Michael’s Blog

Antiques Trade Gazette has reported today about the, as they have it, ‘lukewarm’ performance of the London Frieze art fair. Opening to great fanfare in 2007, it was thought to represent a new type of venue, dedicated to contemporary art and attracting thereby a younger group of punters who might ordinarily shun a traditional fair. Although attendance was good, albeit down from prior years, the sales were more than a bit thin on the ground. Although very few major sales were posted, most of what was sold was in the 4 and 5 figure range.

Wonderfully synchronic, we had a gallery browser in earlier today opining that younger buyers don’t buy high end material of any stripe any longer, and she asked me why I thought that was. I told her frankly that I didn’t really agree with her premise, that, actually, our mix of buyers is, chronologically, pretty much the same as its been since we started in July, 2002- some younger, some older, but none very, very young, and none very, very old. What makes them all the same, though, is the desire to pursue a connoisseurship that propels them toward making a purchase. For Chappell & McCullar, the mix of inventory needs to be something of a constant, as we’ve found given the relationship nature of the business- if we change our look dramatically, we’ll confuse, and lose, our clients. Cutting edge? Perhaps not, but then, what is cutting edge? In the fine and decorative arts, what’s cutting edge today will tomorrow look as dated as tweed upholstery on a sofa. We’ve always said in our business, we want to offer material that’s already established in the art and design canon. Ironically, one of our younger clients reinforced this idea for us when we started out. A gentleman that had survived the dot.com crash, he wanted to make sure that whatever he purchased from us was of a type and quality that, should the cycle repeat itself, he could bail out. He’s an astute fellow and, the result of the debacle of the last several years, he hasn’t had to find any of this out.

Still, this makes an excellent point, and something that the waning fortunes of contemporary art, and the related fairs, makes clear- the canon is time wrought and time tested. It just might be that a fair like the Frieze fair has experienced time passing it by.

It had to happen, and it has- my spam folder showed up this morning with a blast from a new website, dedicated to online browsing of upcoming fairs. While a number of art and antiques publications through their online editions promote fairs either through editorial or paid ads, this is the first site we’ve seen that is solely dedicated to fairs. However, the call to action from the new site isn’t to visit the fair, but unfortunately asks the question that large numbers of people apparently are already asking, to wit, why visit actually when, through the internet, one can visit virtually? And the site offers just such an opportunity.

And, clearly, this is a question that permeates the art and antiques world specifically, and the entire retail environment generally. Of course, the slow economic recovery has at least something to do with the numbers of vacant storefronts in even the best shopping venues, but the retailer that trumpets ‘free shipping with online orders’ has clearly altered his business model and is probably not planning a bricks and mortar expansion.

Frankly, our own gallery footfall has been mercifully constant over the course of the last couple of years- constant, but hardly increasing. One thing that is also a constant, that every first time gallery visitor has visited us at least once online before they’ve darkened our door. We chat about this frequently with gallery visitors who at once decry the declining numbers of galleries while at the same time acknowledging how much stuff they purchase online themselves.

I notice this morning the cancellation of a long running London fair, in response to the increasing difficulty punters have in reaching the fair venue due to the traffic congestion charge. Well, it’s always something- perhaps the fair organizer will develop a virtual platform- ‘save the congestion charge and visit us online’- it just might happen.

It would be difficult to consider vernacular style without a consideration of the influence of local materials. While the local oolitic limestone in Bath, with its golden color and ease of carving resulted in some astonishing effects, the use of basaltic lava in Honolulu is possibly, pardon me for saying this, Madame Pele, a little less pleasing.

What’s pictured is the Bishop Estate Office along Merchant Street built in 1898 and designed by the same Charles William Dickey who designed the entrancing Alexander & Baldwin Building around the corner. It is interesting to note that the original Bishop Museum buildings, constructed at the same time, are of the same stone, and have the same dour appearance. It would be hard to imagine the use of a more truculent building material, with the consequent effect the rudimentary elaboration the result of lava being so difficult to work with. Although the Bishop Estate Office has been described as Romanesque in the manner of Henry Hobson Richardson, the American architect who popularized massivity in scale wrought in stone in the late 19^th century, I think the stylistic application to the Bishop Estate Building is not entirely appropriate.

Firstly, the building is very strictly symmetrical, with the heaviness of the building material ameliorated to a great degree with the fairly lavish use of apertures- note the doorways and the tripartite and thermal crowned window on the ground floor. The upper floor contains a range of four windows, interrupted only with engaged columns that function to draw the eye skyward where, in a fairly subtle decorative elaboration, the big-ish undressed stone blocks of the lower storeys gives way to considerably smaller blocks that for all the world remind me of Roman opus reticulatum. All in all, a thoughtfully designed and sophisticated building more in a classical idiom, made all the more noteworthy given the difficult vernacular medium used to achieve it.

The notion of restatement of what John Summerson called the classical language of architecture is interestingly expressed in the Kamehameha V post office at the corner of Merchant and Bethel Streets. Completed in 1871 during the reign of Kamehameha V, it has come to bear his name, signifying the large number of building works begun in his reign, including the present Iolani Palace, completed, however, after his death. It served as the main post office for the city until the completion of a new structure a couple of blocks away in 1922.

Although not noticeably equipped with any recognizable decorative motifs that would be possessed of a particularly Hawaiian resonance, it is noteworthy that buildings completed under the patronage of the Hawaiian monarchs were strongly European in style, seeking by visual affiliation, to if not align then to identify themselves with their European cohorts. The Kam V post office is sited facing makai along Merchant Street the wharves and levees of Honolulu harbor that, at the time, would have been no more than 100 yards distant.

The building’s exaggerated balustrade-capped Tuscan colonnade was an environmental adaptation to accommodate post office windows and boxes that were originally accessible without actually entering the building. The choice of the Tuscan order perhaps indicates some particular knowledge of the hierarchy of the classical orders, with the choice of the more robust Tuscan for use in the ground floor colonnade something that Vitruvius himself would have understood.

In an interesting bit of urban organicism, the colonnade curves along to the Diamond Head side of the building, but the frontage along Bethel Street seems truncated, bereft as it is of the colonnade. The lack of the colonnade does expose, though, the rusticated effect achieved with the use of pre-cast concrete blocks, the first of their kind ever used in the islands, and what was to become and remains to this day a mainstay of island commercial and residential construction.

While only an erstwhile linguist and philologist, vernacular in my parlance comes in the form of the logically extended use of the term when applied as an adjective to architecture and the decorative arts. I am reminded of a lecture I had given a year or so ago about 18^th century English furniture and the first question I fielded was on why it was that English furniture looked the way it did, and French furniture, produced just a few miles away, looked so markedly different. Surprising that this question, that could only be considered suitably in a tome of a half-million words, with an equivalent number of images, was asked by the curator of a well-known local collection. Perhaps she was trying to catch me out, but her tone suggested that she really wanted to know. I dodged the bullet, as it were, answering that this was a question with no simple answer, but did suggest one aspect might be the woods available to English makers, with the corner on the mahogany market yielding pieces with a liberal use of carving and an iridescent sheen that French makers could not accomplish with the local woods and the comparative paucity of exotic woods necessitating their sparing use in the form of veneers.

Of course, this provides a little bit of an introduction, albeit with a deterministic bent, into the development of vernacular style. The consideration of any particular vernacular is never so simple as Abbé Laugier seemed to think, with, in his view, classical architecture mimicking archaic Greek trabeated structures. Moreover, style is hardly static, so any consideration of any vernacular style anywhere is always an exercise in trying to hit a moving target.

Keith and I recently returned from a trip to our adopted home of Honolulu, a city we love for a variety of reasons, but one of them is its built environment. The main original commercial core of Honolulu with its mauka axes of Nuuanu, Bethel, Fort, and Bishop Streets, running Diamond Head direction from their makai terminus of Merchant Street contains a welter of 19^th and early 20^th century buildings that, despite an overarching and predominantly European style, are nevertheless possessed to varying degrees of a local vernacular.

A particular favorite of ours is the marvel of fanciful decoration and architectural restatement that is the Alexander & Baldwin Building at 822 Bishop Street, built in 1929 and designed by Honolulu architects Charles William Hickey and Hart Wood. Their classical training doubtless contributes to an exterior design that, at first glance, bears a striking resemblance to a Florentine palazzo, with its massively scaled ground floor hinting at what would have been rusticated if built in an earlier day, and then gradually lightening visually, to a loggiaed top storey with an overhanging eave and fronted by a balustrade. Italianate in outline, but stylistic motifs that would have vernacular resonance are uniformly substituted for classical ones. In the detail image, for instance, where one might reasonably expect the use of bukrania in the frieze decoration, the architects used the heads of water buffaloes. Although now largely forgotten, Hawaii agriculture in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries was dependent on the labor of these beasts, and doubtless, with so much of Alexander & Baldwin’s fortunes derived from the production of sugar and other agricultural products- most notably rice, still an agricultural staple in Hawaii at the time this building was constructed- this sort of apostrophe was considered appropriate. The building is replete with orientalia, with the post and lintel construction of an entranceway, for example, of Italian travertine, but liberally embellished with Chinese fretwork.