That the trade is slow is not news to anyone in the art market, be you merchant of any stripe, from wall art to English antiques. The disbursal sales we’ve attended make that clear. With quite a bit of material at the final clear outs unsold, or selling at low estimates you have gathered, therefore, that with limited commissions earned, the auction business is still tough sledding, too.
Although material more within the canon, both fine and decorative art, composes the Chappell & McCullar oeuvre, we are still sufficiently close to the world of contemporary material to gain a sense of the weather there. Frankly, while it may be shall we say inclement here, it is the mother of all storms there. When a body thinks about it, it isn’t terribly surprising. As with the 18th century material that forms our corpus, fine quality 20th century material is pretty rare. As Poillerat, Printz and Nakashima pieces were not mass produced, these one-offs have often commanded more at auction than a period piece of similar outline with an illustrious provenance and attributable to a vaunted maker. Moreover, with a limited supply and, for a while, frenetic demand, dealers oftentimes began to offer what was, frankly, kitsch of the Murano glass and Heywood Wakefield furniture variety. Assuming you wanted to turn your living space into a 1950’s TV room, this is, then, okay. But the question was inevitably begged- why purchase 1950’s kitsch, if that is your perverse desire, when you can buy the same thing- new- for less money. The penny dropped for me a year or so ago when a young man looked at a piece of midcentury design in our own galleries, and asked a question I couldn’t answer. ‘Why,’ he queried, ‘would a person buy a worn-out Eames chair when the new one is 
exactly the same, made by the same maker?’ Good question. Knoll and Herman Miller pieces from retail and online outlets like Design Within Reach are low-anxiety purveyors of 20th century design, and on a budget.
One of the better dealers in mid-century furniture, whose handled material is in the Poillerat, Printz and Nakashima caliber, told us several years ago how difficult it was to sell his stock profitably, as the auction houses were the market makers and, with their databases of sold lots as accessible as their online catalogs, everyone in the world could see what a dealer had paid for their stock. Indeed, a fair old amount of the record setting auction prices were set by, wait for it, dealers buying for stock. Not surprising, a fair old bit of that record setting material is now finding its way back into the auction galleries. Any new records in the offing on the second go-around? No breath-holding, please.