We travel through centuries of New York City history, swept away by furious waves of N.C. Wyeth’s The Coming of the Mayflower in 1620, a lush oil on canvas mural stretching more than 13-feet wide and nearly 9-feet tall.
In 1940, N.C. Wyeth was commissioned by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to paint a series of 19 murals for its New York Headquarters at One Madison Avenue. They were installed in the employee lounge and escalator landings of the company’s headquarters at One Madison Avenue. Wyeth died at age 62 in 1945, when an oncoming train hit his car at a railroad crossing in Chadds Ford, a township in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, before this tour de force could be completed. His son, Andrew, and his son-in-law, John McCoy, both students of the artist, upheld his legacy, working from sketches to complete the five remaining panels.
Works installed in the Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts booth at the ninth edition of TEFAF New York at the Park Avenue Armory was a celebration of the city’s robust cultural heritage and commitment to public art. Celebrities,including Scarlett Johansson, Colin Jost, Stanley Tucci, Anderson Cooper, John Krasinski, and Emily Blunt, joined museum decision makers from more than 90 international institutions at the bustling VIP Preview, benefiting Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, on May 11. The New York edition of TEFAF (The European Fine Art Foundation, which extends the reach of TEFAF-Maastricht, Europe’s preeminent global art fair, features unrivaled examples of world-leading masterpieces and museum-quality art across genres and geographies. The fair closed yesterday.
The VIP Preview was so triumphant that one dealer told Bart Drenth, global managing director of TEFAF, they expected to sell out their booth.
As some in the art world continue to embrace digital and virtual experiences over the original truly immersive experience of interacting with physical artworks, Drenth underscored the importance of TEFAF’s dynamic, in-person experience. Engaging with a wide range of artworks created by diverse artists is the most effective way to promote culture and humanity through the cultivation of empathy.
“We love art that you can touch, that you can see, that you can hang on the wall. That’s what we’re about,” Drenth told me at the VIP Preview.
Balcony view of TEFAF New York 2023
William Jess Laird
Passersby were drawn into the Bernard Goldberg Fine Art booth by the two lush oval murals by German-born artist Winold Reiss painted in 1938 for a Longchamps restaurant in the Empire State Building, which is now a Starbucks. Gallery Director Ken Sims discovered the works on 1stDibs, a leading marketplace for extraordinary design, listed as unattributed “Art Deco murals,” Sims told me at the preview. The whereabouts of six other murals from the series remains unknown. The two Reiss murals at the fair sold, and no further details were available.
Since indoor cigarette smoking was ubiquitous at the time, the murals were covered with residue, and appeared a “little dull and yellow,” said Sims,”and that actually preserved them.”
There were no titles, signatures, or any other markings on the backs of the works, said Sims, aside from stickers indicating they had been handled by Sotheby’s at some point. The murals had been stored in their original frames in upstate New York and were delivered to the gallery in a pickup truck, Sims said.
Wyeth’s The Coming of the Mayflower in 1620 and Puritan Cod Fishers (1947) overtake the side walls of the booth, enrobing us in a bygone New York.
Our journey continues as we take a figurative ride on the B/D/F or N/Q subway trains to Coney Island via the Richard Nagy booth, where we encounter Walton Ford’s Lost Colossus (2015), a monumental watercolor spanning nearly 5-feet wide and nearly 3½-feet tall. The London-based dealer specializing in Modern Art acquired the work from a private collector, who obtained it from the Larchmont, New York-born artist’s studio.
We explore the late 19th century history of the legendy amusement park in the peninsular neighborhood of southwestern Brooklyn through Ford’s singular investigation of how nature and human-made structures shape our reality and imagination.
Ford overlays natural history superrealism onto the scene of the defunct Elephant Hotel (also known as the Elephantine Colossus), a novelty seven-story (122 foot- tall) structure designed by Irish-American inventor James V. Lafferty, which greeted visitors to Surf Avenue and West 12th Street in Luna Park from 1885 until it was destroyed in a fire on September 27, 1896.
The tourist attraction included a gallery, a grand hall, and a museum located in the elephant’s left lung. Telescopes implanted in the elephant’s eyes served as an observatory for visitors. Before the blaze, the hotel brazenly boasted a brief but fiery history, serving for a short time as a brothel.
We’re enraptured by Kehinde Wiley’s The Fiery Ascent of the Prophet Elijah (2014), a portrait of a man named Chris Norvell, with an exaggerated, flexed bicep, depicted in a Gothic altarpiece, which guides us into the Sean Kelly Gallery booth. The New York gallery dazzled at their TEFAF-Maastricht debut in March, showcasing Wiley’s Portrait of Jorge Gitoo Wright (2022). The secular icon on view in New York amplifies Wiley’s efforts as a gay Black man to reimagine Black bodies as devotional Renaissance figures, subverting art history and perceptions of race and sexuality. Though he was born in Los Angeles, Wiley lives and works in Brooklyn, as one of the world-leading artists from the city where he finds many of his sitters, exemplifying the myriad street styles of New York.
Hailing from the collection of Pamela K. and William (Bill) Royall, the 22 karat gold leaf and oil on wood panel had been on loan to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
“Unfortunately, one of the owners passed away and it’s come back to the market, and it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing to have it here.” Kelly told me during the VIP preview.
