The MacDonaldisation of Cork Street – London

While Michael recovers, a post from Elliot Lee’s excellent Art Antiques Design blog

For almost 90 years, Cork Street in Mayfair has been one of the most famous streets for art galleries in London, and possibly the world. Cork Street is known and loved not only in Britain but internationally, and provides a major draw to London and the UK throughout the course of a year. The history and atmosphere of this street, as well as its close proximity to the Royal Academy of Art, make this a unique place to visit for collectors, art enthusiasts, students and tourists alike.

The careers of many prominent British artists – Barbara Hepworth, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Lynn Chadwick, to name a few – have been closely related to Cork Street.

In August 2012, Standard Life, the landlord for seven galleries on Cork Street, sold the building to a property development company called Native Land.  The Mayor Gallery (the oldest gallery on Cork Street), Beaux Arts, Alpha Gallery, Adam Gallery, Stoppenbach & Delestre,Waterhouse & Dodd, and Gallery 27 are all affected.

The leases for a number of these Galleries are due to expire between March and June next year. It is thought that planning applications will be submitted to Westminster Council in the next 3-4 months, and from July next year, short-term breakable leases will be in place. The affected Galleries will ultimately  have to re-locate in order to make way for the MacDonaldisation of the street. If, as has been suggested, Pollen Estates – owner of a number of buildings on the opposite side of the road which house another dozen Galleries – follow suit, this would, surely, spell the end of Cork Street as a hub for the showcasing of artistic and creative talent of all periods.

Westminster Council are yet to receive any planning application. They have advised us that when the application is entered for consideration, any objections or  opinions should be registered with them. Please see the link below:

http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/environment/planning/comment/

Elliot Lee

The Housecall

While Michael convalesces, a reprise of an earlier blog

Something that Keith and I do a lot, and always enjoy, is making a housecall. If at all possible, we visit the premises where one of our sold pieces will be installed, when it is installed, to give it a once over, make certain there’s been no damage in transit, and wax what needs to be waxed and polish what needs to be polished. As long as we’ve been in business, we’ve never installed anything where the homeowner, no matter how busy, grand, or vaunted, was not there to greet us.  I’m not letting my ego run away with me here- this has very little to do with anyone’s desire for time with the Chappell visage, but more probably with the level of intimacy established between dealer and buyer.

The why of this, ostensibly, is that one has sold something that will be on display in an intimate space- the buyer’s home. Even the most public of people still consider their own homes to at least some degree their sanctum sanctorum. From clothes closet to foyer, the notion of a person’s home being their castle encompasses what is a basic touchstone. And that one’s possessions articulate with that psychically castellated space functions to make home and furnishings an outward manifestation of one’s personality. This starts to sound like all our clients are megalomaniacs, but, frankly, in our experience, none of them are. In fact, when we make a housecall, as we did this last week in Houston, the powerful lady and gentleman homeowners were supremely gracious, and eager to discuss their collecting passions and objectives. As their purchases from us were adjuncts to their already established collecting foci, we had lots to talk about. This is what’s known as ‘common ground’.

But it’s substantially more than that- it has to be, as discussions and concomitant relationships with clients go on for years and years. In this age of the internet where it may only be the first purchase that is consummated in our galleries and subsequent purchases made online, one would assume that the connection between dealer and collector would wane. To date, I’m happy to say, it hasn’t. While we love what we do, and are fascinated by the objects we sell and feel a connection with the material culture in which they were wrought, this is all very much part of a continuum that involves that part of the bilateral relationship manifested in the housecall.

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.