Antique Show

To his evident embarrassment, a young negro in a white bag wig a trifle too large for him and black satin knee breeches a trifle too small stood on the main staircase of the Grand Central Palace, Manhattan, last week, while 2,000 people snatched programs from his hand and pushed past him into the official opening of .the Second International Antiques Exposition. A well- mannered, dressy crowd, visiting the antique show seemed as definitely a part of the socialite calendar as the horse show, the opera, the flower show, or Newport's tennis week. Restrained in their comments, visitors wandered from booth to booth smiling pleasantly at dealers, murmuring: "Nice bit of spode," "I question that settle," "Lovely chair, but the patina is gone." Enthusiasms were reserved for explosively greeting their friends. Inside the dealers' booths, elegant young gentlemen, patrician young ladies, looked languidly down their noses.

Pundit, patron, promoter of the New York Antique show is white-haired, amiable George W. Harper, Wesleyan graduate, onetime corporation lawyer and Belmont Estate attorney, rabid antiquarian. Four years ago Mr. Harper had a nervous breakdown, was ordered by his doctors to give up his business, travel, find and ride a hobby. He already had a hobby: antique furniture. With his wife he went to London hunting Hepplewhites. He arrived just as a great antique exhibition, organized by the London Daily Telegraph, opened at the Crystal Palace. Never before had Mr. Harper seen so many works of art assembled, all for sale. To a man whose business career had been continually occupied with reorganizations and mergers, the appeal of such a show was instantaneous. As attorney for the late August Belmont shortly after the War, Mr. Harper had operated four marine expositions, designed to arouse U. S. enthusiasm for the languishing U. S. merchant marine. He returned from the Crystal Palace to his hotel, started writing to dealers.

The first Harper-organized antique exhibit opened in the Hotel Commodore a year ago, was highly successful. Enormously expanded, last week's show covered the entire main floor and balcony of Grand Central Palace, contained the exhibits of approximately 200 dealers and collectors willing to pay an average of $500 apiece ($2.50 per sq. ft.) to show their wares, which ranged from entire paneled rooms to little booths of paper weights and candlesticks.

Antique dealers had good cause to cooperate and boost business in last week's show. A genuine work of art of any period has always a certain definite value. A work of art that is also in fashion has an additional value many times greater. Apart from the general lassitude which has gripped all luxury trades since the stock-market break, for the past year Fashion has deserted the antiquaries.

In the past 40 years furniture fashions among the ultra smart have changed many times. In the '903 when Architect Richard Morris Hunt was building chateaux for Vanderbilts (TIME, March 3), socialites bought gilded, carved furniture of the 1 7th and 18th Century French cabinet- makers. Later came an Italian-Spanish period, largely inspired by Boston's Mrs. Jack Gardner. The War, and the temporary end of importations, brought a wave of Colonial and Early American 'furniture. Later when the price of good American pieces had mounted sky high and the chance of picking up bargains had vanished, canny dealers supplemented their stocks with the fruitwood provincial furniture of southern France and Italy of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, furniture which fits easily, blends magnificently in Early American rooms. Suddenly, following the Paris decorative arts exhibition of 1925, U.S. fashionables deserted the antique field altogether, began like their 17th and 18th Century ancestors to purchase Modern furniture, built to their particular needs, representing to the best of its designers' abilities, life as it is led today.

It was an impressive defense that the antiquarians presented last week. Even more impressive were the prices they expected to get. On view was an emerald-diamond-&-ruby-studded scimitar of the late, vicious Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Some 150 years old, intricately engraved, it was ready to enter some tycoon's home for $5,000. The price asked for a silver and gold punchbowl or schwabenkessel, once the property of Wilhelm of Hohenzollern, was $100,000, while $45,000 could purchase six Chippendale arm chairs and a settee with splendid tapestry upholstery. The four walls of a Tudor oak-paneled room were on sale for $14,000. Also on view were six drawing-room chairs, once the property of Charles Dickens; a riding crop of President Martin Van Buren with a dagger in its handle; a painted fan, presumably the property of the elegant Austrian Marie Antoinette, and a copy of that supreme picture book, William Morris's Kelmscott Chaucer. Unusual for an antique show was a booth rented by the National Radio Museum, which considered radio sufficiently venerable to present for antiquarian inspection several primitive receiving sets and the first superheterodyne sold for broadcasting.

Possibly busier last week than he had been at any time during his law practice, promoter George W. Harper took time off to tell reporters that for next year's antique show he has reserved three whole floors of the Grand Central Palace, that many a dealer has already reserved space at new rates of $3 the square foot for first-floor booths, $2.50 for those upstairs.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.