Episode 7: Louis Bofferding

Episode 7 of Handle with Care is really the show’s pilot. Adam and Laura interviewed Louis Bofferding over a year ago, in his fabulous Manhattan treasure trove. Louis is a dealer in art and design, an art historian, and an inimitable storyteller. He specializes in the lesser-known or forgotten stories of artworks and has a rare ability to set the scene and transport you back to the moment an object was made.

The trio discuss the cornerstone topic of provenance, not from a legal perspective but from a narrative one: how much value do the stories objects carry bring? What is the appeal of a complete provenance, or of a work having none at all? If you like this episode, you will love Louis’ outstanding website, where he details in length the stories of his amazing finds.

Follow our adventures @adamcharlaphyman and @laurakugel_

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:07

Hello, this is Adam Sharlop Hyman.

SPEAKER_00 0:11

And this is Laura Krugel. Welcome to Handle with Care, the podcast you didn't know you needed about curtains, chairs, lamps, and provenance.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

We are so, so, so excited to be here in this little private room with pink moldings and doors with the great Louis Bofferding and his gallery on 62nd Street and Lexington Avenue. I highly recommend that for those of you who have not been to his website or this space, you do so at once, but only if you're serious. I always learn so much from Louis and leave this place feeling immensely inspired by his eye, by the way he ties these different and often obscure strands of history together so poetically, and in the way he assembles the pieces on view. In a city that has now sadly lost many of its antique stores and galleries, this space holds special significance as one of the last great places to come and be educated about what you are buying.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

That's right. I'll add that Louis' eye for quality and soul of the objects he presents here is truly moving to Adam and I and to many others. It's not unusual to spot a magnificent object in a magazine or in person in some amazing apartment in New York and to later learn that it was bought here. And this was actually the first episode Adam and I ever recorded. So we are honored that Louis agreed to share his deep love and knowledge for objects, and that he was kind enough to dive with us into the topic of provenance with his own twist on it. So just relax, enter Louis's gallery with us, and lose yourself in his amazing storytelling. This is the perfect introduction for the episode because in the art world, most of the time we read the word provenance, in the news at least. It's often associated with some sensational stories of ownership or objects that were looted during World War II or restituted to museums. All this area of provenance is is fascinating and an important topic that is not what we want to discuss today. We want to discuss all these stories that layer on top of beautiful objects and basically how something can meander through centuries, how valuable that is, or if sometimes this kind of historical part takes precedent over the aesthetic qualities of an object, and if people in the art world make sometimes too much of a big fuss about provenance, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 2:22

Yeah, and I think a useful place to start is that as somebody that's kind of engaging with provenance in a more creative way, because I'm putting things together in rooms. But from your perspectives, what's the history of people caring about provenance?

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Some don't. Some provenance is that really got people interested and made them pull out their checkbooks when I started in 1994. Today people will give me a blind stare. I mean, one of the best examples of that is Elzy DeWolf, you know, who was so important for the profession of interior design, women in the business world, gay studies, all kinds of things like that. And she was, when I started in 1994, kind of a household word. And when I say household, I don't mean just the households of decorators, antique stealers, 18th-century aficionados. I mean kind of the man and the woman in the street knew who Elsie DeWolf was. That was the touchstone. That's very different now. Now, when I mention Elsie DeWolfe, even to like practicing interior designers fresh out of school, they don't know who she is for the most part. But maybe there is no equivalent, because maybe it's about the way kind of celebrity culture has taken over. Because when we're talking about provenance, we could also be talking about the dresses of Princess Diana, for example. And so that's a different thing. And it also has meaning because in the case of someone like Princess Diana, it's like holy relics. And on a more personal level, in my case, for example, when my father died, one of the things I most wanted was an enormous redwood pine cone that was hanging from the ceiling in the garage. Because I remember gathering that up from the floor of Yosemite National Park on a family vacation. And but also being an antiques and art dealer, it also couldn't help but remind me of the wonderful ancient Roman bronze pine cone in the Vatican Museum, you know, which is like 12 feet tall and a thousand years old, whatever. And so I wanted this personal bit of memorabilia. And in the end, I had at great expense a beautiful bronze paste made for it. And so it kind of has pride of place in my living room. You know, provenance means things on a personal level, it can mean things on an historical level, on a commercial level. And commercial is always in flux.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

I guess historically, if you trace it, there's no real start point, because even as far as the ancient world was concerned, the Roman Emperor owning something Greek or Egyptian from previous dynasties was a way of also adding to your cultural capital. Not so dissimilar to how it is today, and it's the same with kings of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. It's the whole history of legacy. And early historic collections were created by kings and princes who collected things that in reality or only fictionally could be traced to other great figures in history.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

What do you want to bet that, for example, with that initial case you're bringing up of the Romans collecting Greek, what were at that point already antiquities, that they were also talking about the person who owned them in Athens. I'm sure there would have been a great interest in these historical figures whose names are probably lost to us.

SPEAKER_02 5:43

But it's such a cool part of all of this, actually, this notion of survival, this thought of these pieces that can survive, these really delicate things that can last so long, and people take care of them for so long, or they don't take care of them, and just by some miracle it it manages to not get melted down or used as firewood or whatever. I think there is something about this idea of provenance or legacy or whatever we're calling it that has to do with a why why do people care? One reason people care, it's because of the sheer awe that we feel when we see something that has just lasted so long and it's outlived the most durable of animals, humans. And that's just so wild.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

But Adam, do your people care? You care, we care, but do your clients care above for all the nice?

SPEAKER_02 6:44

I think my clients appreciate that I'm working in various narratives, histories, meanings, values, and considering value as a multifaceted concept that can involve the price I've paid for something or the price they could sell it for, but also can involve just where it comes from and who owns it and how interesting is it, and how cool do I find it. So I think they appreciate that even if they don't necessarily know what I'm talking about or remember what I'm talking about, we're not curating a collection with somebody, really. I mean, we're making a house. And so then we have all this material that we put together, but I care and I embed a lot of funny relationships and meanings and combinations of things within the rooms that we put together. And even if somebody doesn't know all of the details or, you know, they're not as into it as I am, I do believe that they can feel it. Because there is such a thing as a kind of aura from a piece of furniture. That can be for many different reasons, but one of them isn't the provenance, I guess. But it's funny that things that have that aura oftentimes have amazing provenances because people have been drawn to them over and over again.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

I think I can unite these two things that you're talking about because the interesting thing about objects, Kel Caprice, is that they're very much like people. And there's some that really announce themselves to you. And then there are others that do not. And this is kind of where you get into provenance. But for example, you can be going through an auction on the lowest level, and there will be some object that, as you say, just shines out at you. You know, you're having a sleepless night beforehand because oh, someone else is going to want this thing, and they'll know, and they'll have deeper pockets than me. And you get it for an absolute song, and you're just astounded. And more often than not, as you do your research, you find out why you felt that way. You will find a signature, or you will find a history. But then there are other like people who are very subtle. You have to get to know them, you have to spend time with them, and you come to realize this person is really someone of great interest. And it's the same with objects, and this is where provenance comes in.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

And sometimes I'm reading through the essays we write about some works, and I'm like, okay, this is like really long names of completely unknown aristocrats of the 18th century. What value does this add to my interest? And if that's very little, how am I gonna then convey this to someone else, you know?

SPEAKER_02 9:20

Yeah, and there is this feeling that is very legitimizing, you know, when you can see that you're part of a lineage that has already been established of people who had a good eye, that you can sort of benefit from other people's connoisseurship.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Well, no, for sure. And then when we're lucky enough to have an object that has a good continuous chain of provenance, and we're able to trace it from when it was created to the 19th century, to maybe a figure highly regarded in the art world. Yeah, you would think, okay, and then if I buy this, like I'm the next bullet point on this list. But the downfall of this, and I'm guilty of it, is that sometimes I will be in front of a beautiful object and I will start approaching it by who used to own this rather than this is its quality. And this is the tension because we're always trying to share stories, but I would like to think that when we talk about art, maybe people are going to live with versus art that might end up in a museum because obviously it's a different way of looking at stories, that somehow the object should come first.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Well, I think you know there are a lot of serious art historical nerds who can be very dismissive of provenance. But then there's another school of art historical nerds who are obsessed with provenance as well. And the point is it's simply one of the factors that enter enters into it. And I think by definition, any interesting object has an interesting provenance, one way or another, between the maker, the commissioner, people who bothered to keep it as opposed to throwing it away in the trash van a hundred years later.

SPEAKER_02 11:01

Maybe you can hear in the podcast that there's sort of a very squeaky leather chairs that we're all sitting on, and they're amazing. They're amazing. You're uh we're sitting in something very, very special. What is the provenance of these chairs? What's going on with these chairs?

SPEAKER_01 11:18

So the pair of chairs and the sofa are by a designer. John Dickinson was a San Francisco interior designer. He was California born. He led a rather troubled life. He was a very handsome, charming man, but he didn't have an easy or a happy life. Did you know him? I'm old enough so that there are all these people whom I could have known, but I didn't. And it's like, why didn't I write them? Why didn't I call them? He was one of the many people I could have because he died in 1981 when I was already, you know, in my mid to late twenties. In any case, he designed this seating suite for himself. And well, he was interested in everything, and he was postmodernism before that term even existed. And so growing up in San Francisco, he was aware of, for example, Jean-Michel Franck, because Jean-Michel Franck had done the Templeton Crocker in San Francisco, and all that furniture was there. And I've been trying to connect Dickinson to Franck, and he actually did place a Jean-Michel Franck desk. So I know that he knew about the work, and his work is so influenced by it. In terms of the suite, it has legs that are carved in the form of twigs. And of course, that's very Giacometti who did work for Frog. And of course, to a degree, twigs and branches are a motif in the decorative arts from antiquity to the present. Nevertheless, there's the Giacometti-esque kind of quality. It's someone I simply know that he was paying attention to, that he was aware of. And uh the lamp and the standing lamp, which was by him. He lived in a firehouse in San Francisco, a miraculous survivor of the 1905, or was it 1906 fire, and he designed a suite as the main seating suite in his sitting room, and then the plaster lap is one of the pairs that he made for his dressing area by his bedroom, and it weighs a ton because behind each twig is a metal bar so that he could hang his clothes on it.

SPEAKER_02 13:30

Well, the whole house is really incredible and was documented pretty well, I guess. And the closet, the wardrobe, is totally next level. And there are photos that have this lamp showing this dollhouse facade. All the doors, right, are decorated with dollhouse pieces with little mirrors in the windows. So it's like a San Francisco block of Victorian houses, is the wall of closets. It's so amazing. But they're all painted white, I guess. So there's something kind of restrained about it. It's not too crazy or childish or something. It's cool.

SPEAKER_01 14:04

All of his work is wildly imaginative, and he somehow manages to hamp everything down enough so that it's good taste, acceptable. I think that actually is an indication of what his demons were. Because as a young man, his family was very disapproving. He did marry a woman. So, I mean, he really tried. Like everyone back then, he drank a great deal. And his wife, whom he was very close to, died very young. When she died, he became an alcoholic. But he had such strength of character that he ended up pulling himself together when he was ri completely down and out. He had studied at the Parsons School in New York, and my theory is that he may have attended a lecture that Jean-Michel Franc gave in New York as a refugee in 1941 or 1942, because that's when Dickinson was in New York at Parsons. Wow. Frank came here as a refugee, leaving Paris in 39 or 40, settled in New York, and then committed suicide just around the corner on 61st Street. There was some kind of a connection. But the reason why I'm talking about Dickinson's troubled past is that so he pulled himself together completely. And he lived in San Francisco, which of course had a wild sort of gay culture, and he did indeed partake in it. But he then did come down with AIDS. And I think his world started crumbling when he knew that his days were numbered. Back then, the time was short, and he started drinking again. He also started taking drugs. So, in other words, it just all kind of imploded in his life. And now we're getting into provenance. One of John Dickinson's biggest, if not his biggest, client, also happened to be his muse, his very dear friend of mine. They essentially provided all the financing that was needed so that he could live out his very few days comfortably, and he signed over to them his estate, which means all the furniture we're sitting on and the light that's on as we're talking. And John Dickinson did her Julia Morgan house in San Francisco. So the one thing that he didn't particularly like was she collected also 18th century French furniture. And he didn't like that. Well, he wanted to design absolutely every single thing in the house, and he was saddled with signed 18th century French furniture. On the other hand, he certainly did appreciate it because when Macy's department store in San Francisco commissioned him to do a series of rooms on their furniture floor, one of the kind pieces which are today worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And this is quoted in design magazines of the time. This is the mid to late 70s. He says he set it up as a French 18th-century salon. And it was for this exhibition that he designed, and there are only a handful of examples that were ever made, because of course it scared people so much. Bone furniture. Oh, but the way he did it, I see Laura imploding herself. No, because he created these still lives with bones that are absolutely beautiful, with coral, which are nature's bones. I mean, there was a whole way of looking at life and death in his work, which is unique in the field of decorating and furniture design. Anyway, so she ended up inheriting all this furniture. And it's traveled with her through life. There were some John Dickinson pieces she couldn't bear to par with, so she kept them in a warehouse even though she didn't have a place for them. So I managed to get them.

SPEAKER_02 18:01

Yeah, and we were kind of talking about the other day when I came in here. They're in this really unusual color. Kind of a putty color something. Yeah, putty. I always think of like the legacy of colors and these certain colours that become like talismans of certain designers or of people.

SPEAKER_00 18:20

When we were talking about provals the other day, we quickly brushed upon lack of provenals sometimes. Yes. And how that can also activate your imagination when you actually have no idea where something came from. And there is a specific appeal to that too, Adam, when you source an auction or you come across some things that like, you know, finding something that seemingly is missing.

SPEAKER_02 18:43

It's provenance, that it comes out of thin air, and you know something is amazing about it, but you don't know what, and you're never gonna know really what, probably, unless maybe in 50 years somehow you find the other one of the pair of it in someone's house and they know about it. And there's a label. Yeah. So it could happen, and there is always this kind of excitement. What's your favorite object you've bought that you know nothing about? Well, I have a good one, actually. I know next to nothing about those ivory fruits. But you saw them in my house. I have these Art Deco ivory sculptures of fruits. And there are sort of cumcloths and oranges, and anyway, they're all made in ivory, and they are so beautiful. And they're inspired by Japanese, I think. But they look very French and deco or something like that, and they're very stylized. And I got them in an auction that seemed to contain a few items that I could tell all were from one person who was obviously very spooky into occult art from the 19th century, and there were some really serious, spooky paintings. There were some incredible Japanese prints depicting ghosts, and they are one of these kinds of objects that have an aura. People have come over to my house since I've had them out, and they're, you know, instantly drawn to them and asking questions about them because there are a lot of them. They're ivory, which is sort of charged in multiple ways, and they're so beautiful. And then I know they're from somebody that was such an interesting eye and must have been such an authentic weirdo. And I'm just so curious where they come from and who this person was that had the Japanese ghost prints, which are very rare.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Like, I mean, you fell in love with this ivory fruits. Yeah. And you went through the trouble of looking at the entire auction, understanding this was the taste of one person that you'll probably never know who they were. So you know something about these that will stay with you. Yeah. You know, the mystery will forever survive.

SPEAKER_02 21:00

This is kind of what is the other side of this coin, and it's definitely the same coin, is that provenance is really only as interesting as the lack of provenance, and it's the empty holes, I mean, it's the unanswerable questions that really probably get us. And I think for most people, knowing a few sort of pieces of information about something is enough to help you to ask the right questions that you can never answer. And those are the things that are so stimulating.

SPEAKER_01 21:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:31

And it's what you were talking about the other day as being a kind of metaphysical quality to Provenance, like what is missing and what is the nothingness, you know? Like, is history real? Is the past real? Is the future real? It becomes something actually quite spiritual in a way to feel this connection to the mystery of other people's lives and the beauty of their eye.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Or it's like, do they care?

SPEAKER_01 22:21

I bought which got me off to bubble wrap was a French Empire bed. I really had to do lots of emotional summers somersaults before I could buy that antique bed. Because I was thinking people were born in this bed, people died in this bed. How icky. And of course, what I came to realize is And now you're selling bone furniture. Because they're turned into aesthetic objects. But to me, it's one of the great things about my profession is that it connects me with people of other times and other places on a very human and intimate sort of level. And you know, I do go to bed now thinking I may die in this bed. Hopefully not tonight, but I would actually like to rather than a hospital bed. And I'm not going to say that's particularly a comforting thought, but the thought of people having had sex in that bed, people having been born in that bed, that has actually is comforting. I mean, it's a connecting thing.

SPEAKER_02 23:22

I mean, because Laura's gallery has a lot of crazy provenance stuff going on. And you have this amazing kind of condition at the gallery of having established your own kind of provenance. So things come back to the gallery that you've already sold to someone else, and that's actually kind of like a notable thing. What's your like top, your top provenance story?

SPEAKER_00 23:47

I'm super spoiled because I get to tell the stories of objects for which we have such depth of information, you know, and their beautiful quality. And so I can then rely on this fantastic kind of backbone. But what is rarer is things that can echo in today's context, you know. And then again I will tell the story of this fantastic 17th century pendant, which honestly we could write a book about because we know exactly for whom it was made. There's only two that were made for a wedding. And you have all the attributes of marriage, and then weird, very Tim Burton-y uh enameled hands that are at the center of this pendant. Anyway, you look at it and you're like, wow, it's fantastic. But the most fun thing is that after a very long history around the region where it was created, this thing makes its way to Paris with a great art dealer of the time, Seligman, sells to this American guy and then vanishes for almost a century. And then it got rediscovered ten years ago on the Oregon Antix Road Show, where someone just came with it. And it's, you know, it's one of those great things of the art market when someone just found this in the attic and it had the original invoice from the 1920s with the entire story written on it. And to be able to, you know, just name-drop the antics road show when looking at an object of this quality, it's a powerful tool when you can skip a lot of steps, immediately hook someone's interest, and then you can iterate on top of this, the historical blah blah that we love so much. Also, I don't think that there's anything more potent to make people interested in the art market. The story of rediscovery and like the detective work is what fascinates everyone about the art world.

SPEAKER_01 25:31

And the apps about trying to fill in the gap and then kind of fantasizing about what that gap could be.

SPEAKER_02 25:38

Well, you are such a good researcher. It's so impressive to me as somebody that's more of a consumer, and then I guess maybe like a collage artist. But actually, speaking of research, we're sitting at this little round table with a sketchbook in front of. Can I talk about this? This sketchbook in front of us that Louis just brought out that oh now I'm scared because I've been eating potato chips. To touch it fine.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

Yeah, you know what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_02 26:08

Um Louis brought out this this book that is in this beautiful little kind of folio box which Pen had made for me. Right. In Paris. Right. Because he had so many of these boxes made. Yeah. So look. So you open the box, and inside is this little pink steno pad that really does not look like it's gonna be that amazing. And it's one of Emilio Terry's sketchbooks. And it's not just any sketchbook. I mean, it's not a notepad with like some grocery lists in it. It's real sketches of ideas, of buildings, of follies, and floor plans of villas that he was dreaming up. It's really out of this world. And there's some great kind of shell fountain. Then there's drawings of candlesticks, and actually at the end, I think there's like one that's sort of colored in. And so Emilio Terry, he's an interesting figure when you think about provenance. You know, I mean, a very small group of people, I guess, are obsessed with Emilio Terry Provenance, and it's mostly because there's not a lot of Emilio Terry provenance, and it's very hard to find information even about him, about his life, and he seems to be such a mystery.

SPEAKER_01 27:26

And the provenance behind this notebook is that I got a call from Pierre Latin saying, Oh, there's an auctioneer who's selling off the contents of Terry's country house, where he had a lot of antique furniture, furniture he designed himself. But they came across, I was told by Pierre, a stash of these notebooks. And they were being auctioned in Paris, and I couldn't leave the next day to go and see it. So I just said, Would you please buy one for me? And so that's how I got it.

SPEAKER_02 28:02

Wow, and then he made you this box for it.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

A perfect example because it's both really intimate from the perspective of imagining Emilio Terry drawing on it, but it's also really intimate on your perspective because it's brought to your attention by your close friend, who was also an artist himself. And whoever gets this book in the end, I don't know what we will you will do with it, but maybe they will buy because they love Emilio Terry and they will no longer understand this connection with Pierre Latin, or maybe they will, depending on who it is.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

So this is not for sale, it never will be, and you know, in my will it will be left to someone. So you better suck up to it could be yours what uh I hope you'll be old when you gather. Where it goes is important to me. So, in other words, we're now talking about the future of Provenance. So, this is also what Provenance is, is the human connection.

SPEAKER_02 28:54

Recently I had the funniest kind of brush with uh Provenance, which was very personal, and it involved getting an email from a very distant cousin. We share the same great grandfather. And that man was a decorator in New York. He did some very big projects, and he was an interesting man that I don't know much about, unfortunately. Well, what I knew of him was that he was born in Russia and he had come through London to the United States, where he had stopped in London to learn mattress making in a workshop, and he got here and he worked for an upholsterer in the Lower East Side, and then little by little ended up becoming a decorator and an antiques dealer. And he built a house that I pass all the time, which was also his office and his shop, which is on 89th and Park. And it's quite a wild-looking facade because it's all covered with these glazed terracotta tiles. It's kind of sandwiched between these big, very austere limestone buildings, and it's just an oddity kind of.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

What was the firm called?

SPEAKER_02 30:10

It was called Simon Ginsburg. And anyways, I was just always wondering about him because I'm a decorator and I always was interested in design and always wanted to be an architect or an interior designer of something. And I was always told about this guy and that I'm related to. So unfortunately, I could not find much information about him. And anyways, this really distant cousin wrote to me out of the blue, like, you know, I thought you might be interested to know. There's this like giant painting of our shared relative and all his children that we're giving to this museum. So, anyways, I ended up connecting with this guy who turned out to be super nice and you know, somehow we're living merely blocks apart from each other and are related. And I told him, you know, I've I'm so interested in this man, Simon Ginsberg, and I cannot tell you how much I would like to know about him. And he went into this amazing story with great depth that was really illuminating. Starting for one with the fact that he was adopted, which was like totally crazy in news to me. But, anyways, at the end, he said, you know, bye, and it was really great to meet you. And then he followed up with his emails. Oh, you know, I just remembered I have in the basement of my apartment building Simon's desk. And if you want it, it's yours. I have his his desk that he had in his office where he designed furniture and stuff like that. And I ended up taking it and I have it in my office kind of embarrassingly because it really is not a very attractive piece of furniture, but it has this kind of wild provenance for me because it's his desk, and he was a decorator, and he was also the person that came to the United States, and he's the reason I'm here. And it was such a wild, charged object that really kind of added this whole other dimension, honestly, to like my understanding of myself, my understanding of myself as a New Yorker. It actually has enhanced my kind of connection to so many parts of my life, too. But I don't know what what on earth I'm gonna do with it.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

I'd have to share a picture of you behind that disc. Well, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

I'll just have to love to transform my entire office. Yeah, it is a challenge. Yeah, that's the perfect story to end with, and different relationships to different aspects of a story, too.

SPEAKER_00 32:35

Yeah, and like you said, the provenance is never over, no matter where the piece ends. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you, Louie. I think that went well. Thanks for listening, guys.

SPEAKER_02 32:46

Thanks to all our fans. Bye. All right.