Dealer Profile: David Lavender

Editorial Staff Art

One of the surprises of the huge Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé sale this past February was the splendid selection of objets de vertu the two men had gathered for their twentieth-century Kunstkammer. The way in which this assemblage contravened recent trends in collecting was on my mind as I waited to see the London dealer David Lavender, whose …

Endnotes: Duck call

Editorial Staff Art

This Canada goose clearly lost its bearings, migrating all the way to South America in the twentieth century before returning to the United States this past August. A routine e-mail inquiry to Christie’s in New York resulted in the exciting realization that it was only the fourth decoy of its type to come to light. What makes it so special …

The Art of the Samurai at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Editorial Staff Art, Exhibitions

Selecting a single object from the myriad works on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s current exhibition Art of the Samurai (through January 10, 2010) presents a challenge. The exhibit, which Roberta Smith of the New York Times has called a “once-in-lifetime event for children, war buffs and connoisseurs of all ages, even garden-variety art lovers,” includes more than …

Superlative finds at the International Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show

Editorial Staff Art

Wrapping up the 21st annual International Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show, which closed on Thursday, organizers Brian and Anna Haughton, who recently announced they will host a major new fair—Art Antiques London—in June 2010, reported healthy sales and attendance significantly up from last year.  In the Haughtons’ own words, the fair was a display of “objects of drop-dead beauty, …

This Week’s Top Lots: October 17 – 23

Editorial Staff Art

* Christie’s London/October 17, Post-war and Contemporary Art Day SaleThe sale total was £3.5 million. The top lot was Anselm Kiefer’s Baum mit Panzer that sold for £169,250 (estimate £70,000-90,000). Other top lots were Martin Kippenberger’s Self-Portrait that sold for £139,250 (estimate £18,000-22,000), and Wim Delvoye’s Last Port that sold for £109,250 (estimate £50,000-70,000). * Skinner Boston/October 17, Asian ArtThe …

Chicago and the arts and crafts movement

Editorial Staff Art

October 2009 | “Chicago is the only American city I have seen where something absolutely distinctive in aesthetic handling of material has been evolved out of the industrial system” – C. R. Ashbee During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Chicago stood at the crossroads of the handcrafted and the machine-made, aspects that came to define the American arts …

Malmaison in the sky

Editorial Staff Art, Furniture & Decorative Arts

Malmaison is familiar to many as the château of the Empress Josephine in Rueil-Malmaison, eight miles west of Paris. In 1978, though, Malmaison moved to New York—figuratively speaking—in the form of Roger Prigent’s fabled Malmaison Antiques, which introduced French Empire furnishings of the highest quality to the United States. An insatiable—yet discerning—collector who refers to Josephine as “the first lady …

Design and reform: the making of the Bauhaus

Editorial Staff Art

October 2009 | In our time  the name Bauhaus has become a synonym for high modernism, a stand-in for the purist design language of the years between the two world wars and beyond. For many it is now a stylistic descriptor, a sort of shorthand for a specific look, often understood without any temporal attachment or historical meaning. But the …

This Week’s Top Lots: October 10 – 16

Editorial Staff Art

* Skinner Marlborough/October 10, Richard Wright Collection: Important DollsThe top lot was a Roullet & Decamps magician automaton that sold for $80,580 (estimate $25,000-35,000). Other top sales were a set of four Alice in Wonderland character dolls that sold for $40,290 (estimate $30,000-40,000), and a Queen Anne lady doll and case that sold for $50,363 (estimate $50,000-70,000). * Sotheby’s Milan/October …

This Week’s Top Lots: October 5 – 9

Editorial Staff Art

* Christie’s London/October 6, Islamic and Indian ArtThe sale total was just over £5 million. The top lot was a circa 1600 Ottoman navigational chart of the Mediterranean coastline that sold for £1.07 million (estimate £300,000-400,000). Other top lots were a Qu’ran dated 1288 AD that sold for £457,250 (estimate £200,000-300,000), and an 18th century painted and carved Damascus room …