Maine Antiques Festival had its best Saturday attendance ever on August 12, with strong sales of early American antiques, according to Promoter Paul Davis. David Good, a partner in Good & Hutchinson & Associates, Inc, a firm he founded with Robert Hutchinson, died of a brain hemorrhage on August 28. He was 78. The Bridge Hampton Historical Society and Stella Show Mgmt Co.'s most recent show, conducted August 19–20, together with an earlier June show raised more than $25,000 for the society’s treasury. Dolls took center stage at Alderfer Auction and Appraisal’s semiannual antique doll auction, “Favorite Pastimes,” on August 10. St Charles Gallery enjoyed great success with a standing-room-only crowd bidding at its recent summer estates sale. Once again the firm of James D. Julia, Inc proved that quality merchandise combined with quality marketing and promotion equals quality results. “Remove one piece of that equation,” said the firm’s sales coordinator Dudley Browne, “and you have just another auction.” Andy Warhol’s Athlete Series will go on view at the Allentown Art Museum on Tuesday, September 12, through October 1. The ten images were commisisoned by art collector and friend of the artist Richard Weisman. The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, New York Regional Gallery, presents “Recent Acquisitions: Honoré Sharrer papers” an exhibition featuring selections from the papers of painter Honoré Sharrer. Lyman Allyn Art Museum will present a new exhibition, “femme brut(e),“ opening on Thursday, September 14, and on view through February 4.
A full house was in attendance for Rose Hill Gallery’s recent 400-lot sale of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century art and antiques.
Vivien Cord and Ed McClure concluded their 36th year of outdoor shows on a high note with the Lasdon Labor Day Antiques Fair at Lasdon Park on September 4. “Everything was a perfect ten,” said Vivien Cord, “the weather, the crowd and the buying.” The Marion Antiques Show, now in its 14th year, had a strong gate for preview and throughout its run with most of its dealers reporting having a good show. Bonhams & Butterfields’ ninth annual sale of collectors’ motorcars and automobilia last month at the Quail Lodge resort brought a record $12,930,386, fueled by dynamic bidding duels between predominantly private buyers — rather than members of the trade. Athenaeus by the Seventeenth Century English writer Ben Jonson, with his signature and writings in the margins, sold for $5,775 at a three-day estate sale conducted by Philip Weiss Auctions this summer. RM Auctions sold the 1958 Ferrari 412 S race car for $5.61 million at the Monterey Sports and Classic Car Auction on Saturday, August 19. This one-of-a-kind racing Ferrari was the top car sold at auction during the Monterey Classic Car Weekend. More proof of the red-hot market for American folk art was supplied by Northeast Auction’s Marine and China Trade sale, conducted under the big tent at the firm’s Treadwell House headquarters on August 19–20. The Speed Art Museum will present “Forging An American Identity: The Art of William Ranney” September 29–January 1. A sleuthing historian on a mission has just uncovered a key fact in the theft of a powder horn stolen from her local museum last year — the powder horn is a fake and the real one has been found in a private collection one town away. Lawrence Williams Jr, age 83, husband of antiques dealer Cecelia Williams, died August 29 at Frederick (Md.) Memorial Hospital. He was born on June 5, 1923, in Washington, D.C., son of Lawrence Edwin Williams Sr and Louise Williams. In the first effort of its kind, the National Auctioneers Association (NAA) has begun an effort to encourage state legislatures to adopt a uniform state auction license law the association recently created. C. Eddie Hyre, a longtime antiques dealer who had owned shops in New York City, New Hope, Penn., and Lambertville, N.J., died on December 3, 2005, from a lung infection; he was 71 years old. The Modernist photographer Edward Weston (1886–1958) may be best known for his voluptuous 1936 odalisque “Nude on Sand, Oceano,” depicting his muse and second wife, Charis Wilson, propped on one elbow in the dunes, her back turned to his lens. The sensuous image helped secure Weston’s reputation as a libertine, faithful only to his art. The myth is one that Alexander Lee Nyerges dispels in “Edward Weston: A Photographer’s Love of Life” on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum through December 31. Organized by Nyerges, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts since August, the exhibition of vintage palladium and gelatin silver prints, color transparencies, family snapshots and letters opened at the Dayton Art Institute before making a nationwide tour. In 2005, it was shown at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., where Nyerges, a photography buff whose prior study of Ansel Adams prepared him for his work on Weston, spent afternoons as a teen. John Sandon, Bonhams’ director of British and European ceramics, was a happy man on September 13 having sold an important circa 1752 Worcester Wigornia creamboat at Bonhams’ sale of Fine British Pottery and Porcelain for $87,817. “Fishing in the Everglades” by German American artist Hermann Herzog blasted its way to $226,000 at Skinner’s September 15 sale. The price appears to be a record. Sales were surprisingly strong for the 25th consecutive Labor Day edition of Farmington Antiques Weekend at the Farmington Polo Grounds, September 2–3. Inside the outwardly nondescript North Atlanta Trade Center, something magical was happening. The 80,000-square-foot facility virtually shone with a glow from the 90-plus galleries displaying a wide offering of folk art radiating with youthful innocence or spirituality. For the 35th consecutive year Jock Hengst collected antiques dealers on a field between the two small villages of Madison and Bouckville, about 20 miles south of Utica and the New York Thruway, for three days, August 18–20, selling to crowds numbering in the thousands. A rare windup toy motorcycle made by the German firm Ki-Co around 1910 sold for $5,060 at Four Seasons Auction Gallery’s recent estate sale. The penny toy, measuring 4 by 3 inches, had all its original paint and was in excellent condition. Less than a week after closing out its Marine auction, the Robert C. Eldred auction company continued with the second sale of its popular three-week-long summer auction schedule, The Americana at Auction sale, August 3 and 4.
Over the years auctioneer Jim Julia has coined the phrase “spectacular” as an adjective for his annual summer Americana auction at the Samoset Resort. And it is with good cause, as this highly regarded auction is always filled to the brim with the quality and diverse assortment of spectacular antiques. Winterthur will present an exhibition, “Fashion in Film: Period Costumes for the Screen,” on view September 30–January 7. John Brewster Jr (1766–1854) was a deaf portrait painter who created hauntingly beautiful images of American people during the formative period of the nation. This is the first major exhibition in more than 40 years to highlight Brewster’s life and work. Presented by Japan Society Gallery, “Contemporary Clay: Japanese Ceramics for the New Century” will survey creative and iconoclastic works by the finest potters working in Japan today. This exhibition features more than 100 works and will be on display at Japan Society September 29 to January 21. The Allentown Art Museum will present the special exhibition “Jacob Lawrence: Tales of Freedom” October 8–January 7 in the Rodale Gallery. An opening party will take place October 12 from 6 to 8 pm. Dee Spratta, a well-known and respected antiques dealer, died peacefully Sunday, September 17, with her family by her side. Toward the end of the Nineteenth Century, up-and-coming American artists headed to Paris, the world art capital, seeking to gain technical proficiency in drawing and painting and to enhance their reputations. At least 220 studied with academic master William Bouguereau (sometimes cited as William-Adolphe or Adolphe-William) (1825–1905), a respected teacher and commercially and critically successful artist. According to James Peck, Ruth G. Hardman curator of European and American art at the Philbrook Museum of Art, they were “attracted by his larger-than-life personality and his excellent reputation in both France and America during the second half of the Nineteenth Century. For students looking for an exemplar of the established French academic system, no better master could be found.” For more than 25 years, twice a year, collectors, dealers, dreamers and the merely curious have been coming to the show affectionately and accurately called Papermania Plus. “We knew we were taking a shot in the dark, but it really worked,” Frank Gaglio said about the change in days for his Antiques in A Cow Pasture. When Russell Carrell started this first flea market many years ago in the pasture adjoining his home, it was always on one of the first two Saturdays in September.
Edwin A. Constant died on September 16, at age 91. A proud veteran of the United States Navy, he was the founding president of Constant Graphics Inc, and served as president of the New York Cold Type Association, Printing Industries of America. Thimble Collectors International held its 15th biennial convention August 9–12 at the Hilton Seattle Airport Hotel and Conference Center, with more than 220 thimble and needlework tool collectors and experts attending. After nearly 40 years in the business, Absolute Auctions & Realty auctioneer Don Traver has decided to hang up his gavel. At 10:15 pm on September 9, he struck off his last lot, a group of three framed and matted lithographs of English towns, to an Internet bidder. Mastro Auctions’ August 16–18 auction closed at $11.4 million, generating outstanding results to the tune of several new record-setting prices. A fine afternoon’s painting collaboration between two brothers-in-law was the star attraction at the August 21, Bruce Gamage, Jr, sale, where it sold for $71,500. The artists, Andrew Wyeth and Peter Hurd, had both signed the watercolor of a Maine island house. The James A. Michener Art Museum will present the exhibition, “Form Radiating Life: The Paintings of Charles Rosen” on view October 13–January 28, highlighting the distinguished Pennsylvania Impressionist artist. The Katonah Museum of Art presents two independent exhibitions on view to December 31 that explore iconic female forms from the past and the present. The New York Botanical Garden will present “Buried Treasures: The Nature and Art of Bulbs,” an exhibition in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of prints and artwork featuring flowering bulbs on view October 7–January 7. Rarely does a museum have the opportunity to introduce a subject that is both new to most of its audience and, at the same time, hauntingly familiar. But that is precisely the territory staked in the Milwaukee Art Museum’s epochal show “Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity.” |
