For Collectibles, All Roads Lead to New York

Elle Shushan’s booth at the Winter Antiques Show includes a miniature portrait of William Kent at its center.

A dessert dish, around 1810, at the New York Ceramics Fair.

If art fairs were cameras, their views might range from panoramic wide-angle to sharp-focus close-up. Most land somewhere between, but for the next several days New York will be host to two that define the extremes.

On the one hand there’s the annual cornucopia of culture that has become the Winter Antiques Show, now in its excellent 54th incarnation at the Park Avenue Armory. Encompassing objects from far-flung places and times, its elaborate booths can nearly add up to a small but encyclopedic museum, one that can put down stakes or break camp in something like 24 hours.

On the other hand there’s the relative upstart, the nine-year-old New York Ceramics Fair, presenting mostly glazed plates and vessels but also glass at the National Academy Museum. No booths to decorate here, just cheek-to-jowl glass vitrines loaded with Staffordshire, Wedgwood, Sèvres, Delftware and majolica presenting a concentrated slice — mostly European 17th century to early 20th century — of the art medium on which the sun truly never sets.

A reverie of object-oriented multiculturalism, the latest Winter Antiques Show has many outstanding booths ranging through American, European and non-Western material, dating from antiquity to mid-20th century, but especially American. James and Nancy Glazer have three salt-glazed stoneware jars the size of small barrels from the mid-19th century.

At Olde Hope Antiques, a fabulous album quilt silhouettes people, birds, farm animals and plants cut from delicate calicoes on generous cream-colored squares. Also here, a stunning unusually refined hand-painted chest of drawers from Vermont, from around 1825. A few booths away Elliott and Grace Snyder have a similar one, not quite as refined, and, in between, at Dillingham & Company, some historical perspective is provided by an inlaid walnut chest from 1690 in the William and Mary style that so influenced colonial fine furniture. Among the American dealers, Schorsch-Smiles has an early 19th-century medley of paintings, furniture and painted furniture while other early American paintings can be seen at Tillou Antiques and Hirschl & Adler. One of the show’s flashiest moments occurs at Alexander, with three painted pallets by the American artist Joseph Decker (1853-1924). Each is a highly illusionistic portrait of a young boy, one of whom is blowing smoke rings. His open mouth is the pallette’s thumbhole.

There’s a lively summary of the history of sculpture to be assembled from the Egyptian, Greek and Roman material at the Safani Gallery and the Rupert Wace Ancient Art booths; the mostly English and French medieval pieces at Richard Philp; and Daniel Katz’s airy display of European sculpture from the 15th to the 18th centuries. Further afield, Conru Primitive Art has an impeccable display of objects from Africa, Papua New Guinea and Asia, including a pair of boxy, staring horsemen from 19th-century Afghanistan. Equally rewarding, the Donald Ellis booth brings together North American objects, including Yu’pik masks, Plains Indians shields and Mississippian Period ceramics (1200-1400).

At the Robert Young Antiques booth, across from Ellis, several aged wood poles dotted with white encrustations seem non-Western but are actually oyster sticks, used for oyster farming on the shores of 19th-century France. Among many intriguing pieces of European folk furniture and tools at Young, a small, exquisitely Ingresque Regency-period watercolor shows a young woman reading.

The strikingly eclectic display at Foster-Gwin leads off with an exceptional 12th century Romanesque church corbel from England. Shaped like a man’s head, its demonic expression must have scared the congregation into morality. Here it is placed within a handsome gilt Renaissance frame above an imposing late 18th-century Venetian Rococo-style Chinoiserie fall-front desk lacquered red. The desk’s subtle curves are echoed by an Italian Rococo armchair carved in walnut with considerable flair; its frilly softness seems almost pliable.

An encyclopedic fair always has dealers with highly specific obsessions. At Elle Shushan, miniature portraits rule, starting with one of William Kent (1685-1748), the Englishman credited with inventing modern gardening and landscape gardener to George II. Ms. Shushan’s tree-lined booth was inspired by Merlin’s Cave, a bowerlike folly that Kent built in 1735 for Queen Caroline. Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz, where wallpaper is all, is featuring a magnificent woodblock of Pierrot after a debauched meal with friends, including Harlequin. Designed by the painter Thomas Couture (who cast himself as Pierrot), it caused a sensation at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855, for its size and intricacy. (Its printing required 3,000 blocks.)

At Fine Art Society it’s mostly the late 19th-century English Aesthetic Movement, centering on a fireplace by Thomas Jeckyll with tile designed by Christopher Dresser. In the handsomely homey display at the Geoffrey Diner Gallery, the flow of things Stickley (Gustav) — including a leather-top desk — is interrupted by two objects from the 1950s: a console by George Nakashima and an Italian coffee table with a circular lenslike glass top. Best of all is Associated Artists, which crams an astounding amount of American Aesthetic Movement material, decorously arranged, between walls appropriately covered with peacock-feather wallpaper. Here the centerpiece is a rare pair of gleaming brass andirons in the shape of sunflowers by Jeckyll. But the andirons have a lot of competition, including a moonlight landscape by Arthur Wesley Dow, as well as two cabinets by Herter Brothers and one attributed to Daniel Pabst that brim with alluring ceramics.

As the New York Ceramics Fair abundantly suggests, the ceramics medium is universally necessary as well as rich with possibilities of form, function and decoration that have brought out genius in nearly every culture and period.

There is much to be seen and absorbed here. Asking questions usually has good results and who can resist the opportunity to use the word Spode? Beyond the European focus, Cannondale Antiques has some exuberant Japanese pieces from the 1930s by a potter named Sanpei; they might be by George Ohr collaborating with Andrew Lord. Iznik Classics has four contemporary potters perpetuating and deviating from the Iznik tradition in various ways. Sylvia Powell Decorative Arts is featuring, among much else, examples of the wild Fairyland Wedgwood and the flowered pots of William Moorcroft with their deep washy colors.

At Janice Paull there are contrasting versions of the Bandana ironstone pattern, which is a distinctive, delicate floral (Chinese peonies) transfer design in black on white. It was produced between 1830 and 1848, then revived in the 1890s. Almost like a coloring book, the outlines were filled in, painted over or around with bright colors or tinted with metallic glazes, like some early version of Andy Warhol’s silk-screen paintings. The variety is striking, as is the combination of mechanical means and hand-making, which recurs throughout the show, with some interesting sidetracks.

At Moylan/Smelkinson, a large platter combined widely spaced elements of traditional blue transfer with “clabbering,” as the dealers called the fine textured red — not unlike a Yayoi Kusama net painting — filling in the extensive blank areas around the blue and white designs. (Here you can also trace different pattern designs, which were unpatented, from factory to factory, or contemplate the iconography of the popular Spode Dollar pattern. The floral parts seem identifiably Chinese but the weird twigs looped in green boas are about ... what? Tree grafting seems possible. Anyone? )

At the Simon Westman booth, a stately platter strainer has Greek-vase scenes in black transfer surrounded by textured red, but the word clabbering rang no bells. (Across the way at the William R. & Teresa F. Kurau booth, in what is called Historical Staffordshire, the blue transfer turns dark enough for tornado warnings. This early-19th-century ware was made for export to the young United States, as suggested by depictions of American battles, colleges and historic buildings.) Finally, a possible precedent for the red filling-in can be found at Garry Atkins: two large English Delftware plates dating from 1740, before the transfer technique was invented. Here Dutch scenes are painted by hand in blue on areas of white that were obviously blocked out before the plate was skillfully sprinkled with oxide manganese for a textured red-brown ground. But don’t take my word for it. Go, look, ask.

January 18, 2008