Regional auction houses rival big-city sales
By Taryn Plumb / Globe Correspondent
August 16, 2012
A
river tinted with the pinks and yellows of sunset, portrayed in an
oil-on-canvas by Martin Johnson Heade: $1 million.
A
rustic, milky portrait of a woman in white by Korean artist Park Soo
Keun:$460,000.
A clock that once marked the time for
the John Quincy Adams family: $80,000.
An ornate, intricately-carved Chinese
rosewood marble-top table: $46,000.
All these pieces — from American
rustic, to furniture fit for a manor, to museum-worthy canvases —
were vetted, fought over, and ultimately sold at auction. But not in
some stereotypically stuffy, exclusive gallery with a formal dress
code: These were sold from an unassuming storefront in downtown
Amesbury.
“A lot of regional auction houses
have proved that they don’t have to be in New York City,” said
longtime auctioneer John McInnis, who sold these varied items through
his self-named auction house, housed in what once was a grocery store
and sandwiched between boutiques, jewelers, and salons on Amesbury’s
Main Street. “We can do just as good a job.”
Enabled by the Internet, auction houses
tucked away in the suburbs have become premiere destinations for
international fine art, antiques, and other sundry collectibles —
whether crafted five or 500 years ago — allowing those businesses
to rival their big-city counterparts.
“You don’t have to bring [an item]
to Sotheby’s and Christie’s anymore,” said Diane Riva,
marketing director at Beverly-based Kaminski Auctions. The market has
shifted so that “even a small house can have a wonderful piece and
reach a broader market.”
From Amesbury, McInnis sells items from
all over the world and from various epochs: Ford Model A’s, grand
pianos, paintings picked up for a few bucks at Goodwill, some of
which have snagged upwards of $100,000.
An Asian-themed auction in March
brought in just shy of $1 million, and attracted more than 900
in-person, telephone, and Internet bidders from all over the world.
The Park Soo Keun painting, meanwhile, spurred several prospective
buyers to fly in from Korea. And a two-day auction in July of an
expansive antique doll collection drew roughly 10,000 page views to
McInnis’s online catalog, with Internet bidders hailing from more
than 15 countries.
The auction house recently secured the
estate of David Powers, special assistant to John F. Kennedy and
curator of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in
Boston, and also has items such as signed Andy Warhol originals, rare
Persian fabric, and a Japanese flag captured on Okinawa during World
War II that will soon hit the block.
As McInnis noted, New York (or any
other metropolis, for that matter) is “not necessarily where the
market is.”
It’s wherever the coveted item
happens to be.
“It’s the stuff that’s the
attraction,” he said. “If you got the right item, they’ll
come.”
Well, at least virtually.
Tonya A. Cameronof Wakefield-based TAC
Auctions Inc. said that as Internet bidding grows, fewer buyers are
actually present at the auctions.
“We used to have more live bodies in
the house,” said Cameron, who specializes in estates, antiques, and
decorative arts. “In five years, you’re going to see that a lot
of auctions will be really ghostly. We won’t have very many
in-house buyers.”
Still, McInnis said, wherever the
buyers are, the basic principle remains: “old-fashioned competitive
bidding.”
That is precisely what prospective
buyers were preparing for as they silently and methodically analyzed
and catalogued items at a preview of McInnis’s mid-July doll
auction.
Boasting roughly 4,000 dolls (along
with a plethora of pint-sized accessories, clothes, and furniture),
it was the lifetime collection of the late Texan Kathy L. Hipp, and
was worth between $200,000 and $500,000, McInnis estimated. (One of
its rarer pieces, a Lucille Ball bride doll dating to 1955 and
designed by the famed Madame Alexander, ended up selling for just
over $10,000).
In the Amesbury gallery — with “Hello
Dolly!” fittingly piped in from overhead speakers — cloth,
plastic, and porcelain figures were arranged on stands, behind cases,
on tables, or beside their protective boxes, tags dangling from tiny
wrists. There were Barbies and Kens, Kewpies and Alexanders. There
were dolls that were seated, standing, empty-eyed, stiff-armed, and
dressed in tutus, wedding dresses, and Snow White outfits.
Sandals, patent leather shoes, ice
skates, ballerina slippers, and moccasins fit for tiny feet were laid
out neatly in pairs on one table; various hats for different sized
heads were on another.
“It’s amazing to see the history,
the progression as you go,” Gretchen Moos of Ludlow marveled as she
browsed. Dolls offer their own history lesson, she said, and
ultimately “tell a story.”
A collector for more than 20 years, she
said her particular favorites are the Alexander dolls — especially
the rare cloth variety — named for their creator Madame Beatrice
Alexander Behrman, who founded her self-named enterprise in 1923 and
died in 1990 at 95, according to the company’s website.
Moos is a member of the Madame
Alexander Doll Club, has toured the Alexander Doll Co.’s New York
studio and factory, and regularly attends conventions and doll
unveilings.
“She was a beautiful lady, a tough
businesswoman,” Moos said as she admired Alexander’s various
dolls on display. “She did it really well.”
Nearby, Judith Armitstead of Lynnfield
was examining porcelain “piano babies.”
“Porcelain does something to me,”
she said as she delicately picked up a 5½-inch-tall infant with a
cowlick and an adorable scowl. “Look at that face. They really are
art.”
A longtime dealer and researcher who
has written numerous articles, Armitstead sells through her website,
www.thedollworks.net, and frequents auctions up and down the East
Coast.
She’s a collector, too, of course,
with hundreds of her own.
“The house is full,” she said.
“It’s fascinating,” she said of
doll-collecting. “It’s an interesting and diverse hobby and
business.”
High-priced auction items
August 16, 2012
$510,000
Early 20th century Chinese paintings signed by Qi Bashi (Kaminski Auctions, Beverly)
$460,000
Park Soo Keun, Korean, (1914-1965) “A Seated Woman” painting (John McInnis Auctioneers)
$300,000
Pair of Famille Verte Bowls, China, 19th- early 20th century. (Kaminski Auctions)
© Copyright 2012 Globe Newspaper
Company.
No comments:
Post a Comment