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Winter Antiques Show Offers a Collection of Recent and Rare Works - The New York Times

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ART & DESIGN|ART REVIEW

Winter Antiques Show Offers aCollection of Recent and Rare Works
By ROBERTA SMITH

JAN. 22, 2016

The Winter Antiques Show is a short-lived galaxy of colliding worlds. Nearly
every booth provides a glimpse into some areas of visual culture, fromEgyptian antiquities to American folk art to postwar Italian art glass.
The collisions at this year’s show at the Park Avenue Armory are greaterthan ever because the cutoff date for material has been moved to the presentfrom 1969. One dealer — referring to show’s tradition of fine furniture —observed that this iteration is “less brown” than its predecessors.
Things get going with the featured exhibition, a lively potpourri of works
organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford andintroduced by a Jack Pierson sculpture that is all but site-specific in thissetting: It consists of the text shorthand OMG spelled out in mismatchedletters from vintage signs. It hovers above abstract paintings by Ellsworth
Kelly and Franz Kline; a portrait by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun and an
early exceptional landscape (with travelers) by Frederic Edwin Church.
Especially notable is a thronelike “Charter Oak Chair,” a tour de force madehttp://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/arts/design/winter-antiques-show-offers-a-collection-of-recent-and-rare-works.html?_r=0

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1/27/2016

Winter Antiques Show Offers a Collection of Recent and Rare Works - The New York Timesfrom a tree that played a crucial role in Connecticut colonial history.
Several booths offer OMG moments. Front and center at Gerald Peters
is a formidable bronze urn by the American sculptor Paul Manship. Lost City
Arts has a bronze gong slightly smaller than a door, by Harry Bertoia, and asmall orchestra of his other sound sculptures. And the display at Robert
Young is crowned by the large molded copper face of a clock from around1800 that once adorned a turret in Yorkshire, England. Don’t miss a little gem
tucked in a corner: the naïve bust of an English woman with staring eyes,
carved in pine around 1890.
The new cutoff date alleviates some of the show’s traditional stuffiness.
For example, Elle Shushan, in addition to the portrait miniatures from times
past that are her specialty, is showing photographs in the same style by Bettina
von Zwehl, a contemporary artist. At Liz O’Brien the 20th-century
furnishings include a pair of white-lacquer bookcases by John Dickinson from1978; their looming, robustly sculptural forms expand upon Paul Frankl’s“Skyscraper” cabinets of the 1920s. And Joan B. Mirviss has mounted a little
show of some of the last tea bowls and water jars of Kato Yasukage, a 14thgeneration Japanese potter who died in a car accident in 2012. For context
there’s a cluster of ceramic vessels by his elders (“deceased Japanese nationaltreasures”), including four by the great Shoji Hamada that cover 30 years of
his remarkable development.
At Todd Merrill, a newcomer to this fair, nearly everything dates fromafter 1969, starting with “Three Mauves,” a booming tapestry by the FlemishAmerican artist Jan Yoors. Its style is hard-edge Color Field, its date, around1976. It overlooks an aggressively faceted console in chromed steel (1973) byPaul Evans and several large vases from 2015 by Shari Mendelson. Made ofplastic trash and foil, they both parody and pay homage to ancient glass. Mr.
Merrill seems to favor a high-spirited incompatibility that is unusual here.
At Olde Hope Antiques a large lion in wood relief blends perfectly with

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Winter Antiques Show Offers a Collection of Recent and Rare Works - The New York Times

all the American folk art there, but closer inspection reveals that it was madeby the ingenious Bernard Langlais in 1963. At Geoffrey Diner, barrel chairs
in iron and leather that might almost be Wiener Werkstätte are by the Swedish
designer Mats Theselius, from 1991. They share an ornate Arts and Crafts
carpet by C.F.A. Voysey with an outstanding burl coffee table by GeorgeNakashi
Another newcomer is Kagedo, a veteran of the Asian art fair once staged
at the Armory, where nearly every piece argues for the overlooked strengths ofearly 20th-century Japanese modernism. The layered colors and carved lavalamp forms of a small lacquer box by Tsuishu Yozei exemplifies traditionrenewed. So does the abbreviated naturalism of two rare river otters in bronze
by Tsuda Shinobu: The animals look almost wet.
Next door, Throckmorton has brought a seemingly encyclopedic arrayof pre-Columbian sculptures, vessels and textiles, starting with a red Colima
vessel from 100 B.C. to A.D. 250 that looks like it could have been in made in
the 20th century. Nearby Stephen & Carol Huber has mounted its usual
superb display of meticulously-researched embroideries and samplers. And
the exceptional trove at Peter Pap Oriental rugs includes, all from the 19thcentury, a large and rare Suzani embroidery, dense with red flowers fromUzbekistan; a provincial Persian garden carpet that beautifully simplifies acourt style; and an elegant rug, also Persian, with a spare center medallion on
an empty field, made before the arrival of Victorian style.
Several first-timers have mounted immersive displays. Gemini
Antiques is dense with vintage American toys, most alluringly scores of castmetal building banks, painted and plain. Galerie St. Etienne is almost all
Grandma Moses paintings — including one of the wood embroideries thatpreceded her efforts with brush and canvas — with an outstanding John Kanelandscape in their midst. The exceptionally full booth of James Infanteconsiders several strands of European modernism, topped off by two starlike
cast-glass chandeliers made in Czechoslovakia in 1931 with a decidedly sci-fi

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Winter Antiques Show Offers a Collection of Recent and Rare Works - The New York Times

look. And Thomas Heneage Art Books offers a small library of volumes
some recent and some rare behind a wall of tiny vitrines displaying antiquecameos, medieval seal matrices and a little rainbow of glass paste intaglios byJames Tassie (1735-99).
Certain dealers have forged complete style statements. Kelly Kinzle sets
off its American folk art and furniture with wallpaper of leafy greens. H.
Blairman & Sons has recreated an English Arts and Crafts study, profuse
with ceramics and metalwork, including a severe toast rack from the great,
peripatetic Christopher Dresser. But the high point is a group of lusterware
vases with hand painted Persian patterns from the Pilkington Tile and Pottery
Company. Formerly owned by the architect James Stirling, they glow fromatop an exceptional desk by William Arthur Smith Benson. And Apter­
Fredericks have created the somewhat startling effect of floor-to-ceilingwindows overlooking Uptown Manhattan, while their arrangement of ware
conjures the living room of a prewar apartment.
A tour of the show’s paintings should include the Fine Art Society,where you’ll find three canvases by Walter Sickert — most outstandingly thewar-themed 1914 “Tipperary” — along with lively floral still lifes, all from the1920s, by Ivon Hitchens, Christopher Wood and William Nicholson, Britain’s
genius of light At Jonathan Boos, the centerpiece is “The Pigeons,” from1948-49 by the Magic Realist Henry Koerner, which encompasses income
inequality, childhood fear, racial strife and romance, all on a pink marble stairshown to be made of brick. At Adelson there is “Private Way,” one of Stuart
Davis’s very best early townscapes and “The Plowman” from 1942, a strong
Jacob Lawrence painting. And Michael Altman has an orange-on-orange
seascape that may be the largest, most Abstract Expressionist painting by
Milton Avery you’ll ever see.
At Conner Rosenkranz, the two stained-glass windows by Robert
Winthrop Chanler that flank a Beauford Delaney abstraction once graced thestudio of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum.

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Winter Antiques Show Offers a Collection of Recent and Rare Works - The New York Times

Their turbulent compositions are at once seductive and a bit disturbing. In all,there is much to see.
Correction: January 23, 2016
Because of an editing error, schedule information on Friday with anart review of the Winter Antiques Show, at the Park Avenue Armory
in Manhattan, misstated the website and telephone number for
more information. The website is winterantiquesshow.com, notarmoryonpark.org, and the telephone number is 718-292-7392.
The Winter Antiques Show runs Friday through Jan. 31 at the Park Avenue
Armory, Manhattan; 718-292-7392, ​winterantiquesshow.com.
A version of this review appears in print on January 22, 2016, on page C21 of the New Yorkedition with the headline: Old Collides With Not So Old at the Armory.

© 2016 The New York Times Company

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