A Famous Grasshopper Wet Bar and Long-Lost Damsel Murals

T he European Fine Art Fair — TEFAF — is among the best of the New York fairs. It’s the child of the TEFAF fair held every March in Maastricht in the Netherlands, though with only 90 dealers, it’s less than half the size, with smaller booths, and not the extravaganza that Maastricht always is. TEFAF’s brand is the highest quality, market freshness, and rigorous vetting by outside curators, and TEFAF New York lives up to it.

Old Masters dominate in Maastricht and, to a lesser extent, antiquities. In New York, the art’s more modern, and dealers specializing in design are aplenty. Maastricht is a destination fair, with private planes delivering rich collectors from Europe, America, the Middle East, and Asia. In New York, TEFAF goes where the shoppers are.

I spent an afternoon at the Park Avenue Armory visiting the fair, which closed on the May 16. It wasn’t my favorite TEFAF New York fair — I fell in love with very little, a rare thing for me.

The Paris dealer Galerie Mitterrand was a first-time TEFAF exhibitor and dedicated its booth to the crowd-pleasing husband-and-wife team of François-Xavier Lalanne (1927–2008) and Claude Lalanne (1924–2019). They made sculptures and furniture, both whimsical and ironic, a little bit of Dada and a little bit of Art Deco. Sculptures of cabbages with chicken legs, furniture based on crocodiles, and their signature sheep bronzes made a niche for the pair, who were based in France but did commissions all over the world.

The gallery had a group of crocodile furniture. Claude purchased stuffed crocodiles from taxidermists, made plaster casts of them, and then designed benches, chairs, and desks using the motif. The selection of subjects was very good.

Mennour, another Paris gallery, had a different take. Its booth created a fantasy living room in Paris with a mix of 20th-century furniture and paintings. It was very elegant. Mennour also offered one of three grasshopper-shaped six-foot-long wet bars that the Lalannes designed in the mid ’70s — one is at Buckingham Palace, a gift to Queen Elizabeth from François Mitterrand, the French president. It’s impressive, and fun and clever, too.

A Lalanne rhinoceros bar sold at auction for $7.8 million not long ago, a very pretty penny indeed. Methinks there might be a bubble. Mitterrand sold a Lalanne monkey sculpture at the fair for $1.7 million. Like the couple’s sheep sculptures, their monkeys are not serious. Still, the grasshopper bar is a great thing, and Mennour had it sold by the end of the fair.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery started in Paris nearly 20 years ago to help artists make high-end, avant-garde furniture. It facilitates, promotes, and supports artists but also collaborates with them in achieving their design vision in physical form. Their booth focuses on French-Swedish designer Ingrid Donat (b. 1957) and the French metalworker Line Vautrin (1913–1997). Donat’s massive bronze commode, made especially for the fair, has scarified decoration that Donat says was inspired by French-African Art Deco style in Réunion, the island near Madagascar where she grew up. It’s eight feet long, with intricate cast patterns using the lost wax process. It’s $750,000.

I was delighted to see Di Donna Galleries dedicating its entire booth to the work of Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985), the Swiss artist whose survey exhibition at MoMA I reviewed last year. When the young artist, at 23, exhibited her fur-lined cup, saucer, and spoon in Paris in 1936, it caused a stir, for its eroticism and irreverence. It launched her career. Oppenheim worked in different styles until her death in 1985 but is best known as a Surrealist. Forest Interior with Dryades, from 1967, is an oil painting with oak bark and silver plating. I don’t see it as Surrealist but, rather, as art about German nature mysticism. Dryads are, after all, wood nymphs. There aren’t many good Swiss artists — the people are too conformist. Oppenheim’s the most whimsical and curious of Swiss painters and sculptors. At 53 by 43 inches, it’s got wall power. The price isn’t for publication. Oppenheim’s work hasn’t done well at auction, but not much has come up.

Most of Oppenheim’s work is in Swiss public and private collections, so it was surprising to see a critical mass on the market. Surely the MoMA show nudged collectors to sell, but Surrealist women are also the rage because of last year’s Venice Biennale anchor show Milk of Dreams, which was heavy on them.

Nothing could be fresher to the market than two large oval Art Deco murals commissioned from the German-American artist Winold Reiss in 1938 to decorate a French restaurant on the first floor of the Empire State Building. Part of a series of eight murals of cavorting maidens surrounded by flowers, the murals were assumed to have been trashed in the ’60s when the restaurant jettisoned French food and décor for steak and a Mississippi-riverboat theme. Reiss (1886–1953) was a prolific artist, designer, and decorator specializing in public murals for high-traffic places like train stations and fancy restaurants and department stores. Fascinated by Native Americans, he also painted more than 200 portraits of Montana Blackfeet.

Last year, a specialist working at Bernard Goldberg Galleries in New York saw the two murals on 1stDibs.com. He knew them from photographs of the restaurant and Reiss’s drawings and sketches. The gallery bought them for a mid-five-figure price, authenticating them as part of the vanished set. They’re for sale for a low-seven-figure price. Quite a tidy profit. And the pair did sell by fair’s end.

They’re not my brand of Champagne — so pretty, they’re nearly kitsch — but they’re prime Art Deco. The find got some publicity in the weeks before TEFAF. This might lead to the other six making their buxom presence known.

Sales at the fair seem to have been good. Gladstone sold its entire booth, devoted to Robert Rauschenberg’s 1983 Thai drawings, at $90,000 a pop. Zwirner’s booth, all works by Josef Albers (1888–1976), did well, too. I’m afraid I don’t like either artist.

Galerie Gisela Capitain sold its entire booth — all women artists — by mid fair. Nathalie Obadia’s booth, all work by the Paris-based, American Abstract Expressionist Shirley Jaffe (1923–2016), did well, but a little of Jaffe goes a long way. There were lots of women artists represented at the fair. That’s good, but artists such as Jaffe, the Swiss geometric painter Verena Loewensberg (1912–1986) at Mayor Gallery, and Erika Klien (1900–1957), a Viennese Kineticist, shown at Wienerroitter and Kohlbacher, are minor figures.

I’m not saying they were modest talents. They’re secondary and often derivative parts of bigger movements. Sheila Hicks (b. 1934), the textile sculptor presented by Demisch Danant, and Oppenheim are unique, pioneering artists. I thought Louise Nevelson’s collages at the Pace Gallery were wonderful. Nevelson (1899–1988) was a dynamic force and very much her own thing. I didn’t know she made collages.

The VIP opening was too glitzy for me, and I prefer to move with stealth at art fairs, dressed as a Vermonter. Woody Allen was there, I heard, as were Julianne Moore, John Krasinski, and Stanley Tucci, whose book on Italian food I just read. Don Lemon was there, too. Rumor is that he wants to be an artist like Hunter Biden.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Gustav Klimt’s Island in the Attersee, a rare and sublime lake scene from around 1901 headed to a Sotheby’s auction. I’ve seen the painting off and on for years. It’s been privately owned and here in the U.S. since the late ’30s. On Tuesday, it sold for $53.3 million, which includes the buyer’s premium. Alas, it’s going to Japan, where the new owner lives. I was hoping that Ronald Lauder would buy it for the Neue Galerie in New York. He might have been in the mix, as there was a seven-minute phone-bidding war. The Neue already has a Klimt landscape and, of course, The Woman in Gold.