By SOUREN MELIKIAN: LONDON — The “Art & Design London” show put up under a vast marquee in the West End — where it opened Wednesday and runs through Sunday — is the most stimulating selling exhibition in years. There is no danger of experiencing a feeling of déjà vu here.
Now in its fifth year, the five-day event deals with modern art in all its facets from its early beginnings in the late 1870s to the present day. Simple as it sounds, the idea of displaying 20th-century paintings by the Spanish Surrealist Joan Miró and the German Expressionist Otto Dix under the same roof as a console designed in the 1950s by the architect Giò Ponti or a sideboard conceived in 1969 by the American Paul Evans had never occurred to anyone before — or, if it did it, it was never implemented.
The London show, which offers an updated version of their Pavillon des Arts et du Design in Paris, is the improbable brainchild of two French art professionals. Patrick Perrin, a specialist in 18th-century furniture, now spends more time in his London office fine-tuning the details of the yearly event than running the Galerie Perrin in Paris with his brother Philippe Perrin. Stéphane Custot is a dealer in modern art who moved to London five years ago where he runs the Hopkins Custot Gallery.
While the two Frenchmen do not spell it out, Patrick Perrin is the man with a keen sense of objects and Mr. Custot operates as the arbiter of modern and contemporary art. Together they carefully determine the balance between paintings and decorative works, which gives the display its unique character.
Every selling show eventually reaches its optimum format. The Pavilion of Art & Design, as the fair officially labels itself, did so this year.
Mr. Perrin is the first to concede that what put the event on the international map was its ability to entice important art dealers into participating in it.
The presence of famous 20th-century masters means that major international collectors now feel bound to make the October pilgrimage to Berkeley Square.
On the Hopkins Custot stand, a cartoon-style oil on cardboard of 1953 from Miró’s late Surrealist phase defies precise description. A few steps away, a faceless human form almost carved into the paint by Bernard Dubuffet in 1952 offers a different version of the distortion of bodies in the postwar era.
Mr. Custot’s real gem is an abstract composition painted on March 4, 1962, by Zao Wou Ki. The picture is curiously evocative of the map of Britain seen from outer space, which does not appear to have caught the dealer’s attention.
Simon Dickinson of London also settled for celebrated artists from the European schools. Italian Vorticism in 1913 is represented on his stand by a large Giacomo Balla whose “Forme rumore di motocicletta” in oil and gouache on paper is more dynamic than figural. An abstract work by Gerhard Richter pays its due to our time.
The snarling humor of German painters in the 1920s strikes a more unsettling note on Richard Nagy’s stand. Otto Dix’s self-portrait in wash and pencil drawn in 1922 says more about his harsh sardonic vision of German society than about his empathy with small children. It forms part of a set of 16 watercolors painted as a children’s picture book that was given by the artist to the young son of the woman he courted. The German painter portrayed himself as “Jimmy the Shimmy,” the tough, square-faced character wearing American-style clothes that he impersonated at the night club where he danced with Martha Koch, young Martin Wenzel Koch’s mother.
Nearby, George Grosz’s darker humor hits at the wealthy elite’s indifference to the destitute in the Berlin of the 1920s. “Street Scene Berlin I” in wash, pencil and India ink, executed in 1928, is worth volumes of social analysis on the rise of Nazism, from which Grosz would escape to New York five years later.
The appeal of the paintings at the Art & Design show lies partly in the new avenues explored by some dealers.
On Richard Nagy’s stand, the portrait of the French writer and literary historian Georges Polti reveals the art of a little known Polish painter called Mela Muter. A mix of influences, including a Fauve strain, can be detected in the likeness painted around 1919-1920.
The most impressive discoveries, though, are to be made in the decorative arts, particularly in what could be called “the antiques of modernity.”
Yves Macaux, a Brussels dealer now in London, comes out on top with furniture designed by the Austrian Adolf Loos around 1900. A highly independent character, Loos was fascinated by Britain and was keenly aware of the Arts and Crafts Movement of the 1890s.
His masterpiece, a mahogany dining table with brass fittings on the legs, shows how Loos radically transformed any influence he absorbed. The smooth polished dark wood alone is enough to set it apart from the English models. The slanting legs betray the rarely acknowledged imprint that the architecture of Ming furniture from China left on the Arts and Crafts designers, and through them, on Loos. Immensely imaginative, Loos could also create such unique pieces as a pair of mahogany low cabinets that are entirely innovative.
The asking price for the antiques of modernity are in line with those paid at auction for top Art Deco pieces from France. The dining table with two extendable leaves carries a price tag of £200,000, or $312,000.
By the middle of the 20th century, furniture designers across the Western world found themselves at a crossroads.
Some were attuned to Abstractionist trends with a Cubist tendency and created furniture that looks back to avant-garde Art Deco in the 1930s.
An extraordinary sideboard conceived in 1969 by Paul Evans, a leading figure in the American Craft Movement of the 1970s, is one of the great works from that period.
It was brought to the London fair by Rossella Colombari. The Turin specialist in 20th-century design chose to display it together with strikingly different creations by Giò Ponti, whose hanging shelves or wooden console play on the lightness of the materials and on streamlined forms influenced by industrial design.
The Dane Peter Hvidt, standing somewhere in the middle between the two opposed aesthetic trends in furniture design, imagined around 1960 a circular center table in dark wood that breaks up into six independent sections, each one resting on slender brass tubular legs. At £6,000, it ranks among the more affordable pieces of avant-garde furniture in the Art and Design show.
The decade of 1960 to 1970, which is being rediscovered these days, was a period of infinite diversity in furniture design. Some of the anonymous creations of that period are every bit as worthy of interest as the pieces credited to celebrated artists. A circular bookcase in Brazilian rosewood and altuglas made in Italy around 1970 is shown by Anne Autegarden. The Brussels dealer points out that it was inspired by a model designed a few years earlier by Joe Colombo and produced in the Brianza area near Milan. It is, however, completely different. Lighter and very finely crafted, it is static, in contrast to Colombo’s piece, whose sections swivel at will.
At the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, the bookshelves designed in the late 1960s by the Italian architect Vittorio Introini and executed in polished steel look like industrial units. The steel shelves are oddly reminiscent of Donald Judd’s manufactured modules, with a major difference — Introini’s pieces have a functional purpose, they are not a parody.
Louisa Guinness of London brings a suitable punctuation mark to the marriage of art and design with her jewels created by famous living artists. The brooches, pendants and earrings on her stand are all designed by contemporary artists, from Damien Hirst to Anish Kapoor, most of whom she approaches to commission the jewels. Appropriately enough, Ms. Guinness sells the baubles out of the London gallery of the renowned contemporary art dealer Ben Brown, her husband.
From tiny to monumental, Art and Design projects a view of today’s aesthetic environment — as approved by the avant-garde establishment. It deserves a look.
Now in its fifth year, the five-day event deals with modern art in all its facets from its early beginnings in the late 1870s to the present day. Simple as it sounds, the idea of displaying 20th-century paintings by the Spanish Surrealist Joan Miró and the German Expressionist Otto Dix under the same roof as a console designed in the 1950s by the architect Giò Ponti or a sideboard conceived in 1969 by the American Paul Evans had never occurred to anyone before — or, if it did it, it was never implemented.
The London show, which offers an updated version of their Pavillon des Arts et du Design in Paris, is the improbable brainchild of two French art professionals. Patrick Perrin, a specialist in 18th-century furniture, now spends more time in his London office fine-tuning the details of the yearly event than running the Galerie Perrin in Paris with his brother Philippe Perrin. Stéphane Custot is a dealer in modern art who moved to London five years ago where he runs the Hopkins Custot Gallery.
While the two Frenchmen do not spell it out, Patrick Perrin is the man with a keen sense of objects and Mr. Custot operates as the arbiter of modern and contemporary art. Together they carefully determine the balance between paintings and decorative works, which gives the display its unique character.
Every selling show eventually reaches its optimum format. The Pavilion of Art & Design, as the fair officially labels itself, did so this year.
Mr. Perrin is the first to concede that what put the event on the international map was its ability to entice important art dealers into participating in it.
The presence of famous 20th-century masters means that major international collectors now feel bound to make the October pilgrimage to Berkeley Square.
On the Hopkins Custot stand, a cartoon-style oil on cardboard of 1953 from Miró’s late Surrealist phase defies precise description. A few steps away, a faceless human form almost carved into the paint by Bernard Dubuffet in 1952 offers a different version of the distortion of bodies in the postwar era.
Mr. Custot’s real gem is an abstract composition painted on March 4, 1962, by Zao Wou Ki. The picture is curiously evocative of the map of Britain seen from outer space, which does not appear to have caught the dealer’s attention.
Simon Dickinson of London also settled for celebrated artists from the European schools. Italian Vorticism in 1913 is represented on his stand by a large Giacomo Balla whose “Forme rumore di motocicletta” in oil and gouache on paper is more dynamic than figural. An abstract work by Gerhard Richter pays its due to our time.
The snarling humor of German painters in the 1920s strikes a more unsettling note on Richard Nagy’s stand. Otto Dix’s self-portrait in wash and pencil drawn in 1922 says more about his harsh sardonic vision of German society than about his empathy with small children. It forms part of a set of 16 watercolors painted as a children’s picture book that was given by the artist to the young son of the woman he courted. The German painter portrayed himself as “Jimmy the Shimmy,” the tough, square-faced character wearing American-style clothes that he impersonated at the night club where he danced with Martha Koch, young Martin Wenzel Koch’s mother.
Nearby, George Grosz’s darker humor hits at the wealthy elite’s indifference to the destitute in the Berlin of the 1920s. “Street Scene Berlin I” in wash, pencil and India ink, executed in 1928, is worth volumes of social analysis on the rise of Nazism, from which Grosz would escape to New York five years later.
The appeal of the paintings at the Art & Design show lies partly in the new avenues explored by some dealers.
On Richard Nagy’s stand, the portrait of the French writer and literary historian Georges Polti reveals the art of a little known Polish painter called Mela Muter. A mix of influences, including a Fauve strain, can be detected in the likeness painted around 1919-1920.
The most impressive discoveries, though, are to be made in the decorative arts, particularly in what could be called “the antiques of modernity.”
Yves Macaux, a Brussels dealer now in London, comes out on top with furniture designed by the Austrian Adolf Loos around 1900. A highly independent character, Loos was fascinated by Britain and was keenly aware of the Arts and Crafts Movement of the 1890s.
His masterpiece, a mahogany dining table with brass fittings on the legs, shows how Loos radically transformed any influence he absorbed. The smooth polished dark wood alone is enough to set it apart from the English models. The slanting legs betray the rarely acknowledged imprint that the architecture of Ming furniture from China left on the Arts and Crafts designers, and through them, on Loos. Immensely imaginative, Loos could also create such unique pieces as a pair of mahogany low cabinets that are entirely innovative.
The asking price for the antiques of modernity are in line with those paid at auction for top Art Deco pieces from France. The dining table with two extendable leaves carries a price tag of £200,000, or $312,000.
By the middle of the 20th century, furniture designers across the Western world found themselves at a crossroads.
Some were attuned to Abstractionist trends with a Cubist tendency and created furniture that looks back to avant-garde Art Deco in the 1930s.
An extraordinary sideboard conceived in 1969 by Paul Evans, a leading figure in the American Craft Movement of the 1970s, is one of the great works from that period.
It was brought to the London fair by Rossella Colombari. The Turin specialist in 20th-century design chose to display it together with strikingly different creations by Giò Ponti, whose hanging shelves or wooden console play on the lightness of the materials and on streamlined forms influenced by industrial design.
The Dane Peter Hvidt, standing somewhere in the middle between the two opposed aesthetic trends in furniture design, imagined around 1960 a circular center table in dark wood that breaks up into six independent sections, each one resting on slender brass tubular legs. At £6,000, it ranks among the more affordable pieces of avant-garde furniture in the Art and Design show.
The decade of 1960 to 1970, which is being rediscovered these days, was a period of infinite diversity in furniture design. Some of the anonymous creations of that period are every bit as worthy of interest as the pieces credited to celebrated artists. A circular bookcase in Brazilian rosewood and altuglas made in Italy around 1970 is shown by Anne Autegarden. The Brussels dealer points out that it was inspired by a model designed a few years earlier by Joe Colombo and produced in the Brianza area near Milan. It is, however, completely different. Lighter and very finely crafted, it is static, in contrast to Colombo’s piece, whose sections swivel at will.
At the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, the bookshelves designed in the late 1960s by the Italian architect Vittorio Introini and executed in polished steel look like industrial units. The steel shelves are oddly reminiscent of Donald Judd’s manufactured modules, with a major difference — Introini’s pieces have a functional purpose, they are not a parody.
Louisa Guinness of London brings a suitable punctuation mark to the marriage of art and design with her jewels created by famous living artists. The brooches, pendants and earrings on her stand are all designed by contemporary artists, from Damien Hirst to Anish Kapoor, most of whom she approaches to commission the jewels. Appropriately enough, Ms. Guinness sells the baubles out of the London gallery of the renowned contemporary art dealer Ben Brown, her husband.
From tiny to monumental, Art and Design projects a view of today’s aesthetic environment — as approved by the avant-garde establishment. It deserves a look.
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