The Market |
Asian art in New York
March 25, 2010 |
Asian art in New York
March 20 to 28 is Asia Week in New York, when more than thirty dealers, auction houses, and museums come together to offer an array of exhibitions, sales, lectures, and receptions highlighting the best in Asian art.
The Asia Society, the organizer of this year’s event, will kick off the week with a March 22 benefit reception and dinner dance, Celebration of Asia Week: AllThingsArtASIA, and will have two special exhibitions on view in its museum: Arts of Ancient Viet Nam: From River Plain to Open Sea and Pilgrimage and Buddhist Art. Other participating museums—including the Brooklyn Museum, the China Institute, the Japan Society, the Korea Society, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, and the Rubin Museum of Art, among others—will also be holding special tours of their galleries and exhibitions during the week.
This year’s Arts of Pacific Asia Show, the centerpiece of Asia Week, will be held from March 25 to 28 at 7W New York at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, the same location as last year. The seventy-five exhibiting galleries come from the United States, Europe, and Asia, and will feature important textiles and statuary, paintings, furniture, ceramics, small objects, and jewelry ranging in period from early millennia to the twentieth century. A preview will be held on March 24.
The Market |
The European Fine Art Fair
March 20, 2010 |
The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) Maastricht features emerging dealers in a special section of their own.
TEFAF Maastricht has a notorious-ly long waiting list of dealers hoping to exhibit there. Upon becoming chairman of the executive committee in 2007, the Asian art dealer Ben Janssens listened to a number of young dealers who bemoaned the fact that getting a booth at TEFAF seemed unattainable in their lifetimes. As a response, he initiated Showcase three years ago—a special area of the fair for those with businesses established no less than three years and no more than ten prior to the date of the fair. Showcase dealers must have international standing and quality standards as impeccable as those of the fair’s regular exhibitors.
Showcase amounts to a one-time-only fast track into the spotlight, although participants may later apply for a regular booth at the fair. This year, two alumni of the first Showcase—Emanuel von Baeyer, a German-born, London-based dealer in old master drawings, prints, and paintings, will join the new “works on paper” section (another Janssens innovation), and contemporary jeweler Otto Jakob of Karls-ruhe, Germany—return with booths in the main part of the show.
Von Baeyer says that the Showcase “is a testing ground for both parties. The organizers can invite a younger generation of participants, who can see if the fair is for them,” al-though, he admits, he has not yet met a participant who would not jump at the chance to come back. Fellow 2008 Show--case exhibitor, European sculpture and works of art dealer Bernard Deschee-maeker of Antwerp, confesses that “if the fair organizers called me up and told me a spot had opened up at the last minute, even a small stand in a corner, I would do it without question.”
Others concur. Rob Winter, a Kyoto-based specialist in Japanese arms and armor, who also exhibited in Show-case’s debut season, has now eschewed all other fairs to concentrate on getting a permanent booth at TEFAF. Michel Thieme, an Amsterdam-based tribal arts dealer who exhibited in 2009’s Show-case, initially balked at the prospect of applying for a booth at the main fair because of the financial commitment and the pressure of finding enough important new objects. But he has now set his sight on taking a stand in 2013. Fair organizers have advised him that it’s not too soon to start applying.
What is it about the experience that elec-----trifies participants about the Show---case program despite the small booths and the relative isolation from the main part of the fair? Their reasons invariably include great sales, new clients, increased prestige with old clients, unprecedented press coverage, and the unexpected and welcome sense of camaraderie with fellow Showcase exhibitors. Winter, for instance, was nervous about how his arms and armor would be received at a show where virtually no one was dealing in Japanese things. And yet to the very last his sales never stopped. He reports that “it was constantly buzzing.” Paris-based Alexis Renard, who deals in Islamic and Indian art, and who took part in last year’s Showcase, was also apprehensive at first. But he found that unlike other fairs, collectors seem to welcome new and unfamiliar arenas and do not hesitate to make a purchase. The large number of museum curators in attendance also impressed him strongly.
Alistair Crawford, a New York–based dealer in Georg Jensen and contemporary silver and gold is also an alumnus of Showcase 2009. He describes TEFAF’s organizational prowess as “superb.” He does caution that “you’ve got to get it right because you’ve only got one shot at it.” Janssens explains that his aims in establishing the program were twofold: “One goal is to give young dealers a chance,” and the other is simply “to show just how many young dealers there are…to fight against the pessimism of some in the profession,” he says, referring to a widespread sense on the part of older, more established dealers that they are the last of a dying tribe in a world that lacks interest in history and connoisseurship. He seems to be succeeding on both counts.
TEFAF · Maastricht Exhibition and Conference Center, the Netherlands · March 12–21 · www.tefaf.com» More
The Market |
Dealer Profile Erik and Cornelia Thomsen
March 19, 2010 | Erik Thomsen has learned Japanese twice. The first time he was a child living in Kyoto and Shizuoka Prefecture close to Mount Fuji, where his parents were missionaries in the 1950s and 1960s. “My brother and I were the only foreigners in school,” Thomsen recalls, and he and Hans, younger by a year and a half, naturally absorbed the language in school and in the streets, and just as naturally let it go when they left for Denmark, when Thomsen was ten. The second time he was at Middlebury College, in Vermont, where he and Hans wanted to see if they could revive their Japanese fluency by taking one of Middlebury’s intensive language courses. “Only the muscles remembered,” Thomsen says: their vocabulary and grammar had vanished, but their accents were perfect. It required three intensive summer courses for them to regain their fluency.
After the third summer, Thomsen decided to fill an apprenticeship at the Tanaka Onkodo Gallery in Tokyo. “I just saw it as an opportunity to be immersed with a Japanese family and to improve my Japanese,” he recalls. “I was planning to return afterward to graduate school in Heidelberg, Germany, to continue my studies in Far Eastern art history and to finish my master’s degree in German literature.”
Current & Coming |
Eames House tour contest
February 22, 2010 |
The Delaware-based type foundry and design firm House Industries is offering three lucky individuals a chance to win an exclusive tour of the Eames House (Case Study House #8) in Pacific Palisades, California, where the dynamic design duo lived from 1949. Although the grounds of the Eames House are open to the public, tours of the interior are usually only available to Eames Foundation members once a year. Winners will be announced tomorrow, February 23. Don't miss your chance—enter here!
For a peek inside, check out this vintage photographs from the Library of Congress:
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Discovery |
A to Z: Penwork
February 22, 2010 | 
A Regency penwork cabinet, England, 19th cetury. Courtesy of Mallet/1stdibs.com.
Penwork A type of decoration applied to japanned furniture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, mainly in England. Furniture to be treated in this way was first japanned black, then patterns were painted on in white japan and finally the details and shading were executed in black India ink with a fine quill pen. The effect is delicate and lacy, rather like an etching in reverse, with white motifs on a black ground (The Penguin Dictionary of the Decorative Arts edited by John Fleming and Hugh Honour)» More
Pickle Dish, American China Manufactory (Bonnin and Morris), Philadelphia, 1771-72. Soft-paste porcelain with lead glaze; height 4 3/16, width 4 1/2
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