Let's play Antiques Roadshow!

The funny thing about the radiant baby series is that , when I was a kid near Reading Pa he was getting known for drawing thesesimple figures as Grafitti on street corners and pavements . The one I got is like a tempera paint on an" illustration" (card)board. (Its non archival and I have been keeping it in an acid free environment). Im not a big fan but this painting has 3 radiant babies in various states of ebullience (jumping, crawling, rolling over-all with these rays of light emanating from them ). Its pretty kitchy but, I understand that he's an icon of the 80's. Fortunately the painting I got was done and changed hands earlier in his career. He didnt get to oils until the mid 80's , so the early works have mostly been either chalk or tempera (I believe). I think he died in the early 90's of AIDS.

40K for this? Im not going to say go wan but go on!. Ill have to look up recent prices.

I also bought a Susan McDowell Eakins portrait of a young woman in a style of Robert Henri. I got that one for 50 bucks at an auction and was really surprised that no one (more financially sound) didnt snap it up.

I almost got one of Charles Demuth's homoerotic pencil and ink drawings at an auction but my wife said no and asked me where would we hang it . (I could have sold it , but she ws more uptight than Id ever imagine.(It was a sailor giving a hand job to another sailor) > I later found out that Demuth was famous for these little vignettes of his fantasy sex life. (I guess nobody in the Bible belt of Lancaster County has had the nerve to have a show of this kind of work) the only stuff they put up is Demuths "structural and colorist deconstructions' of buildings or his flower arrangements).
There are always famous local artists whose original works come up in auctions and the prices realized often go 2 ways
1. Extreme high (over estimates) prices
or

2. really really low, (so low that they get pulled for not meeting a reserve, even the reserves can be low).

I get the "prices realized" net through MAD and compare recent values from auctions. paintings are difficult to track since the market price seems controlled by a few thousand (only) very wealthy people worldwide. When they want something, Katy bar the door. Ive seen the PA Impressionists go up and up over the last 15 years, and artists whose work I find personally rather repulsive (like Fern Coppedge), are realizing huge prices that get successively higher each time the work is sold again.

Ph well, we collect Pa German Folk Art and Arts and Crafts Pottery, so the buyers out there are pretty savvy and I dont see any great "deals". Im always butting up against my preset limit (above which I dont go) and Im more often beaten out by someone with greater resources so, all I can do is try to attend the lesser auctions.


OH yeh, why is the insurance appraisal value of an object always in between the auction estimate price and the retail price

I haven't subscribed to any of the auction house online periodicals who report prices for years. Appraisers invest in the services and it's why they charge so much for their documentation. I'd make a guess that $ 40M could have doubled or tripled by now.

Appraisers have never told me exactly how they arrive at a figure. Auctions can sometimes end up to be nearly the same price as a retail gallery if someone wants a particular piece. For rarer Haring imagery, his AIDS pieces are one of the highest appraised of all of his works.

http://www.artnet.com/PDB/PublicLotDetails.aspx?lot_id=425073564&page=1

~~~

I quite like Haring's work. I once split the purchase of a pair of 'authorized' earrings with a friend. Neither of us could afford the pair. Luckily, in those days, lotsa folks wore one little earring and one big one.

Hmmm...I tried ArtNet.com first and it lead me to a subscription page for any auction prices.

Farmerman -- need to remodel your house? Or would the Mrs. like a new emerald ring?

Weve already talked about willing it to the Reading Museum for its permanent collection , and getting a tax benefit now.
If I sold it, wed just probably piss away the money on something stupid. (Unless swe set up a "generation jump" endowment to any kids that my 2 kids would have.

Its getting so that collecting anything valuable (like pottery) has a risk that stuff you have in cases can always be stolen when too many people come in the house. We store our pottery collection in 2 large bank deposit boxes and whenever we go away, like we are now, we spend a day or more moving **** out of sight and into the vault. STupid? yeh, but weve been broken in once and the perps scattered and broke three nice Maria Martinez vases because they just wanted to get to a VCR that was on the same shelf.

Around this part of Pa, George Nakashima tables (he was a Bucks County craftsman) are going for 40000 and up. ALso, theres a small woodshop that was an 18th and 19th century school for orphans, in which the kids were taught carpentry and jointery. The school was called "Soap Hollow" and the diminutive pieces of furniture are bringing like 30 to 50K for a small painted box or acupboard for candles.


FAKES, lots of them around . I see that the big area is high end glass like Tiffany or Loetz. These pieces are being manufactured in China and Indonesia and are being sold as originals to an unwary buying public (usually beginning collectors who havent yet developed a "Bogus radar detection system")

Ever since the tax laws changed so that the "profit realized" was not an incredibly stupid cost base, it had again become a possibility to sell works of art that wouldnt be eaten up by taxes.
PS, my wife keeps records of every piece of art and pottery and antiques weve ever bought. The Keith Haring (I) purchased (we werent married yet) for the princely sum of 250 bucks( and Ive got all sorts of receipts and provenance because the guy from NJ was certain Haring was gonna be a great future value.) Who knew?

I have a fairly substantial collection of Baker furniture, and also a bit of Widdicomb art deco stuff. Here's one of the Baker pieces, known as the "Palladian dining table".

And of course there's this.



I also have a Browning Sweet-16 vent-rib Belgian made that's worth a few bucks...

BBB's screen
http://www.flickr.com/photos/colloidfarl/26759829/

This is a photo of the type of antique Philippine windows made of mahogany and capiz shell inserts before they had glass.

I have a similar three panel screen made of these windows. I bought it for $50 in the 1970s from a woman who had three. I only had room for one in my condo. I used it in front of floor to ceiling windows instead of draperies. The light coming through it was lovely.

A few years ago, I saw a screen just like mine for $1,200 in an up-scale catalogue.

BBB

Interior designers would kill for those.

wizard


Yep, too bad I didn't buy all three of them.

BBB

That is a good assessment, plainoldme.

A curator from the Adler Planetarium told me that I have a "disbound illustration" and that I may never actually find out what book it came from.

The "right auction" would only be something like eBay and I would not get very much.

How I found my Alexandre Benois painting
You've probably heard of people finding valuable things in "dumps". Well, it's true. This is the amazing story of how I came to possess a painting by a famous artist. It is a small (8" x 12") watercolor painted in 1917 of a Russian church courtyard. It is in perfect condition. It also has a handwritten Christmas greeting to a friend below it, which makes it even more valuable. I wish I knew to whom the greeting was written---and would love to know who took it to the dump in the first place without realizing its historical and monetary value.

My then husband could never take a load of our junk to the dump without bringing something home that he found there. This time, I pleaded that he come home empty handed because he usually found nothing I wanted to keep. This time, he found a small watercolor in a cheap "dime-store" frame. He brought the frame home because he though I could use it for some of my paintings that were stored around the house. Well, the frame was junk, but I was attracted to the watercolor. I studied it and then put it away. Eventually, I became interested enough that I went to the library to try to learn more about Alexander Benois. The librarian couldn't find much except that he was a Russian painter who also painted in France.

I matted and reframed the painting, and loaned it to my Aunt to hang in her home because she liked it. The only condition of the loan was that I could retrieve the painting when I wanted it and that it had to be hung in a place not exposed to the sun for fear of fading. Years later, after my Uncle's death, we decided that I should retrieve the painting and I brought it home. I then began to search seriously for more information about Alexander Benois. When I got my computer and got on the Internet, I struck historic gold. It turned out that Benois was one of Russia's foremost painters of the 20th century. My painting was done in Russia, where there is a Benois Wing of the Russian Museum in Moscow.

Born Alexandre Nikolaevich Benois in 1870 (and died in 1960 in Paris) Benois was not only a famous artist, he was an art historian and writer, stage, set and costume designer and librettist. Perhaps Benois is best known in the western world for his partnership with Marc Chagall working for Diaghilev designing the stage sets and costumes for the Ballet Russe in Paris. But that is only one small part of Benois' long art career.

If you want to learn more about Alexander Benois, just enter his name in "keyword" and you will find a lot of information. I also found a newly published book "Theater of Reason / Theater of Desire, the Art of Alexander Benois and Leon Bakst" which has wonderful color photos of much of his work and details of his life and career.

So, friends, one never knows what gem one might find in a dump if one is careful and curious.

BBB

This is my painting:

http://hometown.aol.com/butrflynet/Bumblebee3.html

This is my favorite Alexander Benois painting:

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:X0NcG9Has3QJ:www.rollins.edu/Foreign_Lang/Russian/benois.html+Alexander+Benois+paintings&hl=en&start=2&ie=UTF-8

More Benois paintings and Ballet Russe stage sets:
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:9JBqtDEkOJcJ:dl.lib.brown.edu:8080/exist/mjp/plookup.xq%3Fid%3DBenoisAlexandre+Alexandre+Benois+paintings+and+stage+sets&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=13&gl=us&ie=UTF-8

The Benois Family Museum:
http://www.peterhof.org/english/museums/benois/

The Russian Museum contains the Benois Wing established by Alexander Benois.

After reading about his old metal signs, I now know why I have always been secretly in love with Gus!

Col. Steve Zodiac reminds me of that swashbuckling British actor from the 70s whose name is Michael ........... forgot the last name. I always throught he was in love with his own looks.

Up until the time we moved back in 2005, I had my old baseball cards from the late 60's to early 70's. Some fairly rare ones too - a large collection. It wouldn't surprise me if my wife, who supervised the move out, threw them away, yet she managed to keep a bunch of kid-crap from elementary art projects and other knick-knacks.

Some of the better cards I had: Roberto Clemente, Ted Williams, Al Kaline, Bobby Bonds (several), and many more. I even had some old football cards and other odds & ends that sometimes came with the packs.

I was up at crack of dawn and went to a yard sale near Perry. I bought an old "Pilot house" checker board. Its handmade and has a brass rim around the edges and each square has a small hole so that the checkers (which had little pegs in the center) wouldnt slide around in a gale.
I think that if I was in a 90 ft Gloucesterman, hauling sardines to Portland, riding out a gale in the Gulf of Maine (think :Perfect Storm") I dont think that a checker game would be the first thing on my mind.

The board has a tab on the frame so it would hang up on the chart rack in the pilot house.
I payed 8 bucks for it.

I also bought a bent maple plywood"schoolroom" stool. It looks really art deco and is very neat. I got it for 2 bucks.
They had an old Evinrude 5 hp outboard motor with the top flywheel. While it was neat and a nifty gadget for under 20 bucks, I asked myself'Where ya gonna keep that thing" so I passed

Going through tons of papers and magazines in preparation for moving, I found an article on lunch boxes in a ten year old magazine.

It seems that lunch boxes as a thing for kids really began in the 1930s. Will bring the article with me in a day or two for more information to convey.

I have a girandole mirror or bullet glass mirror, which features the traditional gesso frame with gold leaf applied. the mirror is convex and the frame is mounted by an eagle.

I think it is no older than "Centennial" and might be as recent as the 1930s. I saw a smaller version that was less well articulated in an antique shop for $165. A similiar mirror (mine is about 30" high) was published in the inquiry section of Country Living about a decade ago and the people were advised to insure it for $350.


The problem is determining age.

POM. Take a tiny piece of the gesso from the back and smoosh it on a slide. ypu can then take it to a nearby college and ask someone in the chem or geology depts to do an Xray diffraction or EDAX. If the printout shows that the whitener is made of Titanium, then its post WWII, if its Zinc Oxide , its mid century (10th), if its WHITE LEAD, its really early. The nails can give clues but you need somebody savvy on nails.

Same thing with the gold leaf, it can be analyzed because OLD gold leaf had some silver in it since the refining of gold and silver was not as sophiosticated as today.

Even old silver bars from the Nuestres Atosha had tons of silver bars, most of which contained about 15% gold, which made extracting the gold worth more than the whole silver bar.

The mirroring in old bullet glass uised mercury as an amalgam with nickel, . They stopped that in the 50's