Anthony Haden-Guest at the Winter Show

Anthony Haden-Guest with Gogotte

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST January 2026

  Art fairs bring something special to the life of the art world. Auctions are focused, as are galleries, and museums are hyper-organized, but art fairs are amorphous, including fine art, craft, books, antique furniture and antiquities. The walkthrough of booths encourages us to embrace confrontations, whether it’s of wildly different art objects or as when artists who embrace Modernism are presented alongside those who disdain it. Which takes me to the Winter Show, New York’s oldest fair which is up for a few more days at the Park Avenue Armory and has been in fine fettle this year. Just doing the fair you see things, hear things. These are just a few of the things I saw and heard.

   The stand of Robert Simon Fine Art, a dealer on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, for instance, was an exemplary mix. It was big on the Italian Renaissance, including work by Paolo Uccello and Giorgio Vasari, better known as the writer of the first essential art book, The Lives of the Artists, and it also presented a Gogotte, a boulder-sized chunk of white sandstone that appears to be an elaborately carved abstraction. It isn’t. Gogottes were formed from sand in France during the Oligocene period thirty million years ago, then re-formed thousands of years ago by silica-loaded groundwater that twice surged through the sand. Louis XIV, the Sun King, greatly admired gogottes and his LANDSCAPE architect, Andre Le Notre, used some in Versailles. A perfect add for the Winter Fair.

Gogotte

  The fair has a number of such eyecatchers. Peter Finer, a London gallery which deals in the arms and armor of world-wide cultures, filled its enticingly darkened corner space with such material as multiple blades and guns, along with a headpiece with hair bristling around the mouth and a sprout of beard, entitled A Rare Odawara School  16^th 17^th Century Samurai Mask. Jill Newhouse, whose gallery is on the Upper East Side, has a thickly pigmented oil-on-paper treescape called Farm Buildings in Het Gooi, Veiled by Trees, c 1898-1902. It’s by Piet Mondrian who wouldn’t begin making abstractions till 1910.

   Newhouse was also showing a picture painted in 1912 In the Salon Carre at the Louvre:  The Mona Lisa. It has quite a back story. It was painted by Louis Beroud, who worked within the Louvre regularly, sometimes painting his fellow artists but often when commissioned to copy a work on the wall. On the morning of Tuesday, August 22, 1911, Beroud was the first to spot the empty space where the Mona Lisa should have been. He brought this to the staff’s attention. It turned out the painting had been stolen the day before but the staff assumed it had been removed for cleaning. Among those questioned during the national eruption that followed were Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet, who had written that the Louvre should be burned, and his close friend, Pablo Picasso. And the Louis Beroud painting? He had been so moved that he painted Mona Lisa as if in its former hang between a Correggio and a Titian

Modrian, Farm Buildings

  The actual thief had been Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman, who worked at the Louvre installing glass frontages on paintings, the Mona Lisa included. He was caught when a dealer to wanted to sell the work turned him in. So Mona Lisa is now back and the widely publicized theft had made her an icon. The painting now attracts CLOSE TO TEN million visitors a year.

Peter Harrington, a London gallery which opened a space at 35 East 57th Street last year, is one of the galleries bringing another element to the Winter Fair: Books. It’s hardly news that book-reading is plunging in the wider world, that children are reading less and less, but Harrington deals with rare books and these are afforded the same respect as artworks. “2025 was a record year for us,” Pom Harrington, son of the late founder, told me. ‘This year we’re opening up a 12,000 square foot facility in London as a reference library, for storage and different stuff. Because we sell lots of books.” For instance, Harrington sold a corrected carbon typescript of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince from 1942 fetched US $1.25 million and a First Folio of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies went for $6 million.

Moby Dick

   Indeed it happens that the one of the gallery’s stand-out books at the fair seems oddly relevant to our cultural moment. It’s a copy of Herman Melville’s novel, Moby Dick, which is often called the greatest American novel. But when it first came out in America in 1863 it was in three volumes, called The Whale and didn’t do well. Nor did it fare well in the UK, nor did other, later editions help. The book seemed dead in the water.

Moby Dick by Rockwell Kent

  Then in 1930 a UK house, the Lakeside Press, published an edition of the novel, now entitled Moby Dick, in an edition of a thousand copies on large paper of the novel, now entitled Moby Dick.It was in three volumes, illustrated with numerous striking pen-and-ink drawings styled to look like woodcuts by the artist, Rockwell Kent. It sold out before it was printed, a success in which it was clear the illustrations paid a huge part, and Melville’s reborn novel went on to become a best seller. The Harrington copy was from that edition and it had been signed by both Kent and William Kittredge, the printer. And the above-mentioned relevance of this to our cultural moment? Texts twinned with images have been a recurrent feature in Western culture since the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. But we increasingly seem to live in a world of pictures, making Moby Dick, a great novel, saved by its illustrations, an accidental precursor.