TEFAF New York: A Worldly Fair Overflows With Art and Design
If you put the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a blender, you might end up with something like TEFAF New York. One of two annual fairs staged by the European Fine Art Foundation (the other is in Maastricht), it fills the historic Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan to its rafters this week with modern and contemporary art and design objects, even spilling into the hallways and up to the second floor.
This can make for entertaining juxtapositions inside the 1880 Gothic Revival building. This year, Friedman Benda gallery (Stand 101), one of nearly 100 exhibitors, is showing several colorful Ettore Sottsass vases under a permanently installed portrait of Wade Hampton Hayes, a brigadier general in the New York National Guard. Be prepared for a deluge of furniture, jewelry, art and antiquities spanning several millenniums, often in a single booth.
If you decide to shell out the $55 it costs to get in, I recommend taking a scavenger-hunt approach and thinking in terms of individual pieces. “Models with Model Ship” by Philip Pearlstein, shown along with strong works by Michael Ray Charles and Omar Ba at Templon (326), is an object worth looking for, as are the Fernand Léger at Robilant+Voena (103) and a pair of incredible N.C. Wyeth seascape murals — one with additional work by his son Andrew — at Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts, LLC (357), which is also showing two monumental Winold Reiss Art Deco murals rediscovered from the Empire State Building.
A powdery green bronze and copper mirror by Claude Lalanne at Galerie Lefebvre (209) would be the star of any bedroom, as would a midcentury “crocodile cabinet” at Dansk Møbelkunst Gallery (320). And before you leave, make sure to compare found poster art at Edward Tyler Nahem by the Italian artist Mimmo Rotella (321) with a very similar piece by Jacques Villeglé at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois (358) — and to count how many times Mel Bochner writes “blah blah blah” on a small ink on paper text piece at Peter Freeman, Inc. (306).
Source: The New York Times
