Highlights From The Winter Show 2019

By PAUL LASTER, Jan. 2019

Celebrating its 65^th anniversary, The Winter Show is offering a highly vetted selection of art, antiques and design presented by 68 international exhibitors at New York’s Park Avenue Armory through January 27. 

Walking the aisles and talking to the dealers, Whitehot has selected our favorite booths at this year’s fair. Scroll through the images of our picks below and discover what galleries and works caught our eye. WM

Olde Hope 
American folk and decorative arts of distinction.

Decorating its booth with wallpaper made from 19^th century silhouetted figures taken from Jacob Maentel watercolors and Pennsylvania rag carpeting that you often find in Maentel’s paintings, the gallery is offering an excellent selection of Americana, including a marvelous painting of the “America” steamship by James Bard from 1856, a rare pair of folk paintings from the 1800s by John Brewster, Jr. of his half-sisters, exquisite examples of rare Pennsylvania blanket chests from 1780 and 1841 and some charming antique hooked rugs with horses and birds. Prices range from hundreds of dollars for early textiles to $345,000 for a late 19th-century iron locomotive weathervane from the 12th Street Station of Illinois Central Railroad in Chicago.
 

Michael Altman Fine Art & Advisory Services, LLC 
Advisory services in 19th- and 20th-century European & American paintings, drawings, and sculpture.

Altman is presenting a selection of paintings, drawings and sculptures, ranging from an Old Master canvas of feasting Dutch harvesters by Pieter Brueghel the Younger ($7.5 million) to a giant 2008 charcoal drawing of a devouring shark by Robert Longo ($1.25 million), on view in a double-sized booth that was styled to resemble a home. A 1928 Georgia O’Keeffe flower painting, which was recently deaccessioned by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and sold at Sotheby’s, is priced at $8.5 million, while a 1985 large-scale Joan Mitchell abstract canvas Xavier, named after her longtime gallerist Xavier Fourcade, is available for $5.85 million.
 

  
Gemini Antiques Ltd. 
American and European antique toys, still and mechanical banks, lead soldiers, and dolls.

With 45 years of expertise with antiques toys, which date from the 1850s to the 1950s, Gemini is offering an amazing selection of mass-produced playthings—items which miraculously survived the children that they were made to entertain. The toys range in price from $125 for a toy soldier to $28,000 for a Jerome Secor’s black Banjo Player from the 1870s.
 

Galerie St. Etienne 
Specializing in American and European self-taught artists, Austrian and German Expressionism. 

Celebrating its 80^th anniversary, the gallery is presenting paintings and drawings by four important artists—Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Grandma Moses—that are closely associated with its venerable history. Works are priced from $35,000 for Kokoschka’s dynamic nude, Reclining Girl (c. 1919-20), to the $1 to 2 million range for Schiele’s figurative drawings.
 

Lost City Arts 
Established in 1982, Lost City Arts is recognized internationally as a leading source of mid-20th-century fine art, design, furniture, lighting, and accessories.

Highlights here include a 1960’s ceramic bird sculpted by Suzanne Ramié, who was the co-founder of Madoura Pottery, where Picasso made many of his best ceramic artworks; Harry Bertoia’s fascinating Sonambient, Gong, Bush and Tree sculptures from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s; and Danish architect Oluf Lund’s rare, 1990’s prototype for his curvilinear Viking Chair. Prices range from $5,500 for a Fritz Hansen teak and lamb’s wool stool to $495,000 for Bertoia’s unique Golden Tree from 1956. 
 

  
Jonathan Boos 
Specializing in 20th-century American art with a particular focus on Ashcan School, Modernism, Social Realism, and Post-War paintings and sculpture.

The gallery has brought fine examples of early Modernist paintings and sculptures, including a Cubist canvas of a Madonna and child in an urban setting by William Zorach ($140,000), a small Abstract Expressionist painting by Norman Lewis ($150,000) and a Surrealist canvas of a female nude by the Spanish-American painter Federico Castellón ($200,000).
 

Charles Ede Ltd. 
Specialists in exceptional objects from ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the Near East.

The gallery is offering a selection of museum quality antiquities from Greece, Rome and Egypt—dating from about 3200 BC to the 4^th and 5^th centuries. Standout pieces include fine Roman marble statues of Venus revealing her body after the bath and the head of Apollo with wavy hair tied in a bun, priced at $495,000 and $285,000, respectively, while small Egyptian amulets start in the hundred-dollar range.
 

  
Robert Young Antiques 
Fine European vernacular furniture and folk art 

Displaying antiques in a modern manner, the gallery has created a backdrop of words that they chose for their sound and meaning that are painted on canvas and laid down a floor of wide bookshelf planks to present a fascinating array of works. Showing a mix of Swedish English, Irish, French and Italian objects, priced between $750 and $200,000, standout pieces include an outsized pair of scissors made for a tailor’s trade sign from the 1880s, a painted deed box with floral motifs from 1850, a life-size wooden fishing trophy from 1920 and a variety of wooden vernacular chairs.
 

Didier Ltd 
Artistic post-war jewelry by painters, sculptors, architects, and designers from the UK, Europe, USA, and South America.

Presenting the exhibition “From the Surreal to the Kinetic,” which focuses on jewelry by Latin and South American artists, the gallery is displaying a spectacular selection of artist made necklaces, earring, headpieces, brooches and rings by Carlos Cruz-Diez, Wifredo Lam, Julio Le Parc, Roberto Matta, Jesús Rafael Soto and others. The booth strikingly resembles a store, with photomurals showing a model wearing Leonor Fini’s 18 KT gold animal horn tiara and specially designed display cases with circular windows and glass covered drawers. Other fine pieces of jewelry on view include necklaces by Louise Nevelson and pieces that Pablo Picasso created for his granddaughter, Marina, with the help of his dentist, who had fashioned him a gold tooth.
 

All Photographs © Paul Laster 2019