Adventures in American Bookshops, Antique Stores and Auction Rooms. Guido Bruno
who perhaps lives somewhere in the Bronx, in a little flat and wonders how she could get the monstrous divan into her tiny living room. “Let me advise you to take it,” Hartmann continues. “You will never have another chance at such a magnificent piece of furniture. If I wouldn’t have bought one last week I surely would keep it for myself.” Or, he would lift up some old Steins: “I take any bid for these things,” and he would give his audience to understand how hard he is hit by prohibition. He knows the dealers among his audience.
“All right, if you don’t want to bid any more I will knock it down to one of the dealers who will take it to his shop and sell it to you at an exorbitant profit,” is his remark when he cannot get the people interested in some object or another. Every dealer has a nickname with him. There is a second-hand furniture man from Baxter Street, whom he calls “General Darrow,” much to the delight of the old gentleman who does not look like a general at all. Then there is another one, a very studious looking man, whom he calls “Doctor.” Everybody in the audience really thinks the purchaser is a doctor and a collector of valuables. He is a jovial man who makes you feel at home. A sort of old-fashioned cabaret performance. Everybody seems to take part in the show.
If you would like to see a “dandy,” who feels one with the best of his listeners, whom he wishes to make out society people of the highest order, listen to Mr. Clark on Forty-fifth Street, near Fifth Avenue. His is a society play with an everlasting ripple of shallow laughter on the surface. The auctioneer speaks with a broad English accent, makes little bows every once in a while, and his right hand reaches instinctively for an invisible monocle. I always wonder if he really wears one. And he sells things. Every one has his own methods. But he is a sort of “bon vivant” on the stage of New York auctions.
Would you like to see an old-time Broadway comedy and an actor with a manner that was in style forty years ago? Would you like to listen to well-set flowery speeches? Get acquainted with Mr. Silo and his auction rooms on Vanderbilt Avenue, near Forty-sixth Street. He wears a cut-away and a goatee. He has the distinction of having auctioned off during the past forty years a greater part of the contents of many Knickerbocker Mansions. He seems to love each and every article that comes before his auction table. Everything is “exquisite, beautiful, grandiose, magnificent, stately.” He looks in the ecstasies of an overjoyed connoisseur at his paintings and drawings. He interjects once in a while his sorrow that Mr. Astor is not alive any more, who would have appreciated at once this or that painting. After such exclamations, he looks with sad contempt over his audience, shakes his head as though he wanted to say: “You poor simps, you do not appreciate real art.” He constantly urges: “Don’t buy this, don’t buy it, please don’t buy it. You will do me a favor if you do not buy it, because next week such and such a millionaire collector from California will be in town and he will pay me a far greater price than you intend to offer.”
To emphasize his sincerity at least once during each sale, he would get up from his seat, stand erect with the solemnity of a preacher and declare: “If you are sorry to have purchased this article, please return it to me. I am forty years in the auction business; my word is as good as a bond and I will return the money.” And he makes good; at least he made good to me. In the folly of the minute I bought something that I had no earthly use for. I told him so and a couple of days later he refunded my purchasing price.
What wonderful tales could the hundreds, often thousands, of gowns, wraps, dresses, suits, slippers, stockings, lingerie, furs, hats, gloves and many other intimate garments of pretty women tell, if they had voices to speak while they hang in long rows in Mr. Flatau’s auction rooms on University Place.
Twice a week he conducts an auction of ladies’ wearing apparel. Do not think that poor people go there to buy cheap, second-hand dresses; that they slip in shyly, shame-facedly, make their purchase and disappear into their own somewhere in New York. Ladies with limousines waiting outside bargain for and buy evening gowns, while shop-girls purchase impossible dresses. Here you can learn in one hour more about the tastes of America’s broad masses than in all the museums, art institutions, shops and exhibitions over town. The grotesque seems to hit old and young, beautiful and ugly, slender and fat. The color schemes scream to the heavens. If an invisible power would grant me the fulfillment of one wish I would ask the good fairy who would make me the offer: “Please let all these women that were in Flatau’s auction rooms last Friday wear the clothes they bought there and assemble them for me in the ballroom of the Vanderbilt Hotel.” It would be an unforgettable sight.
And because you were in Flatau’s, drop into Koliski’s, across the street.
The East Sider is very strongly represented in his back rooms, while in the front, the art dealers and peripatetic gentlemen dealers bargain for everything under the sun that you can imagine. Marble lions that stood in front of a library in East Oshkosh are sold with the same nonchalance as the slippers that are supposed to have been worn by Martha Washington during a reception given to Lafayette. Stately furniture from gambling dens is offered immediately after a series of undertaker’s outfits had been sold.
Koliski’s is a great exchange of all antique dealers in New York, as well as second-hand dealers. Here the bids go up a quarter at a time. Human emotions are voiced unrestricted by polite considerations. Here is the atmosphere of an old-fashioned arena.
1917
The Strange Discovery and Disappearance of Stuart’s Washington
ANTIQUE shops are isles of romance and mystery in the commonplace everyday life of New York, but if you wish to enter into the real thrill of adventure, you must forget the fashionable shop, where antiques have found a temporary resting place and you must not talk to the shop-keeper. Antique shops along Fifth Avenue and the main streets are conducted as up-to-date business places, and up-to-date business has a romance of its own, a twentieth century romance that has little to do with the individual and less with sacred time-honored traditions that touch the heart. Most antique dealers kill the charm their curios and works of art awaken in us.
They know the prices of the beautiful and ugly things on sale in their shops, but they don’t know their value. Antique dealers are painful whenever they try to impress you with their knowledge of art or of association or history, or when they simply play on the vanity of prospective customers, telling in whose possession the priceless object has been, quoting prices like stock brokers.
Whenever I spend some time in an antique shop I think of George Bernard Shaw’s essay: “On Going to Church”: “What wonderful and ideal places would churches be if there were no priests and no services to disturb the sublime quiet and the elevating beauty of the edifices.” What charming places for dreams and revery would antique shops be if there were no antique dealers and no ambitious millionaires, who wish to show their appreciation of art by paying exorbitant prices for art objects.
“Then the museum is an ideal place,” I hear you say. No, it isn’t. The museum is a mausoleum of art. The art objects there seem to me buried forever in costly catacombs with beautiful monuments and tombstones, but buried away from our world, separated from life forever; yet the beautiful things done by past generations should be a part of our own throbbing life.
The great antique dealers are not the high-priests of the beautiful in New York. Suave and well-meaning gentlemen; their words come not from their hearts and their love is tied to the price of their wares and not to their merit. Some of these gentlemen have sold shoes, shirts, furniture and cash registers before they went into the “antique business.” Works of art are mere merchandise to them. Money-changers they are in the temple, but the temple is theirs, too; no one ever can chase them out.
“Names” are their gods. Authenticity their dogma. The art of persuasion their greatest asset. To find big names (names that bring high auction prices) is their constant desire and to sell these names to the highest bidder at fabulous prices is their daily dream.
What do I care who painted a portrait? Perhaps it is a priceless Velasquez or Rubens or Botticelli or by some unknown artist