Mozart & Meissen
In August Salzburg hosts its second World Fine Art Fair, timed to coincide with the city’s internationally famous music festival. As Isabel Andrews discovers, the art is alive with the sound of music.
Isabel Andrews, Sunday, 29th June 2008
Visitors to this year’s fair can expect a superb line-up of art, ranging from porcelain, furniture, silver, objets d’art, Old Masters and modern and contemporary art. Wienerroither & Kohlbacher have an enticing array of modern work, including Fernand Léger’s signed and dated Une Fleur et une Figure (1950); Alexej von Jawlensky’s Variation: Zärtlichkeiten (1916-17; Fig. 4); Alfons Walde’s striking snow-scene composition Holzzieher (1930); and a busy ink-on-vellum drawing by George Grosz, Nächtliche Berliner Strassenzzene (1915).
Kovacek Spiegelgasse, specialists in glass from 1500 to 1950 as well as 19th- and 20th-century paintings, are appropriately offering work by Austria’s most famed artists: a sultry oil by Egon Schiele, Klosterneuburg on the Danube River (c. 1908; Fig. 1) and a black-crayon drawing, Seated Nude, by Gustav Klimt. Highlights from their holdings of rare glass include a Venetian tazza painted with the papal Medici coat of arms and a pair of Biedermeier beakers from St Petersburg, made around 1820, one depicting Tsar Nicholas I and the other the Tsarina Alexandra.
For visitors with a special interest in porcelain, the stand of Munich’s Röbbig gallery is a must. On offer is a Meissen Kakiemon slender sake-flask from the collection of Augustus the Strong in the Japanese Palace, Dresden. Seductively decorated with exotic birds, flora and miniature figures, it dates from 1725-30. A rare and large Frankenthal Chinese pavilion with figures, modelled by Carl Gottlieb Lück in around 1765, is also on show (Fig. 2). From the gallery’s furniture holdings there is a secrétaire in (extremely sought-after) green-blue lacquer with gold chinoiserie scenes (Fig. 5), probably painted by Christian Reinow in Dresden around 1738.
Appealing furniture executed by the Wiener Werkstätte at the turn of the century is with Patrick Kovacs Kunsthandel. It includes a pair of model chairs in beechwood and mahogany designed by Josef Hoffman for the interior of the Cabaret Fledermaus in Vienna in 1907. Also available is a striking gilt-wood mirror designed by Dagobert Peche and executed for the Wiener Werkstätte by Max Welz in around 1920.
Last but not least, among the Old Masters adorning the stand of Bernheimer Old Master Paintings will be an early, vivid still life of flowers by Jan Bruegel the Younger in oil on copper, c. 1620 (Fig. 3). Also worthy of a visit is the Bernheimer Galerie Schloss Fuschi, which opened in 2006 at the Hotel Schloss Fuschi, to which Bernheimer has also supplied 150 Old Master paintings.
For further information on the fair and the participating galleries, visit www.salzburg.faf.com
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