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International Fine Art Fair
by Dik F. Liu
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by Luca Giordano |
I lament for not living in the 19th century Paris, where the famed Salon opened each May. There, great paintings rubbed shoulders with the good and the so-so. There paintings hung in what we now call Salon style - from floor to ceiling. Everywhere I looked there would be paintings - colors - decorating every inch of every wall to stimulate every cone and every rod of the retina.
Failing that, there was the International Fine Art Fair at the Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue at 67th Street, in New York City, held 9-14 May 1998. This show came fairly closed to filling the bill. Boasting the collections of 63 dealers from around the world, this fair surveyed eight centuries of Western Art from a painting by Masolino (no, not Mussolini, Masolino, the Renaissance painter) to a 1935 Miro.
The main attraction of the show was a Blue Period Picasso painting, "Angel Fernandez de Soto." This oil depicts the artist's friend de Soto drunk on absinthe, staring back at the viewer with bulging eyes. It is an evocative subject painted by the world's boldest painter using his tamest style. Its poetic contradiction rivals only a double decaf expresso. This work was on loan to the show, courtesy of Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber, the patron saint of Broadway musicals.
In the booth of Rosenberg & Stiebel there was Luca Gioradano's "The Rape of the Sabines." Measuring over eight by ten feet, it had the perverse distinction of being the largest piece in the show. But even if it were not such a massive piece, it would still be a show stopper. Here is a work which had so inspired Fragonard in 1761 that he made a study of it. So imposing is this work, both in its stature and in its size, that it nearly obscures an adjacent work in the booth -- a brilliant Tiepolo oil sketch of "The Martyrdom of San Lorenzo." When was the last time that the showy Tiepolo was obscured?
Leslie Smith had in their booth an early Mondrian: "The Shipbuilding Yard." About the size of my two hands, this intimate oil sketch captures in a few strokes of earth tones the warm glow of a 19th century Dutch landscape. It is painted so freely and innocently that I detect from it no sign of the Mondrian who, a few years later, would storm the Parisian avant garde with his orthographic compositions, primary colors, and rigid doctrines.
While examining this work, a passerby commented that he saw in it something of the later Mondrian. I looked and looked and looked, and, try as I might, I couldn't see it. I nodded in agreement anyway, just to be polite.
Imagine my surprise at Schiller & Bobo, when I saw a superb oil of a few flowers in a glass vase and thought that it was by the sappy 19th century French painter Henri Fantin-Latour, only to discover from closer inspection that it was by one Victoria Dubourg. It turned out that this Victoria and Henri were what you would call an "item": they were married. Like the flowers by Henri, these flowers by Victoria ache of nostalgia. The fragrance of the soft morning light kisses their petals, permeating the air with sweet delicacy. Sentimentality came easily to these Fantin-Latours, like hives.
This show might not be the visual sensory overload of the 19th Century Salon, but with Cassatt, Sargent, Canaletto, Guardi, Vlaminck, van de Velde, Steen, Brueghel, Courbet, Monet, Sisley, Lorrain, Lebasque, Vuillard, Bonnard, Mengs, Morisot, Vacherot, de Chavannes, Magritte, Stevens, all the Rousseau's, and more Redons than I like to remember, I bet it came pretty close.
Dik F. Liu teaches at Parsons, School of Visual Arts and Long Island University. He says he's "35, single, five feet nine inches tall, slender build, and responsible."
*Painting used with permission from Rosenberg & Stiebel Gallery, 32 E. 57th Street, New York NY 10022, USA, (212) 753-4368, Fax: (212) 935-5736.