Living with Antiques |
A new setting for Iliad Antik
March 11, 2009 | A discreet entrance on East 57th Street leads to the new duplex gallery of Iliad Antik, an expansive emporium of elegant design from the neoclassical, Biedermeier, and art deco eras. To coincide with the firm's tenth anniversary last month the husband and wife team of Adam Brown and Andrea Zemel moved their antiques shop, formerly on 58th Street, to this glamorous new space with gleaming limestone floors and French-polished furniture. Soaring ceilings on the main floor and a dramatic cantilevered staircase to the lower gallery present a contemporary foil to the pieces on display. 
An antiquarian and entrepreneur and a studio artist, respectively, Brown and Zemel came to the antiques trade though circuitous paths. After several years traveling abroad and a brief period in Philadelphia, they eventually came to New York City where they opened Iliad Antik. By that time this erudite pair had developed contacts throughout Eastern Europe-where they were known as "the Americans"—in their pursuit of top-notch Biedermeier pieces. Brown and Zemel, who were lenders to the Milwaukee Art Museum's recent exhibition, Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity, specialize in first period Viennese Biedermeier furniture (1815-1830), and these items take center stage in the showroom. One example, a sofa attributed to Josef Danhauser, shows an unerring sense of balance as well as drama, which, Zemer notes, makes it "seem to defy gravity."
» More
Living with Antiques |
Collecting Zsolnay art pottery, a conversation with Dr. László Gyugyi
March 10, 2009 | Dr. László Gyugyi, a Hungarian-born retired research engineer now living in Pittsburgh, has assembled the finest private collection of Zsolnay art pottery, numbering nearly six hundred pieces. A portion of his collection is now on view at the Forbes Galleries in New York City, before it will be donated to a new cultural center being built in Pécs, Hungary, in the former buildings of the famed Zsolnay facilties. We recently spoke with Dr. Gyugyi about his collection and Zsolnay's remarkable history:
You have been collecting Zsolnay ceramics for over thirty years, how did this collection start?
The Zsolnay collection started almost accidentally, after my arrival in the United States in 1963 as a part of my overall collection of Hungarian art. At a local auction near Pittsburgh I bought my first Zsolnay piece, a folkloric ewer designed by Armin Klein, one of the most talented artists of the factory. The beauty of this relatively simple piece started my interest in Zsolnay. I should add that, although I had lived in Hungary from 1933 (the year of my birth) until 1956 (the year of the Hungarian Revolution), I—and most of my contemporaries—did not know much about the great, earlier achievements of the Zsolnay factory. The accumulating effect of major historical events—the First World War, the dissolution of the mighty Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy, the economic depression, the Second World War—had diminished the world famous artistic production of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, The subsequent Russian occupation of Hungary and eventual nationalization of the factory stopped production altogether. The rapid changes in artistic taste in the first half of the 20th century also tended to downgrade Zsolnay's achievements as being "Victorian." Fortunately, although the artistically great and technically innovative historicist pieces are still underappreciated, the major revival of the art nouveau period starting in the late 1950s reestablished Zsolnay's eminence. This revival gave me the opportunity to become familiar with the great creations of the Zsolnay factory.
» More
Living with Antiques |
Dealer Profile: James Elkind
March 6, 2009 | In 1979 a Barnard College student named Grace Gold was walking down Broadway on Manhattan's Upper West Side when she was struck and killed by a falling piece of a terracotta window lintel that had broken loose from the Regnor, a sixty-seven-year-old apartment house. The next year, in reaction to Gold's death, New York City passed Local Law 10 requiring an inspection of the facades of any building six stories and taller. Building owners had been quietly removing stone carvings and other decorations for years, but many used Local Law 10 to justify the wholesale "scalping" of cornices, balconies, parapets, and other architectural details.
By 1985 an army of engineers and architects specializing in preserving and securing exterior decorations had mobilized to quell the rash of scalpings. But those five years were enough to jumpstart the peripatetic career of James Elkind.
Elkind, owner of Lost City Arts on Cooper Square in Manhattan, is widely known as an authority on mid-century…» More
Living with Antiques |
The Hudson River School at Lake Placid Lodge
February 20, 2009 | Visitors to the newly reopened Lake Placid Lodge in Lake Placid, New York, may be surprised to encounter a large collection of paintings, comprised mostly of works by members of the Hudson River school depicting Adirondack scenes. While many of the works are by artists whose names are probably not familiar to most-William Richardson Tyler, John Olson Hammerstad, Nelson Augustus Moore, James Brade Sword, Augustus Rockwell, and G. H. Boughton-there are some surprises. Among them is a small but beautiful Sunrise, Lake George painted in oil on canvas by Sanford Robinson Gifford in 1877, which hangs near the reception desk. The Philadelphia painter Benjamin Champney's Whiteface Mountain, Lake Placid of 1878 depicts a scene that is nearly identical to what one sees today just outside the hotel and was likely painted a few hundred yards down the shore of the lake. It hangs in the hotel's grand stairwell, which was designed to serve as a sort of gallery for the paintings. Hidden away in a vestibule outside one of the guest rooms is another highlight, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tate's Long Lake of 1875, which features in the foreground a group of three deer-including a majestic six-point buck-gazing up at a group of soaring birds.
» More
Living with Antiques |
In conversation with...Ralph Harvard
February 6, 2009 | While booth design may be a secondary consideration for some exhibitors at the Winter Antiques Show, every year a handful make a splash. Among these, the designs of the New York-based interior designer and architectural historian Ralph Harvard have come to be the most anticipated of the show. We recently caught up with Harvard and asked him to talk about his inspired installations:
How did you get involved in designing booths for Elle Shushan and Sumpter Priddy III for the Winter Antiques Show?
Sumpter and I went to the University of Virginia School of Architecture together many years ago, and I have traded thoughts and observations and insults with him for over twenty-five years. The first booth I did for him was very flashy, so that the little southern country boy would get noticed; it had carefully handmade hand-block-printed paper in vivid bright blue, hot pink, black, and white. We were able to buy it as an overrun from the wallpaper produced for the newly refinished George Wythe House in Williamsburg, Virginia, so the paper had an excellent regional and colonial association.
Sitzmaschine, model #670, Designed by Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), Manufactured by J.& J. Kohn, Austria, ca. 1905.Bent beech wood, steel; height 39
» View All
