Clinton Howell Antiques

You can endlessly analyze the reasons for buying at auction from the alleged comfort of a (knowledgeable?) underbidder to showing off to a girl friend. In the end it is a lot sexier, at least for the casual buyer, to purchase something at a sale. For dealers to get hung up on this is rather like a boxer wishing he were a heavyweight when he is 5'2" and 110 pounds. He knows how to box, he just seldom gets any recognition for it.

I would also venture to say that the cyclical nature of all markets makes the auction houses look like they are "winning" at this point in time. Winning, however, is not what the market is about. It is about sustaining a profitable business. Good dealers know that this is the point, not whether auctions get the glory. Furthermore, the auction houses do not wish to eradicate dealers. Dealers amount for a huge amount of underbidding which supports bigger prices. I would dare say that in the English furniture market, there are very few pieces bought above estimate that have not had a dealer involved in the bidding.

The relative ease of the auction house experience--easier if you are richer--needs to be focused on by dealers who want to, if not compete, at least be considered in the same breath as the auction houses. A number of English furniture dealers understand this and endeavor to make their customers understand it as well by offering the best of service. In the end, no buyer at auction would ever buy from them again if the service from a dealer exceeded that of the auction house. The funny thing is that it usually does.

I did not read what Souren Melikian wrote in "Art and Auction" the other day, but I was told that he wrote that the art dealer was a thing of the past. Certainly the art dealer is under severe strains in many ways, at least if you are talking about the English furniture market. Some of the stresses include very high rent for decent space, fast rising costs in insurance and transportation and extraordinarily expensive booth rents at antique shows. Add to that the difficulty of finding inventory, and it is not an easy business to be in.

Is the auction house the cause of all this? Certainly, auction houses have muscled into a place of prominence that few might have imagined they could attain years ago. They are into just about any and every field and really are the market setters in a few such as contemporary art and impressionist art. Both fields, because they require such vast sums for the purchase of just one item have, however, become investor dominated. People look to them to put money into as a safe haven for a long term investment or as a short term profit maker on a rising artist. Yes, the auction houses have benefitted greatly from the "art as investment" mind set.

It should be realized, however, that not everyone in every market is in it for investment. This is art after all and it is highly personal. I have known collectors who have ignored price tags in order to acquire THE piece for themselves. You could call it an obsession, but that is not accurate. It is that the object is worth more to them than the money. How simple that understanding is and it epitomizes the essence of and the reason for the dealer, because above all, the dealer educates. Money isn't everything after all.

The New York media is transfixed by the fifth anniversary of 9/11. The reasons for this could be many, from demonstrating to Washington why more funds are needed to secure New York City, to an attempt at some form of catharsis. Whatever the reason, I would say that anniversaries, particularly of this nature, are private affairs for people to experience in their own ways.

Whatever the mood, New York has to get on with business. I have noticed that the streets are more crowded and that traffic, which was benign last week, has resumed its more frenzied proportions. However, my shop sits a little lonely at the moment. I await my re-fenestration which should have been completed weeks ago and I sit with tools and equipment jockeying for space amid the walnut, mahogany and satinwood.

This product that I tout, 18th century English antique furniture, is in my opinion, some of the most aesthetically pleasing and intriguing furniture ever made. English furniture of this era has something that few other pieces of great furniture from any country has, which is the sense of having lived and having gotten better and more beautiful as it did. It is a great pleasure to be surrounded by these objects.

It isn't true that summer ends at Labor Day. These days, for a great many students, summer ended last week as they returned to classrooms. In the antiques trade, summer ends well after Labor Day, which is neither a good or bad thing unless summer has been a long dry spell of no business. If that is the case, you want to take your shot gun out and blow summer all to hell.

My summer has been quite pleasant. Buyers and sellers have been on the move and that is good. I have not quite accomplished all that I set out to do. This because I wanted to extend my windows to the floor of my gallery and because of a certain expert bureaucratese, I will be doing this post- rather than pre-Labor Day. Since my shop is a mess in anticipation of construction, I hope that the buying public will delay until I am cleaned up and ready to roll.

The only thing that I dread about summer other than a complete lack of business are heat waves. Heat waves pay no attention to the date and occur well after the calendrial end of summer. The first year of the International Show in mid-October fell on the night that Hugo started ravaging South Carolina and the barometer in New York City was through the roof. Anyone in New York City that wasn't sweating that evening was already dead.

Visibility and location are what it is all about in the retail business. Or so I am told. My own experience tells me this is only partly true. People have to look. If they aren't looking, they don't see. They also have to believe in you, at least as far as selling expensive antiques is concerned. Being believable is a function of the buyer's experience, of course. The less they have, as far as I am concerned, the worse it is for me.

In any case, I am in the midst of making my windows extend to the floor of my gallery. It is a straightforward and rather simple project. However, people and bureaucracies come out of the woodwork to throw wrenches into the project making it slow to a creep. If I were twenty years younger, I would be screaming at people. At this stage in my life, it is better to take two aspirin and think of the end result.

It is August as well which is the slowest of months. Even December has more zip to it than August. Not the weather, but the number of clients roaming the streets. Nonetheless, I am not expecting anything and more is happening than that. I love busy designers. I just hope they love me and are able to see beyond the thick layer of dust that construction has wrought.

There isn't a decorator alive who doesn't say that their work is anything but timeless. Tell that to Dorothy Draper, Metropolitan Museum retrospective, notwithstanding. What is timeless is good taste and she certainly had that. Her work, specifically her interiors, are another matter altogether. What can possibly survive the onslaught of happy decorating?

The things that survive are the furniture and the objects. Look at the memorabilia sales that the auctions have been having. A crappy old set of JFK's golf clubs for over $200,000! I would call that survival. What won't survive are neon pink or beiges or black walls or striped walls or wooden houses or glass houses. Unless, of course, you are Phillip Johnson's glass house. But that was an object of his anyway.

Life is a curious combination of enjoying the moment and living for the future. Antiques, paradoxically, are for the present and the future. Color is for now. Decorating is for now and if you are a color freak, live with it. If you are a beigeista, revel in your serenity. Sooner or later your choices will be painted over. And you will most likely be the person doing the painting.

Every once in a while, I read the new York Times with absolute awe at their choice of editorial content. (Actually, more than once in a while.) Today, there is an article entitled, "Is This What Happiness Looks Like?" This is an article with lots of photos, in other words not a cheap piece to run, devoted to the discussion of whether bright colors in the home make for happier people.

I think the article was supposed to just be fun, or perhaps it was tongue in cheek. One of those articles that signifies what New York City is really like. The philosophy of color needs, I believe, a great deal more space than this one got. This article was hardly a statement, more of a chance for decorators to have a few good sound bites published.

If they had asked my opinion, I might have suggested that the clientele subjecting themselves to the tastes of a decorator spend a little time learning just what it is that makes them relax. A glass of wine or a shot of bourbon in neon pink just may be the right thing, but if it isn't it grows old real fast. Our homes are our refuges and they should offer as much a chance for rejuvenation as you can get in the 12 hours or so you get to be there each day.

Relaxation and comfort, in other words, require an effort to understand. Years ago, I painted my library apple green and I liked it for a while. But it did not stand up to the test of time and it is now a dark forest green. It is the right color for me, but in fact, the color is less important than what I have in the room. Books, of course, are the primary thing, but then I have antiques on sabbatical from my shop and they work very well at making a room to relax in.

I suppose what I started out to say is that the New York Times has these many sections every day that are other than the news and which are, in essence, the tabloid part of the paper. Instead of scandal, there is every facet you can imagine to do with modern times with the strongest emphasis being on fashion and design. But the articles don't delve deeply. The intent is titillation. I guess you have to sell newspapers and cater to your market. The articles just should not be taken too seriously.

In writing about bogus bargains yesterday, I focused on pieces that looked exceedingly inexpensive for what they were. Dealers who have been in business for a certain amount of time do not make such mistakes, that is underselling an item by not just fifty percent but by seventy-five to eighty percent. That kind of naivete, also known as stupicity, doesn't make for a successful antiques business, unless..........

I would never hire a plumber that told me he charged only twenty-five percent as much as his competition. I would suspect a car that was being sold too cheaply unless I had an expert mechanic to look it over. Why would an antique dealer let a huge profit go untapped? How dumb do antique dealers look? Getting fooled, after all, is a two way street.  Understanding just where the joke lies is more important than anything.

Frankly, I believe that you can fool a lot of people a lot of the time and for some dealers, that is just enough. Looking at the world for what is real is not an easy task, one of the reasons being that it just costs a lot to get what you want--there are no "steals". Getting a feel for reality, something I would like some of our politicians to do, is the basis for greater understanding. I must reiterate that if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it is a duck.

Most of the antique dealers that I know at the upper end of the trade really enjoy the decorative arts. Furniture in particular offers dealers the ability to create a sense of their own taste by buying certain forms or styles that are in a color and condition that they can relate to and promote. Dealers also need to enjoy the buying and selling as well as it is a necessary adjunct to being a dealer. These two sensibilities, for lack of a better word, are essential to top flight dealers and it is one of the most unifying aspects of the antiques trade.

Dealers, however, do not march in lock step. There are strong disagreements about taste, authenticity and knowledge in general. The vetting process at antiques fairs is a reminder of this and although many dealers have objected to assessments as well as reserved the right to further disagree with a vetting committee opinion, there is also a tacit agreement to abide by the rules. The system is far from perfect, but it has forced dealers to both raise standards and work within them.

In a discussion with a dealer the other day, it became quite clear to both of us that the unwritten rules of the antiques trade are not universal. He told me about a dealer offering a rare Italian cupboard dating 1540 for around $150,000 that he had been asked to look at for some clients of a friend. The clients, who had priced similar pieces before, were aware that great examples sell for close to seven figures. They sensed that they had a "steal" and were extremely excited. They should not have been.

The antique furniture market has become, with the use of the internet, about as transparent as it can be given the essential truth that every piece needs to be closely examined. You can look up just about anything and determine what the market for an item should be. Yes, there are dealers that sell things for less and there are some who ask big prices. Dealers are allowed to do this and if they have great knowledge, they probably should. But bargains such as the one in the previous paragraph are not real. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

I once had a decorator bring a client to my shop to look at a dining table. It was a table that I was selling for a friend. The surface was filled with scratches and dents from fairly rough use, but it was a perfectly good two pedestal table with a reasonable patina. The friend needed the money from the sale and I priced it very inexpensively. The decorator knew the table was inexpensive and thought her client was more averse to spending money than worrying about scratches an dents. That was not the case, however.

Having talked about stains, I omitted talking about polishing because antique restorers seldom build a finish from scratch. Occasionally, you have to match a leaf to a dining table, but that is likely to be the largest surface you will work on. Good restorers always try to find already finished old wood for repairs and then resort to "new" pieces of wood, usually old timber but freshly cut, to fill in missing pieces of veneer. Good staining technique is paramount in such circumstances. What restorers never do is sand off an old finish, even if it is marked excessively as this table was. You lose the patina and I knew that sooner or later, someone would come along who liked the patina and could live with the dents and scratches.

I try not to buy surfaces that are too scarred because my customer base has a limit to how much history they want to see on a top. I never buy something where I think I will have to sand a surface down, re-stain and re-polish. It goes against everything that I think an antique dealer should stand for, i.e. the retention of all that has happened to a surface. There is always a customer for every piece who is looking for something that they would call the perfect antique, regardless of condition. Don't tell anybody, but it is just a case of the right person finding the right object. It is also called falling in love.

I was asked to look at a banister rail to determine what I thought was wrong with it. The first thing I could see was that someone had put a very dark oil stain on it and that this was done to cover up the second rate craftsmanship of the manufacture and installation of the rail. It was  clearly a simple minded and wrong headed solution to a problem that has nothing to do with stain. But oil stains are often used thusly. I refer to my analogy of yesterday.

At this point, I have to say that one of the things that is so compelling about English antique furniture is the color that it has. The combination of wood choice, stains, finish, aging and care often produce astounding patina. Very little is known about how antique furniture was stained and finished, however, although there are plenty of theories some of which sound great but which in practical terms are quite silly. And yet, the variety of water borne stains that existed in the 17th and 18th centuries certainly exists today and a good stainer/finisher both then and now would closely guard this information. It is a hard won knowledge. The complexities of the art, however, make it all the more appealing.

It is quite certain that stains from the 17th and 18th centuries were used to make things brighter. Virtually all of the harewood we see, and there was a great deal of it used in the 1760-1800 period, was quite green when it was first stained. That is what harewood is after all, green stained sycamore. Would I have liked the furniture so brightly stained? That is hard to say.

In summary, I would say that oil stains bought on the market today are not really intended for use the way water stains are. Oil stains, which come named as cherry or oak or walnut, are a modern look. If you want your pine to look quite dark, a walnut stain will do the trick. If, on the other hand, you want your pine to look like walnut wood, you better use that wood, because pine will never look like walnut no matter how often you stain it.

There are two kinds of stain used on raw wood, water borne and oil based stains. Of these two, water stains are more complex as they include chemical stains which react to the wood they are being used on as, for example, copper sulphate does on mahogany in eliminating the red color. A clever stainer knows which stains will react well together and how they affect different kinds of wood. The simpler water stains that merely add color are really not so simple to use as they require an understanding of finishing altogether, that is the laying of a polish on the stain. Oil based stains are basically designed for the novice that wants to occlude the surface of the wood they are working on to give it basic color. Oil based stains can be used in faux finishes, but for the purposes we are talking about, they are a simplistic solution to coloring wood.

The simple-ness of oil based stains, however, is not so simple. Yes, they allow you to stain in a one step process, but in so doing you lose the subtlety of tone and wood grain. It is not unlike our president's policies which boils issues down to who is wrong and who is right. It is not equivocating to see shades of gray in issues and to act according to subtleties that might not yet be apparent. A good stainer is no different in that he judges the wood he is working on, knows what his stains will do and how the polish will affect the stains and proceeds accordingly, often in the opposite direction from what you think might be the obvious way to go as, for example, in provoking the red in mahogany to go bright with a lye based solution and then knocking it back with peroxide. Oil stains and antiques don't, as a rule, mix all that well simply because they lack subtlety.

To be continued.

The best thing about contemporary art as far as I can see is how it deals with certain issues. Take authenticity, for example. I read in the New York Times that a Damien Hirst shark is decomposing in its tank and that one of the Hirst people said that replacing the shark with a second one won't affect the integrity of the piece. I love that! I wonder what the insurance industry's take on that is?

In my business, I have people asking me just exactly what has been done to restore a piece and the answer, in the trade in general, is nothing. I don't agree with that answer but people are generally quite skittish about buying anything that has even seen the inside of a restorer's studio. And everything has in some way or another.

No, contemporary art knows how to deal with their clientele. I can't help but reiterate, I love that! Imagine building half of a house and then telling the client it was finished because the idea of the house was the important thing. I wonder what will happen when there are no more sharks to fill the tank? You still have the tank, the formaldehyde and, of course, the idea.

The movie, "Wordplay" is a charming film about the 2005 Crossword Puzzle Tournament held in the Marriott Hotel in Stamford, CT. Well, that is part of what it is about. It is also about the allure that the New York Times crossword puzzle has for a great many people. I am among those people. I have competed in the last four or five tournaments and after having peaked in 2004 have watched my mental capacity deteriorate quantitatively since.

The movie is really charming. The people who do crosswords, the people who are really good at them, crackle with the competitive urge to go faster and be smarter than anyone else. I won't say that I don't enjoy being able to do all the puzzles, because I do and I really enjoy being better at them than most people. Not these people, however. They are good and fast and I am not in their league.

I did the Sunday puzzle yesterday while watching England beat Ecuador in soccer. It took me about forty minutes of on again, off again concentration. I like this technique because I work in pen and it is neater because any jams allow me to lay the puzzle aside for a few minutes. I still make mistakes but far fewer than when I was in my 30's. It is also illustrative of why I will never be better than I was the year I finished at 153rd. In any case, this is all to say that I can be seen in "Wordplay" in the last 15 minutes or so. Enjoy.

And by the way, today's puzzle, which is very easy and which I timed myself on took me close to five minutes, a full three minutes longer than some of the pros. I was not stumped on one clue and I never stopped writing. Go figure.

When discussing the incident I wrote about yesterday with a British dealer, he told me that there were a great many fakes coming out of Ireland at the moment. He had an experience with an Irishman who tried to sell him an early Regency serving table that had come from "a private home in Ireland".

My friend looked at the table and it tweaked a memory of a sale he had attended in the country. He still had the catalogue and went into his office to look it up. It was the same table and the Irishman had clearly been the consignor as the table had not sold. When he pointed this out to the Irishman, he discounted his lies and admitted that he had put it into auction. My friend was appalled at this conduct.

These are cautionary tales. Anyone who thinks they can get something on the cheap is just kidding themselves. When we willingly suspend common sense because something is too good to be true, it is too good to be true. But this story is re-played again and again as human nature is, particularly for trusting people, open to believing in miracles.

An expanding circular table, one of the fakes that has been circulating around London, is coming up for sale soon in Stamford, CT, courtesy of the Irish mob I met the other day. It is a modern table and nothing more.