Clinton Howell Antiques

Determining what is art according to what has been collected over the years, as the Frick is doing in its Center for the History of American Collecting, is extremely tricky. Almost everyone is a collector of some sort or another. Why should one person's collection of shoes, for example, be considered "art" while another's collection of bottle caps not be so considered? Is there a line that eventually gets drawn about what is collected that qualifies as art and who draws the line?

Frankly, what is considered art boils down to taste. Furniture offers a very real test of what is good taste, partly by its survival and partly by how well it was made. This is not to say that solid pieces of furniture are all in good taste, but it does mean that they have one quality by which "good" furniture is measured. But "good" does not guarantee taste. There has to be an aesthetic hook or otherwise, like all those well made Victorian wardrobes, they will be cut up and used to make something else.

Which is the point about what is good taste. The decision about what is good taste will be made by ensuing generations. The shark in formaldehyde will eventually disintegrate (as it has already once) and a new shark will be needed. How long will that maintenance continue? All things in this world require maintenance and those works of art that need a lot of it will suffer the fate of the shark if there isn't someone to foot that bill. Time, it seems, not only weeds out survivors and shapes our view of what is art, but it does so in a willy-nilly fashion. Frankly, if I had my money in a lot of conceptual art, I would dump it now. I would be worried about those ensuing generations.

The Frick's study on the collector and his influence on art started me to think about artists. Artists are interested in two things, the first to please themselves and the second, if they are professional, making a living. In other words, an artist is driven by two, sometimes opposing, currents, one is personal satisfaction and the second is business.

Great 18th century furniture was made by men who did not compromise on quality. There was a commercial imperative that drove them to make everything the best that it could be. There were no compromises. Compared to the furniture industry today, barring a few properly trained bespoke makers, the 18th century is nonpareil.

Unlike furniture, if you can convince someone of the value of your art, you are, in essence, an artist even if the critics tear into you every time they look at your work. But in the decorative arts, function trumps the word, "art", requiring items that are sturdy and useful. Imagine trying to sell a chair with two legs? This is not to say there is no "art" in furniture because there certainly is.

The amorphous meaning of the word, "art" is ultimately the sticking point in granting the right to call any collector's collection, "art". The unique sensation achieved by the viewer of any piece of art, be it discarded dental floss or the Mona Lisa, makes it "art". Taste is not relevant to the discussion of what is and isn't "art".

On my part, I feel the great leveler of stuff ("art" that not all of us agree with) is time. That which gets neglected and ultimately destroyed will cease to have a hold on anyone. It is no longer "art" at that point. The Frick's endeavor to classify art by what is collected seems premature particularly with the plethora of contemporary art on the market. Time has not had the chance to destroy things, but it will. The "art" may or may not remain. We would like to believe that it will. 

An article from The New York Observer about the study of art collecting caught my eye today. Inge Reist is a director of the two year old Center for History of Collecting in America at the Frick Museum and, if I understand the article correctly, Ms. Reist believes that collectors essentially determine what is art. It is an interesting hypothesis, but I am not certain that I entirely agree with it.

Furniture collecting has been a story of neglect and it continues to be a story of neglect. The job for most dealers is to recognize what has been discarded, neglected and broken and to bring those items "back to life". Furniture is not the same as art, but I know plenty of art dealers who do what I do. There are precious few collectors who do it simply because they have neither the knowledge or the confidence. 

This is not to say Ms. Reist is wrong. There are collectors who recognize genius. But there is a conflict here. Having seen the Kandinsky exhibition at the Guggenheim, I felt that Kandinsky's work ranged from near genius to mediocre. Solomon Guggenheim, under the direction of the painter Hilla von Rebay, bought Kandinsky extensively. Did Guggenheim make Kandinsky or would he have been appreciated anyway? The question is an interesting one. I would love to have a conversation with Ms. Reist on the subject.

An article in the NY Times yesterday about a pre-Mesopotamian, European culture showed some artifacts from that culture. One small gold object looked like a study for a Brancusi sculpture. Last year, while I was in Berlin, I saw some Egyptian statues at the Pergamon Museum that looked like Giacometti sculptures. On Sunday, while viewing a Leonardo exhibit at the Discovery Center in Times Square, I saw a working drawing that could have been a Kandinsky drawing.

I bought a mirror several years ago that has a distinctly baroque shape. However, the style of the carvings--the mouldings, the carving on the flat and the crest--are all distinctly neo-classical. So, here is a frame that could date 1730 that can only be thirty-five to forty years later. How did this frame come into being? I don't know, but it is original and I like it for being so unusual. In a way, it is original, but it isn't.

I can appreciate, on an intellectual level, what conceptual artists achieve in their work. They can claim originality, which is a difficult thing to do, because their art is the thought in their mind. Throw a shark in a tank and it can mean anything. Do endless silk screens of celebrities or even every day objects and you are a genius for stating the obvious. Originality of this sort is an eldorado for the artist. But from what I keep seeing, there are no new ideas.

From time to time, once I acknowledge how little I know about English furniture, I wish I knew about other things as well such as, for example, icons. In reading Chris Wickham's, "The Inheritance of Rome", I came to understand the debt owed by western art to the Orthodox church. It is a circuitous path and one that I am not totally certain of but it is clear that a woman named Eirene, a woman who, among other things, blinded her son to become Empress of Constantinople in 797 A.D., had a stong hand in bending the theology of the Catholic church in Constantinople to venerating icons.

Eirene was the daughter-in-law to Constantine V, wife to Leo IV and after his death regent for her son, Constantine VI, before becoming Empress. In 785 A.D. while still regent, she called for a council to study the inclusion of the veneration of images into the church. After a second council was called in Nicaea in 787 A.D., her ideas were adopted. The Orthodox church was largely established as we know it this day after that second council. And the painting and veneration of icons became central to the theology of the Orthodox church.

Iconoclasm, the movement that tried to stop Eirene and the Second Council of Nicaea, did have some hold in Germany and there was also a ban on holy images in both Islam and Judaism. It is remarkable to think that this woman's actions, her insistence, led to the great western tradition of church art. It isn't really clear why she was such a fan of the painted image, whether it was a reaction to her Iconoclast father-in-law or whether she wanted to make her mark because she loved painting. No one could have foreseen Leonardo's, Last Supper, or Michelangelo's, Creation.

"The Inheritance of Rome" by Chris Wickham is a history of 400-1000 A.D. the first half about western Europe and the second half about the eastern Roman Empire. This period is known as the Dark Ages and Wickham's raison d'ecrire seems to be to dispel the notion that it was dark and that the hangover of laws and ways of being from Rome contributed a great deal to the establishment of Europe as it exists today.

English history touches on a number of significant dates such as 1066 when the Norman invasion of England took place, the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 which subjected kings to the rule of law and the union of Great Britain in 1603 under James VI and I. But what has been lost is what life was like prior to the Norman Invasion. Indeed, we don't really know that much about life in England up to 1603, at least not at all levels of society.

The concentration of United States history within the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and today allows for the average American to know what life has been like for Americans from the very beginning of statehood. Granted, many American traditions are juvenile in comparison to most European traditions, but then there is not the weight of what has gone on before. The inbred antagonisms that haunt Europe and the Middle East, some political, some economic and a great many of them religious have never hampered America. That may be changing as politics embraces "culture" wars. We should think twice before going down that road.

One of the things I admire most about people who think is how they take on difficult situations. My two year older brother demonstrated his thinking abilities when our parents asked the two of us what instruments we would like to learn to play? I was eager, but my brother was not and yet his demurral was not to be accepted. I can still remember his silence that seemed to last quite a long time when he finally suggested in a tremulous voice, "bagpipes". He was never asked again.

The panoply of styles that can be found in English furniture in the 18th century is broad for a number of reasons. The most obvious is because of all the immigrant craftsmen. One of the greatest of this number is Pierre Langlois who came from France imbued with French styles which he continued in England. A commode by Langlois is in the Huntington Art Gallery in San Marino, CA and was bought because the Huntingtons thought it was French. I have to say that it was a brilliant purchase, country of origin notwithstanding. It is a great piece and the fact that it was made in England only makes it more intriguing.

Langlois was not mainstream but he was a great craftsman. There are others like him such as Gerrit Jensen or any of the numerous Swedes who followed the French trained Swedes, Haupt, Furlohg and Lining to start their own workshops. That England, the country that could be called Europe's cabinetmaker for the vast amount of furniture it exported, could so readily accept these itinerant craftsmen makes English furniture that much more interesting. On the 150th anniversary of Darwin's, "The Origin of the Species", it is only fitting to salute the evolutionary quality of 18th century English style and craftsmanship.

The fracturing of stone beneath the earth to enable a drill bit to run through very hard rock in order to reach gas deposits trapped in the earth is achieved with chemicals that are not good for you or anything else in the environment. I am told, however, that this process, known as "fracking", can be done safely if the proper precautions are taken.

"Mad as a hatter" is a phrase that was coined in the 18th century for those people in hat factories who shaped felt with the aid of hot mercury fumes. Hot mercury was used to adhere silver to glass and gold to brass. Hence, hatters could be found in the upstairs of plate glass or ormolu manufacturers. Hatters weren't mad, they were poisoned. No one told them of the risks of such a job and that is an horrific situation.

There are a great many things that are bad for you in this world. Jaywalking, which will get me killed one day, is an acceptable risk for me. Certain taxi drivers are not an acceptable risk but if I am trapped in one that isn't, there is precious little I can do about it. No one wants to take stupid risks, but we all accept the responsibility of some risk. Is "fracking" acceptable? I don't know. But I accept risk when I get in an airplane or eat processed food. There is an answer, but I doubt it will be acceptable to everyone as no one wants their risks to be calculated for them by somebody else.

I was pleased to see a large and boisterous crowd at Olympia the other night. The Olympia Fairs may be gaining a Lester but they have slowly been losing their luster as the antiques trade undergoes what can only be called a downsizing. The November Fair reflects this in its smaller size and there are really no stands that boasted what I would call great Georgian furniture. A few near misses perhaps, but nothing quite on target. The public seem unfazed by this fact. And the bar was packed by the time I left.

The collecting of things has probably run unabated since the dawn of time. Talismans, think of those poor saints whose bones were dispersed far and wide for those of little faith, were collected for their spiritual meaning. Magic was as much a part of this kind of collecting as anything else. What is so remarkable is the way in which collecting has gone from the spiritual and religious to the secular and monetary. I must remind myself here that all good furniture collectors focus on color first and that is how you recognize a furniture collector.

I live to meet collectors, particularly the neophyte collectors. They always seem so certain of what they are doing. Furthermore, they have a sense of security and knowledge about their actions that belies the quixotic God in the Book of Job. These collectors give order not just to their own universe but to mine as well. I salute them with utmost sincerity.  

In reading about Dick Armey's intent to thwart the government health insurance plan, I realized that Mr. Armey expects all of us to outsmart the insurance companies. The thought of a larger government is scary to be sure, but the insurance company quest for profit means that finding insurance if you are ill or have a pre-existing condition more difficult than finding that needle in a haystack. Mr. Armey is covertly suggesting we outsmart the insurance companies on our own so that the government doesn't try to.

The English furniture market should, by all accounts, be reeling in this recession. You would think furniture would be selling for less. However, it isn't and there seems to be very little of quality coming on the market. When things of good quality come on the market for the first time in years, they sell for a great deal. For a dealer, that means it is hard to sell one's stock and it is hard to replenish. Nobody is outsmarting anyone at the moment, except that big money is buying quality. That may be the best and smartest strategy of all.

Understanding markets is a function of being expert and making bold moves. This is true in antique furniture, health or any other market you may want or have to be in. It is often not a case of outsmarting anyone, more a function of reading a situation in a way that you think you can make work for yourself. That may still be possible in English furniture if you work hard. When it comes to health insurance, the only way to outsmart anyone is to stay healthy.  

I have a very hard time differentiating black and dark blue, particularly in the form of socks. Hence, I tend to wear colored socks because they are so much easier to sort. (They are also more fun, but I don't think everyone gets the joke.) I know that I have a very good eye for color and it annoys me that I have a hard time with black and blue.

Antique furniture is, for the most part, about color. It isn't always as sometimes it is about design, and occasionally it is about craftsmanship and to some degree about materials and rarely about provenance although a cast iron provenance of something extraordinary trumps every other category by which we judge antiques. Anyone buying an antique with lousy color needs to reassess why they buy antiques in the first place.

It was made clear to me yet again the other day that what I like about a painting is how the artist reveals light. My lack of enthusiasm for contemporary art is because concept is rather like an insiders joke whereas craft reveals itself. Of course, 19th century painting abounds in artists capturing light, some examples of which ended up on chocolate boxes. My favorite, however, remains JMW Turner. No one has tried harder to reveal light and few have had such success.

Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times the other day about a lunch she had with Rush Limbaugh a number of years ago where he stated that he was proud to be "one dimensional". My first thought on reading that was of a Damien Hirst shark in formaldehyde. I suppose life does imitate art, but maybe I am giving Mr. Limbaugh too much credit.

The depth and complexity of English furniture is but a pale reflection of the complexity of life. Nothing is as simple as it seems and in talking about trust, as I did yesterday, I believe it is the person who can best explain the complexity of English furniture who can engender trust in his clients. And yet, a good salesman without knowledge often understands character better than what he may be selling. Charm is the weapon of the salesman, knowledge is a hindrance to uneducated charm.

I tried to imagine just what Mr. Limbaugh meant by his remark. It could be a reference to his thought process, a metaphor for his unequivocal style. It could also be a declaration that there is no depth and that certitude underscores that simplicity. I would guess, however, that Mr. Limbaugh was using hyperbole to describe his style. But does hyperbole fit into just one dimension? 

The need to question everything belies the sense of trust that all of us must have. Without trust, there is no security and the lack of security is at the root of most conflict. How do we get to trust when we are warned not to?

The complexities of English furniture leave lots of latitude for people selling furniture that is not antique. The rules, the exceptions to the rules and the unique things that just don't seem right but which are real call our trust into question. The issue of trust is paramount to any buyer.

Trust must be earned somehow. It is interesting that religion demands the trust of its followers but often casts other religions as untrustworthy. This duality is one of many conundrums that cause us to question and possibly to distrust. The issue is a hard nut to crack.

The conspiracy theories of the 1960's were, for the most part, risible. Save for J. Edgar Hoover who seemed capable of just about anything, most conspiracies were aggravated rumor and forgettable. But conspiracy theories have not died. They have life on the internet as I learned in listening to a story on the radio last night about how vaccinations were being railed at on the internet by people believing all sorts of strange conspiracies. The off balance odor of the half truths almost made me smile in remembrance until I realized the stupidity that was being purveyed. The 1960's have not died, they continue to simmer.

There is an internet site offering a Chippendale table that has carved and gilded legs, except for the fact that the legs are not carved. The ornament on the legs is composition, a material made from glue, whiting and linseed oil. This material came into vogue after Chippendale's era and you will not find it on any documented Chippendale furniture. In a way, this dealer's assertions reminds me of both the anti-vaccine crowd and the 1960's. The more outrageous something is, the better chance it has of being believed.

You can go onto the internet or read newspapers and magazines that will adjure that the world is flat. The essence of truth today seems to lie in the repetition of something that is said, not in whether it has any basis in fact. The computer has become a form of Miracle-Gro for half truths that would wilt under serious examination. Of course, brain washing is what the witch doctor did and mass delusion is what the magician does. Undermining the truth is the essence of all conspiracy theory. I am sorry about this. I rather like the unvarnished truth.

This is obviously a hot topic these days. The reality of our system is hard to grasp unless you are in need of health care and then that reality takes on a surrealistic edge. I was ill with what turned out to be sinusitis last week. It was as bad as I have ever had making it impossible to sleep or focus. The easiest thing to do was to lie in bed, not move my head too much and keep my eyes closed with the hope that I would sleep. On the third day of doing this, I called my doctor--this was a Saturday so I reached the doctor on call who told me that it might be meningitis and that I should go to an emergency rooom.

I have been in emergency rooms around the world, from Australia to Indonesia, India and London, Kansas City to Mt. Kisco, NY. Almost all of them have been staffed well and run smoothly. Last Saturday, I was at Mt. Sinai and the experience for a ten minute diagnosis lasted from 10:45 to 6:30. The emergency room was certainly busy and I felt terrible that for sinusitis I was taking up room in place of people that were far more ill. Why did my experience last so long?

The only thing I can think of is that doctors are taught not to rush. This is probably an excellent thing, but I have to say that the procedures surrounding the diagnosis could be a great deal faster. An efficiency expert could have had a field day at Mt. Sinai last Saturday identifying redundancy and other wasteful procedures. I was not impressed but extremely thankful for the care. It is clear to me that the health care debate needs debating on a great many levels as well. Would that the Republicans would join into it.