Michael’s Blog

We took a busman’s holiday yesterday afternoon. Yes, the afternoon, at leisure, the two of us, much to the delight of my nephew and gallery colleague Jack Tremper, who gets to see more than he’d like of Keith and me.

The glories of our business, we never take time off, or seldom anyway, and when we do, we do things that are related to what we always do. A movie, yes, but not having had enough of the beautiful people who form the core of our business, we saw them distilled to their very essence in ‘The September Issue.’ For the benefit of those of you fashionistas who’ve been on a desert island for the last 6 months, the documentary is entirely devoted to the production, from concept through design and execution of the ‘big’ issue of the year for Vogue. Although most reviewers have focused on Anna Wintour, devil theorists may be interested, if not disappointed, to find that the magazine’s creative director Grace Coddington figures nearly as large. Moreover, though Wintour is the lightening rod, Coddington makes it happen.

We may be stepping way up in class, but I mention busman’s holiday in that, in our own little creative sphere, we are always interested to see how someone else does it, and what we might learn thereby. Given that we spent two hours in our workshop with our cabinet maker and a client this morning solely for the purpose of finalizing the carving on a six square inch area of a chairback- this is God’s honest truth- we have something of a feel for how subtle, tediously collaborative, and downright fiddly the creative process is.

While Wintour is famously regarded as less than warm, the people we know who are friends of hers are, incongruous as this seems, warm and friendly. I was therefore also keen to consider how she came across on film, and how that might then articulate with her relationships with others. In my own life, those people with whom I’ve established lasting friendships are those whose acquaintance, at first face, I didn’t particularly care for. Outspoken to the point of brusqueness seems to be a common feature of most of my nearest and dearest. My devoted readers may, or may not, find that this is a central feature of my own personality- or so Keith tells me, ad infinitem. With Anna Wintour, I found plenty to admire. Outspoken, but hardly loquacious, decisive, and confident in her own vision. In a business as fickle as fashion, who can argue with a vision that has yielded her successful 20 year tenure? And what a synchronic partnership with Grace Coddington, likewise outspoken, but friendly in a way that gets the most out of the no-doubt maddeningly fickle creative types whose constant and always disparate inputs are daily essential and concomitant feature to the running of the magazine.

It is this central constancy, in my opinion, that people find- well, I’ll say it- endearing. Knowing what to expect, face it, is comforting where erratic is not. With Vogue as the ultimate expression of the vision of Anna Wintour, while it may be exciting, it is never, as its readers comfortably realize, ever erratic.

A youngish couple, embarking on a family, purchasing a new house- and one of the component pieces of this confluence of events is a stop in our galleries. With the initial purpose of looking at to purchase a painting or two, this visit has then segued into a larger discussion about long-term collecting objectives.

This is the second time within as many weeks we’ve had someone pleasingly describe their experience with us as ‘one stop shopping’. Who coined that phrase, anyway? While we don’t consider ourselves anything like a supermarket, a supermarket analogy is not entirely misplaced. Where one trades is not just a function of convenience, but as much about shopping where one can expect to get the types and quality of goods one wants to acquire- at a price one wants to pay.

Will that price be a bargain? I doubt it, because if it were, we couldn’t carry on in business. Will it represent value for money? As much as we can possibly make it, yes, because it is the relationship Keith and I seek in every sales transaction, with the client recognizing not only that he has purchased something priced fairly but that it also includes a fair profit for our gallery.

And, of course, that is the nature of a lasting relationship, where it carries on as it is beneficial to both parties. For those who seek to deal with our gallery in the manner in which the invading army relates to the young maidens of the town, one will find us, shall we say, less than compliant.

Keith and I were pleased to attend last night’s preview of the second annual SF 20 Modernism Show.
Frankly, the show is a huge improvement not so much in quality but certainly  in style over its maiden outing last year. The returning and the new dealers endeavored to make this a serious show, with new dealers including, a fortunate example, San Francisco’s Hedge. Opting for SF 20 over next month’s San Francisco Fall Antiques Show, they really put shoulders to the wheel. Their centre of the show pavilion, formed with both interior and exterior walls composed of weathered barn lumber, was perhaps the most striking of the entire show. This, coupled with interior designer and Hedge co-owner Steven Volpe’s entrance vignette, resulted in both designer and gallery forming a nearly overarching at-show presence.

Another notable display, and I am trying to overlook my personal biases because they are friends of ours, was that of Downtown, the bicoastal gallery of David Serrano and Robert Willson.  Chic, no question, but with the inclusion of soft furnishings in a room vignette, one can project oneself easily into the setting- perhaps what I might term elegantly domestic.

Downtown’s near neighbor at the show, Habite, is also their near neighbor in Los Angeles. Though great to see owners Laurent Rebuffel and Kimberly Denman, a bit of wistfulness is mixed in, too. Laurent is closing his San Francisco location, and consolidating his stock in their showroom on La Brea in LA.

The great and the good were all there, but a significant cadre of interior designers- great, good and beautiful- were on hand, too. Designer presence was doubtless bolstered by the active involvement of preview designer chairman, Douglas Durkin.

With SFMOMA  as the beneficiary of last night’s gala, the show is certainly given further legitimacy by the generous support of the newly launched Modern, an editorially serious quarterly from Brant Publications, whose other magazines include Interview and The Magazine Antiques.  Gregory Cerio, already well established as a journalist of note in New York design circles, is editor in chief, with Greg in attendance last night and through the run of the show.

The show runs through this Sunday, September 27, at Herbst Pavilion at Fort Mason.

Local luxury goods retailer Gump’s will this evening be hosting Charlotte Moss, who will be giving us an illustrated lecture about her notions of design and style. As well as interior design, Moss has been in the lifestyle boutique business for nearly 20 years. While some come and some go, that she has survived, and that Gump’s has, too, for that matter, is saying something.

Glib but not lightly meant, as staying in business while maintaining a freshness that impels the customer to return is the most difficult of difficult balancing acts, requiring the careful reinvention of one’s style and aesthetic balanced with the right degree of constancy. While one builds a loyal cadre of buyers, not all buyers buy all the time, with a goodly number dropping right off the twig. But the secret is to add new buyers at a greater rate than normal attrition, and not enhance that attrition the result of unpleasant changes in presentation or product mix. And not just the wrong products, mind, but items that do not quite articulate with one’s core business. Even in our own little English antiques sphere, we’ve felt our way along gingerly, finding it essential to mix in 20th century items, both artwork and furniture, and even going so far as to offer our own range of bespoke modern pieces.  For us, this has mercifully proven a successful blend, attracting new private and interior design clients who seem to like our look, while not putting off the existing clients whose purchases are almost exclusively period material.

With all that, what has been difficult for Keith and me to get our heads around, venal souls that we are, is that a lifestyle boutique will only appeal to those who share the vendor’s aesthetic vision, and that will amount to only a fraction of those who darken the front door- or browse the virtual store online. And of those, fractionally fewer will actually make a purchase. The temptation, I suppose, is to broaden the appeal of one’s merchandise, but that’s about the riskiest proposition there is. An overly broad mix of products dilutes the impact of one’s signature merchandise. Also, the broader the range of products, the broader the number of competitors, and we all seek to stand out.

No question, Charlotte Moss seems to have got it right. By the way, another prominent guest this evening at Gump’s will be my good friend Diane Dorrans Saeks. With her own lifestyle blog Style Saloniste, Diane does an exemplary job keeping San Francisans up to the mark.

While the mania for mid-century modern design may be somewhat in abeyance, it has by no means gone away. I am put in mind of this in light of the second running of the SF20 Show running at the Herbst Pavilion at San Francisco’s Fort Mason this coming weekend. With most of the participating dealers having come from outside the local area, I certainly hope the show proves worthwhile. Whilst we normally gauge our own success at a show by reviewing sales up to six months after the show is over, times being the way they are, some significant at-show sales for the participants would not, I’d venture, be found amiss.

Given that modern material is sort of off the boil, I don’t believe that will actually result in slow sales. Selective sales, more likely, as what we’ve noticed is a pronounced movement back toward the center amongst both collectors and interior designers, with the simultaneous and eclectic utilization of the best modern, contemporary, and period material. The show preview will benefit the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but as I review the list of show underwriters, some very significant local names stand out, including a client of two of ours, who we know for certain are broadly eclectic in their taste. And why shouldn’t they be? Certainly in the decorative arts, good design is good design, regardless of period.

That’s certainly what I look forward to seeing at any show, good design. Cutting edge? Well, possibly, but the show is really geared, or should be, to be accessible to those who may not be familiar with the material on offer. Mind you, I’m not suggesting the show should be composed of 1950’s kitsch, although a smattering makes for some fun, but excellent quality Italian and northern European design from the same period would not be amiss. Who’s not going to understand or be put off by Wegner and Gio Ponti? Eileen Gray? Well, possibly, but we’ve all seen too many knockoff Bibendum chairs.

What I’m saying is that there is nothing wrong with material that allows the early-stage collector to sort of ease into the acquisitions mode. Too often the presumption is that price alone is what determines a willingness to purchase. I suspect that pitching the note a bit too high up the collecting scale might with as much frequency also function to de-incent sales. It only stands to reason, doesn’t it?, the more arcane the design and designer, the more commensurately rarified become the buyers.

The antiques business is fraught with surprising nuances, surprising to me, anyway, and one of the most is the level of intimacy we establish with our private clients. What put me on to this was the frequency, begun some years ago, with which we had contact with our clients, whether they were in a mood to make a purchase or not. The consideration that I’ve given over the course of the last couple of days to collecting reminds me that Keith and I share a mindset with most of our private clients, with a variety of interests that are sometimes mere enthusiasms, and sometimes pervasive, lifelong quests.

With English antiques as our core business, we nevertheless frequently become the go-to guys for a variety of different types of material. Only today we have been discussing, pardon the alliteration, Venetian veduti and French vitrines with good clients who, frankly, are not collectors of English antiques.

That people ask us to help them find disparate objects in the fine and decorative arts has a lot to do with comfortability. Well, people find Keith comfortable, anyway. A local arts journalist characterized me as ‘acerbic.’ Still, that people overlook my personality and allow both of us into their homes when we deliver a purchased item always, by the letting us into their dwelling space, establishes an intimacy. This experience has never, ever not involved the client themselves, invariably at home to meet us, wishing to discuss their own collecting interests and objectives. The brief installation results in discussions with clients that, as occurs with any meeting of minds, go on for years afterward.

Query- what makes an object a museum piece? Answer- because it is in a museum collection. There actually should be a corollary to this answer- because someone donated it to a museum or stumped up the money for its acquisition.

Everyone in the art and antiques trade feels an ego boost when selling to an institutional collector, but it is frankly something of a hassle to do so. In the first place, very few institutions have an acquisitions fund, and if they do, the museum professionals are so hamstrung in their ability to access it, they might as well have nothing. Moreover, any acquisition is made through a committee composed of curatorial staff and trustees that meets infrequently- and may change its collecting focus between meetings. Consequently, what might absolutely make the collection of any particular museum might be passed by because of a lack of funds, lack of focus, and/or the inability of the institution to act in a timely manner. While we do sell to museums from time to time, we also are familiar with the pat institutional declination of interest, phrased as follows-  ‘We are not making any acquisitions at this time.’

I say this by way of expanding the discussion about collecting started yesterday. Although my own sense of collecting makes it difficult to understand any notion of a collecting end-point, even museums, ostensibly the most professional collectors of them all, often pursue collecting interests in a manner, if not erratic, that can certainly seem less than systematic.

The best collections cannot be put together in a short period of time, simply because the finest material of any stripe, be it English antiques or Roman antiquities, presents itself in the marketplace on a piecemeal basis. As an antiques dealer, this makes for a wonderful opportunity, as we are in the marketplace daily and can acquire pieces as they come along- and offer them first thing to the collectors who we know will be interested. No collection is composed solely of star finds, but the collection put together quickly, given the limited quantity of material available at any given time, will likely be of more, shall we say, uneven quality.

Ironically, collections put together with inordinate slowness might also suffer the same fate. The institutional collector whose purchase comes only when a donor has money will find it has money burning in its pocket that has to be spent- before the donor rescinds the donation, the result of suffering some financial vicissitude or because the museum director inadvertently gave him a game look.

We received a rather surprising telephone call yesterday from an interior designer with whom we do business from time to time. She had expressed strong interest in something from our personal collection, that because it no longer quite articulated with the rest of the material, we were willing to sell. Surprising in that, although the piece was exactly what the designer wanted, it was no longer required as she had ‘finished out’, her words, the client’s collection.

For an antiques dealer, this happens with some frequency, and not just when dealing with an interior designer. The designers’ brief, of course, is to deploy colors and movables in a particular space to pleasing aesthetic effect. Not that I don’t believe that is important, but the better antiques and art dealer usually offers material that is an extension of the dealer’s own connoisseurship, and, like us, an outgrowth of their personal collecting passion.

Since passion overrules intellect, it is, consequently, at least difficult for a dealer to understand when a collection, even when put together entirely for decorative effect, is ‘finished out.’ For the collector, and that includes virtually all antiques and art dealers, collections can never be finished out, as one collects continually, upgrading the quality of one’s collections as taste, discernment, and the range of interests change. Moreover, the true collector will always be looking for something, and shedding things that are either outside the current scope or inferior to other items. For Keith and me, our showroom is the ultimate outgrowth of our own interests. While we do need to sell a piece of furniture or a painting or two to earn our daily crust, we determined some time ago that if we acquire strictly commercial material, we do so at our peril. Our business with other collectors, and even our interior designers, will find that they are in no small measure driven to purchase pieces from us that we can speak passionately about. As we say so often, we avoid having anything in inventory that does not have a compelling reason for being here. Always something about the piece, be it furniture or artwork- color, condition, subject, provenance, attribution, and generally a confluence of these- compel us to try and acquire a specific piece.

The responses I get to blog entries, every one of them, surprise me, as they are generally only obliquely related to the blog itself. Now that we are actively socially networking on Twitter, we’ve cast our nets wider beyond the 20 or so devoted readers with whom I seem to share a common mindset.

Although I opined yesterday that it was unlikely to the point of near impossibility to find a ‘sleeper’ either at auction or amongst the stock of any particular dealer, someone asked about getting good value in a contemporary gallery. Doubtless familiar with how poorly contemporary art has fared over the course of the last 12 months, my reader, who is working with an interior designer to acquire, curate, and display her growing collection of contemporary art, presumes that this might be one of those buy now times.

To repeat what I wrote yesterday, with period material, I would say emphatically yes- buy now, enjoy it for years, and sell it off when it no longer works for you. Moreover, I’d say this applies to anything established in the canon of the fine and decorative arts. Note that I said ‘canon’, because what has come off the boil has been contemporary material. This phenomenon is what I term the Luke Fildes effect. Who is Luke Fildes? Well may you ask, as this illustrates my point perfectly. Sir Samuel Luke Fildes was arguably one of the most celebrated, popular and highly paid artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His socialist realist style is perhaps best realized in a painting from the late 19th century, ‘The Doctor’, depicting a physician pondering how to treat a sick child in a poor crofter’s cottage. Well drafted with a clear narrative content, it is, however, miles from anything currently thought fashionable.

Don’t dismiss fashion, as it as strong an influence in the fine as it is in the decorative arts. Whatever critics may embrace in terms of the fine arts, they are nevertheless trapped in time as we all are, and what looks au courant today may look like a buggy whip tomorrow, no matter in what sort of critical framework it was grounded.

I am not dismissing the importance and influence of criticism. Would we know Jackson Pollock had there been no Clement Greenberg to champion him- in suitably abstruse language, of course.

This is Friday, and I am off to an auction view, so let me bring this to a quick close. I can, of course, because the advice I’m proffering is what you’ve always heard, and it is of sufficiently few characters to be contained in a ‘Tweet’- where contemporary art is concerned, buy what you like within your own budget. For when buying art outside the canon, where value and fashion are concerned, what is a ‘sleeper’ today might next year appear as sick as Luke Fildes’ patient.

The recession is over, so you know. That’s what the Fed is telling us, anyway, and making this determination using a variety of (arcane) measurements. My frontline assessment is conditioned by whether or not I’ve written an invoice today. When not, I am inclined to agree with my sainted grandmother whose folk aphorism, expurgated for the delicacy of my devoted readers, was that it is hard to appreciate the daylight when you’ve fallen into the privy.

With all that, we do seem to be clawing our way out- of the economic privy- although it is hard to tell in the antiques trade, with the epidemic of gallery closures hardly abating. The auction houses, which should derive some benefit from stock disbursals the result of closures, are yet in trouble, with relatively few buyers and not enough consignments to make operations profitable. But therein are the green shoots, actually, because amongst the dross, goods that are of fine quality and fresh to the market are garnering significant attention (read ‘selling for big money’).

This is the thing that we’ve seen all along, even in the darkest days, with the good goods selling, and the mediocre material just sitting there. This is hard for all of us to communicate to clients, who immediately assume that anything offered for sale, either privately or at auction, is necessarily a distressed sale. That has exacerbated already tough trading conditions, because our clients, who are in the market only when the spirit moves them, do not see movement within the trade to the point of vivacity if a piece is truly worthwhile. In spite of its overall decimation, trust me, there are still plenty of trade buyers out there. As a consequence, it is doubtful that a private buyer, either collector or interior designer, will even in this environment acquire a ‘sleeper’.

The better pieces are still, then, with alacrity being acquired for resale by the trade. What buyers need to consider is that, if the beige book is right, while one may not necessarily find a bargain out there, when the green shoots become in the fullness of time the tree branches of economic recovery, one might regret not having made a purchase right now.