Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
By PAUL LASTER, Oct. 2018
Returning to the Park Avenue Armory for the third edition of the fine art fair from October 27th through October 31st, TEFAF New York Fall features 93 international art and antiques dealers presenting top quality, strictly-vetted works from a variety of collecting areas, including fine and decorative art from antiquity to 1920, as well as rare books and manuscripts, ceramics, jewelry and much more.
High on our list of must-see works at the fair are Old Master paintings and drawings by Claes van Beresteyn, Jan Breughel the Younger, Cesare Magni, Jan Steen and Bernardo Strozzi. Breughel the Younger’s canvas captures a marvelous bouquet of fresh blooms in a painted pot while Steen’s painting portrays an impoverished alchemist at work as his crying wife and child await the outcome of his foolish, obsessive pursuit of wealth.
Standout sculptural works from the same period include Balthasar Permoser’s A Pilgrim as a Memento Mori, which presents a beautifully carved boxwood figure of death dressed in pilgrim garb; a marble bust of a young boy by an artist from the circle of the Italian Renaissance sculptor Desiderio da Settignano; a ceramic sake bottle with European figures by Edo Period, Japanese Raku Master Nonko; and a cabinet of curiosities, featuring finely crafted artefacts arranged by Kunstkammer Georg Laue’s legendary proprietor.
Notable modernist picks on our list are Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of a Bearded Man, an early painting on panel from 1895 that’s signed P. Ruiz, the way he initially added his name to his work; a silver sculptural table lighter by Carl Fabergé & Julius Rappoport that was inspired by caricatures of Charles Darwin as an ape; Karl Sterrer portrayal of two female nudes lying in a barren landscape; and Edward S. Curtis’ striking portrait of Mosa, a Mohave girl on the copper photogravure printing plate that the photographer used to make his editions.
Scroll through to see these and more artworks that visitors to the fair will be posting on Instagram—or taking home—later this week. WM
Paul Laster is a writer, editor, curator, artist and lecturer. He’s a contributing editor at ArtAsiaPacific and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art and writer for Time Out New York, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, Galerie Magazine, Sculpture, Art & Object, Cultured, Architectural Digest, Garage, Surface, Ocula, Observer, ArtPulse, Conceptual Fine Arts and Glasstire. He was the founding editor of Artkrush, started The Daily Beast’s art section, and was art editor of Russell Simmons’ OneWorld Magazine, as well as a curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, now MoMA PS1.
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