Talking antiques: The Winter Show
Editorial Staff
As exhibitors prepare for the Winter Show’s first-ever virtual event, we asked them to reflect on their past years at the fair or highlight one exceptional object available this January and describe it as they might to an interested collector. Here are their stories and the works of art they chose to share.
Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts
We mounted a Charles Burchfield and William Hunt Diederich exhibition at a TEFAF fair a few years back, where a dealer visited our booth with images of what he thought might be architectural works by Diederich. The images depicted his classic flat, iron, silhouette animal forms with dozens of whimsical birds and desert plants. Everything looked “right,” but we had never seen anything by the artist on this grand scale. Our research traced the provenance to a 1920s commission for a town house in New York, and when we visited the town house we were able to identify other examples of the artist’s work in its architecture. What we had was, indeed, by Diederich, and perhaps his largest work ever discovered. The fun part was to then reimagine the tableau for our booth at the Winter Show in 2019, a task that proved to be our most expansive installation to date. We designed a fifteen-foot scene of thirteen birds inhabiting a foliate landscape. The work took up an entire wall of our booth, but the result was stunning and stopped every visitor in their tracks. The entire tableau was sold immediately as the fair was opening.