Clinton Howell Antiques

Hans Fallada was a German writer who somehow survived WWII in Germany, only a small part of his life experience much of which is far more novelistic than most novels. "Every Man Dies Alone", his last novel was based on a true story and was written just after the war and is set in war time Berlin where paranoia and human brutality is the norm. Nothing can be relied on, least of all humanity, and I find myself flashing back to Kafka and realizing just how prescient he was.

The cabinetmaking trade in late 18th century London was roiled by the burgeoning middle class which needed furniture. New markets created a struggle among the guilds, the trade unions and cabinet shop owners, part of which upset the traditional apprentice system. Entrepreneurs sensed this opportunity and small shops set up to take advantage of the market. These shops were called the "dishonorable trade" by the established West End makers. Some of these shops used shoddy materials and short cuts in production. If any antique furniture should be considered fraudulent, it is the product of these shops, much of which is not worth restoring even to this day.

Pernicious is the best word for the society Fallada writes about. When I use the word society, however, I think of an interdependent group. Fallada's cast, apart from a few idealists, is hardly interdependent. It is not a society, it is a fraud, a place where lies, greed and bullies win the day, a system that the Nazi party only encourages. You could almost say that these traits reflect capitalism run amok--think BP or Chinese cat food. Or, perhaps, some members of the London cabinetmaking trade at the end of the 18th century?

Reading Franz Kafka's, "The Castle", is a little bit like letting HAL run your spacecraft. He just keeps taking you out and out and out and ultimately, he wants to be alone. Fortunately, you can put the book down. Clearly, Kafka understood totalitarianism and how it self perpetuates through misguided belief in the "system".

Totalitarianism appears to be a human condition. At any given time, there are at least two or three such regimes in the world. When you think on it, a totalitarian leader believes only in himself and ultimately the system is built on greed. It is unclear to me whether today's technology abets the totalitarian or vice-versa. Maybe a little bit of both.

Totalitarianism succeeds because truth does not announce itself. It has to be looked for and then understood. Kafka makes it very clear that truth is not self-evident and that is one of the things that is so scary about his writing. He makes untruth so very plausible. Other writers have done it since, but Kafka does it eerily. His writing gives me the chills. 

I am losing my wonderful assistant, Kristen, to motherhood soon. This will be the third to motherhood and while they have all been great, Kristen has been that plus some. She has an easygoing manner, a great smile and she works hard. I will miss her and so will more than a few of my clients.

I know I have referred to Queen Anne's (1702-1714) nineteen pregnancies before. One was an hysterical pregnancy, many were miscarriages and one infant made the age of one. Talk about taking a hit for God and country. Protestantism doesn't have martyrs, but Anne deserves a mention.

My own mother said that the summer of 1949 was very hot. She claimed that she sat on the beach feeling like a whale, but with three other children, 10, 7 and 2, and no help I doubt that was the case. It was all in a day's work, I guess. I can't thank her enough.

I loved visiting Portugal. Warm hearted people with a beautiful coast line, Roman ruins, cathedrals, walled cities and one of the oldest universities in Europe at Coimbra. I picked up "Night Train to Lisbon" by Pascal Mercier, partly because of these memories and because the first paragraph seemed interesting. And it is, and it is also a short course in philosophy as well as being an allegorical tale with lots of levels of meaning.

I don't think of Oxford and Cambridge when I visit England whereas I do think of Coimbra when I think of Portugal. I have visited Oxford many times, but the visit I remember best was when my friend Guy Durham was in digs one summer where I visited him for an afternoon and evening. Guy was an Anglophile of the first order and he wanted to experience Oxford, albeit as a mature student, the way an undergraduate might. We went to Evensong and a well known pub as well as taking numerous short cuts around the town. He knew his Oxford, that is for sure.

I was told by my mother that the Lisbon Botanical Garden was one of the great European botanical gardens because the Lisbon climate could sustain both tropical and temperate plants. The garden, when I saw it in 1999, was in some state of neglect, but the bones were there and hopefully it has been brought back to its former splendor. Mercier's book uncovers the darkness of the Salazar years through the writings of an aristocratic physician which were published posthumously by his sister. The interlocutor is a professor of classical languages from Switzerland. The bones Mercier uncovers are like the bones of the Botanical Garden--all there and waiting to be re-discovered.

I was listening to Brian Lehrer on WNYC this morning and he had a guest on talking about the ten ugliest buildings in NYC. To begin with, one has to take the concept of ugly with a grain of salt. When you come right down to it, there is no such thing as ugly. Ugly is a subjective sense of revulsion, it is not a condition. Furthermore, when you apply the word ugly to a building, you are inevitably basing your judgment on the environment a building is in. No matter how you put it, the environment cannot be taken out of the building.

Not all antique furniture from the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries is beautiful although it is generally well made with good materials. Design, on the other hand, allows the connoisseur to be subjective. Some late 18th and early 19th century furniture, the Yorkshire makers, Wright and Elwick's pieces come to mind, qualifies as beautiful in my opinion. But even more to the point, connoisseurs can get wrapped up in cabriole legs being too thin, too thick, too stiff, etc. Criticism is what connoisseurs do. 

I was interested to hear Lehrer's guest refer to the Whitney Museum as the ninth ugliest building in NYC. I walk by it every day and I can't say that I believe it fits in the neighborhood. It is a modernist icon, I know, but it is, in my view a lump. Ugly--that is not my call. Does it engage the neighborhood and vice-versa? I don't think that it does. That the Upper East Side of New York allowed such a building to be created is what is so bizarre. Now that it is here, it gets to be itself, however. That is what New York City is really about. 

It sounds from what I wrote yesterday that I don't like the direction that the antiques business is taking as exemplified by Masterpiece and the auction houses. That is not true. Prices are getting dearer and both Masterpiece and the auction houses have recognized that you have to make the selling of high priced items an event. They have succeeded and they deserve credit for their success.

My fear is that the upward trajectory of prices necessarily turns off clientele, even people well enough off to afford great furniture. Not everyone wants a champagne preview and not every rich person interested in antiques wants to show off his wealth by being the highest bidder on an already expensive piece of furniture. Pastimes are for pleasure and a lot of the fooforaw around "events" is not to every person's preference.

Without doubt, the organizers of Masterpiece deserve kudos for their efforts. They have successfully resurrected/created a new event that will draw collectors from around the world and that is no mean feat. Their success is offset, unfortunately, by LIFAF or what used to be the Olympia Fair, which appears to be headed downwards. Olympia is/was an important event in the antique furniture world and will, I hope, continue. As iffy as LIFAF seems, Masterpiece appears an assured and vibrant event. Long may it prosper. 

The Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair ended last year and the mantel of that fair has been picked up by the Masterpiece Fair which ran this year from June 23-30. Masterpiece was a success from almost every point of view. It garnered support from the trade and the buying customers. What more can you ask for?

Why do I feel hesitant in my praise? It was a beautiful fair, but it lacked soul and felt like it was about money. It was as if antique dealing had gone corporate while no one was looking. Is this the reality of the antiques business?

I think the model has been set by the auction houses who have endeavored to make their product, whatever it might be, more posh. They massage the clients and the clients spend with them. Their product becomes more about the pitch than the product. Has this always been the case?

I am not criticizing any of this. Masterpiece was masterminded by the English trade and they have made a posh event--it is quite extraordinary. The English trade works hard at being elegant and creating an aura of something the American dealers don't seem to be able to muster. I would rejoin that the business is about antiques. From my perspective, that is what really counts.

There is very little one can say when one's children call to wish a happy father's day. What did I do to deserve them? Frankly, their mother was far more important to them and a far better parent, particularly on a day to day basis. I was in the position to enjoy them, something that seems a lot harder for mothers who feel the weight of responsibility for these lives they have created.

Parenting, at least in the way that we know it in 2010, is a long way from what it was in the 18th or 19th centuries. Children in those days were little people, expected to behave like adults. They were dressed like adults and treated as such and in countries where primogeniture was the rule, the oldest son was expected to recognize and pursue his responsibilities. How many tales have been written about children that could not achieve that sense of responsibility?

There is also a certain hypocrisy to "special" days that seem designed to get one to spend money. The cynicism is life long and I don't remember celebrating either mother's or father's days. Fortunately, I (and my siblings) enjoyed my parents and told them so. Friends they were and still are, their corporeal finesse notwithstanding. He or she is truly lucky to have a parent as a friend. I am doubly so.

The fair that used to be known as Olympia has been transformed and now is known as LIFAF. As a brand, LIFAF means very little, but I suspect it is trying to relate itself to TEFAF which is also known as Maastricht, a successful dealer run fair held annually in the Netherlands. LIFAF has been taken over by David Lester whose success as an antique fair promoter is limited at best to Palm Beach. The fairs he started in Dallas, Los Angeles, the touring boat and the fair that never was at Pace in Westchester, NY, were all bombs.

David Lester is a hard worker and a man with vision. His vision relies, however, on dealers who can pay the freight to be in his shows, none of which has been cheap and all of which have been long on promises. LIFAF was beautiful, but there wasn't enough to see. The most important thing about a fair is the product on display--that is what makes a fair successful. He needed more of the top crowd to exhibit with him but they refrained themselves in order to go with either the Haughtons or the Masterpiece Fair. 

It is clear that David Lester thought that he would be able to wrest the mantle of the now defunct Grosvenor House Fair to LIFAF. That has not been the case this year, but the drama is doubtless ready to continue, although the area that Olympia is in is slated for massive re-development. It isn't easy being a show promoter, that is for certain. For David Lester, it has always seemed to be about what could be. LIFAF still could be a good show, but the odds are against it. 

Reading "Under the Volcano" by Malcolm Lowry is an experience akin to to reading William Gaddis' "Recognitions", or David Foster Wallace's, "Infinite Jest". The language of these men is stunning, the way they string their words together is dazzling. Lowry takes us into a house and refers to the mirador, the bartizan and the machiolations, architectural terms relating to battlements.

The language used to describe furniture is largely been lifted from architecture. We talk about, architraves, fascias, cornices, pediments and stiles. Naturally, a great deal of furniture decoration is lifted from architecture so it makes sense. Unfortunately, a lot of architects, good ones, have also felt that they could design furniture. Sometimes they could and other times, they didn't.

Of course, "Under the Volcano" is a battle, a battle the protagonist, Geoffrey Firmin, the former British Consul, wages to save his life. His despair is blunted by his drinking and his drinking disallows him to make any progress to undo the despair. Sisyphus had it easier. When Lowry has Firmin refer to the cloacan darkness, I got the point. After I looked up the meaning of cloacan. 

Having viewed the Patricia Kluge sale being held by Sotheby's on site in Charlottesville, I have to say that it was mildly depressing. The furniture, some of it quite good, seems to have been cleaned to the extent of having lost its patina. I recognized a walnut stool that I sold to Stair and Co. that was for sale and it almost looked naked, no dirt, no nothing, just a monchromatic brown tone. This is the brown that gives the brown in brown furniture its bad name.

The key to great furniture is condition. As important as style, craftsmanship and materials are, condition is what makes you want to own a great piece. It is a function of patina and patina is everything. A replaced leg on a chair with great patina is forgivable, whereas on a chair with no patina, the missing leg becomes a bigger issue. Patina will frame desire in other words. 

For many years, I have been trying to convince my clients that a "dry stripped" gilded frame is preferable to a regilded frame. Dry stripping is the cleaning off of successive repairs to old frames to return to what one hopes is the original gilding. The old gesso and clay have a distinctive look, but one thing is for certain, the frame hardly looks gilded when it is dry stripped. Most buyers of gilded furniture want to see gold, however. One of those regilded frames is hanging over the fire place in the Kluge drawing room--the base is beautifully carved. The mirror practically gleams.

Clearly, the most difficult aspect of walking into an antique shop for most would-be buyers is knowing what it is you want to buy. "I will know it when I see it." Perhaps you will and perhaps you won't, but I find that most people want to be talked into buying something. I find that concept to be very difficult. The easiest clients for me are those people who feel a pull towards something. You can see it in how they look at the piece and how they touch it. There is essential appreciation and a connectedness that you wish everyone would have to beautiful things.

I can't imagine how the Earl Burlington was able to talk Robert Walpole, England's first Prime Minister, into building Houghton House in Norfolk. Along with William Kent, Burlington took charge of the design of the house, the interior and the exterior and in so doing created one of the greatest English houses. Walpole must have been scandalized at the cost, or perhaps he wasn't, but he certainly would have been aware of just how Queen Anne looked upon Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough and her expenditures on Blenheim Palace. The friendship did not survive that building project.

The question that lies at the bottom of building or buying, taste notwithstanding, is money. You can have all the money in the world and not have taste. What is unforgivable is thinking that you have taste because you have money. The two bear no relationship to each other. Furthermore, it is clear that a masterpiece is not going to be inexpensive. The two great patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for French furniture, the Wrightsman's and the Linsky's certainly came to understand that maxim. But then they knew what they wanted. 

Whenever I read a novel that is very foreign, non-Western in nature, I grant a surreal quality to it. "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami is set in Tokyo and is about the struggle against evil. The protagonist, Toru Okada, is seemingly a character of benign passivity. Is this a Zen like quality that all Japanese have or am I missing an essential element of the novel?

But when you think about history as I often do, it also has a surreal quality to it. The last quarter of the 17th century in England has so much happening--great building, technological and scientific advancement, plague, pestilence and fire and a continuing war between Catholicism and Protestantism. It all seems more than can sensibly fit in the moment.

Ultimately, real life is always an interpretation, just as novels are a form of history and history is a form of novel. It is the interpretation that we give to what we are reading that makes something real and that is all that matters. If we can convince others about our interpretation, we can actually change history. That is a scary thought.

I have been trying to understand what a deeply held belief is. I know that there are things that evoke the phrase, often to do with politics and religion. Democracy is a deeply held American belief and borders on being sacrosanct. The Tea Party-ers are obviously in that camp, but so are the Senators and Congressmen and President (and most of the bureaucrats, I suspect) as well and they are the object of scorn and derision by the Tea Party-ers.

Deeply held beliefs are, however, subject to change. In the mid 17th century, the English beheaded Charles I who was the head of the English Church and Lord of all British subjects. You might say that it was heresy to commit regicide, but they did it anyway. The French followed suit near a century and a half later, so this was not just some quirky English tic that was manifesting itself. Deeply held beliefs were, in these cases, suspended for the alleged benefit of the majority. You might say that their rebellion was a deeply held belief and superseded the deeply held belief of the loyal subjects.

There is a contradiction here and it leads me to believe that there is no such thing as a deeply held belief. Certainly there are great martyrs throughout history and their obstinancies are admirable, but were they being stubborn, or did they actually believe that their choice was absolute, more valuable than their ability to stay alive and help others in some other way than martyrdom? Ultimately the reason that I enjoy antiques (and art) is because you are not looking at an abstraction that may or may not be true. That antique in front of you is real and revealing. That is more than you can say for a deeply held belief.

The shifting silt at the bottom of Lake Seneca in upstate New York, the second longest Finger Lake, makes it very difficult to know the absolute depth of the lake. The bottom is perhaps shifting waterlogged logs or perhaps sunken boats. It is, for certain, quite deep and was, for this reason, used by the US Navy for submarine training during the Second World War. My oceanography classes at Hobart used to involve field trips on the lake and we never got good readings for the bottom. Probably because we tended to go out on the lake during blizzards, but that is another story.

The visual impact that a piece of old well figured wood has requires that you really look at it. If you don't have the time or the inclination, it will not be there for you. There is a depth and a shifting bottom to it, but if you don't see it, it is just a surface. This may sound a little touchy feely, but that which you look for is the thing that will take you somewhere interesting. It most certainly is that way with wood and it is the first step in helping you discern different types of wood. Most antique dealers get caught up in this very quickly as I did when I lived in London and spent my life going to veneer shops and timber merchants.

This is also true in literature or the fine arts and, indeed, in life although I don't want to get too carried away here. Searching for things is the diametric opposite of waiting for things to happen and it is the search that engenders interest and it is the interest that propels the search. The bottom is, after all, incidental and finding it is, in the end, not that important. That is life.