August 7, 2013 - Auction Central News

Marburger Farm boasts Texas-size bounty Oct. 1-5

ROUND TOP, Texas – There are places where you can find quality antiques on a small scale—exclusive shops, elite environments, private sales. But the consistent feat of the Marburger Farm Antique Show has been quality writ huge, quality writ fun, quality writ Texas-size. On Oct. 1-5 over 350 dealers from most states and many countries will arrive with their very best antiques, vintage and artisan objects at the twice-yearly mega show in Round Top.

Aisle after aisle, tent after tent, acre after acre of only the very best quality, whether high-end or a bargain, delivered in a setting like no other. Not just something for everyone, but something of quality for everyone.

“It’s the quality of our dealers that gets people to come show after show,” says Marburger Farm co-owner Ashley Ferguson. “People plan their year around Marburger. We’re seeing advance bookings from groups—corporate and sorority alum groups, book clubs and garden clubs.”

“I don’t bring anything ordinary to Marburger Farm,” says exhibitor Adele Kerr, owner of the New Braunfels, Texas, collective Adele Kerr & Co. “Marburger is a quality show and I love it.” For the Oct. 1-5 show she will offer Swedish herbariums, art, mid-century modern lighting, a Hollywood Regency sofa and chair set, 1940s French advertising and “prints galore.”

“Quality,” says silver dealer Carol O’Steen of Tallahassee, Fla., “is condition. It’s the person who made it and how the people who had it took care of it.” O’Steen will offer Marburger customers hundreds of sterling and fine silver-plated pieces, including figural napkin rings, pre-1865 coin silver and larger pieces that are, she says, “in wonderful condition, usable and will endure.”

Oriental rug dealer Shahin Azra of Atlanta, Ga., defines quality as how a rug has been made and whether it uses authentic vegetable dyes. “We carry only the highest quality antique Persian, Turkish and Oriental rugs from the 18th and 19th centuries,” says Azra. “The colors and design of a rug are personal and subjective, but quality is universal.” The Azras will offer over 200 rugs at Marburger Farm, from small runners to room size to monumental size.

Quality on a wearable scale will arrive with Adrienne Astrologo of Philadelphia’s Ladybag International, which offers the world’s largest collection of vintage designer handbags, including Hermes, Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Judith Leiber. “You can feel quality in a handbag,” says Astrologo. “It’s the sumptuous leather, the perfect, even stiches. It’s the good-quality lining and zipper. It’s heavier, better designed hardware. A Hermes Birkin bag took months to make by a single craftsman in France. These bags are authentic, quality works of art.”

Offering another perspective, Janet Romine of Rubbish Antiques believes that “Quality is in the eye of the beholder.” Alongside her pristine, modestly priced schoolhouse flashcards will be objects that flaunt their age. “I’d rather have an imperfect piece of ironstone that was used and loved on a Thanksgiving table. Imperfect things can be high quality too.” Romine will offer a curved antique couch with wood in as-found condition, but reupholstered in chocolate and creams. She will also have two deconstructed chairs. “I will take them down to the burlap and bones. They will be functional, but you will see the beautiful strapping and internal structure.”

For Colorado exhibitors Terry and Bill Pfister of East of LA Antiques, quality has a simple definition. “A quality antique,” says Terry Pfister, “is one that I would put in my own home.” Because they shop just for Marburger Farm, “We don’t have to fill a store with quantity, so we can buy only quality pieces for Marburger. Our customers at Marburger come back year after year and that means a lot to us,” says Pfister. On one side of the aisle, Bill Pfister gathers hefty American architectural antiques, including iron from Boston and New Orleans. He will also have rare iron railings from a bank in Colorado and Bollard lights from an early public building.

On her side of the aisle, Terry Pfister will offer Italian and French furnishings and chandeliers, including a down-filled French chaise lounge and an Italian tole chandelier in pastel painted metal. What is quality in a chandelier? “Quality is the gilding and patina,” says Pfister, “It’s the weight and facets of the crystals. They’re not just glass. They are lead crystal, the real thing.”

The real thing will also shine in the benefit booths for Dwell with Dignity of Dallas and the Brookwood Community near Houston. Dwell with Dignity networks with interior designers to create functional environments for families escaping poverty and homelessness. They will transport antiques donated by Marburger dealers to the month-long Pop Up shop in the Dallas Design District, starting Oct. 10. The Brookwood booth will offer an abundance of plants, gifts and gourmet items created by its community of special needs adults. (See dwellwithdignity.org and brookwoodcommunity.org)

So, whether you look for sterling qualities or the quality of well-worn character, plan to attend the fall Marburger Farm Antique Show on Oct. 1-5, 2013, where you will find a Texas-size dose of both. Antiques, vintage and artisan exhibits will include American, French, English, Asian, Continental, Mid-Century Modern, industrial, architectural, fine art, jewelry, silver, Western, garden, textiles, lighting, early Texas, original artisan works and more.

The Marburger Farm Antique Show opens on Tuesday, Oct. 1, with early buying from 10 a.m. through 2 p.m. for $25 for adults, free for children 15 and under. Regular $10 admission begins Oct. 1 at 2 p.m. One admission is good all week, with the show running on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Saturday, Oct. 5, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Parking is free. Marburger hosts a Man-Cave in the Blacksmith Shop. A full-service food pavilion and Blacksmith Bar will keep you energized and happy. The atmosphere is relaxed, family friendly and fun. Dogs on a leash are always welcome.

Follow show news and previews at www.facebook.com/marburgerfarmantiqueshow. See information on the Marburger Farm Café, travel, maps, vendors, special events, lodging, on-site shipping and more at www.roundtop-marburger.com. For other information or advance group bookings, call Ashley Ferguson at 800-947-5799. Groups receive advance tickets, reserved lunch seating, boxed lunch option and will be greeted at Marburger with a Texas welcome and a swag bag of treats, all quality.

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Goya works headline Spanish art exhibit at NM museum

Francisco de Zurbarán (Spanish, 1598–1664), 'Head of a Monk,' black chalk and gray wash, circa 1635–1655. Image courtesy of New Mexico Museum of Art.

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) – The New Mexico Museum of Art will display drawings and prints by Spanish artist Francisco de Goya and others at an exhibition that’s the only U.S. stop on an international tour of artwork from the British Museum.

The exhibition, “Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings from Spain,” will open Dec. 14 at the museum in Santa Fe and runs through March 9.

The museum is the final stop for the exhibition that’s been in London, Spain’s Prado Museum in Madrid and opens this month in Australia at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.

The display includes Spanish artists and European artists who worked in Spain from the mid-16th century to the 19th century.

Rapid City approves plans for Native American sculptures

Native American physician Charles Eastlake will be among those honored at the sculpture garden in Rapid City, S.C. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

RAPID CITY, S.D. (AP) – The Rapid City Council has unanimously approved a Native American sculpture garden in the city’s downtown despite safety and access concerns.

The sculpture garden in Halley Park proposed by the nonprofit First Nations Sculpture Garden Corp. will feature bronze statues of four prominent 20th century American Indians: Charles Eastman, a physician who witnessed the Wounded Knee massacre; Black Elk, an Oglala holy man who was born and raised at Pine Ridge; artist Oscar Howe; and author Vine Deloria Jr.

Construction is to begin within three years, according to the Rapid City Journal.

The garden will be flanked by two of the city’s busiest roadways, raising concerns about traffic safety and available parking. The city’s Parks and Recreation Advisory Board in July narrowly rejected the plan, urging First Nations to work with city staff to find a more suitable location. First Nations officials maintained the park likely will not draw heavy foot traffic, and the city’s Public Works Committee last week narrowly recommended approval.

“This project is not meant to be obtrusive,” project coordinator Elizabeth Cook-Lynn said. “It’s an art-history project. It has nothing to do with politics. It has nothing to do with religion. We don’t want to dig up old animosities. Very simply, it’s an educational contemplative garden. It will remind us of our indigenous past.”

The leaders selected for statues represent a cross-section of influential Native American leaders, which moves away from depictions of American Indians as strictly warriors or other stereotypes, according to First Nations.

First Nations will finance the sculpture garden. The group has estimated it will cost thousands of dollars. First Nations also has agreed to donate 10 percent of whatever the cost turns out to be to the city to help offset maintenance costs, which will be the only city expenditure tied to the project.

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Information from: Rapid City Journal, http://www.rapidcityjournal.com

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Gold coins of late recluse auctioned for $3.1M

1875-CC double eagle, struck at the Carson City mint. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) – The last remnants of a fortune of coins found packed in ammunition boxes in the garage of a recluse who died last summer was auctioned Tuesday for more than $3.1 million—but not before bidders got assurances they could return any of the rare $20 gold pieces that some collectors spotted as counterfeit.

Reno-based Silver State Coin bought three of the six lots offered at the Carson City district courthouse, just a few blocks from the old U.S. Carson City mint. Silver State paid nearly $1.2 million for the most expensive lot that featured 880 $20 gold Saint Gaudens.

The other half of the estate of Walter Samaszko Jr., consisting mainly of gold bullion, sold at auction in February for about $3.5 million.

A cleaning crew that went through his small house after his death in June 2012 found the rare coins at his home in a modest neighborhood where neighbors were shocked to learn the elderly man who kept to himself was sitting on such a treasure.

“Anytime you have the ‘hoarder mentality’ where someone very unassuming is in possession of so much, you sort of say, wow,” said Allen Rowe, the owner of Northern Nevada Coin and Bullion who purchased four of the six lots auctioned earlier this year and picked up two more lots on Tuesday for a total of $816,000.

The auction, which lasted about 30 minutes, was delayed briefly after Rowe said he had spotted at least 20 counterfeit gold coins among the more than 2,000 to be sold. The bidding restarted after Alan Glover, the Carson City clerk-recorder in charge of handling the estate, and estate lawyer Dawn Ellerbrock agreed with five potential bidders that any coins certified as fake could be returned.

The agreement seemed to satisfy Brittany Carlson, who made the winning bid on the most valuable lot on behalf of Silver State Coin.

“If I was buying those fakes blind, it might be different,” she said.

Her plans for the coins?

“Sell them as quick as possible,” she told reporters afterward.

Rowe’s store is directly across the street from the old mint that operated in the late 1800s at the height of the Comstock Lode in nearby Virginia City. He bought two lots of $20 gold Liberty Heads and Indian Heads.

“This was a little trickier because of the counterfeit situation,” Rowe said, noting the counterfeiters did a “fairly good” job on the coins.

Most of the fakes probably were made in the 1970s in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, Rowe said. Although they likely contain a full troy ounce of gold, they clearly were not made at a U.S. mint, he said.

The Rare Coin Company of America of Willowbrook, Ill., bought one lot of 444 $20 gold Saint Gaudens for $630,000, pushing the value of the overall estate past the $6 million mark.

The fortune, after taxes, will go to Samaszko’s only surviving cousin, Arlene Magdanz, of San Rafael, Calif.

A substitute teacher, Magdanz has not spoken publicly about her new-found riches. Officials were able to track her down using a funeral bulletin at Samaszko’s home that led to his father’s service in Chicago in the early 1960s. Newspaper clippings listed survivors.

Glover said he’s never met Magdanz but had spoken with her by phone before the first auction. Since then, they’ve communicated only through third parties, he said. Her lawyer, John Mulligan of Reno, was in Argentina on Tuesday and could not be immediately reached for comment.

The cleaning crew that discovered the coins from Austria, Mexico and the United States also found meticulous records of Samaszko’s purchases dating to at least 1964.

Neighbors didn’t seem to know him at all, even though he had lived in the house since the 1960s. His mother lived with him until her death in 1992. His bank account stood at $1,200. He had a money market and mutual fund accounts with a combined value of more than $165,000 when it was closed. The three-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot house was sold for $112,000.

“You drive by his home over on Mountain View and it’s a very little, unassuming house,” Rowe said. “You wouldn’t think he had so much. The way he lived was very modest. He was very frugal.”

Samaszko made good investments in gold at a time in the early 1990s into 2000 when gold was still under $500 an ounce, Rowe said.

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Robert Motherwell’s early collages coming to Guggenheim in Sept.

Robert Motherwell, 9th Street Exhibition, 1951. Watercolor, ink, gouache, and pasted drawing paper, printed paper, and Kraft paper on paperboard, 28.6 x 36.5 cm. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph L. Tucker, 1963 © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York. Photo: Courtesy Dedalus Foundation, Inc.

NEW YORK – From September 27, 2013, through January 5, 2014, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Robert Motherwell: Early Collages, an exhibition examining the origins of the American artist’s style and the critical role of collage in his oeuvre. Devoted to papiers collés and related works on paper made during the first decade of his career, this exhibition offers a focused exploration of Motherwell’s innovations to the medium. While the artist’s work has been investigated comprehensively in recent international shows, including a major retrospective that traveled to the Guggenheim Museum in 1984–85, this presentation is the first to extensively chronicle Motherwell’s artistic beginnings through the lens of his revelatory encounter with the collage technique, which he described in 1944 as “the greatest of our [art] discoveries.”

This exhibition is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art with additional funding from the Dedalus Foundation, Inc.

The Leadership Committee for Robert Motherwell: Early Collages is gratefully acknowledged for its support, including Gilbert and Shelley Harrison, Dorothy and Sidney Kohl, Louisa Stude Sarofim, and Lissa Noël Wagner.

Exhibition Overview:

Focusing specifically on papiers collés and related works on paper from the 1940s and early 1950s, Robert Motherwell: Early Collages features approximately 50 artworks drawn from museums and private collections across the United States and Europe. The exhibition examines the artist’s explorations in the medium and also honors Peggy Guggenheim’s early patronage of the artist. At her urging and under the tutelage of émigré Surrealist artist, Matta (Roberto Antonio Sebastián Matta Echaurren), Motherwell first experimented with the collage technique in 1943. As he recalled years later, “I might never have done it otherwise, and it was here that I found . . . my identity.” Motherwell’s earliest papier-collé works were featured in the groundbreaking show Exhibition of Collage, the first international presentation of collage in the United States held in 1943 at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century museum/gallery. Little more than a year later, Guggenheim mounted Motherwell’s first solo exhibition in this country, which proved to be one of the largest shows in the history of Art of This Century.

Over the next decade, Motherwell’s production of large-scale collages outpaced his creation of paintings. Motherwell’s enthusiasm for and dedication to the collage technique for the remainder of his career sets him apart from other artists of his generation and went beyond the mere physical presence of torn, rumpled, and pasted papers. He produced both abstracted figural collages and pure abstraction collages through the 1940s, however, by the middle of the next decade the Surrealist influences prevalent in these first works had given way to Motherwell’s distinctive mature style that was firmly rooted in Abstract Expressionism.

The genesis of Motherwell’s career coincided with a peculiar and turbulent period for the United States, when the country entered the World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It is within this sociopolitical context that Motherwell engaged with themes of symbolic violence and humanitarian struggle. This preoccupation came to the fore in his work in collage beginning in 1943, from his application of evocative titles to the very process of tearing pieces of paper—an aggressive act Motherwell likened to “killing someone.” In these works he moved freely between spontaneous abstraction and semirepresentation, between abstract figures (Personage [Autoportrait], December 9, 1943) and pure abstraction (Untitled, 1943), at times incorporating fragmented military maps and resistance slogans (Viva, 1946), prison bar motifs (Jeune Fille, 1944), and wounded “stick figures” (Three Personages Shot, June 6, 1944). In his explorations with collage, Motherwell developed an artistic means of grappling with the madness of the sociopolitical situation of his day, as well as a way to express his personal anxieties as an emerging artist in New York. By cutting, tearing, and layering pasted papers, Motherwell reflected the tumult and violence of the modern world, which established him as an essential and original voice in postwar American art.

Visit the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum online at www.guggenheim.org.

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Christie’s hired to appraise city-owned art in bankrupt Detroit

The main building of the Detroit Institute of Arts, designed by architect Paul Philipe Cret. Detroit Institute of Arts image.

DETROIT (AP) – International auction house Christie’s will appraise some pieces in the Detroit Institute of Arts collection as a federal judge considers a state-appointed emergency manager’s request to push the city into the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Christie’s also will assist and advise on valuing the artwork while leaving the pieces in the city’s ownership, the New York-based firm said Monday on its website.

The DIA, considered one of the top art museums in the country, is home to hundreds of paintings and sculptures by Van Gogh, Bruegel the Elder, Renoir and other masters. The city purchased many of the pieces in the collection years ago during more prosperous times.

That means they could be considered assets in a bankruptcy, a possibility that emergency manager Kevyn Orr warned DIA officials about earlier this year. Orr filed for bankruptcy on July 18.

“We understand that a valuation of all the city’s assets (extending well beyond the art) is one of many steps that will be necessary for the legal system to reach a conclusion about the best long-term solution for the citizens of Detroit,” the auction house said.

“We want to continue to focus our efforts on being a positive force in both the interests of the city of Detroit and its arts community, including working with our fellow arts professionals at the DIA and with the city to find alternatives to selling that would still provide the city with needed revenue.”

Orr has said the city is insolvent and can’t pay its bills. Detroit has a budget deficit of about $380 million. Long-term debt could be as much as $20 billion.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes has to determine whether Detroit is eligible for bankruptcy.

Creditors have asked the city to put a value on its assets, Orr said Monday. Placing dollar figures on the pieces does not “portend a sale of any asset,” he added.

“There has never been, nor is there now, any plan to sell art,” Orr said in a news release. “This valuation, as well as the valuation of other city assets … is a step the city must take to reach resolutions with its creditors and secure a viable, strong future for Detroit and its residents.”

The DIA told The Associated Press in a statement Monday afternoon that it would cooperate in Christie’s appraisal process, but pointed to a formal opinion by Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette that said city-owned DIA pieces can’t be sold in a bankruptcy proceeding. He said in June that the artwork is held in a charitable trust for Michigan residents.

“We applaud the EM’s focus on rebuilding the city, but would point out that he undercuts that core goal by jeopardizing Detroit’s most important cultural institution,” the DIA said.

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