Author: Michael Chappell

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.