We had an inquiry from one of our better interior design customers a few days ago, asking after a shallow sideboard. That modern day dining rooms are narrow always begs requests for sideboards and dining tables that are shallow. We are able to shift 40” to 48” deep dining tables with alacrity- one of the finest tables we’ve ever handled is 54” in depth, and, despite the oohs and aahs from punters, it’s still here.

Purpose-built dining tables have always varied in dimension, but the fact is, the standard six-leg sideboard was meant to be a fairly deep piece of furniture, something in the neighborhood of at least 24” to as deep as 40”. Its original function was to serve as an in-dining room butler’s pantry, holding extra napery, with its cellaret drawers divided into bottle-sized divisions, lead-lined to hold water for keeping various types of firewater cool. A side note- sideboard examples from the north of England and Scotland, while containing drawers with bottle divisions, frequently do not have the lead liners- presumably it was so cold there that artificial methods for chilling wines were unnecessary.

The other item that is a frequent accoutrement of a sideboard is a cupboard for holding a chamber pot. Yes, you’ve read correctly. Why on earth? you ask. Well, after the ladies withdrew following supper, the gentlemen remained to drink themselves legless, and, naturally enough, needed something near at hand for relieving calls of nature. Depending on how grand the house, footmen were sometimes on hand to assist by holding the chamber pot in near proximity. Presumably another footman would hold on to the otherwise swaying gentleman, as well, to ensure a true and accurate arc.

All of this Georgian scatology, though, is by way of indicating that the original purpose of the sideboard tends to make it perforce a complicated and large piece of case furniture that cannot always be accommodated in a 21st century dining room. Sideboards couldn’t be accommodated in 20th century dining rooms, either. Consequently, for at least a century antiques dealers have blithely butchered these pieces, more than any other type of item than I can think of. Given how complicated the sideboard is in its original incarnation, one can understand, then, and appreciate to what extent a sideboard would have to be altered to decrease its original, purpose-determined depth.

In making a sideboard shallower, the back portion of the piece is sliced off lengthwise, eliminating any rear gallery, and requiring drawers be shortened, as well. Precise Georgian dovetails joining the drawer linings are eliminated, and typically replaced with- well, something less than precise. Bottle divisions and the linings are almost invariably stripped out, too- who needs them anyway, since champagne is kept in a refrigerator. Gone, too, would be the pot cupboard, sited as it typically was on the side and toward the rear of the original piece.

Unfortunately, this penchant for alteration has gone on so long that even heavily altered pieces can now look venerable. What would have seemed obvious when first done, with a number of years worth of subsequent use now looks old. Bottom line, though, is that a sideboard altered in the early 20th century is not any more valuable or desirable than a piece despoiled just yesterday.

As a child, my favorite Walt Disney movie was Pollyanna. Sorry she was an orphan, of course, but the prospect of being ensconced in Aunt Polly’s astonishing Victorian house looked, to my young eyes, too good to be true. Of course, that was the hallmark of any Disney movie of the time- or Disney anything including Disneyland, for that matter- an idealized image of turn of the century America that did not include things like, for instance, horse manure.

But let’s not soil poor Pollyanna with horse manure. It is, actually, Pollyanna’s ‘glad game’ that I’m in mind of. For you poor souls that don’t know about it, or know why an optimist is sometimes unfairly dubbed a Pollyanna, she was, you might find interesting to know, given to looking on the bright side of everything. Pollyanna would, as the old joke would have it, ask for a shovel and then dig like mad when confronted with a manure pile, as, presumably, where there is dung, there will be a horse. On yesterday morning’s news show, a psychologist was featured who took the view that our present morass of economic problems was made worse by our general perception that they are problems- what exacerbates any economic woe is our societal refusal, as it were, to indulge in the glad game. Well, of course, it is hard to feel glad about $5 per gallon unleaded gasoline, isn’t it? I am, though. Frankly, I wish it were something closer to the $11 per gallon our friends in England are paying. As I got off the San Francisco Municipal Railway this morning and walked up Sansome Street to our Jackson Square galleries, I had to dodge a half dozen people who were so, shall we say, plump, they impeded the passage of everyone on the sidewalk. If you haven’t noticed, we are replete with fat people in this country and why? As a nation, the private passenger car is still seen as the only reasonable way to get from one place to another. Consequently, we seldom walk and get only the least possible amount of exercise, piling into our cars for even the shortest trips, usually to the grocery store to stock up on frozen pizza, potato chips, and Coca-Cola.

Don’t get me wrong, though- I’m not criticizing Coca-Cola. Although it has been a significant fellow traveler along with automobiles in making us a nation of porkers, I am glad the corn that is used to make its major ingredient- impossible to metabolize, spare tire around the middle producing high fructose corn syrup- is now being price-co-opted into the  manufacture of ethanol, a renewal energy resource. Doubtless Coke will be forced to return to reliance on its traditional sweetener, sugar, resulting in, I’m glad to say, a return to boom times for the moribund sugar industry in Hawaii.

But, of course, ethanol cannot be produced in unlimited supply, and its use in transportation fuel will only function to moderate the rate of increase of fuel costs- not make them any lower. And this brings us around to the point of the beginning- they shouldn’t be any lower, as the increased cost will, at long last, force fat Americans out of their cars and onto the sidewalks, I’m glad to say. Horse manure? I prefer to indulge in the Glad game.

My partner is a CPA whose post-collegiate experience in audit came from Price Waterhouse. 20 years of my working life were spent in commercial lending with now sadly departed First Interstate Bank. I say this by way of indicating that explicit disclosure is how we are experienced in doing business. Those of you who have made purchases from us know that, whatever the type or scale of transaction, it is accompanied by a signed invoice.

And why not? I ask rhetorically. A signed invoice wherein are disclosed all the terms and conditions of the sale is a pretty basic contract, outlining as it does the mutuality of agreement between buyer and seller.

It is surprising, therefore, when I read today about a solicitor speaking to a conference of UK auctioneers who cautioned that it is not okay to pay a ‘gratuity’ to someone who directs to them a possible consignor. What a surprise. The auctioneers are further advised to disclose the payment of any such gratuity to all parties.

That this would have to be the subject of a public forum leads one to surmise that, in England at least, payments of what I would term kick-backs must be terribly prevalent. Very sorry to hear it, and very sorry to hear that auctioneers must be at least be reminded, if they even knew in the first place, that they have a fiduciary responsibility to their clients that obligates them to disclose all aspects of the sales transaction.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on auction houses, as kick-backs within the trade can take many forms. I am reminded of a discussion we had fairly recently with one of our lawyer-neighbors on Jackson Square. A nice guy, but as a litigator, he’s a bit of a bulldog- rather what you want, of course, if he’s on your side. He was inquiring about the extent to which we had done business with a prominent local interior designer. As it happened, he named someone we knew, but had never done business with. The lawyer went on to mention that he had prosecuted the designer, on behalf of the designer’s former client, for taking kickbacks from a couple of dealers in mid-century modern furniture that were used in the client’s home. Would the designer have used items from these dealers anyway? Perhaps, but that isn’t the point- the designer had not disclosed the receipt of this ‘gratuity’ to his client, which gratuity, of course, enriched the designer at the client’s expense.

Unfortunately, we have antiques dealer colleagues, not so many in this country as abroad, who love to pay kick-backs to anyone, interior designer or otherwise, who bring buyers into their shops. This may be considered by the dealer as a cost of doing business, but, of course, it is the buyer who ultimately foots the bill. One wonders, of course, how many and how much in ‘gratuities’ were paid by the dealer(s) involved in the evolving scandal mentioned in an earlier blog, and reported extensively in The New York Times involving the sale of fudged-up ‘antiques’ at inflated prices.

What was announced officially yesterday was something that the trade knew for a while now- venerable dealers, and their own near neighbors in Knightsbridge, Hotspur and Jeremy will cease trading soon. Their remaining stock will be sold at Christie’s in November.

Doubtless trading conditions have been tough, but the principals of both firms cite as their reasons for closing that they are in their sixties, are tired of working 7 days a week year-round and would like to retire.

Based on our experience with even our short tenure in the trade, I am more than inclined to take them at their word. As much as we enjoy what we do, it is all-consuming. And in spite of general complaints about difficulty in current trading conditions, I don’t know, even in better economic times, when it ever was not all-consuming.

In what were, arguably, the good old days in the art and antiques trade in the early years of the last century, even the redoubtable Joseph Duveen, for all his elaborate sales and showroom apparatus, was essentially a one-man band. Although he had a worldwide network of ‘runners’ scouting items to purchase, it was largely Duveen who negotiated the deal. On the sales side, Duveen’s involvement was even greater. Virtually nothing closed without his direct involvement. As he made his peripatetic way from his galleries in New York to London to Paris, he knew, as his staff knew, that nothing of importance would occur unless he was there in person. It was a punishing existence that forced him to interrupt his schedule for six weeks every summer to ‘de-tox’ at one of the European spa towns. There were, of course, other Duveens in the business, but the patriarch was more than primus inter pares, and even the younger family members bit the dust before Joseph Duveen.

Depth and continuity of management in the art and antiques trade is a tricky proposition, and for successful galleries it has traditionally spanned generations. Duveen’s success was built on the two generations before him. I mentioned Galerie J. Kugel a couple of blog entries ago- they represent 5 generations, and Robin Kern of the aforementioned Hotspur is the third generation of his family operating the business. The why of this is hard to put a finger on. What I do know, however, is that the successful dealer must possess an encyclopedic knowledge about his particular field. He must not only know about the objects he represents, but must also have an exhaustive knowledge about the historical period from which they came. It occurs to me that, once acquired, knowledge about the business and the reams of auxiliary knowledge that must also be part of a dealer’s stock in trade is most successfully passed on to the dealer’s progeny who’ve acquired it by a constant exposure akin to osmosis. Although successful, even the best firms are seldom very large in terms of staff. They do, however, tend to punch above their weight, probably as a function of the high profile material they handle, and the high profile collectors from whom they derive their patronage.

Doubtless this note of affiliation with the great and the good has required that so many successful dealers traditionally were composed of the younger sons who, thanks to primogeniture, stood not to inherit but could at least take advantage of family connection to make a go of it in the art  and antiques trade. Now, it seems as if the sexier activity is hedge fund management, so the trade is bereft of a lot of its outside pool of staff support.

Frankly, lots of people who today might formerly have worked in the retail trade also find they have a home at the major auction houses. With their efforts to market their services to the retail buyer, the auction houses are much larger staff-wise than they used to be. The prospect of a regular paycheck, and regular working hours, are too good for the present generation of would-otherwise-be dealers to pass up.

The long and the short of it is, of the dealers we know, very few have involvement in the business save the present generation. Once the existing ownership decides to hang it up, the only prospect is to sell the storefront and consign the stock to auction. Unfortunately, this has happened fairly often in the last few years and the prospect is that it will continue apace. None of us in the trade are getting any younger.

Since I know that, of course, you are riveted to the computer screen taking in my blog entries as though they were divine emanations, my dozen or so readers will doubtless remember a few weeks back the discussion of the May contemporary art sales in New York. This last sentence sounds more of the snotty variety than the humorously ironic. It might be because the weather in San Francisco as I write this is uncomfortably warm. My naturally buoyant mood, given that the inside of our galleries is like a baking oven, seems to have been affected. In any event, the entry will be a follow-on from an earlier one, discussing the late June impressionist and contemporary art sales in London. Record-breakers, there, too, with Monet’s 1919 Le Bassin aux Nympheas, consigned from an American collection, selling for £36.5million to a private collector. One of the sources I’ve consulted said the European-based buyer was invested in ‘natural resources’ (read ‘oil money’) as the source of his wealth. Since it is a combination of Russian oligarchs and oil sheiks that are driving the top end of the market, one wonders from which yacht off Cap Ferrat or Corfu the telephone bid was placed. Presumably they are in a more comfortable spot than I am right now.

What’s apparent, however, is that it is, as with all other material, the best of the best that’s making record prices. Mind you, at Christie’s and Sotheby’s not much went unsold.

It isn’t too surprising that the most prominent work was from an artist, Claude Monet, whose best work, for a couple of decades now, has sold into the 8 figures. Strong selling prices, as evidence of market demand, are arguably as large a component of what determines canonicity as intellectual criticism. Having said that, one wonders what place would have been made in the canon for the work of Monet had it not been for the critical framework established by Roger Fry when he mounted and curated the first exhibition outside France of impressionist and post-impressionist work.
The point is, even when it seems to be immutable, the canon is not unchanging. Witness a painting by Gino Severini, a central figure of Italian Futurism, that sold for £13.4million at Sotheby’s during the same spate of sales. Futurist, as Constructivist, as Vorticist, and as, frankly, analytical Cubism, have recently not been as commercially popular as some other works. Perhaps it is because, aesthetically, all of them have an overtly period look,  with their angularity and flattened perspective, making them easy to place within the first quarter of the last century. As the Futurists celebrated modern machine age culture, it is not surprising that natural forms often have the appearance of machine parts. Of course, if it were not for the machine age, Futurism would not have become a movement at all. It was the technology of the high speed printing press and the publication in the mass circulation Le Figaro of what has come to be known as the Futurist Manifesto that brought adherents- writers as well as artists, together. They were able to read about and locate other like-minded souls in the cutting edge communication tool of the day- the newspaper. Unfortunately, the Futurist Manifesto also promoted warfare for its ‘cleansing’ effect of sweeping away the old order and also caught the attention of a then-nascent, ultra nationalistic political movement in Italy. From the get-go, Mussolini’s Fascist Party was strongly aligned with Futurism.

Interestingly, Gino Severini was not as highly political as his other colleagues, most notably Umberto Boccioni. In spite of his early embrace of Futurism, Severini seems through his career to have considered himself more closely aligned with Parisian schools, including Cubism and the Dadaists. As well, Severini, for whatever reason, tended to avoid representing overtly charged subjects that were Futurist favorites. As with his fairly tame Danseuse, the Severini lithograph in our inventory Arlequins will hardly evoke a strong, call to arms response in the way works by Boccioni were intended to. Although not so much fodder for art critics, it is possibly this easy on the eyes aesthetic that made for Severini’s good outing at Sotheby’s.