By EVE M. KAHN
Furniture makers in 18th-century Europe had to fend off competition from Asia. The Westerners, like their counterparts today, sometimes pleaded with their governments to impose tariffs that could stem the tide of imports, but more often they straightforwardly mimicked lacquered pieces coming in from China and Japan.
The simulations only subtly reveal that they were made by European hands. On glossy red or black tabletops and desks the Westerners painted or molded village scenes with mythical birds aloft that sometimes look like European poultry. The villagers wear embroidered hats instead of traditional Asian pigtails, and the pagoda eaves flare a little too widely over mismatched fence railings.
There’s great folk art appeal to these cultural misappropriations, about 50 of which are on view through next Friday at Philip Colleck Ltd. (www.philipcolleck.com), which occupies an 1850s brick row house at 311 East 58th Street in Manhattan. Displayed in parlors improbably overlooking a Queensboro Bridge access ramp, the furniture known as chinoiserie and japonaiserie is surprisingly transporting.
The gallery owners, Mark and Diana Jacoby, are showing a few 18th-century tables actually made in Asia (priced around $15,000), which accurately depict fishermen hoisting nets and weavers incubating silkworms. Craftsmen all over Europe developed various colors and materials to imitate these precedents.
A Venetian lacquered mirror ($9,850) is tinted chocolate brown with gilded palm fronds, and a French table with scrollwork legs ($18,500) is labeled “espresso colored aventurine.”
The lacquer was usually applied to wood, or else convincing substitutes. The Jacobys have found an English papier-mâché sideboard ($78,000) with dragons sculptured on its gilded hinges and an enameled metal table ($8,500) marked here and there with nonsense crisscrosses meant to represent Chinese characters. On an English leather screen with a gold backdrop ($55,000) villagers with auburn hair are gathered on a footbridge.
This bright-colored screen was modeled after a multilayered, heavily carved type of Chinese lacquer that is confusingly named Coromandel, because the main exporters operated along India’s Coromandel Coast. That is, Colleck is head-spinningly offering an English copy of a Chinese ware often misattributed to Indians.
As the furniture suppliers of 18th-century Europe scrambled to meet demand for exotic-looking luxuries, Mr. Jacoby said, “the whole sense of place of origin ended up completely muddled.”
UNCUDDLY PLASTIC PURSES
With hard bracelets for handles and heavy boxy shells, 1950s Lucite purses are not cuddly or ergonomic. Collectors are drawn instead to the range of treatments: embedded seashells, plaid fabric, butterflies and glittering confetti and tints that evoke stone, tortoiseshell, butterscotch candy and crushed crayons.
Owners of two of the country’s largest collections have collaborated this fall on an exhibition and a complementary book, both titled “Carry Me!”
All of the 177 Lucite purses in the show, at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis through Jan. 17 (www.dixon.org), belong to a Memphis art collector, Caryn Scheidt. She has 130 more at home.
“They’re on the tables and shelves and everywhere,” she said.
During the Dixon run, while so many of her bags are in Lucite cases and gleaming in one another’s reflections, she will likely buy more. “I’ll get needy, I’m sure,” she said.
The book, by Janice Berkson, a New York dealer and collector, and published by Antique Collectors’ Club ($55; www.antique-acc.com), shows highlights of Ms. Scheidt’s holdings as well as pieces owned by boldface names including the magazine and book editor Robert Gottlieb and the philanthropist Faye Wattleton.
Ms. Berkson’s text and the Dixon wall panels explain how, in the 1950s, a dozen innovative manufacturers in New York and Florida adapted Lucite from a warplane windshield component into a handmade evening accessory. Shaped like hatboxes, birdcages, bowties, guitars and briefcases, the handbags could be trimmed with rhinestones and gold filigree.
They cost up to $100, “while a two-bedroom apartment in New York cost $75 per month,” Ms. Berkson writes.
Their cachet lasted into the 1960s, when manufacturers started mass-producing injection-molded lines. “These cut-price versions retailed for as little as $1.98,” she writes.
Her SoHo store, Deco Jewels, at 131 Thompson Street, has about 150 purses in stock, at prices up to a few thousand dollars. Especially desirable are models with original labels, popup makeup compartments and bold colors like red or glow-in-the-dark lavender. Clear purses are more common, but also more versatile.
“You put a scarf inside,” said Evan Pazol, a creative consultant at the store. “So you can match it to different outfits and hide your junk too.”
SALE OF D-DAY ARTIFACTS
Source : www.nytimes.com
