March 4, 2010 - Auction Central News

Fine art at the vanguard of Leland Little auction March 20

Unusual pottery-themed Satsuma lidded jar from the Tasho Period (1912-1925). Image courtesy Leland Little Auction & Estate Sales Ltd.

HILLSBOROUGH, N.C. – Nearly 800 lots of fresh-to-the-market merchandise from prominent local estates will be sold at a Fine & Decorative Arts Cataloged Auction slated for Saturday, March 20, by Leland Little Auction & Estate Sales Ltd. The sale, to begin at 9 a.m. Eastern, will be held at the firm’s state-of-the-art showroom, located at 620 Cornerstone Court in Hillsborough. Internet line bidding will be facilitated by LiveAuctioneers.

This sale will complete our first year at the new gallery, and by all accounts it has been a very successful venture,” said Leland Little, owner of the firm. “It’s not only a better work facility for the team, it has provided easier access off the Interstate for customers and offers better presentation for the sellers.”

Little said the new gallery will be enhanced with a planned 50 percent expansion of the building in late 2010/early 2011. The added space will be used for more storage space, a professional photography studio, a larger gallery space for future auctions and a bigger kitchen. “The principles behind our decision to build the new gallery have proven to be successful for our company and both sellers and buyers,” said Little.

Since the move, the firm has experienced growth in its estate treasure auctions as well, held about two to three times a month. “They’ve doubled in attendance and sales results,” said Little. “This is a reflection of the location of the new building and the wonderful presentation venue it makes.” He added, “We are continuing to attract larger estate consignments as a result of this.”

Many of the expected top lots at the Mar. 20 auction will be in the fine art category. Two works worth watching will be a large oil portrait of Mr. William Whiteright Jr., by William Merritt Chase (New York, 1849-1916), signed and dated 1886 (est. $20,000-$30,000), and an oil painting of a skater by William Frerichs (North Carolina/New York, 1829-1905), signed (est. $10,000-$15,000).

Other paintings of note will include a circa 1900 American School oil on canvas portrait of a woman, with an illegible signature and in a gilt wood frame (est. $6,000-$9,000); an oil on canvas by Claude Howell (North Carolina, 1915-1997) titled U.S. 17 South (est. $4,000-$8,000); and an 1830 full-length figural silhouette by Augustin Edouart (American, 1789-1861), framed (est. $400-$800).

Period furniture is also expected to do well. Examples include a fine Connecticut bonnet-top Chippendale secretary, circa 1760-1780, two-part form, cherry with white pine and chestnut secondary woods (est. $6,000-$9,000); and an early 19th-century American Federal triple-pedestal dining table with Classical elements, mahogany and mahogany veneers (est. $3,000-$5,000).

Also from the period furniture category: a North Carolina Edgecombe County china press, circa 1820-1830, vernacular Neoclassical form, walnut with poplar and yellow pine secondary (est. $3,000-$5,000); and a 19th-century Southern inlaid bonnet chest, river birch with yellow pine secondary and two deep side-by-side drawers over three graduated drawers (est. $1,200-$1,800).

Asian antique decorative arts will be plentiful. Star lots promise to be a rare and large late 19th- century Japanese Sumida Gawa masterpiece vase (est. $6,000-$9,000); an unusual pottery-themed Satsuma lidded jar from the Tasho Period (1912-1925), signed (est. $3,000-$5,000); and a 19th-century Qing Dynasty Chinese ancestral portrait on silk (est. $2,000-$4,000).

From the same category: a Chinese Yongzheng bottle vase, monochromatic egg-shell blue glazed earthenware on a footed base (est. $1,000-$2,000); a Chinese Export armorial teapot in the rare bell shape, circa 1750 and made for the American market (est. $300-$500); and a Chinese Export porcelain chocolate pot, 18th century and quite small (est. $300-$500).

Recently, Little established a vintage wines department. More than 50 lots of wine will be featured in the March. 20 sale, an example being a bottle of 1966 Krug vintage champagne, blanc de blanc, one of only about 500 bottles made (est. $6,000-$9,000).

Clocks will include a LeRoy & Fils French Empire bronze mantel clock made circa 1830-1840 (est. $2,000-$4,000); a late 19th-century French tortoiseshell mantel clock made for Tiffany & Co. (est. $2,000-$4,000); an early 19th-century English twin fusee bracket clock by Lambert of London (est. $1,000-$1,500); and a William Black bracket clock (est. $1,000-$1,500).

Silver pieces will include an 1890s Tiffany & Co. rare and monumental sterling silver meat platter, oval form with central well and tree (est. $1,500-$2,500); and an important 19th-century coin silver mug by B. Dupuy of Raleigh, N.C., (est. $1,000-$2,000).

Estate jewelry, a hallmark of many Leland Little auctions, will feature an onyx and diamond ring of chic contemporary form, inlaid with two black onyx stones in a fanned-out design (est. $600-$900); and a Tiffany & Co. 14kt gold tank watch with black lizard strap (est. $400-$600).

Rounding out the day’s expected top lots: a Tiffany floriform Favrile vase, signed (est. $1,000-$2,000); a Royal Copenhagen Flora Danica soup tureen, oval lidded form with applied crab-stock handles (est. $3,000-$5,000); a pre-Columbian Nayarit pottery warrior made in Mexico sometime between the third century B.C. and the third century (est. $2,000-$4,000); a pair of early Victorian cast-iron Continental garden chairs, ornate black (est. $1,000-$2,000); and a gorgeous early 20th-century antique area rug from Northwest Persia (est. $800-$1,200).

For details e-mail to info@LLAuctions.com or call (919) 644-1243.

View the fully illustrated catalog and sign up to bid absentee or live via the Internet during the sale at www.LiveAuctioneers.com.

Click here to view Leland Little Auction & Estate Sales, Ltd.’s complete catalog.

ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE

Fine Connecticut bonnet-top secretary, circa 1760-1780, cherry with white pine and chestnut. Image courtesy Leland Little Auction & Estate Sales Ltd.

American School oil on canvas (lined) portrait of a woman, circa 1900, with illegible signature. Image courtesy Leland Little Auction & Estate Sales Ltd.

Oil on canvas portrait of William Whiteright Jr. by William Merritt Chase (NY, 1849-1916). Image courtesy Leland Little Auction & Estate Sales Ltd.

Rare & Large Japanese Sumida Gawa Masterpiece Vase late 19th century, with Inoue Ryosai maker's cartouche, 29 inches. — Rare & Large Japanese Sumida Gawa Masterpiece Vase late 19th century, with Inoue Ryosai maker’s cartouche, 29 inches.

Tiffany floriform Favrile vase, 11 inches, gold with light green iridescence, signed L.C. Tiffany. Image courtesy Leland Little Auction & Estate Sales Ltd.

Robert Frank photo exhibition recalls ’50s Detroit

Robert Frank, ‘Assembly Plant, Ford, Detroit,’ 1955, gelatin silver print. Detroit Institute of Arts. © Robert Frank.

DETROIT – An exhibition of more than 50 rare and many never-before-seen photographs taken in Detroit by Robert Frank a half century ago will run at the Detroit Institute of Arts through July 3.

Detroit Experiences: Robert Frank Photographs, 1955 showcases more than 50 black-and-white photographs taken in Detroit by legendary artist Robert Frank. The exhibition is free with museum admission.

In 1955 and 1956 Robert Frank traveled the United States taking photographs for his groundbreaking book The Americans, published in 1958. With funding from a prestigious Guggenheim grant, he set out to create a large visual record of America, and Detroit was one of his early stops. Inspired by autoworkers, the cars they made, along with local lunch counters, drive-in movies and public parks such as Belle Isle, Frank transformed everyday experiences of Detroiters into an extraordinary visual statement about American life.

First editions of The Americans, published by Grove Press, have sold at auction in recent years for $4,600 to about $5,800.

According to Frank, The Americans included “things that are there, anywhere, and everywhere … a town at night, a parking lot, the man who owns three cars and the man who owns none … the dream of grandeur, advertising, neon lights … gas tanks, post offices and backyards.”

The exhibition includes nine Detroit images that were published in The Americans as well as, for the first time, an in-depth body of work representative of Frank’s Detroit, its working-class culture and automotive industry.

Frank was drawn to Detroit partly by a personal fascination with the automobile, but also saw its presence and effect on American culture as essential to his series. Frank was one of the few photographers allowed to take photographs at the famous Ford Motor Co. River Rouge factory, where he was amazed to witness the transformation of raw materials into fully assembled cars.

In a letter to his wife he wrote, “Ford is an absolutely fantastic place … this one is God’s factory and if there is such a thing – I am sure that the devil gave him a helping hand to build what is called Ford’s River Rouge Plant.” Frank spent two days taking pictures at the Ford factory, photographing workers on the assembly lines and manning machines by day, and following them as they ventured into the city at night.

Whether in the disorienting surroundings of a massive factory or during the solitary and alienating moments of individuals in parks and on city streets, the Swiss-born photographer looked beneath the surface of life in the United States and found a culture that challenged his perceptions and popular notions of the American Dream.

Further accentuating his view of America, Frank developed an unconventional photographic style innovative and controversial in its time. Photographing quickly, Frank sometimes tilted and blurred compositions, presenting people and their surroundings in fleeting and fragmentary moments with an unsentimental eye.

Beat poet Jack Kerouac expressed the complex nature of the artist and his work in a passage from his introduction to The Americans stating, “Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world.”

Born in 1924 in Zurich, Switzerland, Frank emigrated to the United States in 1947. He worked on assignments for magazines from 1948-53, but his photographic books garnered the highest acclaim. After publishing The Americans, he began filmmaking and directed the early experimental masterpiece Pull My Daisy, in collaboration with Jack Kerouac in 1959.

Frank continues to work in both film and photography and has been the subject of many traveling exhibitions in recent years. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., established Frank’s photographic archive in 1990 and organized his first traveling retrospective, Moving Out, in 1995 as well as a 2009 exhibition Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans.”

Frank lives in Mabou, Nova Scotia, and New York City with his wife, artist June Leaf.

On the Net:

Detroit Institute of Arts: http://www.dia.org

ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE

‘Drive-In Movie,’ Detroit, 1955, gelatin silver print. Detroit Institute of Arts. © Robert Frank, from ‘The Americans.’

‘Drugstore, Detroit,’ 1955, gelatin silver print. Detroit Institute of Arts. © Robert Frank, from ‘The Americans.’

Detectives solve cold case of clocks stolen from museum

LOS ANGELES (AP) – The U.S. widow of a notorious Israeli thief has been convicted of receiving stolen property from a 27-year-old heist that included more than 100 expensive timepieces and museum artifacts, including what’s been called “the Mona Lisa of the clock world.”

Nili Shamrat, 64, was convicted Feb. 23 and sentenced to five years’ probation and 300 hours of community service, state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner announced Tuesday.

In 1983, 106 timepieces, paintings and artifacts were taken from the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem. It was hailed as the costliest theft in Israeli history and included a pocket watch made by famed watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet for French queen Marie Antoinette that museum officials valued at more than $30 million.

There was a hefty insurance settlement and the case went unsolved for nearly two decades.

Detectives say the theft was committed by Naaman Diller, and he was caught because of his deathbed confession and will, which left everything to Shamrat after he died in 2004.

Diller and Shamrat met in 1970. They lost contact in 1972 when he went to prison and she came to the United States to study, but they reunited a few years after the theft and were married in 2003, said Capt. Randall Richardson of the California Department of Insurance.

Los Angeles lawyer Jeff Rubenstein, who represented Shamrat in the Los Angeles County case, said his client was “a misguided victim.”

“It was her ex-husband’s deathbed actions that placed her in this position,” Rubenstein said. “Her accepting responsibility for her small part is hardly the insurance commissioner cracking an international case.”

Shamrat has no comment now and wants to go about her simple, private life, Rubenstein said.

The big break in the case, Richardson said, came in 2006 when an appraiser told the museum he had been contacted by an attorney about 40 of the stolen clocks.

The attorney wanted $2 million for the clocks – the amount of the reward offered in the case – but that was negotiated down to $35,000, and the first of the stolen items, including the Antoinette watch, were returned to the museum. That batch of recovered items also included a Breguet design from 1819 known as the “Sympathiques” and a clock shaped like a pistol from the same period.

Detectives then followed a paper trail, Richardson said, that led to safe deposit boxes and storage units in France, the Netherlands and Israel. Some items were found in Shamrat’s home when a search warrant was served there.

“She had all his documents and some of the stolen items, as well as display placards from the museum,” Richardson said.

So far, 96 of the 106 stolen items have been recovered.

Although the stolen clocks had no connection to Islamic culture, they were displayed at the museum because they originally belonged to Sir David Lionel Salomons, the father of the museum’s founder and the man who became London’s first Jewish mayor in 1855.

There was no immediate comment about Shamrat’s plea agreement from the museum, which was closed when the announcement was made.

Diller’s notoriety followed a string of bold thefts in the 1960s and ’70s. He was renowned in Israel for daring break-ins and an ability to keep one step ahead of the law. He meticulously researched sites for hours and used innovative techniques that earned him the admiration of the same people who were trying to stop him.

Investigators used words like legendary and unique to describe him, and one detective said he was disappointed they were unable to sit and talk to him about his exploits.

On April 15, 1983, knowing the museum’s alarm was broken and the guard was stationed in the front, Diller used a crowbar to bend the bars on a back window, according to police reports. Behind a parked truck, he climbed inside with a ladder and was able to slither in and out of the opening throughout the night. Most of the timepieces were small enough to get through the hole, and if they weren’t, he knew how to take them apart, police said.

___

On the Net:

L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art:

http://www.islamicart.co.il/en/

AP-CS-03-02-10 1830EST

Police say source in U.S. artifact case committed suicide

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) – A Utah businessman who worked a two-year sting operation for federal officials investigating looting of American Indian relics across the Southwest has died of a self-inflicted gunshot after a brief standoff with police.

It appears to be the third suicide connected to the case.

Ted Dan Gardiner, an antiquities dealer and former grocery store CEO, shot himself Monday in his bedroom in a Salt Lake City suburb, police said.

Gardiner, 52, was the government’s lone operator in a sweeping federal investigation that led to felony charges against 26 people in Utah, Colorado and New Mexico on charges of trafficking in artifacts.

Gardiner’s father and his son told The Associated Press on Tuesday they didn’t know why he killed himself. Federal authorities declined comment.

The trouble began Saturday, when Gardiner’s roommates called police to say he was suicidal. Officers confiscated a handgun from Gardiner and he was transported to a hospital for a mental health evaluation.

On Monday evening, roommates called authorities again after gunshots rang out in Gardner’s bedroom. An officer confronted Gardiner, who refused to drop his gun. The officer felt threatened enough to fire a round at Gardiner, but the shot didn’t hit him, Police Lt. Don Hutson said.

Gardiner was later found dead in his bedroom of a single gunshot.

Two defendants – a Santa Fe, New Mexico, salesman and a prominent Blanding, Utah, physician, James Redd – committed suicide after their arrests in June.

Gardiner offered in 2006 to help federal authorities set up what turned into a long-running sting operation in the black-market trade in prehistoric relics.

Gardiner provided prosecutors with hundreds of hours of video showing suspects admitting they took artifacts from federal and tribal lands, according to court documents.

The case broke open in June when about 150 federal agents descended on the Four Corners region. In the small town of Blanding, Utah, agents raided homes of 16 people. Most were handcuffed and shackled as agents confiscated stone pipes, woven sandals, spear and arrow heads, seed jars and decorated pottery.

The arrests prompted outcry from southern Utah residents – many claiming federal officials were heavy-handed. One man served a year in federal prison for threatening to track Gardiner down and beat him with a baseball bat.

Two of the 26 defendants – Redd’s wife and daughter – pleaded guilty last year. The rest pleaded not guilty.

AP-CS-03-02-10 2201EST

Paintings are strong suit of Jenack’s auction March 14

Alfred Arthur Brunel de Neuvelle (French, 1851-1941) signed this still life, an oil on canvas measuring 15 by 18 inches. It has a $2,500-$4,000 estimate. Image coutesy William Jenack Auctioneers.

CHESTER, N.Y. – While William Jenack Auctioneers’ sale March 14 will be highly diversified, artwork may be the strongest segment that day. Works by listed artists such as Henk Bos, Georges Mathieu, Francis Coates Jones, Alfred Arthur Brunel de Neuville, August Albo, Josep Maria Vayreda Canadell, John Whorf and Jules Chapoval will be available.

LiveAuctioneers will provide Internet live bidding.

The Alfred Arthur Brunel de Neuville work, a still life of cherries and plums in a basket, it will be lot no. 137 and carry an estimate of $2,500-$4,000.

If the excitement from the previous auction of John Whorf’s watercolors carries over to this auction the auctioneer anticipates lot no. 234, a winter landscape by the Massachusetts artist, to sell above its high estimate of $5,000.

Other lots of note will include a small collection of Meissen figures dating from the 19th to early 20th century.

Fine and vintage jewelry will be available. A few vintage costume jewelry pieces by Christina Dior will also be offered.

A collection of art glass includes examples of cameo by such makers as Daum Nancy, deVez, LeVerre Francais, Muller Fres/Luneville, Arsall and Almeric Walter/Henri Berge.

Mid-century modern furniture and lighting will make up the main furniture section of the auction. A featured piece will be George Nelson’s design for Herman Miller Co. of the Comprehensive Storage System. The large wall which will carry an estimate of $2,000-$3,000.

Books and ephemera will also be offered throughout the sale. Volumes of note include The Two Spies, Nathan Hale and Robert Townsend, by Morton Pennypacker 1930, first edition, #178/780, Houghton Mifflin; Robert Browning’s Complete Works, Florentine Edition, #680/1000, Defau, New York, 1910 in quarter leather; One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, first edition, Harper & Row, 1970; and Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard, by Thomas Gray, 1853, New York, full leather.

As usual the auction will also include Oriental rugs and carpets, 19th- and 20th-century furniture, mirrors, decorator display pedestals, collection of Chinese art and artifacts, fine jewelry, bronzes, curiosities and decorative accessories for every taste and budget.

Previews for the sale will be Wednesday, March 10, noon-5 p.m.; Thursday, March 11, 2-5:45pm; Friday and Saturday, March 12-13, noon-5pm; and the day of the sale, 9 a.m.-10:45 a.m.

For details call 845-469-9095 or go to the auctioneer’s Web site: www.jenack.com

View the fully illustrated catalog and sign up to bid absentee or live via the Internet during the sale at www.LiveAuctioneers.com

Click here to view William J. Jenack Auctioneers’ complete catalog.

ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE

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