The Magazine Antiques

Current & Coming | By The Magazine ANTIQUES

Jewels and Gems in Boston

October 17, 2011  |  

Brooch designed by John Paul Cooper (1869-1933), English, 1908. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; gift of Susan B. Kaplan.

Jewels and more jewels are to be found in the new Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Family Foundation Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which opens on July 19. Jewels, Gems, and Treasures: Ancient to Modern, the inaugural exhibition, includes approxi­mately seventy-five examples, drawn primarily from the museum's own jewelry holdings with a few select loans, that together represent four millennia of personal adornment and the brilliance of the jeweler's art. They range from ancient Egyptian, early Kerma culture (modern Sudan), and Mayan pieces to con­temporary studio jewelry, with the greatest number representing the most famous names in jew­elry history-Lalique, Tiffany and Company, Van Cleef and Arpels, and the like. In addition to the …

Dealer Profile | By The Magazine ANTIQUES

Hirschl and Adler

October 17, 2011  |  "We've done something that hasn't been done before," Stuart P. Feld told me, rais­ing an eyebrow ever so slightly above the rim of his glasses, after the opening earlier this year of Hirschl and Adler's exciting new gallery in the Crown Building, on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street in midtown Manhattan. And indeed, decorative and fine arts of multiple centuries and mediums mingle here in a way that one rarely encounters in an antiques shop or fine arts gallery, or even a museum-not separately but together entirely copacetically. It wets the imagination, even if one is not a collector.

Elizabeth and Stuart P. Feld. Photographs are by Eric W. Baumgartner.

The gallery design, the result of what all par­ties have called an enormously satisfying team effort, was jointly devised by New York architect Evan Mann in close collaboration with the Felds-Stuart and his wife Sue, and their daughter Elizabeth, who has been an official part of the team at Hirschl and Adler since 1999, and now serves as the director of the decorative arts department and managing director of the firm. "Evan is as detail-oriented as a Feld could hope for," Liz says, "and most importantly he understood the importance of the classical line, which is really what enables us to show works of all periods so seamlessly in the new space."

It is at once classic and contemporary, a twenty-first-century home for an art and antiques business with a long and distinguished history. (The firm opened in 1952 and Stuart joined it in 1967, after six years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and became sole proprietor in 1982.) From the front door one proceeds along a hallway to the recep­tion desk, and from there the showrooms open up in several directions at once. Doorway widths and ceiling heights vary, each chosen to create unclut­tered sight lines that allow the eye to take in a huge range of paintings and decorative arts, yet not feel overwhelmed. The main enfilade of showrooms permits enormous flexibility: viewing the open­ing installation from the south end, for example, encompassed paintings by contemporary artist John Moore as well as by earlier American and European painters and folk artists, sculpture, furni­ture, and glass, culminating in the north gallery with a quintessential neoclassical Boston sofa and a grand manner portrait flanked by English Argand sconces.

Flexibility is important because exhibitions change often: between now and when this issue is printed, a show of the works of William Adolphe Bouguereau and his contemporaries will have been mounted and taken down, and "Masterworks: The Best of Hirschl and Adler" will be on view-a multi­tude of the finest examples of the gallery's fine and decorative arts, including aesthetic period works. In the not too distant future the "World of Duncan Phyfe" will take center stage.

Beyond the actual physical layout of the gal­leries, two other elements are key to making the space so adaptable to the many different types of art Hirschl and Adler has to display: the light­ing and the wall colors-the latter are Benjamin Moore's Balboa Mist and Collingwood, two shades of warm gray that are contemporary yet equally as complimentary to a Gothic revival sofa as to a twenty-first-century painting.

An enfilade of galleries seam­lessly displays American and European furniture, decora­tive arts, and paintings of multiple centuries.

"The design process was exciting," Liz recalls. "Since we didn't use an interior designer, it was very specific, very detail oriented and required us to make decisions on the most minute aspects of the job." Mann appreciated the Felds' input: "it was refreshing to have a client willing to massage things-evolve details, shift walls-even as those things were getting built," he says. And some would-be problems resulted in brilliant solutions: when Mann realized that the walls between the two galler­ies at the north end would have to be a cumbersome eighteen inches deep to accommodate structural beams above, Liz and Stuart immediately brightened, "vitrines!" -where they can showcase fragile porce­lains and other vulnerable objects that would other­wise have to be stored out of harm's way.

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The Market | By Courtney Bowers

More on Manz

March 24, 2011  |  Tiffany and Company. Shreve, Crump and Low. Black, Starr and Frost. Marcus and Company. Gorham. Raymond C. Yard. These are just a few of the prominent jewelry retailers supplied by the German-born New York jeweler Gustav Manz in the first decades of the twentieth century. Hitherto little known, Manz's work is examined in "Where credit is due: The life and jewelry of Gustav Manz" by Courtney Bowers, in the September-October 2010 issue of ANTIQUES. But his clients during his peak years-between about 1910 and 1925-were too numerous to document there. The listing that follows, collated from Manz's business records at Winterthur, along with the number of sales he made to each, shows why. Though Manz's mark almost never appears on a piece, his jewelry is definitely out there to be found.

Current & Coming | By Staff

Williamsburg Forum 2011

October 25, 2010  |  Colonial Williamsburg will convene its sixty-third annual Antiques Forum between February 20 and 24, 2011. The theme this year, Decorative Arts Forensics: How We Know What We Know, is intended to shed light on some of the fascinating advances in techniques for historical research and scientific investigation that have opened new avenues of verification for curators, collectors, and scholars. The forum will bring together a group of widely recognized authorities, who will present recent findings on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture, metals, ceramics, glass, clocks, musical instruments, and architecture. In addition to Colonial Williamsburg curators and conservators, scheduled speakers include garden historian Paul F. “Chip” Callaway; Robert Hunter, ceramics scholar; Lynne Dakin Hastings from James Madison’s Montpelier; Tom Savage from Winterthur; Daniel Kurt Ackermann from MESDA; and noted antiques dealer and auctioneer Leigh Keno. Optional hands-on workshops with the…» More