Antiques Journal, Comprehensive Coverage of the World of Antiques

That appalling specimen of humanity called Hermann Goering was, I’m sorry to say, a genuine connoisseur. Plunder is hardly an admirable way of building an art collection, but the collection he built was first class - almost as good as Hitler’s! A Dutch dealer, Han van Megeeren, sold him a Vermeer, and selling a Dutch masterpiece to a Nazi was treason, punishable by death. While in jail, van Megeeren confessed that he, not Vermeer, had painted the artwork, and that he’d sold Goering a forgery. (Sadly, he’d sold his forged “Vermeers” to many other collectors and museums as well.) Goering learned of the forgery while he, too, was in prison, facing execution for crimes against humanity. Apparently he was more distressed by the fact that his beloved Vermeer was a forgery than by his own impending death. He also thought that van Megeeren had done more evil to him than he had to the peoples of Europe. He was a true connoisseur.

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In My Opinion Archives

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John Fiske

Why did the Arts & Crafts movement think that the seventeenth century could provide the panacea for the ills of the nineteenth? In the second half of the nineteenth century, Arts & Crafts began the rapid, and radical, shift of taste from the Victorian to the Modern. The taste for Victorianism died, not just because of this taste change, but because of a growing disillusionment with the industrialization that fuelled Victorian wealth and shaped its decorative arts.

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“Modern antiques” may seem an oxymoron, but twentieth-century antiques have overcome some initial reluctance to allow them into the world of “real” antiques, and are now securely established as an important sector of the antiques business. NEAJ wondered how this market segment was faring in these uncertain times. To find out, we interviewed a leading member of the trade in each of four market sectors – a group shop, a dealer, an auctioneer and a show promoter.

Jim Tindell/Paul Plumadore, Center44, 222 East 44th Street, New York, NY 10017, (212) 450-7988, www.center44.com

Mark McDonald, 555 Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534 (518) 828-6320, www.markmcdonald.biz

David Rago, Rago Arts, 333 North Main Street, Lambertville, NJ 08530, (609) 397-9374, www.ragoarts.com

Joan Tramontano, Stella Show Mgmt. Co., (973) 808-5015, www.stellashows.com

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1750-1780 Importing a
fashionable commodity
Before 1750, few colonists in New England could afford to decorate their homes with wallpaper (or “painted paper” as it was called in the eighteenth century, a translation of the French term papier peint), and surviving examples from this period are rare. Wealthy urban colonists could purchase “painted paper” from stationers, booksellers and as a custom order from merchants who specialized in imported luxury goods. Wallpaper was an expensive decorative material, yet it was created as an affordable alternative to more costly wall coverings.

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If walls could talk
Until the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century, the use of wallpaper was nearly universal in American homes of all economic classes. Beginning as an expensive handmade imported product in Colonial times, wallpaper became much more affordable and popular in the industrial age. It was especially prized as a way to cover plaster walls and hide cracks, and the cost was often comparable or even cheaper than painting. Although wallpaper in all types of styles and materials continues to be used to this day, serious study of this historic material culture has only resurfaced in recent decades.

One of the oldest log cabins in the United States lies in a pasture off Rural Route 2 on Grand Isle, Vt., just near the elementary school. The cabin was acquired by the Vermont Historical Society in 1945, stabilized for further restoration and moved two miles to its present location. In 1952, the cabin was turned over to the Vermont Historic Sites Commission and its initial restoration was undertaken by the Department of Forests and Parks. Today, the cabin is owned and maintained by the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, successor to the Historic Sites Commission.

I enjoy the contradictions that the passage of time creates. Things remain the same materially, but they change socially, and that process is the sort of history that I love. Thoughts like these were drifting idly through my head as I lounged on the lawn outside Crane Castle, right here in Ipswich.

Crane Castle was built at the beginning of the last century, by Richard Crane, a hugely wealthy man. These days, we’re all too familiar with hugely wealthy people, and they’re not too high up our popularity scale, and rightly so. But at least the mega-rich of a century ago made their wealth by producing real objects that actually made life better for the poorer people who bought them – with Crane, it was bathroom fixtures. Think of the difference between a flushing toilet and a sub-prime mortgage, and you’ll get my point.

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