While the calendar tells us the year starts January 1, we know the season doesn’t really start until the opening of the annual Winter Antiques Show. We were there on Thursday evening the 20th for the East Side House benefit opening night party wandering among the furniture, decorative arts, drawings, jewelry, carpets and other wares of this year’s 74 exhibitors.
We heard that Hugh Jackman was there, but alas we didn’t see him though we did catch Mario Buatta, Tom Felicia, Hilary Geary Ross, Alexandra Lebenthal, and Honorary co-chairs Dan and Cynthia Lufkin. Although more crowded than usual, this year seemed to draw fewer familiar faces jamming the booths and sampling awkwardly generous hors d’oeuvres.
Along with Jamie Drake, who was signed on to star in the Young Collector’s Night, we admired the frolicking cherubs cared onto a marble wellhead in Barbara Israel’s booth (www.barbaraisrael.com). A mahogany cabinet decorated with floral drawings was a centerpiece at Hostler Burrows (www.hostlerburrows.com). Alexander Gallery (www.alexandergallery.com) was showing the pastel portrait miniature of Benjamin Franklin once owned by Lafayette, and one of the most touching pieces was a humble sack loaned from the Historic Charleston Foundation. Embroidered letters spell out that it held the meager possessions of a slave girl given to her by her mother when she was sold as a slave at age nine (www.winterantiquesshow.com/loan/).
The historic paintings and sketches of junks and hong merchants in Martyn Gregory’s booth (www.martyngregory.com) were a contrast to works we’d seen earlier in the day at the International Center for Photography where “When Worlds Collide” depicts mammoth photographs by Wang Qingsong (www.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/wang-qingsong-when-worlds-collide), a contemporary artist who portrays modern China’s encounter with the global consumer culture by staging updated versions of noted historic works – think George Washington crossing the Delaware to shop at Sears.
