A tale of two cities
Three fairs in London and Paris bring together the best of the world’s art
THIS year’s arrangements for Tribal Art London, previewed here last week, to run from September 6 to 9, and the Paris Parcours des Mondes between September 12 and 17, should make it easier for enthusiasts to visit them both than in the past, when they have overlapped. The Parcours of tribal arts, antiquities and Oriental dealers’ shows around the streets of the Carré Rive Gauche also coincides with this year’s Biennale des Antiquaires in the Grand Palais.
Kapil Jariwala is a peripatetic, but now London-based, dealer in Oceanic, Indian, Tribal and Contemporary art. His show at the Galerie Marie-laure de l’ecotais, 49, rue de Seine is titled ‘Mapping Belief’ and among the exhibits is a 94¼in high—or long—jain pilgrimage map (Fig 1) for devotees visiting the Gujarat city and hill of Palitana. This might well be needed, as there are some 900 temples there, making it the largest temple complex in the world and Jainism’s most sacred place. The map was painted in watercolour on cotton in about 1925.
Another major show is at the Galerie Abla et Alain Lecomte, 4, rue des Beaux-arts. It is drawn from the collection of Batéké fetishes from the Lower Congo region formed during the 1920s by Robert Lehuard, a telephone engineer, and passed down to his son and daughter-in-law.
Among them is a well-rounded 10¼in-high figure with something of the appeal of an African Falstaff (Fig 3). With the collection are photographs of the engineers working in what is now Burkina Faso (Fig 2). The Parcours lives up to its name: a tour of many worlds. Serge Schoffel from Brussels, exhibiting at the Galerie du Crous de Paris in the rue de Beaux-arts, has a defalim parrotfeather headdress (Fig 4) that may be 20th century, but takes us back to the creation myths of the Telefol people in Papua New Guinea’s West Sepik Province. The Telefol are one of the highest castes of the Min peoples and, worn with red facepaint mixed with pig grease and bone or claw ornaments, such a headdress represents, for an initiate, the ideal of young manhood as decreed by Afek, their founding ancestress. In London, the 9th annual LAPADA Fair will return to Berkeley Square, W1, between September 15 and 20, with more than 110 exhibitors and a mixture of art, antiques and contemporary offerings ranging from about £500 to at least £800,000. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Macconnal Mason of Duke Street, St James’s, has a 19¼in by 23¼in portrait by Leonard Harry Wells of Wing Commander, later Air Vicemarshal, James ‘Johnnie’ Johnson (Fig 6) and Cheffins of Cambridge auctioned his 1942 journal for £20,320 at the
beginning of July. Johnson (1915–2001) was the highestscoring Western Allied fighter ace against the Luftwaffe. Later, he fought in Korea and, after retirement, founded the Johnnie Johnson Housing trust.
Wells (1903–1990) painted him in 1946, while he was still serving in Germany, and captured the melancholy of a warrior at a war’s end.
Another notable portrait will be offered by The Parker Gallery, a London-based ‘by appointment’ dealer in Old Master and British paintings. The 171 ∕8in by 21½in canvas turned up at an auction catalogued as by a follower of Sir Joshua Reynold. It has since been established as a selfportrait by Wright of Derby (Fig 7), who gave it to his friend the Rev Thomas Gisborne (1758–1846), a Suffolk squarson and Canon of Durham, who was an amateur artist.
Wright often visited him and they toured the Lake District together. Wright also painted Gisborne and his wife.
Although British diplomatic gifts and other artistic exports to China sometimes provoked derision in the Middle Kingdom’s sophisticated Court, London clockmakers such as James Cox got it right with elaborate automaton timepieces. Howard Walwyn of Kensington Church Street has a similar thing made in about 1795 by Henry Borrell for the Ottoman market, a flamboyant musical clock offering six tunes.
Another profitable market for British cabinetmakers, silversmiths and porcelain manufacturers was Portugal, for which they produced pieces that often blended the traditions of the countries in satisfying hybrid ways.
Mackinnon of Ryder Street, St James’s, has a George I giltwood secretaire cabinet (Fig 5) made by the elder James Moore, a royal cabinetmaker, for export to Portugal during the reign of João V (1706–50).
The exterior is richly decorated with gilt-gesso strapwork and foliage on walnut and the interior is magnificently fitted. The dealer notes that it is ‘arguably one of the finest and most important pieces of English furniture made in the 18th century’ and prices it at £785,000.
Next week Autumn exhibitions and fairs