Hammering Out a Deal
Helen and Jack Ofield were a bit flummoxed last Sunday morning when a photographer asked them to pose with their chair. They’d owned and used it regularly for the past three decades, but they no longer knew whether they should even rest a hand on it.
“It feels like we can’t touch it anymore,” Jack Ofield, a filmmaker and professor at San Diego State University, whispered to his wife as they stood just inside the entry to the main showroom of Butterfields auction house in Hollywood.
About an hour later this same secretary’s chair--designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1930s for his S.C. Johnson Administration Building in Wisconsin--would fetch nearly $105,000 in less than a minute, leaving the Ofields breathless and a crowd of serious buyers, sellers and the simply curious cheering.
Never mind that the chair was a bit worn and had an ink stain on the seat. Never mind that because of its three-legged design it is famous for tipping over. Never mind that it came to the Ofields as a gift from the Johnson family after Ofield shot a TV documentary on Wright’s masterwork. As the auctioneer’s gavel fell, the chair dropped out of sight and into the hands of a private collector who would not reveal his name. It turned from one family’s prized possession into another man’s latest holding--perhaps equally prized, but for different reasons. Because it’s rare. Because it’s considered to be in great condition despite the nicks of time. And because he--whoever he is--just had to have it.
And so it goes in the ever-evolving world of collectibles, a world with its own rhythms of letting go and coveting anew, of market rises and falls, of competition for singular items and neglect for yesterday’s treasures.
The Wright offering was the clear highlight of Sunday’s auction of nearly 450 lots of 20th century furniture, decorative arts and a smattering of fine art that brought in nearly $1 million in about 5 1/2 hours in a blur of edge-of-the-seat highs and blink-of-an-eye lows. It was a classic L.A. scene, with attendees demanding to remain anonymous while dressed extravagantly in everything from cowboy hats to chains, as likely to be sporting elaborate tattoos as diamonds. About 250 people crowded into the darkened auction room adjacent to the display galleries for the top-selling items--including the Wright chair, a trio of 1911-13 mica-shaded copper lamps by the San Francisco Arts and Crafts master Dirk van Erp, and a 1964 burl oak “Conoid” table by George Nakashima. Dozens more bid absentee or by Internet and phone. But even in the auction’s quietest moments dozens stayed in the room, ever ready to bid, or just to take notes in their catalogs, for the record.
Butterfields has been headquartered since 1865 in San Francisco, where it conducts most of its sales. But because Peter Loughrey, the company’s 20th century decorative arts specialist, has a long-established base here, and because so much material comes out of L.A.’s trove of Modernist homes, Butterfields runs its modern furnishings auctions at the Hollywood headquarters, an undistinguished whitewashed warehouse at the somewhat dingy corner of Sunset Boulevard and Curson Avenue, about a mile west of the new home of the Academy Awards. It is a corner where auction goers might be accosted in full daylight by neighborhood regulars--women with fluorescent-red hair, 10-inch stilettos and shorts that barely qualify as clothing. It is also a neighborhood where nearby homes sell for millions and people often come in on a Sunday afternoon willing to spend hundreds--or hundreds of thousands--in search of a bargain.
Butterfields may be best known for selling California plein-air paintings, but it is increasingly becoming a place to buy more recent works of all genres. In the past year the L.A. house has offered four auctions in recent vintage design, recognizing a growing taste among both young and older collectors and high- and low-end buyers. Works by Tiffany and the Eameses regularly come up alongside the flickering flames of various eras, such as the once-hot Italians known as the Memphis Group. “There’s our kitchen table growing up,” said one 30-ish woman as she walked through the showroom on Sunday. “There’s Dad’s office.”
As with any auction, the real business comes down to who’s ready to buy, and for how much. The mesmerizing voices of the auctioneers invite bidders to go just one increment higher--raising the bids by $10, “if you wish,” for a commonplace item like an Eames walnut chair that could easily be bought new for about the same $380 that it sold for, used, on Sunday. Or, often enough, they ask buyers to go up $5,000 more for, say, a rare Van Erp lamp.
On Sunday, because of differences in style and condition, three Van Erp lamps sold one after another for $104,750, $23,500 and $14,100, as openers to the sale. The first was particularly noteworthy for its size and style, known as “warty” because it has a lumpy base.
The auctioneers--on Sunday Loughrey split the duties with Ed Beardsley--knock down their gavels about twice a minute, selling, in this instance, someone’s favorite sofa (Nakashima, $4,700), a prized clock (George Nelson Spike Clock, $323) and a half-complete German china set ($264).
Every object has a story behind it, and the results of the sale, with its highs and lows--top prices and buy-ins of things that don’t reach the seller’s minimum “reserve” price--become a historical marker, a public record of taste at the beginning of the 21st century.
Eight phone bidders were on the line when the Wright chair came up just after 1 p.m. Loughrey had put a low-ball estimate on it of only $12,000 to $15,000 in the catalog, but he’d since learned that rival auction house Christie’s had sold a chair of the same design in the mid-1980s for $65,000, and he was hopeful for a much higher price.
Although there are hundreds of examples of the same chair still being used in the Johnson’s Wax building, this is one of very few the Johnsons have allowed to be removed. The Ofields got it as a gift from Sam Johnson, grandson of the man who commissioned the architect. Johnson sent the chair after Jack Ofield took special care in filming Wright’s streamlined, modern building in the mid-1970s. Since then, the Ofields used it throughout their home--as a film editing chair in Jack’s studio, as a telephone table in their living space. It wasn’t very comfortable, Jack says, and indeed, legend has it the Johnson’s Wax secretaries once complained to Wright because they were falling over in it if they weren’t careful. “They’ll only fall once,” the curmudgeonly architect is said to have replied.
The chair opened at $10,000 with an absentee bid, and the price rose quickly. Bryce Bannatyne, who runs a private design and paintings gallery in Venice, stood at the back of the room, his numbered paddle held high and unwavering. As the price rose by $10,000 increments, one bidder after another dropped out. When Loughrey hit $90,000 the room fell quiet, and he let the hammer fall. The actual buyer--on the phone with Bannatyne--had his chair. Adding in the standard, required buyer’s premium, the buyer paid $104,750 for the chair, plus, presumably, a fee to Bannatyne for his advice.
“It was a deal,” Bannatyne said right after the sale, wearing a large grin. His client, he said, plans to use the chair; he lives in many residences, only one of which is in California, and in recent years has been amassing a collection of major furniture he hopes to exhibit someday. “It is a really important chair with a really great provenance,” Bannatyne said. “That makes it extremely rare.”
The Ofields were introduced to Bannatyne in the reception area and seemed reassured that their chair would be cared for. “This is historic preservation,” Helen Ofield said, still looking stunned. “Obviously it’s going to someone who wants it.”
The rest of the afternoon was not nearly as dramatic--nearly a quarter of the works didn’t reach the seller’s reserve price, and will either be sold privately by Butterfields or returned to the owners--yet the auction house counts the sale as a success. With the low estimate for the total set at $808,780, Loughrey, exhausted and still computing the overall meaning of the sale, reported that at the final drop of the hammer at 5:30 p.m., the afternoon’s take had reached $926,580.
It’s a business of guessing, and even the experts are often wrong. David Rago, owner of David Rago Auctions in Lambertville, N.J., and a regular on PBS’ “Antiques Roadshow,” is among the best-known dealers in Van Erp lamps; he set a record in May when he sold a large one for $180,000. Speaking before the sale by phone from New Jersey, and without seeing the Butterfields’ offering, he predicted that the “warty” lamp “shouldn’t go for less than $100,000.... This is exactly what they’re looking for,” he said.
On the Wright chair, however, Rago’s predictions weren’t as on the mark, demonstrating, as he admitted, that Wright is not his area of expertise. “That’s a cool chair,” he said. “That chair might have gotten $50,000 eight to 10 years ago, when the market for Wright was up there. I’d be stunned if it brought more than $25,000 today.”
What doesn’t sell sometimes is as interesting as what does. In a conversation as the sale items were being installed in the galleries, Loughrey pointed to a rusty low-lying metal container, 5 feet wide, 1 foot long and about 5 inches high, on rollers. It looked like something the movers had left behind, nothing anyone would covet. But, Loughrey pointed out, it was in fact a rare example of an indoor planter box, designed in 1952 by Charles Eames. The catalog estimate was $5,000 to $7,000, and when it was finally displayed in the galleries, it did look spiffy--filled with pebbles and for the moment supporting a Harry Bertoia sculpture, circa 1970. But despite its pedigree and a clear provenance--it was custom made for the Malibu residence of the late screenwriter-director Philip Dunne--the bidding for it went nowhere, and it counted as a “pass.”
Perhaps just as interesting are the buyers. The same paddle numbers are repeated over and over as the winning bidders, and often those buyers are dealers planning to resell. Not always, however.
Toward the end of the day, after successfully completing bids on two tables--a dining table with a glass top and hefty sculptural base by the mid-century New Hope, Pa., designer Paul Evans ($4,406) and a coffee table in Evans’ eccentric style ($763)--Gillian and Stephen Foster left the salesroom to settle up. Gillian readily admitted that she and her husband had never before encountered Evans’ work, and that they had made the purchase because “we buy what we like.” Los Angeles residents, they are buying “for personal use,” she said, for a location she didn’t want to disclose. “We’ve bought quite a bit in these last few days,” she said; at the auction the couple also purchased a black-leather 1970 American sofa ($6,462) and 10 Mies van der Rohe armchairs with brown leather seats ($7,637). “We haven’t done much with auctions,” she said, explaining that they usually buy from galleries. “I feel badly bidding against dealers we buy from, but this is a democracy,” she said with a shrug.
Some leave happy, others not so. Some a little of both. One of the latter was a young man who asked to remain anonymous because he often buys from private sales to sell at auction and doesn’t want to be known for that. A couple of his items did poorly early in the day, and he was peevish, but a final consignment, in the final moments of the sale, went for more than double the low estimate.
He left smiling, his outlook radically revised by the luck of a single bidder’s insatiable desire.