Clinton Howell Antiques

The paper we love to hate, The New York Times, is at it again. An article about collecting that features auction houses and collectors and doesn't quote a dealer? That is sort of like trying to make Kool Aid with ice, it doesn't really work no matter how precise your measurements are.

One of the collectors amused me greatly in the article. She says that she bids to where the dealers, who have to buy wholesale according to her, drop out and then she bids one more and takes home the prize. I do hope that Bill Gates doesn't take a shine to the things she collects. She could have an expensive auction or two in her future.

Seriously now, auction houses get articles per sale. They want to sell all those articles. That is their job. Don't you think that they will try to sell every piece to someone? Do you think, given the vast quantity of things that come around the salerooms that every collector is going to get personal attention?

Auction houses are vital as a source, but dealers are vital for knowledge, and collectors, like the lady who is so clever to outbid the dealers, should be smart enough to know what they don't know and that is usually a great deal. And The New York Times? They should learn learn to publish more balanced articles.

Defining Sarah Palin makes me think of 1950's and early 1960's television programs. She has a little of "Our Miss Brooks" (good put downs), a lot of Beaver (complete naivete), a touch of Bambi (more naivete), a smattering of Cruella Deville, a bit of all the character on Little House on the Prairie...., I could go on.

What she doesn't seem like to me is a person who has her own views. The views are Alaskan in every sense of the word. Is that wrong? It might be for the rest of the United States. Her qualifications would be laughable if she were a man, but as she is a viable token, we have to take her seriously.

I am sorry about this. I think this is a terrible put down to women, paritcularly if she is instrumental in a McCain loss. If she is a winner and she becomes, by chance the president, she will have to shuck all those television characters and be something I don't think she has ever given a thought to--the leader of a democracy that is more than just Alaskans.

Should Alaskans take offense at this? I would say the same about anyone whose provincialism was an alleged asset, be they from New York City, Columbus, Ohio or anywhere else. George Bush's provincialism (those "gut" decisions have cost us dearly) is a case in point.

Watching clips of (the later) Eric Clapton on YouTube reveals a man who enjoys making music and esteems the people that he is playing with as well as his audience. The music, whether you like it or not, is only part of the show as the joy released by the players can't help but affect your feelings about the experience of watching the song. It is having fun and, in turn, making magic.

That is the point, of course, to have fun. Not everyone gets to do that in life. English furniture dealers, those that care about the business, get it when they find something that appeals to them, something that others might have overlooked or not understood. Moments like these help define just why you are in the business. It, too, is like magic.

The internet sensation that was Paul Potts singing Nessun Dorma for a talent show was less about whether Potts has the ability to sing--he surely does--and more about his revealing the passion that he has for singing. When people catch that, it is catching magic. I know how hard that is and how great it feels, but I probably love it more when I see it in others. We need magic in our world.

It is true that faith is the first step in learning about antiques, let alone anything else in life. But in learning about antiques, there have to be mistakes that are made. This is also probably true about life as well, just look at our current president. The problem is when do mistakes stop and faith have to end? The answer to both is never.

There was a dealer in London who died a number of years ago, Dick Turpin. Every dealer used to warn neophytes from buying from him. I, however, always found him reasonably charming, quite knowledgeable and impossible to get money from. Once I got money out of him, I found him interesting to listen to and a great deal more straightforward than many of the "honest" dealers in the trade.

I think my advantage in this business was to spend time going to the London College of Furniture. Bullshit is much harder to ram down the throat of someone who knows just what a "wax finish" is or that "construction techniques" were absolutely uniform. Wax finishes don't last and construction techniques vary, that is a hard and fast rule. Take my word for it.

The New York Times is almost as silly as the Wall Street Journal when it comes to talking about trends in the furniture world, be they antique or contemporary. Today, there was an article on a woman who has a second career faux finishing cast off tables and re-selling them. How inventive!

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but my niece, Liberty Howell makes a much more interesting table than the faux jaguar table featured in the NYT today. She has a table that has glass with printing on, printed material that you can order specifically. It is a neat idea and should get great publicity.

The issue of publicity is always a question of who you know. Merit has little to do with anything. Too bad. "All the news thats fit to print" used to be bowdlerized to all the news that fits, we'll print. It does sort of seem that way.

One of the things that has made America unique in the world is the ability to quantify things that are unquantifiable.The hamburger is a good case in point. The Wall Street Journal turned their attention to quantifying antique furniture sales last Friday in an article by Nancy Keates.

The numbers she throws out are impressive, but what do they mean? She cites the fact that only 141 Queen Anne pieces sold on Ebay compared to 2,376 mid century modern pieces and 2,132 Eames inspired designs. Which part of the market do any of these pieces represent? She quotes both Leigh Keno and Simon Redburn, luminaries in the business to bolster the article from the high end perspective, but when coupled with the Ebay statistics, the reader is more confused than edified.

Articles such as the one by Ms. Keates make me wonder just how newsworthy a great many articles are. What does she know about the furniture she cites in her article save to say that it underperformed at auction. Did it have good color, was it restored, were there other pieces in the sale that were similar? The variables are many in such situations. What I would suggest to Ms. Keates, had I been asked, is that quantification of the antique furniture market is not one that the Wall Street Journal should attempt. The attempt, in the eyes of the professionals at least, comes off as silly verging on pejorative.

A number of people brought to my attention the article written by Nancy Keates in Friday's Wall Street Journal. It was impressive that Ms. Keates could put a number on how little antique furniture is compared to last year, i.e. thirty cents to the dollar.

Facts and figures really are punchy. The quotations accompanying the article point to a severe decline in the antique furniture market. Having written about the English furniture market for over 30 years, I can say that one of the quotes by Simon Redburn from Sotheby's is no different from the quotes I have heard from dealers and auctioneers from the very first article I wrote in Art and Auction in 1979. Good things sell, second rate things don't.

The furniture market belies market analysis for one simple reason. Quality, the essential ingredient behind value, is undefinable. Two pieces made by the same cabintmaker might be worth vastly different sums for a number of reasons. No other market is like furniture in this way. Does Ms. Keates understand this? I don't think so.

Within the English furniture market, there are a number of different markets which heat up and die down. Economics can cause a market to go off the boil as it will reduce the number of bidders, but collectors die or complete their collections as well. It isn't just a function of price. If you look at the sale Christie's had in June in London where the record for English furniture in auction was broken three times in one night, you might conclude that one part  of the market was bullish. Mid-Georgian furniture with a provenance seems very hot to me. Wish I had more of it.

Generalizations about the furniture market suffer for other reasons as well. The economic recession has reduced the number of players in the market. Many of these people could be called speculators and speculators will ride good economic times and pull out in bad simply because they don't understand the markets as well as they might. What a surprise this is! Housing also seems to be falling as well. Don't kid yourself, there are a great many people watching and waiting and wondering when to get back in. The WSJ article is just a starting point for them.

I often liken the complexity of the furniture market to trying to assess the value of a diamond at thirty yards. Is that actually a diamond one sees glittering on the ground over there or is it a discarded plastic bottle? The people who know it is a diamond are the people I don't want to listen to.

A friend who has had trouble with a building contractor was fulminating about how any future builder working for him would have a contract written out by the best lawyer he knew. I asked him whether trust was a factor in hiring this new contractor and he said that it didn't matter because the contractor would be bound by the contract. Seems contradictory to me. You have to trust the man to do the job before you can entertain giving him a contract, don't you?

I understand his feelings. My trust has been abused a number of times over the years and those circumstances still burn me. However, I have realized that if the right intent is there, there can be trust. You don't want to hire a round peg for a square hole, of course, but if you can hire someone that is capable of filling the square hole properly and who is willing to perform at a hundred percent, a contract becomes a mere formality. Necessary, perhaps, but still a formality.

I have written before about just how important trust is to me. I feel it is the lynch pin of our society, because if you can't trust, no amount of legalese is going to make you trust. Indeed it is the lynch pin of civilization and it is what is lacking in the world today. Personally, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt--it allows them to abuse me if they wish. But once abused, I can assure you that they will have to earn my trust after that. And it won't be easy.

The ability to determine bad taste really should not be too difficult. The recent cover of the New Yorker, for example, was in bad taste. It showed Obama and his wife in the oval office dressed as Muslim and militant. Aside from the fact that irony is alien to most Americans, what's the joke here?

In English furniture, there is one euphemism that I find totally offensive. Oddly, I don't mind antique dealers using it, because they understand what it means. It is "boring brown" to describe the entire genre of English furniture. Someone who doesn't really know what it means should not use the term. It is in bad taste. One of the decorators interviewed in the article on John Hobbs in the New York Times used the term to describe why he bought with Hobbs, to bypass the boring brown. Hopefully, his clients are boring down on him for spending their money so indiscriminately.

Bad taste is understood sensually, visually and intellectually. Bad judgment is often bad taste but bad taste is not always bad judgment. The above decorator had bad judgment and bad taste. The editors at the New Yorker had bad judgment because their point, that Obama is none of those things pictured in the cartoon on the cover, will be missed by the multitude. Why not make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies instead?

Jose Saramago's book, "Seeing", takes a simple premise, the desire by the majority of the populace in a capitol city to leave the ballot blank, and demonstrates the inevitable megalomania of a few of the ruling elite.It is a chilling book that demonstrates the fragility of democracy in the face of the arrogance of power.

In my lifetime, beginning with Truman, I believe that there have been possibly three presidents who have dealt fairly with the power of their office. I have to admit that it would be terribly difficult to have such power. But what I find so amazing is that you will find the same megalomania in towns and villages around America.

It is true in the antiques world as well. One dealer that was hoisted on his own petard, never liked to be contradicted, particularly by the pickers that would bring things to him for sale. He was, in his mind, infallible and that is the picture of arrogance. He fell, as most do, in the long run.

If furniture is all about function, and it is, then painting, oil painting specifically, is all about color. Of course, line is tremendously important in painting just as style is important in furniture, but it is color that is the artist's goal once he sets brush to canvas.

In reading the NY Times review of the Turner retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, I have to say that I was more than a little startled by a few of the adjectives used by the reviewer, Roberta Smith which included "mechanical" and "overblown". They would hardly be the words I would use to describe the artist who set painting free of the tyranny of line. His work is about color and how to get it onto the canvas and still represent what it is that he sees (or saw) in his mind's eye. That achievement is singular in painting history.

The show is a triumph in my opinion and will help give even better context to the multitude of Turner's works on view at the Tate Museum in London. Turner was a professional artist who lived to paint and that is quite evident in this show. His abstraction became a logical extension of color and in that, he set painting free for better or for worse. It is a tremendous show.

I have just finished reading "The Master and Margarita", a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov which was written during the last twelve years of his life between 1928-40. It is a transcendant work, rich in allegory, satire and symbol. Would that I knew more of Bulgakov as well as the time period and Russian literature and I would perhaps have enjoyed the novel that much more. Regardless, it is an extraordinary read.

I am on my second Roberto Bolano called, "By Night in Chile". Bolano is also a satirist and his work is rich with complex characters whose meaning unravels page by page. And you want to read the next page to find out who these people are and what they mean. Bolano, unfortunately, died at the age of fifty, five years ago. His talent is crystal clear.

What my reading has to do with antiques is not so clear, save for cultural understanding, which is what I do as an antique dealer. I have worked to understand the 17th-19th centuries in Europe, visiting houses and museums, and learning about restoration, reading endless histories so that I can feel satisfied that I know what I am doing. It is a handle that I have to have to feel comfortable about being an antique dealer. With the novels that I read, it is a handle that I long to have on the rest of the world.

...is a novel by Roberto Bolano that is well worth the read. It is part detective novel, part suspense novel and a delicate and devastating swipe at the Pinochet era in Chile. I bought two books by Bolano and I look forward to the second one.

Great furniture can be a bit like an epic novel, but it can also be something that is out of the ordinary. Bolano's novel sort of sneaks up on you. I have a pair of rococo mirrors that do the same. They are obviously rococo, but they somehow seem different. They are, both in the way they are carved and in the way they are composed. A little thought and you can see how they are different. I like that about them.

The decorative arts are about interpretation of generally functional forms. I hate to be so non-specific, but some decorative arts are not at all about function. Nevertheless, there is a lot of nuance within those boundaries. Sometimes it is good, sometimes not so, but it is almost never boring. What is really interesting is that it hardly matters what style or era the piece is made in. How nice it is that styles don't march in lockstep.

A bank teller just asked me if Brussels was in France. The question threw me for a second as I couldn't imagine it being anywhere but in Belgium. The place where the great chocolate comes from, perhaps? Or might that be the other banlieu known as Switzerland? The mind rambles on.

I would like to say something germane about knowledge, and I will in a second. However, I want to mention this author I just discovered, Roberto Bolano with a tilde over the "n". His knowledge of South American literature leaves me, a confirmed gringo, aghast. What I have been missing is something I will try hard to re-align. His work is conversational, sort of stream of consciousness but quite coherent, never flight of fancy.

Knowledge is the essence of antique dealing. The only other thing it is about is taste. There are plenty of antiques out there that are not beautiful, some because they have been abused, and some because they were never beautiful in the first place. Good antique dealers have knowledge and there aren't that many out there. Count yourself lucky if you know one.

There is a lot going on in the English antique furniture business these days. Two of the more venerable dealers in the business are retiring and putting their stock up for sale this autumn. Jeremy and Hotspur of Lowndes Square in London are leaving the business for retirement. Their stock will be for sale at Christie's in November.

Speaking of Christie's there were two sales of English furniture at Christie's, London on Wednesday of this week. The earlier sale of the estate of Simon Sainsbury, the grocery heir, made over sixteen million pounds. The later sale, 12 Exceptional Pieces of English Furniture made over ten million pounds. Clearly, if you wish to buy retail, the auction houses are the place. Should your horizons need expanding and your wallet less exercise, you might drop in on a dealer to experience the wholesale side of the trade.

Finally, the Grosvenor House Fair will miss Jeremy and Hotspur tremendously. Two great dealers with consistently great things for sale are hard to replace. Charlie Mortimer's assertion that the fair is dying may be closer to the truth than even he realizes. One long time exhibitor confided to me that it just wasn't worth the investment from his point of view. Another told me that he might drop out for a year or two and yet another felt it just cost too much money. It would be hard to replace such a prestigious event but premature postmortems have a way of being wrong. Lets just say that the road ahead will be different than the road we have all been used to traveling on.