel Munroe. The dealer, who is currently working on a book on musical clocks, also sold two card tables and several accessories.
Also new to TAAS was Dalton’s, Syracuse, N.Y., dealers in American Arts and Crafts antiques who brought signed Samuel Yellin wrought iron andirons, $45,000; garden decor specialists the Finnegan Gallery from Chicago; folk art dealers Otto and Susan Hart from Vermont and Just Folk from Summerland, Calif.; fine arts dealers James and Timothy Keny of Columbus, Ohio; and Manhattan-based Winter Works on Paper.
Jeff and Holly Noordsy, new exhibitors from Vermont, led with American pottery and glass, featuring a late Nineteenth Century Bristol and cobalt decorated stoneware face jug, one of two known (the other is at the Milwaukee Art Museum).
“Every museum in the country came,” said Mark McHugh of Spencer Marks, new exhibitor in American silver. The dealer’s inventory ranged from a circa 1820 Fletcher & Gardiner flatware service to a dozen rare pieces from Erik Magnussen’s 1928 American Modern line for Gorham. Spencer Marks had greatest interest in an engraved Robert Jarvie Arts and Crafts octagonal presentation silver pitcher. “It’s the best piece of Jarvie on the market for years,” said Spencer Gordon.
“The show has expanded to include a broad selection of American fine and decorative arts,” said Briskin, who envisions further enhancements. Displays ranged from tramp art at Clifford Wallach to vernacular photography at Odd Fellow Antiques to American classical lighting at Charles and Rebekah Clark.
American Indian art at the show has grown to include Trotta-Bono, which offered an important deer effigy bandolier bag that once belonged to Chief Neamathia, portrayed by Charles Bird King; an early San Ildefonso polychrome pottery jar by Maria Martinez and Nicolosa Pena Montoya, exhibited by the Renwick Gallery in 1978 and offered by Marcy Burns; nine Yei masks at David Cook of Denver; a Lenni-Lenape human effigy feast ladle at S. Scott Powers of Brooklyn, N.Y.; and a complex Yupik Eskimo transformation mask at Ned Jalbert.
“TAAS was really quite good this year,” said DiSaia, citing general attendance roughly on par with 2008. “There were over 400 sales, and those are just the things that left the floor. Dealers marked other pieces for later delivery.”
Rx for an ailing economy? “Buy beautiful things and keep going,” urged Stephen Score.
For information, 212-977-7170 or www.theamericanantiquesshow.org .
