Everything looks seductive on a glowing screen, said Louis Bofferding, both the bogus and the real. That is why, for many years, Mr. Bofferding, a Manhattan antiques and art dealer with a voice that seldom rises above a hush, staunchly resisted the lure of e-commerce, with its slick images, overhyped language and tendency toward the dubious.
His stock in trade — which encompasses everything from a gilded 18th-century Rococo sconce to a kink-adjacent steel and leather chair by the 20th-century designer John Vesey — is best experienced in person, touched and measured, appraised and, whenever possible, turned upside down.
“Objects have voices and personalities,” Mr. Bofferding said one recent afternoon. Seated behind a 1920s desk by Ernest Boiceau, he was wearing a woolen Paul Stuart sports jacket and a crisp white Charvet shirt. “I can remember, as a child, endowing inanimate things with the qualities of a human being,” he continued. “I recall being uneasy when my mother put water in a pot to boil.”
To showcase his stock of objects from centuries past, Mr. Bofferding, 70, has maintained a series of bijoux spaces over his decades in New York. He dealt first from his Park Avenue studio, later from a minuscule Lexington Avenue storefront whose theatrical window tableau attracted a devoted local following and then from a gallery in the Fine Arts Building near the Queensboro Bridge. Most recently, he has operated from a two-room space in an Upper East Side walk-up, wedged between a florist and a Fix-and-Go cellphone repair shop.
Now, over four decades after migrating to New York from Minnesota with dreams of becoming an art historian, he is pulling up stakes and returning to the heartland.
“It’s closing the circle,” he said, adding that he is moving his business fully online, not shuttering it.
Like so many others in a parade of quirky antiquarians who have closed their businesses or decamped from Manhattan in recent years, he is doing so in large part because, for his moneyed clientele, bricks-and-mortar retail has irrevocably lost ground to the internet. “My billionaire clients are perfectly happy to buy from photos,” he said. “Nobody needs to squeeze the tomatoes anymore.”
In the Manhattan of today, a pedestrian is far less likely to come across a shop selling, say, a 19th-century birdcage than a Dunkin’ outpost. “I feel bad for young people today because their lives lack texture,” Mr. Bofferding said, referring to the sensory deprivation that goes along with a screen-heavy life. “Everything is throwaway.”
This, after all, is a man who has spent his life retrieving from obscurity objects that have been overlooked or forgotten, reveling in what he called “the comforting and profoundly affecting quality of objects made by other hands and owned by other humans.”
Mr. Bofferding was raised in suburban Minneapolis, one of two children of a father who worked as a service man for the Minneapolis Gas Company and a mother who played classical piano and managed the home. He was a solitary youth who spent his days in libraries researching medieval heraldry, painters of the quattrocento and the history of the great ocean liners as outlined in obscure journals like Marine Engineering & Shipping Age.
Educated at the University of Minnesota and the University of Chicago as an art historian, he arrived in New York in the late ’70s, one in a wave of newcomers scrabbling their way up through the ranks of a booming gallery scene. Eventually, he came to deal in works by white-hot Neo-Expressionist art stars like Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter and was, at one point, pulling down a seven-figure salary during what he terms his Concorde years.
“I have not always been obsessed by the past,” he said, adding that, unlike many dealers in antiquities, he never haunted junk shops in boyhood and seldom felt the need to accumulate stuff.
His first possession of any note, he said, was an illuminated sheet from a 13th-century French manuscript. He persuaded his parents to buy it for him on a road trip to Florida when he was 12. “I suppose, too, that like a lot of children in the ’50s, I pursued stamp collecting briefly,” he said. “After six months, I may have bought a total of two.”
As a child of the Kennedy era, he grew up with “this idea that everything new was, by definition, better than what it replaced.” He held to that belief until the contemporary art trade disabused him of it. “Increasingly, I became disheartened by the present,” he said.
He made his pivot to the past with the encouragement of a friend, the French Vietnamese artist Pierre Le-Tan. “If Pierre thought it was a good idea, then maybe it was not so harebrained,” Mr. Bofferding said.
What Mr. Le-Tan knew — and the trade would learn — was that Mr. Bofferding had an unerring eye to go along with his wide-ranging tastes. To understand how broad his interests are, consider that the objects he has bought and sold have ranged from a first-century Roman head of a sprite in giallo antico marble to a Louis XIV sofa from the collection of Alexis, Baron de Redé, an American adventurer who scaled the heights of French society despite having started his life in Troy, N.Y.
Objects without interesting and verifiable back-stories hold little interest for Mr. Bofferding. “You know if you see an object on his site, it has been researched and documented and vetted every which way,” said Jeffrey Bilhuber, an interior designer. “The world looks to him in a different way than they would other vendors.”
The reason is straightforward, explained Amy Fine Collins, a journalist, author and style authority. “Louis is first and foremost not a man of commerce,” she said. “Far more than an antiques dealer, he is a scholar and curator, equal to or better than any professional.”
Mr. Bofferding takes a more modest view of his business. Asked to characterize his manner of dealing, he steepled his hands and paused. “I suppose you could say I specialize in things other people don’t necessarily recognize as of quality and of interest,” he said. “My place is a salon des refuses.”
And that is exactly what made him a resource for members of the city’s ultrawealthy class, not to mention the architects and decorators who midwife their desires and shape their tastes.
Case in point: a sculptured head mounted on a block of Lucite in an anteroom of his gallery. When it turned up in one of the regional auctions whose catalogs Mr. Bofferding sleuths daily, it was described as a generic portrait of a Black man. The story may have ended there were it not for Mr. Bofferding’s tendency to treat a murky provenance as a personal provocation. Knowing that the stylized sculpture came from the estate of a niece of the great American songwriter Cole Porter, he decided to buy it and track down its subject.
“I increasingly became obsessed with the thing,” he said.
Whether or not that fixation proves to have much bearing on the ultimate monetary worth of the object, the story Mr. Bofferding will spin about it holds a value almost equal to that of the thing itself.
Research into the mysterious head led Mr. Bofferding to 1920s and ’30s Venice, where Porter and his wife, Linda, took up residence in an 18th-century palace, Ca’ Rezzonico. There, the Porters hosted parties so extravagant and apparently debauched that the staid city fathers eventually ran them out of town. The entertainment for those soirees, held on barges decorated with banks of flowers and fueled by Champagne and cocaine, often centered on jazz bands, including one led by the Grenadian bandleader and singer Leslie Arthur Julien Hutchinson.
Now all but entirely obscure, “Hutch,” as he was known, was one of the biggest cabaret stars in the world and the toast of society in New York, London and Paris. As his biographer Charlotte Breese would note, he had affairs with a number of women and men, including both Edwina Mountbatten, the British heiress and socialite, and Porter himself.
“Hutch and Porter were lovers,” Mr. Bofferding said. “Porter was essentially a satyr, sexually.”
His forensic pursuit of the object led him to conclude that it was a representation of Mr. Hutchinson and that it had been commissioned to commemorate their affair. As he spoke, there it was, the marvelous head, perched atop a Mexican modernist table.
“I suppose it’s true that this job is slightly morbid,” Mr. Bofferding said. “But that’s why it’s interesting, exploring a past that, in many ways, is more fascinating than the present.”
When his business moves exclusively online, no longer will passers-by be able to stop in to inspect the motley treasures he has gathered, objects bearing so little superficial relation to one another that visitors may feel as if a Surrealist séance has been conjured, with Mr. Bofferding playing host.
“What’s so great about Louis is that he is among the last of the dealers left from a time when you could run around the corner from your office and buy anything known to man,” Richard Keith Langham, an interior designer, said. “I worked for Jackie Onassis toward the end of her life, and she loved to plunder and prowl around town. She loved to find a treasure here and there at places like Louis’s shop.”
Where, Mr. Langham was asked, will that type of collector go when dealers like Mr. Bofferding are gone?
“Honestly, I don’t know.”
Guy Trebay is a reporter for the Style section of The Times, writing about the intersections of style, culture, art and fashion.
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