Remembering the stands last year at the major fine and decorative arts fairs, it’s impossible not to be impressed by the visual symphonies of erudition, style, beauty, surprise, wit and sheer theatricality orchestrated by many of the dealers.
Between the fees for the space, insurance, shipping and, finally, design and installation, hundreds of thousands of dollars are often spent. With that kind of money at stake, how a dealer chooses to display his or her wares is not simply an aesthetic decision, but a business decision as well. What will best illustrate a dealer’s particular vision? Most effectively showcase the objects and art themselves? Attract new collectors? Titillate the media? It’s all fairbiz (it’s like showbiz but less pushing).
That said, when thinking about the last twelve months of fairs, beauty, connoisseurship, general (if discreet) razamataz, and consistency, I think of the Steinitz stand at last year’s TEFAF, a tour de force envelope of 18th-century French boiserie and parquet de Versailles floors filled with FFF (fine French furniture), complemented by period rugs, tapestry, objets and light fixtures, and contrasted by several pieces of contemporary art. Steinitz has the stand as a complete environment down to a science (or art, as the case may be).
On that note, I also remember Axel Vervoordt’s stand at BRAFA, which like all his stands over the last several years combined Vervoordt’s own furniture designs alongside ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian statuary, modern art (Lucio Fontana “slash series” paintings being a continued favorite), monumental pieces of furniture (fifteen-foot bookcases beautifully styled and unafraid of the power of negative space), and low atmospheric lighting punctuated by dramatic spots.
I also recall Carlton Hobb’s collection of English and Continental antiques, the research comprising a pile of documentation of maker and provenance thicker than my (admittedly feeble) forearm—as well as a beguiling, beautifully rendered, almost photographically precise 1888 painting of the moon (its title simple “Mond”) by German artist Julius Grimm—at the American International Fine Art Fair & Antique Fair in Palm Beach.
But the stand I think back to most often is Maison Gerard’s at last October’s International Fine Art & Antique Dealers show in New York (pictured above and below). It wasn’t the most expensive, immediately jaw-dropping or intricate. It was considered, restrained, quietly revolutionary, pretty of course, and smart as hell.
Maison Gerard is located in New York and specializes in French and American Art Deco furniture, objects and lighting. Often at fairs in which they participate, owners Gerard Widdershoven and Benoist Drut choose to design stands that mirror residential, even familial and intimate spaces. “We usually start with one important piece or a collection, then build around it either by designer or period,” says Widdershoven.
At this year’s International, their stand was inspired by a post-war vanity by French furniture designer Jules Leleu once owned by the Countess Douieb de Lonlay. Around this piece (an exceptional and unique vanity, notes Drut), the two gallerists built an entire boudoir using other Leleu pieces from other commissions. “Even though they are from different commissions and different decades even, they work together because of the quality and sense of design seen in Leleu’s pieces from all periods throughout his career,” says Drut.
Lovely as the Leleu pieces are, the stand’s pièce de résistance was the two 120-inch-high by 57-inch-wide woven fabric panels depicting a pair of doors opening into another room. Inspired by a period photograph of an interior designed by Leleu in 1927, and reproduced in the 2008 book House of Leleu: Classic French Style for a Modern World, 1920-1973 by Françoise Sirex, the panels were commissioned by Maison Gerard from the legendary Lyon-based textile house Prelle—which in turn wove the panels on a brand new, state-of-the-art loom that was five years in the making. As Terry Wendell, who runs Prelle’s U.S. operations, explains: “It took Guillaume Verzier, the owner of Prelle, two years to convince the world’s leading loom manufacturer, Staubly Verdol, to build this prototype loom, then another two to three years to actually design and build once Staubly Verdol had agreed to built it. To date it is the only loom of its kind in existence.”
What makes it so special? It is the only loom that has a weaving bed sixty-four inches wide and that is capable of weaving a single pattern or design or repeat across the entire width of the loom. That means big BIG images. Then there’s the number and range of color. Whereas run-of-the-mill Jacquard looms are only capable of weaving with sixteen different colors of yarn, “we have been able to weave twenty-four colors,” says Wendell, “and the number keeps increasing as our knowledge of the loom increases. Also, since the loom is run by computer and the actual weaving instructions are a computer program, we can weave almost anything that the imagination can come up with. If we can figure out the mathematical calculation, we can weave it.”
“It,” in this case, is the panels on which Maison Gerard and Prelle collaborated, panels which draw directly upon 19th-century French scenic wallpaper often used to create dado-to-ceiling panoramas of lush gardens, exotic locales, and mythical landscapes.
What we’ve got, then, is 21st-century technology employed to render an interpretation of a reproduction of a 1920’s interior executed by an 18th-century French fabric house, the application then drawing upon a 19th-century decorative arts trend but employed in a way that is vaguely expressionistic (the panels are not side by side, causing potential POV distortion) and thoroughly up-to-the-minute fun. The panels are old, they’re new, they’re now, they’re beautiful, and they visually open up a stand in New York’s armory, linking a bedroom full of lovely Leleu from various mid-century decades to the late 1920’s entry hall in, as Françoise Sirex credits it, “The Mr. & Mrs. Winburn Residence, Paris.”
Magic.
(Larger images of the panels are below.)
