Tefaf New York will return to the Park Avenue Armory this year for the first time since fall 2019. The August art fair began in Maastricht, the Netherlands, and is often billed as ‘7000 years of art’. This is where you can pick up discarded museum pieces – or add one to your own museum. The current fair does not focus on European old masters, one of Tefaf’s specialties. However, there is a lot of top quality modern and contemporary painting, sculpture and design. In contrast to most fairs, this one also has fatties: expert curators and restorers who analyze and authenticate the works, but also assess the quality. In other words, when a dealer tells you that something is “rare” or “one of the few examples” of a certain type, they have a backup. The current fair includes 91 galleries from 14 countries, with 13 new galleries participating in this edition. Here are a few standouts.
Modern masters and contemporary newcomers
Some stands are arranged as mini-exhibitions of periods or movements. A knockout is the Years stand (Stand 310), titled “Fields of Color”, which shows large-scale canvases by the late Modernist titans Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, who absorbed the lessons of Abstract Expressionism and took them back to the 1960s and 1970s, often with new materials such as acrylic paint. Another beautiful presentation is the London Gallery Dickinson (Stand 208), on the second floor, whose exhibition “Visible and Tangible Form” shows geometric abstraction of the Bauhaus, concrete artists and op art.
The New York Dealer David Tunick (Stand 371) has a great range of prints by Edvard Munch and Picasso, some hand colored and with unique signatures and markings. Tunick’s eye-catcher, however, is a 1917 self-portrait by Marc Chagall that already caught the eye before the fair opened, providing a beautiful view of Vitebsk, Russia, as the artist hovers over it as an observer of history. likewise, Blum and Poe’s (Stand 305) showcasing Thornton Dial — an artist whose estate they now represent. Dial’s colossal paintings here, made with found objects arranged in rough compositions, don’t disappoint. Hanging around the corner David Zwirner (Stand 347) is a collage work on paper by Mexican artist Martín Ramírez, a modern master of the folkloric or self-taught variety. Beloved Italian minimal still life specialist Giorgio Morandi is also featured in several stands, such as Italian galleries Tornabuoni (Stand 327) and Galleria d’Arte Maggiore (Stand 354).
Textile
Tefaf encompasses both art and design, but some objects stretch across the dividing line between the two. Textiles and weaving also compete with painting in the field of art world, and here are some excellent examples. Vedovi Gallery (Stand 323) from Brussels has a museum-quality work by Alighiero Boetti: an embroidery, made by Afghan craftsmen, as was his custom, has links to information and systems theory – which he also considered magical and cosmic. Bernard Goldberg (Stand 357) focuses on early modernism and the work that caught my attention is a beautiful tapestry by Marguerite Zorach, who was best known as a painter. It was called “Tapestry, The Snake and Bird” (1937) and was made by sticking pieces of wool and fabric together.
Ancient and Ethnographic Art
The difficulties in trading ancient and ethnographic art are particularly acute at the moment, with waves of repatriation – cultures around the world rightly asking for their heritage works back – and the murky but thriving practice of dealing in objects created by unknown artists and craftsmen. That’s why Tefaf’s vetting process is critical. the Parisian Gallery Bernard Dulon (Stand 351) has a robust collection of African art, particularly from Gabon, and Gallery Chenel (Stand 204) also from Paris, specializing in ancient art. A section of marble draperies on a first-century AD Roman sculpture, Aphrodite, has made the rounds through the museums and stands, bathed in light, in their second-floor theater booth.
From an entirely different region and culture come the ‘led ledger drawings’ from around 1880, attributed to the artist Cedar Tree at the New York dealer Donald Ellis (Stand 373), specializing in Native American art. The Cedar Tree drawings, made with chalk and graphite on lined paper (hence the “ledger”), offer a glimpse into Southern Arapaho culture in the central plains of the United States. They depict battles and perhaps ceremonies or rituals and provide essential windows into indigenous history.
TEFAF New York
May 6-10, Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, Manhattan, (646) 202-1390; tefaf.com.