notes

It was announced today that Norman Adams, the venerable Knightsbridge antiques dealer, will close up the end of this month. This saddens me more than any of the other bad economic news we’ve had to date. Admittedly, sentiment is mostly to do with it, as Norman Adams was the first showroom we ever visited in London, and, in some manner or other, we’ve tried to pattern ourselves on the Norman Adams model ever since. Quality through and through, we’ve been fortunate enough to handle material that had once graced their premises, and we always considered it a selling point if the piece still bore the gallery’s ivorine label.

Everyone’s aware of how retailing has crashed and burned this past holiday season. At first face, one would assume that Macy’s store closings announced today are illustrative of what retailing is facing for the foreseeable future. Frankly, though, we have a dozen Macy’s serving the greater San Francisco bay area and, to my mind, the question has long been begged of how many are really needed.

Still, with our one gallery location, we do from time to time venture forth, to bring our material to where the customer is, rather than just waiting for them to roll in over the threshold. And we will soon be coming to a neighborhood near you, providing you live in Los Angeles. We will be collaborating with McColl Fine Art at the Los Angeles Art Show from January 21 through January 25 at the Los Angeles Convention Centre.

As this is the first show on the coast in the new year, and the first for this show at the LA Convention Centre, we approach it with modest trepidation. Clearly, a show is direct, hard marketing retail- not quite what one normally expects in the art and antiques world. What we are used to, the gallery setting with off-white walls and rows of track lights overhead is actually a post-1950 innovation. The retail art market prior to that time generally was conducted in settings composed of room vignettes, with everything from the chairs and their decorative cushions to the paintings, tapestries, and appliqués on the walls for sale. Interestingly, the modern art fair is more akin to what took place in the Low Countries in the 17th century. English diarist John Evelyn wrote of the novelty of these fairs, surprised to see generic artwork for sale outside the atelier of a master painter. Most of the so-called old master paintings that grace collections today were probably originally sold to their first purchaser at an art fair.

As my 20 or so devoted readers will doubtless remember from previous blog entries on the subject, Keith and I love fairs, despite the work, and expense, of transporting, setting up, and taking down, a short-lived venue. There are dealers we enjoy seeing that we only see at fairs, and naturally enjoy looking at their material. Seeing each other’s stock also keeps all of us in line on pricing- parenthetically, a buyer should note that a fair is, consequently, a great place to comparison shop (and buy, too. A redundant use of parentheses- I should have used brackets.)

In terms of direct marketing, we also see clients at shows that we never see anywhere else. It is gratifying that, whether they are there to buy or not, we have an astonishing turnout from clients and these often involve our making house calls. Whether it is to put a piece in place or consult about their existing collections, it is fun for us as well as the client. I would be lying if I were to say that it isn’t more fun when some business is done.

Times being the way they are, one would assume that the rubber will be meeting the road at the Los Angeles Art Show. Hard to know, as we never judge the performance of the fair until long after its conclusion. With client follow-up and its concomitant palaver, it is 6 months before we can determine the success of any show.

We’ve plenty of American Express around here- reliable old green cards for personal purchases, and with a membership since 1976, a number I can cite from memory, and, wait for it, platinum cards for business use. As well, we are American Express merchants. Times being the way they are, who can resist the prospect of an airline mile for every dollar charged? Although it is not often that clients use any charge card, when they do, it will likely be American Express. Without doubt, we’ve been at least tangentially responsible for a number of bonus mile first class trips to Europe.

I say all this by way of explaining why we get Departures magazine, the membership organ (sounds a bit rude, doesn’t it?  I beg your pardon) for American Express and possibly explain why we tend to read it, when World of Interiors stacks up for several months at a time waiting for us to give it a look.

While the current issue has some good post-holiday spa and de-tox advice, appropriate as we try to metabolize the last of the New Year’s Day ham, my focus was on the squib from Nick Foulkes on beloved Mount Street in Mayfair. As with the literary postcard from a year ago in W, Foulkes celebrates the change in the street from antiques venue to high-end fashion strip mall. And that’s what it’s become, hasn’t it? How many Marc Jacobs outlets does one need to have, anyway? Or Dunhill? Actually, Foulkes was stretching a point to include Dunhill, a block or two off Mount Street in premises formerly occupied by the venerable antiques dealer Mallett, whose remaining premises in Bond Street, alas, are now also for sale.

I realize, of course, that Mr. Foulkes’ brief was to write about what might be thought current and kicky. As the author of a weekly column in the Evening Standard entitled ‘Ginger Fop’, it isn’t surprising his focus would be fashion. My dismay at the change of Mount Street from wonderful antiques venue to, well, strip mall, would be tempered if the replacement merchants were selling particularly British goods. But the focus of companies like international luxury goods retailer LVMH, whose aforementioned brand Marc Jacobs now occupies the former premises of antiques dealer Pelham Galleries, is mass marketing. This, then, begs the obvious question- why would one wish to visit Mount Street if it is indistinguishable, save the weather, from Rodeo Drive, or Michigan Avenue, for that matter?

Good way to start the first full week of the New Year, I stopped at the Brunschwig et Fils showroom in San Francisco, looking for fabric with which to cover a late Georgian mahogany showframe stool. A delightful piece of sinuous design, our ace restorer Tony Smith had put the frame in shape, paying close attention to the condition of the seat rails, in anticipation of a shall we say ‘ample’ designer or client heavily parking their keister upon it.

As I was shopping for chintz, inevitably selecting several fabrics we had used before, it occurred to me that, in our galleries, with our own selves, we tend toward fabrics that suit us, and this remains fairly constant year to year. Particularly frustrating, then, the phenomenon of style and design obsolescence. It occurs to me that one of the outcomes of the worldwide fascination with interior design has been the mania on the part of fabric houses to turn out new items at a furious pace- and outmode existing lines at the same rate. Every interior designer who’s worked on a project for either a celebrity or been on a couple of episodes of ‘Changing Rooms’ feels the need to introduce a line of furnishing fabrics. Nothing is wrong, of course, with fresh and original, but, frankly, quite a bit of what comes out is bizarre and dated looking by the time it reaches the public.

To be fair, the fabric houses need to introduce a certain number of new designs to engender continued interest, by which I really mean gain the attention of the shelter publications. Feature mention in AD or Elle Décor seldom occurs with a fabric that has been on offer for half a century. It should occasionally, though, because designers tend to forget that fine quality, canonical design is always current.

What’s put me in mind of all this, of course, is the motto on the bottom of Brunschwig’s order blanks ‘GOOD DESIGN IS FOREVER’. So true.

During our tenure in business, we’ve sold a lot of paintings, from our own stock and sourcing pictures for clients. We do this with some facility, as our background is in the fine arts. However, we had chosen some time ago to have our main area of specialization the decorative arts of the 18th century in England. Our present exhibition of art work from McColl Fine Art has reminded us of why we made this choice.

There are things generally a bit more matter of fact about the sale of 18th century furniture that makes it a bit- actually, a considerable bit- easier to shift than pictures. A Regency period dining table, for instance, naturally goes into a dining room. The client, whether interior design or private collector, tells us room dimensions, how many people they wish to seat, and their budget for such an item, and, well, there will doubtless be some palaver, but you get the general idea.

Not so with artwork. What we’ve found is that everyone, and I do mean everyone, is an art expert. While Keith and I bring the same sort of selection criteria to art as inventory- with price based on quality, condition, and rarity- people insist on waxing eloquent about pictures. As well as throwing out a bunch of adjectives, it is amazing the numbers of people who still try to achieve a site of meaning by examining the painter’s motive for painting. In that most of the painters whose work we represent are long dead, I am sometimes tempted to suggest a Ouija board, but have so far been able to restrain myself.

The adjectives  and the communing with the dead together form a methodology we always term ‘appreciationism’, referring to that long-practiced schools and museum education department pastime of art appreciation. I can still see troops of small children, and women and a few men of a certain age, making their way through the National Gallery, listening with rapt attention to the marginally informed docent spill some sort of palaver about the artist suffering from tuberculosis, or syphilis. One thing that is worth pointing out- TB and VD were major killers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries- that an artist was suffering from either or both does not, in itself, signify any more than that a grocer was likewise afflicted.

Moreover, the production of art was and is a way to make a living. Admittedly, a talent for painting, for instance, is certainly a help, but, at the end of the day, paintings were and are produced for sale with the artist using the money- wait for it- to pay rent, buy groceries, or straighten the childrens’ teeth. We’ve all seen the movies of van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec driving themselves crazy with drink, which drink is, presumably, a palliative consumed by the artist to assuage the pain of ripping out their souls and placing them in artistic form on a canvas. It is my understanding that, in truth, it is far more likely to be the artist’s childrens’ dentist who is so in need of a palliative.