Mature is the word in the trade for fairs like the Winter Antiques Show, though time-honored, even venerable, would be closer to the mark. The show, which opens today, has been around forever (well, since 1955). It delivers substantial, sometimes spectacular retail; always has. Dealers and clients alike return, like swallows to Capistrano, year after year. So if solid tradition, rather than Art Basel Miami Beach-style blowouts, is what you want in a fair, this one’s for you.
Content-wise too it is a grown-up show (though I suspect that kids with doubloons to spend will not be turned from the door). The best material is geared to seasoned eyes, sophisticated budgets and meditated decision making rather than to random drive-by shopping.
Finally, this fair is multiplicitous in ways that few others are anymore. Half a century ago the specialty fair — Outsider, Asian, Tribal, Ceramics — hadn’t been invented. Shows were omnibus things with antiques and antiquities, Buddhas and bracelets, chef-d’oeuvres and doodads. The Winter Antiques Show encompasses all of these and more, with an ardent mix-it-up spirit that was once called eclectic and is now called postmodern.
As established as it is, though, the show is not staid. It is famous, as one is reminded with a slight shock every year, for its adventurous “look,” a certain real-faux, regal-populist picturesqueness, like a cross between, say, the Wrightsman galleries at the Met and Wigstock. Each booth has its own done-up style. The one occupied by Elle Shushan, from Philadelphia, exemplifies the general mode.
Appropriately for a dealer specializing in miniature paintings, Ms. Shushan’s space is extra-small, seven by seven or something like that. But, with wall-covering silk-screened drawings designed by another dealer, Ralph Harvard, she has transformed it into the great hall of an 18th-century colonial Georgian plantation house — one that actually exists, named Westover, in Virginia. Purists will snicker and sniff: the walls of Ms. Shushan’s Westover are fuchsia. As it happens, the blushy tone does wonders for tallowy New York winter complexions, and, more important, it sets off to advantage the booth’s prize display: a 1901 portrait miniature of the future Kings George VI and Edward VIII, at ages 6 and 7 respectively.
It was painted by the artist Gertrude Massey, who earned royal favor for her portraits of Queen Victoria’s dogs. The picture comes with an entire documentary archive of letters and clips. And the princes, in matching sailor suits, look right at home in their mock-colonial digs.
A lot of the fair is made up of similarly nested histories, most of them American. At Thomas Colville Fine Art there’s a terrifically winning portrait by John Singleton Copley of his sister-in-law, Sarah Clarke Startin; you can tell from the zesty way he painted her that he liked her. In the artist’s family from the time it was done, around 1783, it trails multigenerational stories behind it.
Alexander Gallery has a moody, mystical Thomas Cole biblical scene as its centerpiece. More accurately, the gallery believes it has two Coles in one. X-rays — you can ask to see them — reveal that the present painting covers an earlier one, possibly a version of his “Hagar in the Wilderness,” long thought lost, but for which drawings exist.
A stately Philadelphia Queen Anne secretary desk, with a zillion movable parts, at G. K. S. Bush offers a concrete example of a hidden masterwork fully revealed. The desk was made in the early 18th century, but in the mid-19th century it was covered with a coat of lacquerlike black paint in a technique called japanning. Recently the piece was spotted for what it is and the overpaint was stripped off, except on one interior panel, a souvenir of an Orientalist past.
If you were combing the show for overarching themes, Orientalism, defined as the adaptation of Asian motifs to Western forms, is a strong candidate. Michele Beiny has two stolid Prussian “Chinese” vases made around 1840, when Europe was on one of its recurrent Far East jags.
At Roger Keverne, dragons and putti cavort side by side on an 18th-century Chinese silk bed-covering — in imperial yellow, no less — made for export. And in Elinor Gordon’s booth you’ll find a shipful of China Trade porcelains, of a kind that gave the West an image of China that the Chinese thought the West wanted to see.
Ms. Gordon’s display is also a classic demonstration of how visually effective a concentration of like or similar forms can be. Other dealers know this too. Peter Finer’s space, bristling with firearms, has a trigger-happy look you don’t forget. Macklowe Gallery suggests an Art Nouveau explosion. Julius Lowy has erected a whole glowing house — tiny but yes, a house — of gilded picture frames.
Still, individual objects stand out everywhere, either for their beauty, their historical weight or their oddity. A 13th-century Umbrian Italian Virgin, with mesmerized eyes, at Richard Philip, is one. An exquisite Egyptian bronze head of a cat at Rupert Wace is another. A Yupik Eskimo dance mask at Donald Ellis, with an immense carved hand wrapped around its hallucinatory, fly-apart face, is a third. All fill the bill on all three counts.
Add to them Teotihuacan carvings at Throckmorton Fine Art, fantastic Oceanic masks at Conru Primitive Art and early American portraits at Peter Tillou, and a message comes clear: Geopolitical encounters, across the centuries, across continents and across art-fair aisles, are what make the world of art the thrilling, forward-looking place it is.
To be sure, other sorts of encounters spice it up too. I refer you to the duel of jewels at the very center of the show, where two galleries, James Robinson and A La Vieille Russie, each with blinding, wearable arrays of precious metal and rock, sit diagonally across from each other. They call their merchandise art; I call it bling and say it’s fierce. Caught between the booths, you might as well just surrender to both.
Then, to power down a bit, drop by this year’s special loan exhibition, a selection of pieces from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, which opened in Winston-Salem, N.C., in 1965, when the Winter Antiques Show was already a decade old. In its cultural variety, the museum’s collection, with European, American and African-America influence mingling, resembles the texture of the fair. Yet the loan exhibition feels quiet and pulse-soothing, like a retreat from the hubbub around it.
What’s the difference? No price tags. No pitch. No desire or scent of the hunt in the air. In the museum show everything is already spoken for; all you can do is look, and think, and wonder. Which is of course exactly what some of us have been coming, gratefully, to this grand old-new fair itself to do for years.
