Is good design timeless? The Salon Art + Design fair at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan would seem to say yes, with its many contemporary works that talk with age-old visual trends.
Now in its 14th year, the fair runs until Nov. 10. It offers an often eye-commanding, if unsure, mixture of the two categories in its title. Art (things we look at) and design (things we use) aren’t segregated here. Nor must they be.
Across 47 exhibitors, you’ll find a big-tent variety, from the sixth-century Constantinople Omega table in stone, displayed as an upright tableau at Ariadne (Booth C1), to the improbably cinematic bronze-cast mini bar from Paul Evans in the 1960s, over at Milord Antiques (D4). The feel is a more permissive, more willfully sleek version of The Art Show, the antiques fair that runs at the same venue each January.
This year’s Salon skews post-1850. (Though don’t forget Carole Davenport Japanese Art (D8). Design-wise, there are few descendants of that laboratory of German design efficiency, the Bauhaus.
Instead, “art” wins out — thanks in part to 11 installations straight from designers, rather than from dealers. It’s a museumy touch from Nicky Dessources, now in her second year as director.
If you attend, expect some returns to almost unusable displays of baroqueness, like the spiky-furry chair at De La Vega Designs (H6) that might have pleased Cruella de Vil. And expect to question what we mean by “design.” Here are six themes that kept me wondering:
Human Faces, Through Time and Space
Scientists call it pareidolia when we see ourselves in everyday objects. At Carlo Bella (D13) two late-19th-century masks from the Yup’ik culture of Alaska, designed to hang in ceremonial homes, make clear how easy it is. The frowny face is defined by a deep-carved “V” brow, the happy one by an “M.” How emotive just a few clean bevels of wood can be. Efficiency-wise, not a far cry from the big-beaked monkey mask and the deep eye-socketed hunter’s mask, both from Mali, on view at Misgana African Art (A7), a strong new dealer this year.
Carved in-the-round, and more photographically faithful, is a tall ceremonial nude in wood at James Stephenson African Art (A7), which the Lagoon peoples of the Ivory Coast. Life-size and jet black, with pearl inlay eyes, scarification bumps and a look of almost blasé duty, she is one of the unmissable pieces at Salon. She could be the half sister of the Paul Rochell nude, a plaster from 1930s France, over at Maison Gerard (A11). Both even bend their left arms as if to scratch the same itch.
Bulls and China Shops
From third-century B.C. Greece, an alabaster bull about the size of a house cat is the gem of Phoenix Ancient Art (B7). He is dense with muscle, ready for the butcher, and it’s telling to me that Phoenix has split its booth with Antico Contempo, a reproduction firm that 3-D scanned this bull, cast him in aluminum and displayed him on the opposite wall, along with other modern interpretations of antiquity.
If you needed even further reminding that past is present, go to Helicline Fine Art (D6) for the small bronze cast of “Riders of the Elements,” Chester Beach’s 40-foot fountain for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It was an allegory for the history of transportation, depicting a pileup of sea, ground and air crafts, spiraling upward among horses and their human riders — a sort of industrial take on Rome’s Trevi Fountain. Helicline recently commissioned this bronze from Beach’s surviving plaster maquette. Along with two paintings from the 1939 Fair, the trio is an advertisement for Helicline’s collection of artifacts from that event of Depression-era techno-optimism. It is for sale as a 1,000-piece lot.
Or, China Shops and Bulls?
Ceramics give the most “antique” flavor in this fair, and the one most consciously imbued with modern attitude. At Shoshana Wayne Gallery (D2), Jiha Moon’s vases piled up with little ceramic banana peels (rotten) and pot stickers, then glazed, are oddly beguiling, if attention-grabbingly cynical.
As is the ornate tureen by Sunshine Thacker at the Female Design Council (H1), a take on the traditional tromp-l’oeil seafood china you find at the Metropolitan Museum, with a line from Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi, “No Soup For You,” on its lid.
For a breath of sincerity, at Mia Karlova Galerie (C5), find Anna Volkova’s staggering photo-real sculptural take on Dutch floral still life, made of tissue-thin glazed and fired porcelain tulips, dahlias and other blossoms in a Delftware vase.
Classical Redux
Elsewhere, the copies themselves are the artifacts. What is old, and what new? The parlor screen of intersecting planes at Sceners Gallery (A3) was designed in the 1930s by Jean Dunand. The screen was only realized in the 1980s, and visually it belongs as much to that Memphis-obsessed era as to its Deco origins.
At Opera Gallery (A4) find the sculptural abstraction of one of Diego Velázquez’s “Meninas,” or ladies-in-waiting, by the Spanish artist Manolo Valdés. Jigsawed together circa 2000 from rough blocks of wood, it chimes to Valdés’s enormous bronze take on the Spanish painter at the corner of Park Avenue and 79th Street. It is also an exercise, with its helmet-hair and hoop-dress forms, in how much you can pare away from an old master while still retaining recognition.
Now find two psychedelic gouache sketches at Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts, LLC (D1). Black-light posters from a 1960s head shop? Unseen Aubrey Beardsleys from the 1890s? Neither. They are conjurings from the Gatsby era by August Biehle of the Cleveland School, and lovely glimpses of American decadence and sensuality. A third Biehl here, a sketch for a faux-stained glass lunette dominated by parrots, is all that’s left from an important mural he painted at Lakewood Schools in Ohio during the Depression.
Stylish Distress
Like torn jeans of the 1990s runway, the enormous rusticated mirrors by Cimone Kind Berman, at Wexler Gallery (C6), seem a little needless. Until you sidle up to the many colors and textures Berman pulls from these panes with her chemicals. They recall the time-stained pier glass of historic homes, with a chromatic variety that age alone couldn’t have given.
The small torn paper and plywood collages of Louise Nevelson, at Galerie Gmurzynska (B5), are mistakable for discarded packaging until you see their humor and subtle sweetness. Quite unlike the bossy black towers of her renown, a few of which are also here: the “cityscapes” she made from printer’s typecases.
Chairs, Chairs, Everywhere …
… but not a seat to sit. A chair is a manifesto for a designer. Here, many are overstuffed, Instagrammable settees better suited to watching Netflix in. But the British designer Max Lamb, by welcome contrast, has stacked and sloppily lacquered pieces of cardboard into seats with a cleverness recalling the De Stijl school, at Gallery Fumi (B1). The delivery markings are still visible beneath Lamb’s colors.
With the bigness of the furniture designer Joe Colombo, Ron Arad at Opera Gallery (A3) casts bulbous armchairs from tinted crystalline resin, in yellow and blue, but he leaves them provocatively full of cracks. They are a far cry from the two chairs by Fabio Lenci from the 1970s, again at Milord. Each is two walls of tempered glass spanned by a drawbridge of leather bolsters the shape of giant Tootsie Rolls. After an evening on your feet at the fair, how tempting.
Salon Art + Design
Through Monday, Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, Manhattan; thesalonny.com.
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