Snake Auction Observer 021 | new SNAKE shirts and hat for sale now (three designs)
Auctions feature: Noguchi, Aulenti, Pergay, Deco, Borsani
SNAKE IS BACK — Snake Auction Observer: good furniture, undervalued, or eternal, all selected off LiveAuctioneers.com, with an emphasis this week on Deco, tables, Italian and French design auctions near and around NYC and Chicago.
First, some housekeeping:
With my BOOK SHEER DRIFT: The Snake America Newsletters (1-100) is out and available for order through Shining Life, I made shirts and a hat to celebrate and to help defray the author costs of publishing.
Leftovers from the NYABF are up on my shop—many sizes available—consider buying one or two to support independent journalism: snakeusa.bigcartel.com
The items:
A closer look at what’s on snakeusa.bigcartel.com:
A two-sided tee commemorates my book:
With the back print featured above. The breast print is New York state in a target. The graphic is a tribute to an old convention shirt I picked up somewhere.
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A Greek statue shirt commemorates 100 newsletters:
Featuring a graphic from an Era 1 newsletter and font/design done in the manner of the Sally Klein dog shirts (you’ve seen them…) which are an important piece of vintage design. Both shirts printed on heavy 6 oz. cotton, professionally screened, etc.
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3. This baseball hat commemorates Snake America fandom, and its relationship to R&M Corp., a solutions company.
Thank you Matt Bellosi for help with the graphics and for the hat graphics, and to R&M Corp. Thanks to anyone who got a shirt or hat on snakeusa.bigcartel.com.
snakeusa.bigcartel.com | snakeusa.bigcartel.com | snakeusa.bigcartel.com
Auctions:
Mahogany/rosewood pedestals, Philly: Fairly beauty display pedestals, nominally Art Deco (30s), which checks out. Round corners, shiny rich people wood, and imposing angles. This piece is less Deco-y than some of the auction’s other lots, which includes a striking two-door server in brighter wood, a primitive settee, some great burl items, a walnut and leather settee and pair of chairs, and this incredible tabletop:
that’s also meant to hang on a wall, which is new to me. Deco, I’ve been writing here, is a great value design buy, because it’s both produced incredibly well (anything 90 years old that’s lasted until now is a luxury good), and since it’s much louder than the mid-century modern items that were pretty well made and which followed a couple decades later. Most lots in this auction are sans designer. I’m not up enough on AD to distinguish who did what. Many in the several hundo dollars range. No in-house shipping, but Philly’s not far, and there is lots of great portable food there, as well as the Gremlin drink. $800
Noguchi coffee table, Cleveland: Cleveland should have renamed their baseball team the Spiders, and this auction through LiveAuctioneers seems to only be a placeholder, with the real bids going on on the auction house Aspire’s, website, or through them somehow. Decent stuff, though, with an honest price expectation listed there on every item. It may be worth the extra registration, and if not, it’s worth a skim to see what a dozen or so items are worth. This Noguchi table, for one—not my thing, but it has the signature, and is a liquid piece of furniture (you can sell it in a day)—Aspire expects to run $325. Which is around what these things run. Other notable items in the lot include an Arne Jacobsen coffee set (worth $1,000 to me—beautiful), an Eames wire chair with the nice leatherette, a Gehry cross chair, Widdicomb… rocket full of 1950s furniture.
Kusch co. harsh armchairs, New Jersey: I wasn’t sure if I remembered this auction house, but I did, they’re the ones who size items not against Coke cans but employees and sometimes Red Delicious apples. Cursed… I prefer imperial measurement… moving on, I haven’t seen these Kusch chairs before, and the house hasn’t either…. not much information, so I’ll drop it here: Kusch and Co. are a German furniture company who seem now to split attention between furniture similar to this and airport seating. This particular chair, the 8600, is their best known model… designed by Hans Ullrich Bitsch (German guy, taught at UT for a year way back), and is available in many variations, though rarely this one… with the colors it reminds me of an French updating of Gerrit Rietvield’s century-old tough angular works. Silver might be the best bet since it looks like it could place in a Future video. Prices vary on these, but they average $600 a chair; seller has a pointless tall Baughman obelisk, an accurate second-tier 1960s egg chair, a batshit ebonized dining table with a top in the colors of imperial Japan’s Rising Sun flag (the campiest thing I have ever seen) and a palace-sized sarouk rug that I sadly think is machined. $500 for the pair
Osvaldo Borsani chair, NYC: Catalog (the auctioneer) has a curated offering ending this week, more so than the rest of the places in this email, which require digging. Many items—vases, tables, paper—that might belong to someone with good taste. Feels adjacent to what fellow Canadian Geoff Snack offers through Wrong Answer, which is his project. This Borsani p40 chair jumps out in this auction—they don’t often sell stateside, and the design is one of those great early pieces of Italian design, where it’s a little bit more “straight” and nearly industrial, before the class of designers started getting jaunty. Borsani made a few chairs similar to this, and several great tables for Techno—cool name—the bestof of which skirt Wendell Castle. P40s tend to hover around $2,000; House has a Calder-style wire elephant that’s charming, a superstudio table (LA), a Sottsass table, pottery, fine vases, a couple Piretti coat racks, much more. $850
Aulenti Oraccolo floor lamp, Chicago: A very plain (by Aulenti’s standards) lamp, but it’s a floor model, 4.5’ tall, so more a critique on the form, or a pop art thing, or the furniture equivalent of when CIA asset Tom Hanks danced on the big keyboard during Big (the movie). Aulenti designed enough good items to sink a battleship (Stringa sofa, Jumbo table, Pippistrella lamp, Pileino lamp)… she’s a giant. Auction includes high level mid-century items (Eames, Alexander Girard, Nakashima, Prouve), these really sick Jacques Adnet nightstands, Goyard trunks and a Louis, vases, and the same lamp but shorter and for a table. Prices on Oraccolos vary; this one’s at $1,400, which is fair
Maria Pergay chair, Chicago: The Wright auction also does well to source items from Demisch Danant, the premier gallerists/collectors/legends of French furniture from that era and several others. (I lived in France.) Can’t beat the provenance here, though this Pergay chair would be a nice bruiser piece even if Shoe Bomber Richard Reid himself owned it… the other Pergay chair (Ring) sells for a lot more but is less interesting to me. In fact, this one barely has a price history. I don’t know, you can’t beat this thing. $4,500
Luigi Massoni for Poltrona chairs, Larchmont/NY: Beautiful bread and butter lounge chairs here by Massoni (best known for the “Dilly Dally” vanity, a small circular cutie) that straddle the line between post-disco/Polo Bar American elegant furniture styles and the direct round reality of 60s and 70s Italian design. Not much price history here, but who needs it? These are two beautiful and distinct chairs for $900, and for that they are the Snake Locks of the Week, which must be an honor for them. House has much Knoll, rough art, some snuff bottles, rugs, an Omersa rhino and maybe a Baughman chrome bench (which I own, and which I wrote about often in the first 100 letters), with those two singled-out items mislisted and a chance for a Snake subscriber to get a deal or a steal.
Quick hits:
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