Clinton Howell Antiques

A pair of commodes sold in London for ninety-five thousand pounds the other day. Given their rarity, it is an odd price in the eyes of the antiques trade which feels that they should either have been four to five hundred thousand or, if they were 19th century, a good deal less.

The commodes raised questions that could not be answered from the point of view of a workshop like Thomas Chippendale's, or for that matter, by any sophisticated London shop of the 1750's. The inconsistencies in construction, none of which condemned the piece entirely but which did cast shades, not absolute, doubt on the pair, were sufficient for two people in particular to question the authenticiy of the pair. The two individuals, both experienced and with excellent credentials, one a restorer and the other an auction house expert, were leery enough about the commodes to forestall bidding by dealers who felt that such a negative slant might harm their prospects of selling the pieces. Whether they knew it or not, they affected the bidding.

The question that begs to be asked is how did these two individuals earn such a valuable position in the antiques trade without being dealers? I know of instances where the auction house expert has incorrectly rated furniture. That is not to say that I or anyone in this business is infallible, but isn't that the point? Further, does a lukewarm opinion of goods at a rival business guarantee an unbiased opinion?

The one thing that I have learned in the English furniture business is that there is no such thing as altruism. There are people with agendas who will say negative things for their impact. I am not saying this is the case here because I did not examine the commodes and may agree wholeheartedly with the rumored judgment. But I will say that people who speak honestly are seldom given credit for it and/or they are roundly condemned for their naivete. The consequence is that one has to invariably suspect any opinion, no matter who voices it. In the end, honesty is a variable commodity and that is a great pity.

The inventory of M. Turpin Antiques was sold at Christies several weeks ago and the net result was over five million pounds. Dick Turpin had an exceptional eye and what went up for sale represents a fraction of the great things he handled over the years. I am sorry that it went up for sale at auction, but if antiques are liquid, it is an unreserved auction that makes them so.

Several dealers suggested to me that Dick would have been appalled that his goods sold under the hammer. I am not so certain of that fact. Dick liked to be known to be clever and this final sale of his goods shows him to have been just that and maybe a little bit more.

Dealers make money when they don't pay rent by owning their premises and when they continue to buy antiques. Dick, I think, owned his mews houses and he never stopped buying. And because he had a good eye and good instincts, he bought very well. His sale at Christies was only a reminder of how good those instincts and that eye were.

I often wonder why anyone walking into any store, antiques or otherwise, should be secure that they are getting value for money. Prices are completely arbitrary and are based on demand alone. This particular factor can make antique galleries look expensive because some items will wait for years for buyers.

Antique dealers at the top end of the market MUST know their goods. They must be able to understand and articulate what it is they are selling from every point of view. How else can you factor prices? Demand is not instantaneous and hinges on esoteric factors such as connoisseurship and collecting and how a piece will fit where it is intended.

This takes us back to client insecurity at determining value for money. I wish that I were a salesman because it would then be a question of making a sale, but I always want to try and educate my clients which more often than not is an uphill battle that is frequently lost. I strongly recommend that anyone who considers walking into a high end antique shop first come to grips with the fact that there is both no demand and an extraordinary demand for our product. That should explain value in a nutshell. As for insecurity, I couldn't possibly explain that.

There are few furniture styles that I do not like. Indeed, style in furniture is what makes it great although there is a caveat. It has to function to a reasonable degree if I am either going to own or sell it. My Bugatti secreatire and chair barely make the cut in that regard. I have to say that some architect designed furniture leaves me a little cold although I love the Greene and Greene furnitre. Gaudi deserves a pass for his overall work, but Frank LLoyd Wright fails in my estimation, at least as regards furniture design. I could go on giving thumbs up or down about much more, but I will leave that to another time.

Of course, English furniture qualifies differently from the aforementioned furniture. When you come across something in good condition, with great color, wonderfully made of great materials and the design has that extra fillip of imagination, you know you have found a great piece of English furniture.  It has extraordinary warmth and is very liveable. Try it, you will probably like it.

I thought I should finish up talking about taste in regards to style. Style is not always in good taste, but good taste always has style.

It always amuses me to see Sean Combs dressed like Rex Harrison in "My Fair Lady". A promoter of the gangsta style, he could not be further from it now. Tom Wolfe, an excellent writer in my opinion, has kept alive the fop in his manner of dress. It is amusing and very stylish.

Function also has a place in determining whether style works. Does Frank Gehry's museum in Bilbao work? I have been there and found the exhibition spaces perfunctory. Maybe I was there too soon after it opened.

Taste and style are two different things. Choosing to be stylish is always bold as it requires thought and gumption. Choosing to be tasteful can be boring. Designing for function alone can be boring--think of the post war British architecture in London. And yet combining all the elements is what great taste makers/designers try to achieve. It is no easy feat.

The trouble with creating a brand is the time that is involved in getting that brand known. Advertising is the quickest method, but a phenomenal product usually helps--except in the antique business.

There is always some savant who thinks he knows your product better than you. At the Palm Beach Fair last week, a young French upholsterer came onto my booth and pronounced some English chairs of mine as new, because, he said, the stiles (back legs) should embrace the crest rail. He was dead certain he was right, but English chairs are not built that way. The crest rails in English chairs rest on the stiles. Any fool could tell you this was so.

A dealer informed me at the fair in Palm Beach that someone had crabbed a piece of mine at the Winter Antiques Show. This is one of the problems any dealer has in creating a brand. The agents who advise clients talk as if they knew every piece of furniture on the market. No brand is immune from such chutzpah. Their talk might even be considered slanderous.

The question is how much bad taste matters in regards to the state of the world when humanity clearly prefers a state of religious strife, to ignore hunger and disease and to warm the planet so that our weather gets wilder and our lives more uncertain? Bad taste seems a minor infraction when placed on such a scale.

I beg to differ. Our environment is us. Pretension, the underlying conceit of bad taste, is a plague on humanity. Not quite as deadly as disease or starvation, it should not be ignored. It leads us down the wrong path, the path of arrogance or perhaps of stubbornness in not seeing that which is in front of us.

Art, and by art I mean all things creative, has the potential to soothe the soul. It maintains us and keeps us on an even keel. Things that offend the eye do not. They have quite the opposite affect.

Good taste requires training your eye. And just because you train your eye, it does not mean that you will have good taste. To make the assumption that good taste is a genetic trait is a presumption that a) there is good taste from one's past to inherit and b) that it is possible to compact good taste in a gene and transfer it.

Bad taste, however, is not naivete. It is an ssumption that you can do something in a fashion that imitates good taste for less money or less effort. Think of the plenitude of balloon curtains,for example, and how poorly they can look with too little fabric. That is bad taste.

Good taste does not require money. It requires the ability to try things until they work. If you don't try, you won't know and if you don't know, you will never learn. The magazine "World of Interiors", particularly in its early years, showed great taste at a wide range of budgets. If money defined good taste, we would have better looking currency.

Bad taste is the attempt at making something with good taste without understanding the underpinnings of what good taste are. An example of this is the overuse of the Palladian window as seen in so many of the McMansions that are built in affluent suburbs. So many arched window make it difficult for the eye to align itself. The lack of a focal point makes the design feel a little queasy. It is rather like reading a paragraph that has an exclamation point at the end of every sentence! !Or in front of every sentence as well! Stop me now!

In essence, good design is in knowing how to use the right elements at the right time. Good taste, which is not necessarily synonymous with good design although it sure helps, is similar. You don't want to put an enormous house on a tiny plot of land, no matter how beautiful it is. You lose more than what you are trying to gain.

So where do ugly and kitsch fit into bad taste? Ugly is interesting unless someone tries to fob it off as beautiful. Kitsch is the memory of former bad taste that reminds one how embarrassingly bad one's taste once was. It is ego control for those of us that think our taste is so great!

My daughter and I were discussing elitism the other day. I thought that elitism was the belief in the value of the best and she thought it meant a form of snobbery. Neither of us was correct although her understanding was closer to the "Dictionary.com" definition, "The belief that certain members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social class or financial resources." I have never believed the value of one person to be better than another, but there are people with bad taste and bad taste requires elitist principles. I may like people who have bad taste, but I won't like their taste.

As my daughter is still in college and is an unbiased egalitarian about most things, I try to encourage her to make judgments. Being a dealer of English antique furniture requires a host of judgments. Being any kind of dealer requires judgments and I encourage the development of an elitist attitude, at least regarding the quality of any of the arts.

Contemporary art is a wonderful case in point. Some of it is fantastically priced and appears, to my eye, quite ordinary. It seems that some of the art floats on great PR and not much more. Not being a connoisseur of the genre, I will fall back on my elitist principles and judge according to what I see and what pleases me about art. More often than not, I disdain it. Equally, some English antique furniture should be disdained. Just because it is old doesn't mean that it has any particular aesthetic or monetary value.

Is there a need for price guides in the world of English antique furniture? Our corporate culture likes to think that everything can be quantified as long as we have enough information from which to draw a conclusion. However, I don't think English furniture lends itself to this analysis.

I have expounded many times on the five aspects of a piece of furniture that make it unique. The foremost is design because it is the form and shape of the object that is of paramount importance to the buyer. The second is condition. Condition is tricky as sometimes a piece is in terrible shape and can be restored without affecting value. In other words, good color may exist under a bad finish. Or, in regards to gilded things, a mirror might be dry-stripped, a process that rids the mirror of subsequent gilding repairs while essentially retaining the original gesso, clay and if you are really lucky, gold. Experienced dealers make money off of these situations because they know what can and can not be salvaged. The third aspect is craftsmanship. There are poorly made antiques and they don't earn a great deal of money in auctions because of their dubious quality. The fourth is the materials from which a piece is made. A dumbwaiter made of mahogany is a fairly common object, but one made in rosewood, indicating that it is probably Chinese made, is a great deal rarer and commands a higher price. The fifth is provenance which is likely the trickiest of all to prove unless you have a signature on the piece which happens very seldom in English furniture. There is also another category which is more difficult to define and it is the odd piece of period furniture that does not fit the norm. For example, you would be very hard pressed to find a narrow console table with cabriole legs that is over three feet wide. It goes against the proportional mandates of the 18th century cabinetmaker and yet such oddities do turn up and can be quite valuable.

How can a price guide factor in these elements? I don't think it can.

A merry, or if you are English, a happy Christmas to all.

The pwerful force that is inertia can perpetuate a quasi-cotton wool state that endangers the use of common sense. I often think that politicians (take either side) revel in the glacial like movement of the US government which does not seem to want to reflect on its position at any level, from local to international. I would not say that it is ineffective, but I would say that its ability to apply reason to a given problem is compromised because of the force of the status quo.

This is true for a great many buyers of English furniture. Dealers are often branded for a host of reasons. It may happen because a browser who is influential tells a friend how expensive a dealer is and the word never dies. More often than not, the negative brands can be considered gossip. Seldom do positive brands sustain a half life but when they do, they are hard won from many years of experience. Changing a negative brand is not only difficult, but quite often impossible.

Inertia wins most of the time. Convincing people about what they should or should not buy or where they should buy is an uphill battle. The English dealers, for example, are generally more expensive than the New York dealers for items that are of comparable quality, but a certain segment of the buying market is not so easily convinced and go to London almost as a reflex action. (Do people actually believe that you have to be English to know about English furniture? Heaven forfend!) But the status quo is a comfortable, powerful and, in the end, easier course of action. It just happens from time to time to belie common sense.

Michael Kimmelman's article in the Dec. 8 issue of the New York Times, "Regarding Antiquities, Some Changes, Please", outlines the problems facing museums that buy looted art. As Italy is the current country raising the fuss, though Greece has also been in the fray since Melina Mercouri demanded the Elgin Marbles be returned to the Acropolis from the British Museum, the storm is currently focused on things in the Metropolitan and the Getty Museum.

Kimmelman's article deftly covers the situation where museums are being faulted for knowingly purchasing looted items as well as the countries whose laws invite illegal smuggling because of the consequences that landowners face when finding antiquities on their property. His argument for the reform of the laws and museum policy has a great deal of merit.

What is lacking in my opinion is the understanding that there is so much out there. A culture that encourages the proper excavation of sites, including payment to the landowner for the temporary use of his land as well as returning it to its former condition once the site is completely excavated, is one step. However, the next step is legalizing the selling of items. Kimmelman cites British law that allows British museums first dibs on any article found or excavated, but at a fair price. That sounds great to me. If a museum does not want the article, then the owner is allowed to sell the item--legally.

Nationalism is at the root of these countries wanting looted items back. And the fact that many things were illegally obtained is a fair argument for their return. But nationalism is the world of 2005. Our desire to be French or Nigerian or Peruvian is a recent phenomenon. When I look at things made thousands of years ago, I don't think of them as being Italian, Iraqi or anything else. They are made by a culture that once existed and no longer does and, in an odd way, belongs to mankind. The temporary custodians should realize just that--they are temporary. And as custodians, they should be doing the best job they possibly can of preserving them.

The best place to find art, antiques, archaeological artifacts or anything that a museum or a government might be interested in is in a warehouse. An article in the New York Times yesterday wrote that there were three thousand institutions in the United States with 4.8 billion artifacts needing conservation. If I were a young curator wanting a job with a museum, I would want to see what they have in storage before I did anything else. It would scare me to know that I had a conservation issue that might cost many millions if I was, in fact, inclined to do something. If I wasn't inclined to do anything at all, would I be sued for negligence if I allowed the problem to exacerbate? Not my idea of fun at all.

I have to wonder about the Italian prosecutor who is putting heat to the feet of several American museums. I wonder what the Italian storage facilities look like? Is there perhaps more stuff waiting in the wings than is possible to be shown in several life times of exhibits? My guess is that there is quite a bit. Multiply the problem in the U.S. by all the countries that have substantial museum holdings and there must be many billions of things sitting in storage. The new archaeologists will never have to go out into the field.

There is a solution, of course. Let it out on the market. Sell the stuff. Yes, some of it will be lost and/or destroyed, but some of it will be conserved better than a museum could. Why not create a culture of caring for things rather than packing them in boxes and placing them in a room that might get an infestation of something or a flood or a fire or any other such natural disaster? We have become hoarders and that is about as exciting as watching grass grow.