A Fair Gets a Boost From Europe

As traditional antiques fairs are plagued with disappointing attendance figures and uneven sales, show organizer Meg Wendy has recast her Spring International Art & Antiques Show. The show opens tomorrow night with a benefit vernissage for the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House and runs through Tuesday at the Park Avenue Armory. For the fifth annual event, Ms. Wendy has corralled a new group of top European fair dealers.“With the old paradigm of narrowly focused fairs no longer working, I sought out higher-end established European fair dealers, but also with a view to incorporating antiquities dating back thousands of years, right up to contemporary art and jewelry,” Ms. Wendy said recently from her office in Westchester. To that end, she honed in on dealers who also participate in the Paris Biennale as well as the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht, Netherlands. This year’s fair boasts 16 new dealers, including seven Paris Biennale regulars, five Maastricht fair participants, and three Grosvenor House show dealers.Those dealers include the Parisian dealers Galerie Cazeau-Beraudiere and Galerie Patrice Trigano, both of Impressionist and Modern art (and Trigano with contemporary art, too) and Galerie Sylvain Levy Alban, of European 17thand 18th-century art and antiques; the New York antiquities dealer Royal-Athena Galleries; Luis Alegria with Chinese Export porcelain from Porto, Portugal; Galerie 146 Autegarden-Rapin, with 20th-century decorative arts from Brussels, Belgium, and Alberto Santos with Chinese porcelain from London.With those new fair participants, the fair now features 45 dealers, some of whom have taken stands triple the standard size. The participation of upper-level European fair dealers means finer material and higher prices, too. Galerie Patrice Trigano, for example, will offer a $2.8 million Chagall oil painting, “Les Amoureux dans le ciel de St. Paul” (1980).Nearby will be a $2.4 million Camille Pissarro oil painting titled “Fenaison a Éragny” (1901), offered by the New Orleans–based M.S. Rau Antiques. At Wendy’s Antiques & Fine Art at the Armory, held in December, Rau sold a monumental Bouguereau oil painting for more than $3 million. “That sale proves that good art sells at fairs, for sure,” William Rau, who commands the 95-year-old gallery, said. He also said he has noticed a resurgence of interest in 19th-century pieces. With that in mind, Mr. Rau is featuring a 19th-century marquetry vitrine by Francois Linke for $1.2 million at the fair. “Top 18th-century furniture is beyond reach, pricewise, for many, and the quality of some 19th-century furniture is breathtaking,” Mr. Rau said.Sales figures like Mr. Rau’s are a major attraction for new dealers, but there’s another factor luring European dealers. Fewer Americans are traveling to London and Paris for shopping sprees since September 11, 2001, according to British and continental dealers. Further accelerating that trend, the American dollar continues to slump.Yet there’s another reason New York is a draw for dealers from abroad, and it has to do with collecting patterns. “New York is the capital of 20th-century design collecting,” a Paris-based 20th-century design dealer, Olivier Watelet, said. His sales of that specialty alone at the Haughton International Design + Art show held this past in September in New York came close to his entire sales total at the Paris Biennale staged the same month. “More than 50% of my clients reside here, and that number is growing,” he said.Mr. Watelet’s stand at the Park Avenue Armory will be filled with furniture by the contemporary Paris designer Serge Roche, whose work is collected by Tom Ford, as well as interior designers such as Peter Marino, Robert Couturier, and Thierry Despont, who is working on Bill Gates’s home.Dealers hailing from New York say the fair attracts clients from far beyond the 10021 ZIP code. Last year, the 58th Street dealer Iliad Antik, which specializes in Biedermeier and Art Deco antiques, sold their prize piece, a c.1935 Central European sideboard, for a six-figure sum to a Floridian interior designer.“The show is far more of a destination than Madison Avenue,” Andrea Zemel, who heads up Iliad, said. Tomorrow, front and center on her stand will be an Austrian Biedermeier writing desk in bird’s-eye maple trimmed with inlaid ebony.Of course, the art market overall is booming, another fact that is likely to propel the bottom line for the dealers at this week’s show. “My sales in Maastricht were triple what they ever, ever had been,” the director of Royal Athena Galleries, Jerome Eisenberg, said from London, where he was sourcing material for the fair earlier this week. “I was making individual sales for $300,000 per antiquity, whereas before it was $40,000 here, $50,000 there.”To entice antiquities collectors, Mr. Eisenberg is bringing an Egyptian bronze cat from 712–525 B.C.E. with a price tag of $485,000 to this week’s fair. “It’s the finest example of a cat I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Eisenberg said. “The money is rolling.”

A Fair Gets a Boost From Europe

A Fair Gets a Boost From Europe

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