A trio of exciting auctions this coming weekend at the Rago Arts & Auction Center in Lambertville, New Jersey:
One of the world’s largest private collections of Frank Lloyd Wright documents and objects will be on display at San Francisco’s Charles Campbell Gallery from May 20 through June 24, 2006. The archive’s owner, Bill Schmidt – a retired Bay Area art teacher – sold a portion of his collection to the Getty Museum in 1985, and the more than 30 remaining pieces will be the stars of this upcoming exhibit. Items to be shown include:
The always-helpful Tamera Herrod writes to tell us about next month’s Treadway-Toomey Arts & Crafts auction. This year’s event, being held on May 7 2006, includes some really spectacular items, please check out several of them in our Flickr album; the rest can be seen in the online preview.
Arbiters
of Craftsman Style: Influential Designs by Gustav Stickley, Limbert, L.
& J.G. Stickley, More Will Be Offered May 7 at Treadway-Toomey
Galleries’ 20th Century Art & Design Auction
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but the craftsmanship
of the originals fashioned by these visionaries – makers of the first
truly American style of furniture – is beyond compare.OAK PARK, ILL. – Although it’s been more than a century since Gustav
Stickley launched his furniture revival in America, his influence in
the industry today is omnipresent and demand for his authentic designs
remains strong. On May 7, an impressive collective of desirable
originals by Gustav Stickley, Charles Limbert, and Leopold & John
George Stickley are expected to draw tremendous interest and prices at
Treadway-Toomey Galleries’ 20th Century Art & Design Auction. The
event begins at 10 a.m. at John Toomey Gallery at 818 North Blvd., in
Oak Park, Ill.The auction will feature Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco
works in the first session, Fine Art and Paintings in the second, and
1950s and Modern in the third. More than 1,000 lots has been assembled,
including ceramics, glasswork, furniture, metalwork, lighting,
decorative accessories, sculpture, woodblock prints, drawings,
watercolors, mixed media and oil paintings."We’ve gathered an outstanding selection of Arts and Crafts furniture
from all the major makers," Don Treadway, gallery owner, said. "Most of
the pieces have come from private homes in New York, Chicago, Detroit
and California. We’re offering an array of one-, two-, and three-door
bookcases, an extensive group of Morris chairs, china cabinets, desks,
lamp tables, settees, dining tables and chairs, and occasional pieces
such as magazine stands and tabourets." (continued below…)
On Sunday, April 30 2006, you are invited to tour eight historic A & C homes in Pasadena’s "Bungalow Heaven" historic district. In addition to the self-guided walking tour, lectures, demonstrations, short guided tours and a small vendor area will all be available. Home Tour tickets are $15 each.
Concordia University in River Forest (a suburb of Chicago) will host its first annual Arts & Crafts Show and Sale on 13/14 May 2006. For a $6 admission, you will be treated to talks, workshops and sale items from more than 40 dealers, including the Eastwood Gallery in Minneapolis / St. Paul.
(03.19 addendum: I missed it earlier, but Kenneth Baker has a more extensive article
on the same show, also in the Chronicle, with a lot more attention to
the social issues that made the Movement so especially resonant at the
time and fuel the academic approach to the revival today, while showing
the contrast to the "flattened," watered-down approach to the
decorative portions of the movement, popular in current suburban developments.)
Zahid Sardar has a preview of the International Arts & Crafts show – on loan from the Victoria & Albert museum and opening today at San Francisco’s De Young Museum – in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. I can’t recommend the show enough – not only are there some terrific American pieces, like the Wright dining room set and items from Greene & Greene’s Thorsen and Blacker houses, but a range of European A&C items, including a Saarinen-designed wall rug, Russian A&C pieces and plenty of Secessionist furniture with strong A&C ties make an appearance as well.
The addition of several items of Bay Area provenance – textiles and furniture from the Mathews family and a few pieces of Maybeck (not enough, though, in my opinion, given the importance of his architecture on the movement as a whole) give this show special connection with the Bay Area.
I recommend visiting the De Young before June 18 to see the exhibit, but buy your tickets in advance, as they will limit attendance due to the narrow pathway through the exhibit and the relatively small amount of room for visitors.
Yet again, my favorite A & C auctioneer is having a weekend auction jam-packed with amazing items. This time, RagoArts sent me a copy of their hefty catalog, which on its own is a great addition to any Craftsman book collection – the photographs of such a huge range of items make a great reference; it’s $35 and can be ordered from their website. However, if you’re anywhere near the auction house in Lambertville, NJ (not far from Philadelphia) on March 11 & 12 (yes, that’s this coming weekend!), I doubt you could be doing anything much more interesting than attending the auction itself and picking up something special.
Now, though, that print catalog is available online (if you have the bandwidth) using the NxtBook technology, which emulates the full-page views and page-turning effects and some other bells & whistles – it’s fun & a neat way to look at the catalog.
Without further ado, some selected highlights from this upcoming sale:
Sunday also includes a large number of more affordable groupings of ceramic, glass and copper items (and some other bits and pieces), some of which are quite attractive and priced to sell.
My only gripe is that there are very few unsigned items – I realize that the whole point of an auction like this is to liquidate important items and distribute them amongst serious collectors and museums, but it might be good for the movement as a whole if a larger number of inexpensive pieces were distributed amongst the stock – it could bring a lot of new collectors in, and would be a great base to do more education / outreach from. I don’t think this would adversely affect the sales price of the more important items, either.
Tampa’s Old Seminole Heights neighborhood (more about this area in the future!) is one of the best-preserved Craftsman communities in the south. The main reason for this is OSHNA – the Old Seminole Heights Neighborhood Association – which has done a terrific job of doing architecture / conservation education outreach in the community and beyond.
If you are in the Tampa area, you can join OSHNA for an upcoming fieldtrip on March 11. The all-day event will include a private tour of the Leepa-Ratner Museum of Art at St. Petersburg College’s Tarpon Springs Campus, a lecture, afternoon tea and a panel discussion on various aspects of the Arts & Crafts movement and its application in Florida and the US overall.
And unrelatedly (except by geographic proximity), the historic neighborhood of Hyde Park will be offering a home tour this coming Saturday, March 4, and the week after that there’s a similar tour in Tampa Heights.
Ted Wells of Living : Simple passes on this tidbit:
Starting February 23, four Greene & Greene pieces from the Dr.
William T. Bolton house will be on display at the Huntington Library in
San Marino, California: The entry hall table, the two entry side chairs
(the exquisite, tall, Mackintosh-like designs), and the Barlow Bush
curio cabinet. This is the first time these four pieces have been
together since they left the Bolton house. It is incredible to see how
the pieces visually interact when displayed as they were meant to be
seen by the Greene’s. This display will be at the Huntington Library
until June 30, 2006.The
Thorsen library table (not the dining table) is the piece that is
joining the Victoria & Albert Museum’s International Arts &
Crafts exhibit opening at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. If you
did not travel to London to see this exhibit, and you will be near the
Bay Area anytime before June 30, it is worth seeing this show. In
addition to the Thorsen pieces, there are other G&G objects on
display including the Blacker House breakfast room hanging light and a
Blacker arm chair, along with hundreds of Arts & Crafts objects
from around the world.
Also: it’s a long way off, but the Huntington will also present The Architecture and Decorative Arts of Charles and Henry Greene from October 2008 to January 2009.
Running concurrently with the Grove Park Inn‘s Asheville show and conference is a new Arts & Crafts antiques show in Asheville (thanks to Mark Golding’s great Arts & Crafts movement newsletter for this!). From February 16 – 19, this new show will be held at the Renaissance Asheville Hotel, but it looks like it’s mainly just an antique show – they are not competing with the Grove Park’s extensive program of lectures and workshops.