Hungarian Silver, Ethiopian Scrolls and Maritime Art - NYTimes.com
Hungarian gilded-silver vessels and jewelry that narrowly escaped World War II looters will go on display on Friday for the first time in seven decades at a Christie’s auction preview in New York.
Christie's
A 17th-century pendant depicting St. George and the Dragon is a Hungarian piece being sold by Christie's.
Blog
ArtsBeat
The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more.Join the discussion.
About 30 pieces, some dating to the 1600s, will be offered on Tuesday, including tankards engraved with cherubs and hunting scenes, and pendants and belts studded with rubies and pearls. Estimates range from $800 for a Transylvanian beaker with compass patterns to $80,000 for a seashell mounted on a silver cup that depicts Jonah’s biblical ordeal with the whale.
The silver was last fully documented in a 1930s inventory of the holdings of the Herzog family, Jewish banking magnates in Budapest. The Herzogs were also renowned for acquiring paintings by El Greco, Cranach the Elder and Renoir, among other artists. Most of the Christie’s silver lots are listed in the art historian Laszlo Mravik’s 1998 book, “ ‘Sacco di Budapest’: Depredation of Hungary, 1938-1949,” about Nazi and Soviet theft.
“The Herzog family’s magnificent collection of goldsmiths’ works has totally disappeared,” Mr. Mravik wrote.
The consignor, who requested anonymity to avoid attention, said in a recent phone interview that a Herzog family member had managed to bring the pieces to New York at some point. The family had long kept them in storage.
The precious metal still has sharply molded foliage and feather motifs. The gilding layer prevents erosion and tarnish, said Jeanne Sloane, head of Christie’s silver department in New York. Silver polish, she said, “is the great enemy of surface crispness.”
HEALTH CARE BY TALISMAN
Shamans in Ethiopia tried for centuries to cure ailments by naming and ranting against the demons at fault on goatskin scrolls. The calligraphy incantations trailed along vellum strips about six feet long, with illustrations of saints stabbing monsters. The owners would roll up and carry around the protective scrolls, which have turned up in archaeological digs wrapped around corpses.
If the spells did appear to have healing effects during the owners’ lifetimes, the vellums sometimes ended up on the market. The original patrons’ names would be scraped away, leaving blanks here and there that suggest censored government documents.
About 15 of the Ethiopian goatskins, priced between $4,000 and $16,000 each and dating to the 1700s, are on view through June 30 at the new gallery of the New York dealer Milos Simovic, Elizabeth Street Fine Arts, in NoLita. The texts, written in red and black, contain multiple spells meant to fend off different demons.
A typical customer, Mr. Simovic said, would ask healers for help with perhaps an earache, infertility and a cruel mother-in-law, all at once. “You come with a set of problems, and they solve it for you,” he said.
EMPTYING THE BILGE
Nonprofit groups devoted to American maritime history but lacking in gallery space have been culling their collections severely in the last year. Following in the footsteps of the India House Club in Lower Manhattan and the Steamship Historical Society of America in East Providence, R.I., the Seamen’s Church Institute in Lower Manhattan has consigned major artifacts at Bonhams.
On May 25 its Midtown Manhattan salesroom will offer about 140 pieces from the institute, mainly ship models and paintings, and tableaus of sailors grappling with rigging during storms. Oddball artifacts have crept in as well, like patterns for erotic and patriotic tattoos (estimated at $1,500 to $2,500 each for sets of about 40) and Joseph Conrad memorabilia ($600 to $800 for a collection, including his worn leather cigarette case).
Models of medieval Chinese, North African and Egyptian sailboats are estimated at a few hundred dollars each, while paintings and lithographs of New York fleets trudging past Hudson River piers, the Brooklyn Bridge towers and the Palisades are expected to bring a few thousand dollars apiece.
The institute, a social services agency for maritime workers founded in 1834, is moving to Port Newark, N.J. (It has sold its Water Street building to the private Blue School, founded by members of the Blue Man Group.) It is taking along its archive and a few three-dimensional objects, including a 1930s bell from the Normandie ocean liner and an 1840s stone baptismal font.
“Basically, the general guideline was, stuff that had the most institutional history, we kept,” said Johnathan Thayer, the institute’s associate archivist. The Newark office will be open to the public, and a Victorian ship figurehead of a medieval knight has been mounted over the stairwell.
THE ART OF IMITATION
Around 1900, fledgling American museums filled galleries with new plaster casts of ancient Mediterranean artifacts as alternatives to the costly and rare real things. But as American philanthropists bankrolled museum acquisition budgets, and European aristocrats and institutions started breaking up established collections, curators in the United States were able to relegate the reproductions to storage.
In the last decade such copies have attracted scholarly attention again. They are now considered valuable evidence of masterly copyists working for charismatic archaeologists, and influenced by the tastes and technologies of their time.
One of the better-known reproduction workshops, in Athens, belonged to a Swiss father and son, both named Emile Gilliéron (pronounced ZHEE-luhr-on). The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought hundreds of the family’s products between 1906 and 1932, and a show that opens there on Tuesday, “Historic Images of the Greek Bronze Age: The Reproductions of E. Gilliéron & Son,” contains about 55 pieces that the artisans carefully or loosely based on ancient originals.
Archaeologists like Arthur Evans and Heinrich Schliemann hired the Gilliérons to restore excavated objects and depict them in book illustrations, and the artisans also cloned the pieces for museums and tourists. The Gilliérons sometimes speculated when they set out to copy or repair objects; they depicted pearl headdresses, papyrus fronds and mythical creatures with glamorous touches of Art Deco.
Evelyn Waugh, upon seeing their works at a Crete museum in the 1920s, lamented their “somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue.”
The Met’s wall texts will also mention persistent rumors that the Gilliérons had a profitable sideline making fakes. The two men may well have been the culprits behind scores of forgeries that entered the market and museums in their day. With all their experience handling the real thing, “they’re good candidates,” said Sean Hemingway, the main curator of the Met show.
