Transcript
Speaker: Support for curious objects comes from Christie's.
Speaker: This January 17th, 23rd, and 24th, Christie's New York will present Americana Week, a group of three auctions that curate the beginnings, diversity, and burgeoning patriotism of a country's identity.
Speaker: The sales feature an array of artwork and objects that range from outsider art and Chinese export porcelain to furniture, folk art, and silver.
Speaker: So hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the Magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: With me is Michael Dias-Groffitt.
Speaker: Hello, everyone.
Speaker: And we are sitting in a little known auction house in Midtown Manhattan.
Speaker: What is it called?
Speaker: Christie Manson Woods?
Speaker: Yeah, something like that.
Speaker: They might have shortened it.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: Christie's, Christie's.
Speaker: You might have heard of it.
Speaker: And we're getting ready for the Americana sales here in January of 2020, which is always an exciting time of year for antique dealers who look forward to bolstering our inventory.
Speaker: but also, of course, for private collectors.
Speaker: And there are two specialists who have worked here at Christie's on a couple of those sales who are with us here today.
Speaker: Kara Zimmerman, who's a specialist in outsider and folk art, in American art, and Becky McGuire, who specializes in the China trade.
Speaker: So these are two very different subject matter, and we're talking about two separate sales, and yet I suspect we might find some interesting ways that these two categories communicate with one another.
Speaker: And Kara and Becky, you've selected a couple of really fascinating objects for us to talk about today, and Michael and I are really eager to hear their stories.
Speaker: So, Kara, I want to start with you and just ask you to first give us a quick description of the painting that you're telling us about, which I actually saw a blown-up version of it in the display glass on the ground floor here that was coming in.
Speaker: It's a pretty impressive thing.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Today we're going to be talking about a fantastic double-sided piece by an artist named Bill Traylor, who's one of what I call the old master outsider artists.
Speaker: He started creating art late in his life, was actually born a slave, worked on plantations and as a farmhand for most of his life.
Speaker: In the late 1920s, moved to Montgomery, Alabama and started drawing at some point between then and 1939.
Speaker: And his work started to be collected by a younger artist named Charles Shannon between 1939 and 1942.
Speaker: The drawing that we're looking at today, which is a double-sided piece, which is man on white, woman on red on one side and man with a black dog on the other side,
Speaker: is actually from an incredibly interesting collection.
Speaker: To begin just looking at the object, we have on one side of the piece a fabulous image of a woman in a polka dot shirt and brown skirt pointing, gesticulating, possibly angrily, at a man who's smoking a pipe and holding a umbrella on the other side of the work.
Speaker: Many people can relate to this kind of image.
Speaker: This is a fabulous piece by Trailer for a number of reasons.
Speaker: First of all, you have half of the image, which is the size the woman's on, which has a red-painted background, which is incredibly unusual for Trailer.
Speaker: We see this only a few times.
Speaker: Another element that's really exciting is that if you look at it very closely, you can see there's actually an underdrawing of a vertical exciting event, as we would call it, that is visible underneath this final image.
Speaker: So this piece is actually serving as a template for some of the work that Traylor does in terms of figuring out his composition,
Speaker: We can see a little bit about how he works out these scenes, how they're supposed to fit on his page, what he does when he doesn't like them.
Speaker: One thing that is...
Speaker: particularly special about this piece, though, is that it has an entirely separate second son, which was something that we didn't know about when it first arrived here at Christie's.
Speaker: And when I unframed it, which was actually on my birthday, I found a full second son.
Speaker: Happy birthday, Kara.
Speaker: I've gotten it a long time.
Speaker: And it was not the Declaration of Independence.
Speaker: It was not.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: But this was an incredibly exciting find to see the second side with this black dog with this bright red tongue and these sharp ferocious teeth and this man sort of gesticulating off the page next to him.
Speaker: The scale of the two figures is totally out of whack.
Speaker: The dog is almost bigger than the man.
Speaker: It looks like he's either standing on him or about to pounce on him.
Speaker: And this energy that you see on this side, this much more direct, immediate mark-making.
Speaker: is such an interesting contrast to the front of the work that we're seeing really Bill Traylor at his best and most exciting.
Speaker: This work has an incredible story to it.
Speaker: in that it was a gift from Steven Spielberg to the author Alice Walker when they finished making his version of The Color Purple, which is her Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
Speaker: And at the conclusion of the filming, he gave her this work.
Speaker: And he said to her, basically, I hope when you see the final film, you're not as angry as the woman on Reddit.
Speaker: Gosh.
Speaker: So he understood the emotional valence.
Speaker: He got it.
Speaker: He got it.
Speaker: So it's really such a fascinating gift for him to give her in that the trailer was an African-American from the South.
Speaker: working in the 1930s, lived through, you know, obviously early 1900s and that whole period of time, much like the characters in The Color Purple.
Speaker: He lived in a similar period through similar circumstance.
Speaker: And so he clearly was thinking very hard when he selected this as a gift, thinking about the resonance perhaps between the novel, the film, and this piece of art.
Speaker: I was so charmed to read Alice Walker's quote about the gift she received from Steven Spielberg.
Speaker: And I mean, here's some gift ideas for you, Ben, when you're thinking about me on my birthday.
Speaker: Could you read that quote for us?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: After Steven Spielberg completed filming The Color Purple in 1985, he gave me as a gift, man on white, woman on red.
Speaker: He was hopeful, he said with a smile, that when I saw the film, I didn't feel like the angry woman on red.
Speaker: I answered with a laugh, I hope so too.
Speaker: On my first viewing, a private one in San Francisco, I did have some reservations, but I soon came to realize that overall Stephen's The Color Purple is a masterpiece.
Speaker: So there's a happy ending.
Speaker: There's a happy ending.
Speaker: Let's come back to this in just a minute, but I'm already starting to see some parallels, and so I want to jump over to Becky for a second.
Speaker: Okay, these are a little bit forced, but we're talking, you've just told us about a work of art that has two sides to it.
Speaker: Becky, you're about to tell us about a work of art that is actually a pair.
Speaker: It has two sides to it.
Speaker: You've told us, Kara, about a piece of what's deemed outsider art.
Speaker: Becky, you're going to tell us about a piece that comes from far outside the bounds of what...
Speaker: So specifically 18th century Chinese export porcelain.
Speaker: So tell us about this wonderful pair of objects coming up in the sale.
Speaker: I was actually thinking the same thing, listening to Mara's wonderful story about the trailer.
Speaker: In a funny way, there is a parallel, too, about the maker of the painting and the makers of this Chinese porcelain.
Speaker: What I sell in this sale is porcelain made in the heart of China.
Speaker: at Jingdezhen where the kilns were for European consumers and later American once we were a pep tree.
Speaker: Thousands and thousands of miles away, the two never met, and yet these highly sophisticated Chinese potters were creating these incredible works of art with incredible skill for their European and other Western consumers.
Speaker: And they were completely anonymous, a little bit like the outsider artists who
Speaker: although became well known later, were outside the academy, outside the established traditions.
Speaker: We really do not know any of the potters, painters, enamelers, even designers of these fabulous porcelains that were prized the world over because of course only in China could you make hard, true, white porcelain until well into the 18th century when
Speaker: We in the West finally caught up and they began making true porcelain at Meissen in Germany.
Speaker: So the Chinese potters were creating these incredible masterpieces like the vases you're referring to, which are almost the size of an average man in the 18th century.
Speaker: And still impressively large, make a huge statement when you walk in the room and see them beautiful baluster shaped with covers.
Speaker: They're often shown on stands.
Speaker: great halls or flanking a fireplace, flanking a doorway.
Speaker: They're known as soldier bosses, this form, this scale.
Speaker: And there is a real story to that.
Speaker: Augustus the Strong, the elector of Saxony and King of Poland, was a very, very rich man in the early 18th century and completely obsessed with Chinese porcelain.
Speaker: Saxony was very rich.
Speaker: They had mining.
Speaker: They had all the precious metals.
Speaker: control of them.
Speaker: They had tons and tons of money.
Speaker: And he would send agents scouring mostly to Amsterdam, where porcelain from China first arrived at the docks, looking for the best of Chinese porcelain.
Speaker: He accumulated thousands of pieces in his collection, much of which can still be seen at Brisbane in Germany today, where his palace was.
Speaker: He traded Frederick the Great of Prussia
Speaker: a regiment of soldiers for a group of Chinese porcelains which included a number of these giant vases.
Speaker: How did the soldiers feel about that?
Speaker: No, we don't really know that either.
Speaker: They were pretty anonymous for themselves.
Speaker: They were mercenaries, basically, and they belonged, in effect, to almost like slave.
Speaker: They belonged to the political leader who had their control.
Speaker: So bye-bye went the soldiers off to Prussia to fight for Frederick.
Speaker: They were also known as dragoons, so sometimes you hear the term.
Speaker: But today we call them soldier bosses, and everybody knows that these massive,
Speaker: Chinese porcelain boxes, which, by the way, were incredibly difficult to make.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So take us back to China for a second, because as you mentioned, it took the Europeans a long time to figure out how to reproduce this technology.
Speaker: And that's because it wasn't easy.
Speaker: And especially it wasn't easy to make things that both looked good and wouldn't break.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And that could be decorated properly.
Speaker: And my understanding is the larger the pieces, the harder it is to do that properly.
Speaker: And here we're talking about pieces on, as you said, really on an enormous scale.
Speaker: So how difficult exactly was it to produce a vase of that size?
Speaker: This is really about the largest thing you can produce in porcelain.
Speaker: It just won't stand up if it gets any bigger than this.
Speaker: And we know about this, how it occurred in the period because of it.
Speaker: French Jesuit priest who traveled to China, not only traveled to China and went to the court and so forth, but made his way to Ging de Genn, which was quite a journey.
Speaker: I don't know how many weeks or months it took him.
Speaker: He got there and he wrote these fabulous letters back to one of his Jesuit pals in France, which eventually were published.
Speaker: And actually, this was like corporate espionage.
Speaker: They actually were key to
Speaker: to Europeans finally, finally learning the secret of making truth for Islam.
Speaker: But that wasn't his intent.
Speaker: He had that wonderful Jesuit scientific mind and he really just wanted to know how everything was made and how everything was done.
Speaker: So his letters, which you can read online today, they were of course written in Latin, but you can read English translations.
Speaker: Thank you, Google.
Speaker: And they talk about things like how refined the clays were.
Speaker: There were specialists who dug up the clay out of the dry riverbeds.
Speaker: And that's secret number one of Jude Porcelain.
Speaker: You need the right clay.
Speaker: And it only comes from certain rivers.
Speaker: Rivers around Leisland in Germany.
Speaker: Rivers around Seve in France.
Speaker: Rivers around Staffordshire in England.
Speaker: So that's number one.
Speaker: Number two, you need to refine it like crazy.
Speaker: You sift it in all kinds of things.
Speaker: Get all the imperatives out.
Speaker: Number three, you need a particular combination of what they call in Chinese kaolin and potensa, which just means white bricks and hard stone.
Speaker: It's just two different kinds of basically broken down granite that you mix together with some slurry.
Speaker: And then the last secret is you have to, of course, you're going to fashion it into some sort of shape, and then you have to put it in the
Speaker: kiln at a very, very high temperature.
Speaker: And that's a really tough part.
Speaker: And of course, they did that without any kind of temperature control.
Speaker: You had to heat up that kiln for days.
Speaker: The kilns are made of brick.
Speaker: You can walk into them.
Speaker: They're called beehive kilns.
Speaker: They're sort of like a, they look like a giant birthworm.
Speaker: Big lumpy things.
Speaker: They would
Speaker: put everything inside the kiln, light an enormous fire, wait for days to have it heat up to the right temperature.
Speaker: The way they checked for the temperature, they opened a hole in the top, like a chimney, and peered in.
Speaker: So the kiln masters always had their eyebrows and bangs burned off because they looked in to see the color of the coals.
Speaker: And then they let it cool off for a few days once it got hot enough to fuse the porcelain together, almost like the same way glasses make.
Speaker: And then they took it out again.
Speaker: And here in the catalog, you have quoted that Jesuit father saying, out of 24 attempted, only eight succeeded from a set of vases of this size.
Speaker: Correct?
Speaker: So he was specifically recording how difficult it was to make these things of very large scale.
Speaker: And of course, that was only the first step of the process, because then they had to, in that same journey from central China, all the way to the coast.
Speaker: Absolutely right.
Speaker: Barrels with straw going on donkeys or horses or in carts.
Speaker: And then, once they got to the coast, they had to go on ships all the way back.
Speaker: So there was a lot that went into these.
Speaker: The other aspect that's interesting to people who are interested in any kind of ceramic, because this is true wherever you make something out of clay, is
Speaker: The colored enamels, like on these baas, which are painted with exotic birds and all kinds of flowers, really a profusion of flowers growing from a sort of grassy knoll all the way around the baas.
Speaker: And then those scenes are enclosed by a series of elaborate borders with all kinds of patterning and color and gilt and little detailed vignettes interspersed in the borders.
Speaker: Those colored enamels have to be added after the piece is first fired.
Speaker: All the colors come from mineral bases.
Speaker: Cobalt blue, you can fire at once.
Speaker: So that's obviously cheaper.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Whereas these have red, they have yellow, they have blue and green.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I think we've landed on another commonality or connection because it's almost as if it's a miracle that these things were produced and shipped and that any arrived in Europe in one piece.
Speaker: And I think we'll return to this question of how that process was enacted as we continue our discussion.
Speaker: But it was also a bit of a miracle that Traylor's work was preserved.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And also that of some of his contemporaries, other so-called outsider artists who are working in similar conditions, including some who are in this sale.
Speaker: So could you tell us a bit about that moment when these artists were, quote, discovered, we might say, by outsiders who...
Speaker: in the sense of cosmopolitan elites or photographers from New York or museum folks who came to the South, saw the work, and knew that it was special.
Speaker: It's very interesting when you think about outsider art and art group, if you think about the European predecessor to the field, when you consider that all of this work really would have been lost, but for somebody coming along and deciding it was worth saving, as you say.
Speaker: It's so hard to use the term discoverer.
Speaker: But in many ways, it's the simplest way to sort of express this idea.
Speaker: When you think about how this field began in Europe in the 1920s, really, going into the 1940s, the work that comes out of that school really was preserved because it was almost an offshoot of asylum art.
Speaker: And you have these psychologists and psychiatrists who would save the material...
Speaker: Mostly so that they could use it as a didactic tool or learning tool to see, for example, with some of these artists like Adolf Wolfley, to see whether they could diagnose some sort of schizophrenia or mental disorder by looking at the work, thinking about how the art could explain some of these psychological issues.
Speaker: And so it was preserved for that reason.
Speaker: Then in the 1940s, you have someone like Jean Zubuffet, who started his company of art birth with the focus of trying to think about art in its raw and untainted state.
Speaker: He spent most of his career trying to untrain himself.
Speaker: Yes, the great modernist preoccupation with de-skilling.
Speaker: looking at the work of, at that point, often people who were institutionalized, was a way to see that sort of raw creation without the intermediary of an art school or a teacher.
Speaker: When you get to the U.S. and you start to think about artists like Bill Traylor, you're seeing a slightly different sort of framework for this, but
Speaker: an idea that sort of remains is this sense of someone with a position of authority finding and realizing that these works, finding these works and realizing that they were something worth keeping, something worth preserving.
Speaker: And for every great master like Traylor or Edmondson that we have, you have to wonder how many we don't have because no one came along and found them.
Speaker: and felt that they needed to be initiated into this high art realm.
Speaker: In the case of Trailer, you have an artist named Charles Shannon who was a younger white artist.
Speaker: He wasn't the person who first saw Trailer's work, but he was the person who collected it.
Speaker: Between 1939 and 1942, he was the one who really amassed the collection of Trailer's art that we now have.
Speaker: And he spent the rest of his life basically trying to find homes for this work, replacing it and making sure that it was preserved.
Speaker: So you have this trained white artist going in and seeing this value and this unbelievable output and spending his life trying to make sure that other people saw it too.
Speaker: With someone like William Edmondson,
Speaker: who's another artist in this auction, you have an interesting parallel because he was also working in the South, also African American, creating around the same time, mostly in the 1940s.
Speaker: And he was one who really was discovered, quote unquote, by the New Yorkists quite early.
Speaker: And he was actually the first black artist, the first African American artist to have a solo show at the MoMA in 1937.
Speaker: So he had his moment in that regard and then was subsequently, unfortunately, sort of forgotten for some time.
Speaker: But he was part of that moment where Alfred Barr and other artists or other curators and artists and photographers who were really interested in this idea of expansion of the idea of modernism in the most primitive.
Speaker: He really was there at the center of that conversation.
Speaker: It's fascinating to see how...
Speaker: quickly the process of, quote, discovery carried Edmondson from total anonymity in Nashville to MoMA.
Speaker: I mean, it was like a couple of years, right?
Speaker: Could you... It was a very quick sort of turnaround.
Speaker: So basically, you know, it went from 1936 to 1937.
Speaker: In that time period, people became familiar with his work.
Speaker: the Starr family, Alfred and Elizabeth Starr, were big fans of Edmondson.
Speaker: They went to his yard in 1936-1937.
Speaker: They introduced Edmondson to Louise Dahlwold, the photographer, who in turn then...
Speaker: brought Alfred Barr into the conversation.
Speaker: So you have this sort of game of telephone of this interesting artist doing astounding things for his community in Nashville.
Speaker: I mean, essentially, he started carving in the early 1930s because he was carving tombstones and objects for his local congregation and community.
Speaker: He then expanded to what he called his garden ornaments for these
Speaker: incredible sophisticated figures, burbaths, vessels that we now know him for.
Speaker: And it was this group that people really became enamored of.
Speaker: And this show, Pamoma in 37, while small, was certainly something that was reported on and part of the conversation.
Speaker: I can't say that the conversation around it was
Speaker: really addressed him as a peer.
Speaker: It was a very difficult sort of conversation that was happening then, the way people almost dismissed what he was doing as being this sort of, you know,
Speaker: spiritual sort of unknown artist who's making something but he doesn't realize what he's doing yeah you know it was a very dismissive tone to the conversation which then we've seen that approach with tribal art as well exactly exactly and so he you know he sort of fell victim to that for a while and the work really faded from hue for for a few decades before it became part of the conversation again and now we're seeing his work in
Speaker: all these great institutions.
Speaker: It's at every major museum that I can think of.
Speaker: Do we have accounts firsthand from Edmondson and from Traylor of how they personally responded to this explosion of fame and recognition?
Speaker: Well, Traylor never really saw that in his lifetime.
Speaker: We don't have any written accounts.
Speaker: He had a show, right?
Speaker: Yeah, but that was a small show that was organized by a small artist collective.
Speaker: It wasn't... Nothing on the scale.
Speaker: Nothing on the scale of a MoMA exhibition.
Speaker: But he worked on his stoop
Speaker: in Montgomery.
Speaker: He was there for a few years.
Speaker: Shannon was collecting his work after that.
Speaker: We know that he went to live with a family member.
Speaker: We think he worked then, but no one saved the work, so we're not sure what happened to it.
Speaker: To him, it was never something that he saw fame for.
Speaker: For Edmondson, I think when people would speak to him about it, he would draw upon the spiritual side of things.
Speaker: saying that he was sort of visited and told to create this work in a way that I think a lot of people in a disenfranchised situation, a lot of folks would say that.
Speaker: I can't say whether he did or didn't believe that everything he did was due to
Speaker: his spirituality or whether it was a way for him to pass on agency or what his mindset was.
Speaker: But that's really what the conversation has been or was around his work when he was alive.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's interesting for me to just from a psychological perspective.
Speaker: I mean, if we were to draw a line between outsider versus insider artists, you know, it's tempting to think of insider artists with air quotes as people who...
Speaker: likely seek fame who are really interested that you know they maybe they go to art school and maybe they strive to have exhibitions from a young age and maybe they you know work to meet the right people and be represented by the right people and so on and then it's similarly tempting to think of outsider artists as people who have a sort of
Speaker: again, with air quotes, pure motivation, who are really just making things because they're driven to do it, and they don't expect the world to take note.
Speaker: And so it's a sort of a miracle one that does happen, and therefore the work seems to have this special aura around it.
Speaker: But I think that dichotomy might be problematic.
Speaker: Well, it seems as if their conceptions of agency are different, right?
Speaker: It's also an artist by artist thing.
Speaker: There are certainly some self-taught artists who created because they were seeking fame.
Speaker: They thought, this is my ticket to the big time.
Speaker: Justin McCarthy, for example, is one who saw himself as a well-known artist.
Speaker: Lee Godey, who's a brilliant one, called herself a French Impressionist and painted on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Speaker: Some of these folks, for them, it wasn't
Speaker: was about the fame and the fortune that they perceived the art world to be in, albeit from their own vantage point outside of the Academy.
Speaker: For others, it was a way of coping with the world.
Speaker: For others, it was a way of documenting the world.
Speaker: Some artists, like Henry Darker, never wanted anyone to see their work.
Speaker: Some artists like William Edmondson were amused and bemused that people were seeing his work in New York.
Speaker: So it's really a spectrum of how involved these folks were with this concept of the art world.
Speaker: But I think for many of them, there's a permeation of popular culture in their art that allows for that sort of inching into the art world where they see fit, that sort of...
Speaker: That sort of ability to find a connection with what was happening at the MoMA, for example, from their, let's take someone like, you know, Pervis Young from their prison cell in Miami.
Speaker: And that conversation is an interesting one.
Speaker: And Edmondson called himself a disciple.
Speaker: So, you know, whatever his relationship to agency or his feelings about the origins of his gift, I mean, there's implied in that is a sense that he wants to get the work out into the world.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, and he was very much creating for his community.
Speaker: And he was creating, you know, images of his community, images of popular culture, you know,
Speaker: figures, Eleanor Roosevelt, boxers, Joe Louis, all those folks, they were amongst the figures he created.
Speaker: He also carved people who he worked with in previous jobs, or at least he called them that when people would go to his yard and ask about it, whether or not they were just given that
Speaker: that feel because they were there and they knew this person and he thought it would be amusing or whether or not it was actually supposed to be Nurse Wooten, for example.
Speaker: We just don't know.
Speaker: But there is that idea.
Speaker: There is actually a figural birdbath in the sale.
Speaker: Could you describe it for us?
Speaker: It is a very unusual, cool thing.
Speaker: So you basically have a three-part object.
Speaker: It's actually in three separate parts.
Speaker: You have a basin, which is this fabulous, almost V-shaped basin with a carved out section in the center of it.
Speaker: that's resting on top of a very plain block of limestone.
Speaker: And that is resting on top of this fabulous column, which is in part repurposed and in part carved.
Speaker: So you have this great column and base that makes the majority of this birdbath.
Speaker: the bottom part of which was found or brought to him.
Speaker: He often used repurposed materials from around the city that people would bring to him.
Speaker: And then he carved out of that central portion of that column this fabulous face and this great hairstyle for this woman who looks as though she's balancing this basin on the top of her bun.
Speaker: And it's a really very interesting piece in that it is a perfect example of his garden ornaments.
Speaker: It's a bird bath.
Speaker: It is an example of his carved figures because you have this fabulous rendering of the face and the hair.
Speaker: It shows how he used repurposed materials because each of these separate blocks is clearly something that was brought to him.
Speaker: and he has fashioned it into this single object.
Speaker: But another element of this that I find particularly fascinating, and a question that I can't answer about this particular object, is to what extent is there a religious component to this?
Speaker: Obviously, you know, he was known for doing bird baths, and this has gone through his life as a bird bath.
Speaker: But to me, there's certainly something about a... It seems to have a kinship to a religious font, or perhaps a pulpit.
Speaker: There's something about the shape of that...
Speaker: top basin that to me seems a little more than secular.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You could prop the Bible on there, no problem.
Speaker: No problem.
Speaker: And the Greco-Roman imagery really belies the notion that this is a naive rendition of
Speaker: And one thing that's very interesting about Edmondson is that we know he was looking at things.
Speaker: He was constantly looking at advertisements, things he found in his community.
Speaker: How much he knew of art history, we're not sure.
Speaker: What did he have access to?
Speaker: Clearly he wasn't formally trained in it.
Speaker: But to think that he wasn't aware of the world around him when we know that he was looking at images of people like Eleanor Roosevelt or these, as I was saying before, these boxers or other historical figures, it would make sense that he would have access to some of this imagery, whether or not he was using it in its sort of traditional Roman styling sense.
Speaker: It does seem to have a resonance.
Speaker: We'll be right back after this and a word from our sponsor.
Speaker: First, just a quick reminder that if you'd like to see pictures of Kara and Becky's Curious Objects, those are online at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast, as well as on my Instagram at Objective Interest and Michael's at Michael Diaz Griffith.
Speaker: And if you'd like to support the podcast and help new listeners find us, it's really helpful if you leave a rating and a review on your podcast app.
Speaker: Much appreciated.
Speaker: Support for curious objects comes from Christie's.
Speaker: This January 17th, 23rd and 24th, Christie's New York will start the new year with Americana Week, a group of three auctions that speak to the beginnings, diversity and burgeoning patriotism of a country's identity.
Speaker: The sales feature an array of artwork and objects that range from outsider art with pieces from the William Lewis Dreyfus Foundation and Chinese export porcelain from the Tibor collection to furniture, folk art and silver from the period.
Speaker: Dive into curiosities such as artwork from Bill Traylor, sculpture from William Edmondson, Famille Rose Soldier Vases, and more at the Rockefeller Plaza Gallery starting January 11th.
Speaker: Viewings for the remaining two auctions open on January 15th.
Speaker: In the meantime, curate a story of discovery and reveal a history of unbridled creativity and unique style by exploring the sales online at christies.com slash curiousobjects.
Speaker: As long as we're talking about black boxes and trying to understand what's going on behind the scenes, I do want to ask Becky a little bit more about these workers that you've described to us, toiling away and singeing off their eyebrows in the kilns.
Speaker: people who were doing this work, were they revered and respected highly skilled craftsmen?
Speaker: Were they seen or did they consider themselves artisans?
Speaker: Were they laborers?
Speaker: Were they well paid?
Speaker: Were they scorned?
Speaker: What kind of station of society did they want to?
Speaker: What do we know about these?
Speaker: It would be so fascinating to know about them, but honestly, we don't know a thing.
Speaker: They really were
Speaker: highly valued members of society.
Speaker: They were artisans in the eyes of their own culture.
Speaker: Their work was revered, certainly.
Speaker: And as you know, the imperial court in China sought the best porcelains from Jing to Jin, which were made in the same kilns.
Speaker: Scholars used to think there were specific kilns dedicated to imperial works, and other kilns, lesser kilns, would be the implication dedicated to export.
Speaker: But really now, because of the discovery of shards and
Speaker: archaeological digging and so forth in Jingdezhen, we know that it was all kind of mixed up and it would depend on what the market would bear that particular season.
Speaker: The kiln masters were very entrepreneurial and they were going to provide whatever they could to make money.
Speaker: So there was that motivation, but obviously they were also very, very highly skilled and
Speaker: Eventually the decorating moves to the port city of Canton, which we call Guangzhou today, of course, near the coast of China, where it was much more accessible to the Westerners, so orders could be transmitted more easily.
Speaker: Originally you would send designs, drawings, you might send your coat of arms on a book plate, because every 18th century gentleman had a library, of course, and you had an engraved book plate.
Speaker: So that would go toddling off to China so that your coat of arms could be copied onto a whole dinner service.
Speaker: That was the grandest thing you could have in the first half of the 18th century.
Speaker: I'm always curious about the turnaround of those orders.
Speaker: It's a couple of years, right?
Speaker: That we do know because at the Western end, records were kept, particularly good records by the English and the Dutch, which is sort of like... Yes.
Speaker: Thank you, bureaucrats.
Speaker: You can still go to India House in London and find these fabulous things in their archives.
Speaker: The Dutch East India Company, in Dutch, known as the BNC, also kept scrupulous records.
Speaker: It took about two years for most of the China trade period.
Speaker: Then when we get into the 19th century and the American trade...
Speaker: by which time the works of art had pretty much gone down in quality, really superseded by things in Europe that were more fashionable at the time, the clipper ships had come along.
Speaker: And that made it a faster thing than in the 18th century, 17th century when it all began in any volume.
Speaker: It was two years, so you really had to be patient.
Speaker: This is before the Swiss Canal, so everything is going around the Cape of Africa.
Speaker: You're going around more than half the world, right, to get there.
Speaker: And one with a lot of risk involved.
Speaker: Huge investment in the ships, the men, the supplies they needed.
Speaker: They would often stop.
Speaker: in South Africa.
Speaker: And there's some wonderful Chinese expert porcelains decorated with the famous Table Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope.
Speaker: Because that was a watering place.
Speaker: You'd stop there, you'd be supplied, you'd get fresh water, more, I don't know, oranges or whatever you needed for the journey.
Speaker: And a lot of these periods, it wasn't just Canton and back again.
Speaker: You would encounter Chinese trading ships in Indonesia, what they called Batavia, which became Java.
Speaker: They had a huge outpost there.
Speaker: The English were later in India.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: have things in.
Speaker: That's why all the terms get mixed up like coromandel screens, card lacquer screens, because they were stored in India on their way from China back to England.
Speaker: So there was all kinds of trade and commerce and people were encountering each other and the profit motive was great on all sides because if you did make this huge investment in the ship and it did come home laden with ceramics and works of art were a part of it, but there were other commodities that were much more
Speaker: much bigger value-wise, like a layer of tea, boring things like strong matting, all kinds of herbs and spices, all of that, come home with a successful cargo, you could make 200% profit.
Speaker: I like those margins.
Speaker: That's a bad one.
Speaker: To up the ante in this story of risk and adventure, I'd love to consider the reverse painting on mirror that's in the sale.
Speaker: Because I understand that although the imperial production facilities were producing very sophisticated objects in glass in the period we're discussing, they weren't producing flat sheets of glass.
Speaker: So when we look at reverse paintings on mirror, we're not looking at an object that wholly originated in the east and traveled west.
Speaker: I think the lines of flight are yet more complicated, correct?
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And it really is incredible to think that these plates of glass were sent from Europe to China.
Speaker: Because as you say, although the Chinese, there was an imperial glass factory actually in Beijing, making absolutely gorgeous glass.
Speaker: small glass vessels, very sophisticated carving techniques, all kinds of beautiful things.
Speaker: It didn't have the technology yet to make big, flat sheets of glass.
Speaker: And they were a little bit awed by this.
Speaker: In the same way we all learned in grammar school how in the colonies in America, you had to get your glass from England, and that's why you didn't have many windows in your house because it was so expensive.
Speaker: So this was a super high-end luxury good.
Speaker: And these plates of glass were sent out
Speaker: painted on the back so that the scene, you can make this incredibly detailed scene by painting the glass itself in the front where you view the image is smooth.
Speaker: And we have, as you said, we have two in particular, two or three really spectacular ones in this sale.
Speaker: It's a magical visual effect.
Speaker: They're just gorgeous.
Speaker: And then the Chinese sense of composition.
Speaker: They knew that their Western consumers wanted these very idyllic scenes of Chinese life, which of course were completely exotic to the Europeans who were the ultimate consumers of these things.
Speaker: So in the case of the picture you're mentioning, it's a Chinese music party taking place in a garden with a beautiful red lattice fence under the trees, and you have
Speaker: beautiful Chinese ladies in elegant costumes sitting at a table, one's playing food, I think, and gentlemen across the lawn are playing other instruments.
Speaker: It's a beautiful spring afternoon, and everybody's happy, and life is perfect.
Speaker: Before photography and before...
Speaker: any kind of transmitted imagery, of course.
Speaker: This was the way Europeans learned about what they thought life in China was.
Speaker: And maybe it was for the very, very weeks in China.
Speaker: So are you suggesting this is a different kind of picture than the Chinese would have produced for their own domestic use?
Speaker: They really didn't have
Speaker: big reverse paintings on glass like this.
Speaker: It wasn't a thing for them at this time.
Speaker: They were only producing it for European devices.
Speaker: Much more, the Chinese painting tradition, as we all know, is much more about the hanging scroll.
Speaker: Really fine.
Speaker: Europeans actually, again, introduced oil painting and perspective and some European...
Speaker: techniques that eventually influenced Chinese painting, but the Chinese painting tradition is very old and very strong, and that really is an ink painting tradition on paper.
Speaker: I'd like to just pivot from that music party to another one that's represented in the sale.
Speaker: And I'm thinking of one in particular represented on a blue and white musician's dish.
Speaker: And what's fascinating about this scene is that it does not represent Chinese imperial life.
Speaker: It represents a French courtly scene.
Speaker: And I think it speaks to what many of us associate with export ware, which is the sort of Eastern view of the West projected back to the consumer.
Speaker: So could you tell us a little bit about that relationship?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: It's such a fun example because it's a really early one with all kinds of mix of East and West.
Speaker: The scene in the center of this big dish, which is about 13 inches in diameter,
Speaker: So it's a nice sized serving dish.
Speaker: Is again a music party, but three Europeans in costume of the late 17th century French court.
Speaker: So the lady seated at the table has this incredibly high headdress with sort of ringlets coming down from it.
Speaker: The two gentlemen have the curly sort of wigs that were undoubtedly powdered white.
Speaker: One's playing the flute and one's strumming some kind of stringed instrument.
Speaker: Their faces do look, I think, a little Chinese.
Speaker: That they do.
Speaker: This would have been copied from a print, and we actually know the print was Nicolas Bonnard.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It was titled something like Music and Love.
Speaker: It has a wonderful French inscription on it, the original print, which would have been taken again to China to be copied.
Speaker: And sometimes you can see, like you can see in the ladies' skirts,
Speaker: and a little bit of the men's costumes, that the Chinese artist has copied the hatch marks from the print, not really knowing that that was just the engraver's way of transmitting light and shadow, and they're copying that, thinking that's important to the design.
Speaker: That's fascinating.
Speaker: Isn't it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you have, as you say, it's kind of a reverse.
Speaker: You have here a Chinese artist drawing a European music party, but also, if you'll notice, the rim of this dish
Speaker: has a petal-shaped panel.
Speaker: It's a flower, and the scene's the center of the flower.
Speaker: And each petal has a fabulous Chinese landscape vignette in it, almost like one of those great Chinese ink paintings.
Speaker: Yes, these landscapes look much less like the sort of typified Western garden scene than the one we see on the reverse painting.
Speaker: They're not at all.
Speaker: They're completely Chinese.
Speaker: And this dish was made around 1700, which is
Speaker: very early for specifically dictated Western design on Chinese porcelain.
Speaker: There are very few examples before this time period when the designs were actually commissioned.
Speaker: The first armorial, there are few isolated pieces in earlier centuries, but the first armorials in any quantity are made in the very early 1700s.
Speaker: There's
Speaker: There are a couple of royals who had coats of arms on Chinese porcelains in earlier centuries.
Speaker: But it doesn't begin at all in any quantity until this time period.
Speaker: So with these early pieces, you do see a really fun mix of Chinese and Western.
Speaker: By the end of the 18th century, it looks entirely European.
Speaker: Across the country, you wouldn't know if it was made by Spode, Wedgwood, or in China.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: It says so much about what the consumers of this material valued, that they went to so much trouble and expense to attain these images of gaiety, frivolity, maybe decadence.
Speaker: And to think about this kind of imagery, in contrast to what we see in the work of Trailer, is rather striking to me.
Speaker: I mean, these are both...
Speaker: categories of objects that have been collected in America in very particular ways that relate to the American sensibility at different points in our history.
Speaker: And this one in particular has a really auspicious American collecting story, because as you can see in our photo, it was owned by James A. Garland, who was a
Speaker: big New York banker and one of the founders, the original patrons of the Metropolitan Museum, which of course was founded in the 1870s, moved to Fifth Avenue in the 1880s, I think it was.
Speaker: His collection of Chinese porcelain was a huge part of the early Met.
Speaker: He died, I think it was 1902,
Speaker: And Matt had assumed that we hear this story today.
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: But he had changed his will and his estate.
Speaker: He went to his estate and said, so his children sold it in its entirety to the famous dealer Duveen, who then turned around and sold it almost immediately to J.P.
Speaker: Morgan.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So this dish and many other Chinese porcelains that pass through our hands over time belong to Garland and Morgan and has each of their collector labels on the back.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: It's really very cool, I think.
Speaker: become part of the dishes history.
Speaker: So now that you're bringing in the dirty commercial side, let's get down to brass tacks.
Speaker: So we've talked about, I believe, five individual objects coming up in these two sales, which as listeners are hearing this are just around the corner.
Speaker: The Chinese export sale is on the 23rd, I believe.
Speaker: And the
Speaker: Outside art is the 17th.
Speaker: 17th.
Speaker: Yeah, just around the bend.
Speaker: So get your bids in.
Speaker: What are the estimates on these five pieces?
Speaker: Cara, do you want to start with the trailer?
Speaker: The trailer is in at $200,000 to $400,000.
Speaker: And the Edmondson is at $250,000 to $500,000.
Speaker: And how is the Chinese ice porcelain?
Speaker: Well, that makes the porcelain look just like a big... The soldier bosses, which are really quite a special thing in Chinese porcelain, are 100,000 to 150,000.
Speaker: And the blue and white musician's dish is 8,000 to 12,000.
Speaker: Expected range.
Speaker: Are you listening, Ben?
Speaker: Remember my birthday coming up?
Speaker: We haven't forgotten.
Speaker: Could be yours.
Speaker: It actually may have to be.
Speaker: I also have my eye on the Clementine Hunter pictures in your sale.
Speaker: I'm admitting.
Speaker: Great favorite.
Speaker: Aside from Michael, who do you think is going to be bidding on these pieces?
Speaker: I'm not asking for names.
Speaker: What's the profile, for example, what's the profile, would you say, of a trailer collector?
Speaker: Well, the trailer and the Edinson collectors are much more difficult to pinpoint than they used to be, which is a wonderful thing.
Speaker: The people who are interested in collecting these artists now come from many different collecting areas.
Speaker: Used to be that these works were very much aligned with folk art collecting, the Americana collector.
Speaker: Now we're seeing, as there's been this increasing interest in black artists, in African American art, specifically within the modern and contemporary collecting spheres, we're seeing a lot more collectors coming out of those areas.
Speaker: Additionally, as I was saying before,
Speaker: A lot of these works were originally brought to the market by artists or people with artistic sensibilities and often artists or people with artistic sensibilities are collecting them now.
Speaker: So it's interesting that this is an arena in which many current contemporary artists are interested in collecting.
Speaker: So, yeah, if we cast back to the 80s and 90s, we could imagine, I think, the trailers in Jerry Lauren's apartment next to exquisite examples of, quote, American folk art, right?
Speaker: Weather vanes.
Speaker: And that still exists, literally, around the corner.
Speaker: But I think it's interesting to consider that a trailer will likely be hung next to, you know, an Amy Sherald portrait in 2019.
Speaker: Well, if you think about, for example, the reinstallations of some of these big museums, you think about the MoMA, you think about the Whitney, you think about what's happening at the Art Institute in Chicago or the Philadelphia Museum of Art, you're seeing artists like Traylor and artists like Edmondson being...
Speaker: come in many different combinations with many different types of artists, whether it's with other self-taught artists or whether it's with, you know, completely different contemporary artists who have a visual connection or are, you know,
Speaker: coming from a similar landscape or part of the country or period of time, we're seeing that they are making many more cross connections than ever before and it's just going to continue.
Speaker: Let me put the same question to you, Becky.
Speaker: Who's buying Chinese export porcelain?
Speaker: One of the fun things about Chinese export is you find it all over the world, really, wherever there's been wealth.
Speaker: Chinese porcelain, when you think about it, was part of French furniture interior.
Speaker: It was part of English furniture.
Speaker: It was found in Philadelphia in the 18th century, in Charleston, in Latin America, in Mexico City, and so forth, where the great manila galleon trade passed through in the era of the Spanish possession.
Speaker: So that has remained steady.
Speaker: There are international collectors of Chinese, that's called Europeans, South Americans, Latin Americans, a lot of Americans.
Speaker: Within that, there are individual sort of preferences.
Speaker: There's a lot of nationalistic collecting.
Speaker: There are certain things we can say, well, perhaps the arms of Louis XIV, the Frenchman, is likely going to be very interested, or it was made for Thomas Jefferson, or we have a plate in here made for Ulysses Grant.
Speaker: See, an American is 90% going to buy that.
Speaker: That being said, I have a lot of Chinese collectors today.
Speaker: Chinese clients have become more and more interested, as they are interested in the art of all the world, and interested in the same way we are.
Speaker: Interested in cultural exchange, interested in what it says about what they were producing and how coveted it was all around the world.
Speaker: And they are buying across the board European subject, religious porcelain, armorial porcelain, the same exact way my Western collectors are buying, wanting to fill out the grapes, reading the books and wanting to have examples of some of the things with the particularly fun and quirky stories or particularly visually beautiful.
Speaker: So it's a really interesting and eclectic group for which I'm grateful.
Speaker: If you specialize in Dutch silver or...
Speaker: I can't think of many other examples.
Speaker: You're really talking to an entirely focused group.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: But for Chinese export, it's a broadly based community, and that makes it a lot of fun.
Speaker: And the community of collectors in China is rapidly growing, incredibly sophisticated.
Speaker: And I keep meeting collectors who just have...
Speaker: really visionary ideas about what they want to achieve in their collections.
Speaker: I think that, you know, the vanguard of collecting is actually in China right now.
Speaker: So to participate in that is exciting.
Speaker: And it kind of speaks to what you and I always say about Americana Week, which is that it's truly global in scope if we look at it through the more creative and, I think, interesting lens that we've been using today.
Speaker: Just by dint of American imperialism.
Speaker: Precisely.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Well, we wish you the best of luck with the sales.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: And thank you very much for taking us on a tour.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: It's been fun.
Speaker: You have to come in.
Speaker: Put it on a bed.
Speaker: You never know.
Speaker: You know.
Speaker: You've tempted us.
Speaker: That dish could be yours.
Speaker: No, I'm not.
Speaker: I'm looking at it with, you know, greedy eyes.
Speaker: I want to be in that music party.
Speaker: Thanks again.
Speaker: Well, Kara Zimmerman and Becky McGuire, thanks so much for being with us.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: you
Speaker: That's it for today.
Speaker: Thank you so much to Becky McGuire and Kara Zimmerman and to Christie's for hosting us.
Speaker: If you're interested in bidding or just checking out the rest of the lots in those two sales, they are on Friday, January 17th for the Outsider Art sale and Thursday, January 23rd for the Chinese Export sale.
Speaker: Check them out.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: My co-host is Michael Diaz-Griffith and I'm your host, Ben Miller.
