AN OPEN MARKET

Jean Prouvé, Temporary school of Villejuif, 1957, photographed in October 2018. Photo: Galerie Patrick Seguin

The 18-month-long-and-counting Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the globe and forced any number of industries, large and small, to scramble for survival. Many have had to come up with fresh ways of transacting business in a fast-changing and socially distanced economy. The design world of galleries, fairs and auction houses is certainly no different, and one can already see significant changes brewing.

“The pandemic caught everyone completely off guard,” says Evan Snyderman of the Tribeca-based R & Company, co-founded with his partner Zesty Meyers in 1997, “and we essentially stopped all fairs, stopped all exhibitions and battened down the hatches. Then, after the first five months with nothing going on, we said, ‘OK, if we can’t engage with our clients directly, we have to engage them in some other way.’”

In short order, according to the dealer, “we went on a massive campaign of trying to create virtual events, Zoom calls – I had never done a Zoom call in my life! – and all of a sudden, we’re giving really interesting talks with artists and designers and people all over the world. It was a way to do our outreach which we couldn’t do in the gallery, and kept our clients engaged.”

Snyderman and Meyers, already survivors of the economic fallout of 9/11 and the 2008 mega-recession, are moving ahead; in Snyderman’s words, “we’ve always tried to be putting out new material, new objects and using social media as best we can.”

In that shaken-not-stirred cocktail mixture, the dealers also opened a pop-up shop in Aspen, Colorado, in partnership with contemporary gallery Lehmann Maupin last summer, as a proactive way to engage with their upscale clientele safe-harboring in the mountains. They also staged a collaboration with Jeff Lincoln Art + Design in Southampton. “At the end of the day,” says Snyderman, “you’ve got to make a personal connection.”

R & Company will also return to the Park Avenue Armory this November for the 10th iteration of the Salon Art + Design fair.

“To be honest,” says Patrick Seguin of the eponymous Paris gallery he founded in 1989, “we already had the confirmation before Covid: the art world is often disconnected from the reality of the economy, of the planet, and so we’ve had a great year.” As Seguin explains, “with the situation, with less opportunity to buy, people go for this immediacy of pleasure, meaning your house, the art on the wall and the furniture. The market is solid for private. I don’t know about auctions. Most of the business has been for Prouvé and Royère. In my field, my market is very strong.”

Mostly residing in his newly constructed Jean Nouvel house in the south of France, Seguin – whose gallery is laser-focused on five French architect-designers, Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier and Jean Royère – says he sold a Prouvé ‘President’s Desk’ for €600,000 (around $709,000) during the height of the pandemic, as well as two Prouvé “demountable” houses in the past 10 months, at prices starting at €1.4 million (around $1.65 million). “Ninety-five percent of my collectors are great contemporary art collectors and I don’t know of a typology of work that would dialogue better with contemporary art than Prouvé,” Seguin says. “There’s a great synergy there.”

Though leagues apart, both in distance and artist rosters, R & Company and Seguin are active publishers in the design field. This was marked most recently by R’s Objects: USA 2020, a part reprise publication and exhibition curated by Glenn Adamson from the storied Smithsonian Institution show of 1969 – the first of its kind championing the American craft medium – while adding on 50 works by contemporary artist/designers (on view through July), and Seguin’s third volume of a five-volume set, Jean Prouvé Architecture.

Objects: USA 2020 also produced a number of pending museum acquisitions, including historical works by Doyle Lane, Marilyn Pappas, Art Smith and Maija Grotell and, according to R & Company’s head

of museum relations, James Zemaitis, “illustrated the current institutional focus on acquiring works by women and artists of color.”

Research has proved essential in the design field, and no better a time to mine that historical lode than during the current pandemic, especially with art and design fairs on hold or limited to virtual participation and the relative anonymity of digitized viewing rooms.

Suzanne Demisch, the co-founder with Stephane Danant in 2005 of New York’s Demisch Danant, is thoroughly immersed in the history of French post-war design and the gallery’s website has launched a “made in France” online program with the intent “to be inspired to learn more, and have the opportunity to acquire pieces with which you connect.”

“We are interested,” she says, “in the historical background of our works, and like to discover and highlight connections.”

Asked if the gallery’s clientele were coming in to see works or viewing remotely, the dealer says, “it’s a mix – clients and designers seem to be thirsty for inspiration and beauty more than ever. The pandemic has also given us the opportunity to experiment more, to do more simple collaborations, and to highlight other local, creative designers and colleagues. It has proved to be very successful.”

As Demisch – who in 2011 co-authored with Danant the book Maria Pergay: Complete Works 1957-2010 – further observes, and striking a tone clearly heard from other design colleagues, “yes, we noticed an increase in interest and in sales. People do seem to focus on elevating their home environment and experience.”

“Before Covid,” says Loic Gaillard, the co-founder in 2006 with Julien Lombrail of the London/New York/Paris/San Francisco-based Carpenters Workshop Gallery, “we were running around like headless chickens all the time.” But, he says, the extra time afforded by the lockdowns allowed the gallery to “make the digital shift and revolution that our business model should take, to sharpen the way we do business without paying a million dollars in rent for expensive premises in New York, London, or you name it. You cannot justify this money anymore. By using digital techniques, you have a far better reach to the market and I don’t mean just sending out a few sexy posts on Instagram or Facebook.”

Even with his Cassandra-like warnings about the ebbing lifespan of the current gallery model, Gaillard is gung-ho on the resilience of the collectable design market, noting, “so you’re not going to buy, say, a $50 million painting, but you won’t compromise on your dining chairs, table and chandelier.”

Carpenters Workshop and R & Company have profited and even expanded by capitalizing on opportunities during the pandemic through artist commissions. These have included multiple large-scale Galaxy Cluster illuminated sculptures by Jeff Zimmerman, through R & Company, for a private New York residence and priced “well into the six figures,” according to Snyderman. Meanwhile, sculpted bronze furniture by Vincenzo de Cotiis, including an almost 7 meter-long dining table, was commissioned for a private super-yacht through Carpenters Workshop. “This alone is a very big ticket,” says Gaillard.

Asked if the gallery would resume its peripatetic schedule of participating in art fairs across the globe as the pandemic eases and travel resumes, Gaillard says “it might be a good thing for everybody to slow down the pace a bit.”

The auction side of the design market is also going through some sea changes brought on by the pandemic, according to Richard Wright, the founder in 2000 of the eponymous Chicago-based Wright, which merged with the Lambertville, New Jersey-based Rago Auctions in 2019, where Wright serves as chief executive to both.

“The market is almost counter-intuitively strong,” says Wright, whose combined enterprise brought in $55 million in 2020. “With the stock market reaching record heights and people at home, they’re working on their nests, they’re more attuned to their interiors.”

As Wright observes, “we’re famous for our catalogues but we’ve been moving away from our dependency on print and moving to digital for a good long while, and the pandemic just accelerated that and pushed us completely to digital. We stopped printing catalogues and now half of our sales have also gone to digital and I believe it will be a permanent shift in the industry. I don’t think anyone is looking to go back.”