5 Paths Through the Winter Show, an Exhibition of Earthly Delights

Some museums are encyclopedic. Can art fairs be, too? In 2016, the venerable Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory, which for 60 years was called the Winter Antiques Show, began admitting works made after 1969. Three years later, “Antiques” dropped from the name. Now in its 71st edition, this year’s fair, a benefit for the East Side House Settlement in the Bronx, feels like a mini-Met in its geography and generous time span.

From a medieval English baptismal font with its original stucco intact (Blumka Gallery, D7) to a strangely jubilant gouache of a volcanic eruption in 1830 (Hill-Stone, D3), the fair still leans on museum-grade objects that boast enough oddity to beckon the wallets of collectors. You’ve probably never seen a greater expanse of inlaid mother-of-pearl than in the shimmering veneers of two towering Spanish-colonial Peruvian cabinets. (For those, see Zebregs & Röell, D13, first-time dealers at the fair, visiting from the Netherlands.)

The weight of the past in this fair makes it all the harder to miss the present, whether it’s a giant cigarette sculpture from the Oldenburg-infatuated 1980s (Galerie Gmurzynska, E10) or photorealism from last year (Jonathan Cooper, D11). Some booths, like the fine sculptural porcelain and stoneware brought by Joan B. Mirviss, Ltd. (E5), exhibit our century with a devotion more commonly associated with design fairs such as Salon Art + Design. Purists may balk, and may have a right, but some of these contemporary add-ons, especially the exquisite Japanese basketry at Thomsen Gallery (C6), help explain the longevity of certain crafts. And even for browsers, the best of these correspondences help tease out themes. Here are five:

Showstopping Masters of Play

For as long as the Winter Show has been running, the Belgian land artist Jean Verame (born 1936) has been amassing a collection of playing cards, claimed to be the world’s largest in private hands. Offering his total collection “for a seven figure sum,” Daniel Crouch Rare Books (E15) has brought some highlights, and the booth may be this fair’s biggest draw. Memorable improvisations include an Apache deck from the 19th century, with sword, bell and button forms painted into rectangles of rawhide, and a deck of Paris metro tickets painted over by Alexis Poliakoff in the 1970s. Well represented are tarocchi cards, long before the 1700s occult-ified them into tarot. One from Renaissance Italy, in which two cherubs lift a bubble of “The World” into a field of gold, might have been cut from an illuminated manuscript.

True to this fair’s form, furniture dominates Verame’s collection. On view are two of the four known bureaux typographies, portable flashcard trunks from 1780’s France based on the educational philosophy of John Locke. Resembling postal sorting desks, these wooden hutches hinged out into desktops so that children could arrange and learn from the printed cards arrayed above: geography, grammar, etc. The flashcards themselves, many repurposed from the royals in French-suited decks, are appropriately regicidal for that Revolutionary decade.