Heading in the right direction

While Michael recovers, here’s an earlier blog

How goes the old Wall Street aphorism- bulls and bears get rich, but pigs get slaughtered. Sage, perhaps, but financial sagacity is not my strong suit. Nor that of plenty of other people, particularly in the fine art and antiques trade, with this last year or two cluttered with disbursal sales of former dealers. It’s been an interesting experience, Keith and I chatting with those of long tenure in the trade, discussing how items used to be passed from dealer to dealer, with some kind of mark-up each time it traded hands, until it reached an eventual buyer. The new transparency in the marketplace for art and antiques brought about by information technology is, to my way of thinking, not entirely a bad thing. Mind you, price shopping in the art world is pretty tough, as the price differential between a good object and a similar though superior object is measured exponentially.

But, of course, quality and pricing make for good talking points with clients. I hope my colleagues in the trade agree with me, that discussion about the merits of a piece of furniture or artwork ultimately assist the client to make the right decision and the dealer that assists in that process has established a relationship, and not just accomplished a spot sale. We’ve found generally that sales these days are accompanied by lots of discussion, including plenty of specific questions about our stock, about the trade generally, and the nature of connoisseurship. Although times being the way they are, my venal self would like to jump ahead to closing the sale, but the process of bonding through long discussion has had, for me at least, the beneficial effect of keeping me on my mettle. Discussion, research and explanation assist not just the development of connoisseurship in my clients, but significantly improves my own, and ultimately makes me a better dealer.

The Unusual

While Michael recovers, here’s a reprise of a prior blog entry

For my handful of devoted readers, harken ye back to my entry of a couple of weeks ago, wherein I chastised those punters who ask, for wont of anything better to say, for the unusual.

Well, we have it, and ‘unusual’ is said with an attenuated Hitchcockian accent, appropriately enough, because it is an item associated with the great man, albeit tangentially. Specifically, we have acquired out of the stock of Warner Brothers a George III demilune pier table of large size, well known to many of you, whether you know it or not, the result of its prominent placement in the Alfred Hitchcock film ‘Dial M for Murder’. With the movie itself taken from the play of the same name, cinematically it’s what’s known as a ‘rug show’, with all the action taking place indoors, in this instance in just two rooms of the fictional London apartment in Maida Vale occupied by the main characters, played by Grace Kelly and Ray Milland. We’ve got some great photos of Grace Kelly looking harried and Ray Milland deceitfully calculating- with the pier table prominently behind.

Although Warner’s, along with MGM and Paramount, would import vast quantities of European antiques for use in set decoration, it is interesting to note that this piece was actually purchased from ex-star, prominent antiques dealer, designer to the stars and progenitor of the Hollywood Regency style, Mr. William Haines. As well as the Warner Brothers inventory mark, the piece also has a label from Haines-Foster, then located in exquisite premises at 8720 Sunset Boulevard. It was an astonishing place. Purpose built for Haines, with a colonnaded façade and curved display windows, Haines served the ne plus ultra in the industry, with prominent commissions from Joan Crawford, George Cukor, and Louis B. Mayer’s daughter and son-in-law, Bill and Edith Goetz. Haines was also the antiques purveyor to and designer for Jack Warner, whose grand new house designed when Warner married his wife Ann replete with Haines-selected fine quality English antiques.

In this case, though, the pier table connection between William Haines and Jack Warner is incidental, but more substantially linked to the set designer for ‘Dial M…’, the redoubtable George James Hopkins. A designer with a career in movies that lasted from the late teens into the 1970s, Hopkins work, mainly at Warners, included some stunning sets- ‘Auntie Mame’, ‘My Fair Lady’, and- wait for it- ‘Casa Blanca’. In his salad days, he was reputed to have had an intimate relationship with the director William Desmond Taylor, whose yet unsolved murder has always conjured up lurid associations with drugs and unconventional sex. Don’t you just love the movies?

Dining tables this time

While Michael recovers, here’s a reprise of a prior blog entry.

Early George III Dining TableMy last blog entry brought a spate of e-mails- admittedly a smallish spate, as I have only a handful of dedicated readers. The e-discussion centered on how I had brushed aside dining tables, focusing on sideboards as the primary dining room debacle. I readily agree with my readers who point out that dining tables can be more than a little problematic. As well, they are such a bane that a number of fine quality dealers rarely even offer them.

I say a bane for a number of reasons. First, while a sideboard was of some roughly typical dimensions determined by the purposes a sideboard served, a period dining table can be of widely varying dimensions, explained by considering their original context. As with so much multi-use 18th century furniture, an early dining table may not have been used exclusively for that purpose. The earliest dining table we’ve ever handled is presently in our inventory and is shown here fully extended. As such, it can handily seat 20 people. In its incarnation illustrated, it is composed of two demilune ends, two drop leaf center sections, and two leaves. With a little understanding of 18th century usage and room arrangement, one would surmise that the table was seldom fully assembled in its early life, and, when not in use, its components might have been deployed as follows- one of the drop leaf sections was in use for dining, accommodating 8 people around all four sides, with the other drop leaf section, with one leaf dropped, functioning as a side-serving table. The two demilune ends were probably used as pier or console tables, possibly on either side of a chimney breast, possibly in the dining room but just as possibly in some other room. The two leaves? Probably stored- and stored flat, apparently, as they haven’t warped in 250 years.

Regency period tables- those of the splayed legs that seem to inform the image most of us have of a ‘proper’ dining table- are then often times huge pieces of furniture, purpose-built for the now-standard purpose-built dining rooms that accommodated them. While of course length is an issue, the problem we typically encounter most often is depth. Our recent experience tells us that the optimal depth for even a grand modern house is something in the neighbourhood of 40” to 48”. Long and narrow is now what’s wanted to accommodate formal dining. However, formal dining in the Regency heyday of the dining table could not be accomplished with anything so shallow. Part of the dining experience was pageantry on a scale that none of us has ever experienced, unless you regularly attend state dinners at Windsor Castle. 10 courses or more would not be unusual, with a separate beverage for each course. Each place would have been laid with flatware, cutlery and drinking glasses to accommodate the whole of the meal- and a goodly number of the plates, too- all part of the panoply of dining. Consequently, the space required for this massive number of accoutrements was huge, extending an arm’s length from the outside edge toward the centre of the table. A 48” depth would be barely adequate- 60” is more like it.

Even with infrequent use, dining tables have traditionally had hard use. This, then, brings us to the second big issue surrounding period dining tables- their condition. Table tops were most at risk, with wine stains a particular problem. The alcohol in the wine has the unfortunate effect of dissolving the shellac of the table top, allowing the wine access to and absorption by the raw wood. A table cloth will have made matters worse, soaking up wine and keeping it in contact with the table top longer than if the wine were spilled and then mopped up from a bare table. The tannins and oxidation of the sugars in the wine will always leave a dark stain. Although modern restoration using chemical methods can generally ameliorate stains, the more typical method has been a mechanical one- strip off the old finish and then aggressively sand the entire table top to down below the level of the stains. Tragically, this effects to remove all the patination- but not always the stains!-  and a good bit of the figuring in the wood. Adding insult to significant injury is that this ‘restoration’ is frequently followed by the application of impermeable plastic finishes to ‘protect’ the top from future stains. Of all the items that are the victims of botched restoration, I think, as a class, dining tables rank fairly highly amongst the ranks of most frequently botched.

Did I mention, as well, that dining tables take up a lot of a dealer’s floor space? They do, of course, monopolizing space that could accommodate a number of other, smaller items.  So, a costly item, hard to find in good condition, with dimensions that are unlikely to match what’s required by the client, and hard to display. A bane. But, of course, the offset is the magnificence of the best tables: nothing that I can think of offers the expanse of fine quality matched timbers- and this is what makes them sought after, and makes a dealer swallow hard, take the acquisition plunge, and put them on display.

The Jubilee

In the midst of moving my parents from their house on the farm to a new home in town a few years ago, I had cause to ask my mother why she and my father had accumulated so much stuff. Her reply was the typical one, to the extent that one doesn’t discard what one might, at some indeterminate future date, find useful. Well, indeed. Moreover, where would I be in my current endeavor if everyone threw out every item of personal property every few years? 18th century furniture pieces would be even fewer on the ground than they are.

The idea of this though, keeping what one might need, puts me in mind of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. We all saw the final day’s activities, including the Queen drawn from Buckingham Palace in the 1902 state landau, her dress, taking her cue from that of her grandmother Queen Mary, in a style of an earlier day. Despite the vicissitudes of her royal children, made the commonest of common knowledge by an ever hungrier media, Queen Elizabeth is beloved, making a virtue of preserving the best from the past as head of state. Has there ever been a time in her 60 year reign that republicanism waxed strongly? If it has, it has only been considered as a possibility once the present monarch has become the late one.

While the queen’s presence has been an enduring one, the gala hoopla of the jubilee certainly functions valuably to underscore that fact, and provide the opportunity to consider within the context of an extra special event how important and comforting tradition can be. With Queen Elizabeth’s reign basically business as usual, without the special occasion of the Jubilee, one would become naturally indifferent.

And the length of her reign has resulted in celebrations at just the right intervals. Unfortunately, Americans have had nothing similar since the Bicentennial of 1976. Heavenly days! 36 too many years ago. Don’t tell anyone, but for the 4th of July that year, we threw fireworks off the top floor of my condo building at 2611 Ala Wai Boulevard in Honolulu.

Amidst the acrimony that is now sadly the central feature of partisan politics in this country, an acrimony that has degenerated into factional hate mongering, one wonders whether we wouldn’t be well served as a nation, as the British have, from a jubilee that reminds all of us of our endurance as a nation and commonality as a people. When things were at a low ebb, with recovery from the war creeping forward with glacial slowness, London was the site of a Festival of Britain that engaged and consequently invigorated the entire nation. What more opportune time than now for a festival of America. Now there’s a thought.

Helumoa, part 2

The risk run when one speaks of preservation is always of marking oneself out as exclusionary,  or put another way, ‘I’ve got mine and can afford to keep it for my sole enjoyment.’ I’ll let you draw the ‘…and to hell with the rest of you’ implication. The other risk, of course, is to be considered an anachronist and consequently little regarded. As my father says from time to time, ‘If all of us had foresight the way we have hindsight, we’d all be ahead by a damn sight.’ Descriptively put, and highly accurate. No, we can’t turn back the clock but in what matters is it not worthwhile to review and learn from what the fullness of time might have shown up as errors in judgment?

The building of the Ala Wai Canal in the 1920’s, indeed all the alteration of the natural environment in Hawaii and elsewhere that rocketed forward beginning in the early years of the last century were byproducts of what seemed the eternal watchword for all that was good in society- progress. In an effort to bring about what was thought the best for the most, what was existing, in both the natural and built environments, was thought if not actually bad, then at least suspect. The natural environment was exploited for what it was then considered- a malleable raw material that, with man’s active involvement, could always be improved. Although the confidence in man’s abilities reflects the tenor of those recent times, even at this near term vantage point we can agree that, to a large extent, that confidence was actually hubris.

What appeared as gradual improvement then became a juggernaut that, surprisingly, still proceeds apace.  Mindsets changed to those more reflective that seek to slow, eliminate, or even reverse earlier errors in environmental judgment even now seldom win out over the mindset so fervently embraced in the last century. I was surprised, for example, when watching a broadcast of the Kamehameha School’s Song Contest to hear one of the young participants explain his future goal to become the Donald Trump of Hawaii. How surprising it was to hear, given the level of immersion in traditional Hawaiian culture of all Kam School students- one would presume the predominant movement, to the exclusion of all others, would be to stop, if not reverse, the predations wrought by real estate developers. I would argue that the world can ill afford one Donald Trump. Astonishing that anyone in Hawaii would propose there might be room for two.

A few years ago, the Honolulu Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of the work of the late Honolulu architect Vladimir Ossipoff. I believe the excellent book and catalog prepared by curator Dean Sakamoto is still in print and it is worth a read. What one takes away from it is the effort Ossipoff made, certainly at the height of his career, to use contemporary materials and link them sympathetically with the natural environment to yield what might be termed built organicism. Something that, while manmade for man’s use and while fully functional, nevertheless articulates properly- by which I mean as an adjunct not as an intrusion- with its setting. One seldom sees high rise buildings that accomplish this- unless they’re mid rise Ossipoff designs.