58 11th February 2012


Essential but elusive, what is it about the look?


■ What exactly do we mean by ‘decorative’ and why does it play such an important role today? DAVID MOSS investigates


SPENDING an afternoon at the Decorative Fair in Battersea Park at the end of last month, I mused on the longevity of the event and how it still retains its distinctive look. And its “look” is the all-important factor. Although there are


exhibitors who deal in mainstream antiques, the overall effect is unmistakeably decorative. As the name implies, there is, of course, a preponderance of decorative antiques at Battersea. But having spoken to a number of decorative dealers, both at the fair and outside, it became clear that pinning down exactly what is meant by a decorative antique is not easy. Indeed, it is easier to say what is not rather than what is a decorative piece. A stirring piece of Renaissance sculpture, a sublime Ghandaran


Buddha or an exquisitely crafted and beautifully proportioned piece of English furniture from one of the 18th century masters are not decorative antiques. Pieces of museum quality can hardly be decorative antiques; they have intrinsic merit and an academic and emotional appeal which transcends the merely decorative. Seriously prized antiques are often highly embellished, but


they are beautifully and thoughtfully decorated and one could never describe a 17th century bureau bookcase with overall chinoiserie japanning as just decorative. However, Victorian and later, more crudely lacquered furniture


is very much decorative. And Victorian lacquered trays, coal scuttles and a host of other household items are the stuff of the decorative emporiums, as are painted French country furniture, lighting from elaborate wall sconces to industrial floor lamps, glass and metal side tables, perspex, painted wheelbarrows and all manner of other often quirky items. But is there some unifying factor with what are rather loosely


designated decorative antiques? Who better to ask than David Juran, a veteran exhibitor at the decorative fair who liked it so much he bought it in January 2009. David has been a decorative


dealer for 20 years and owns Magus Antiques in Church Street, Marylebone, the street which hosts Alfie’s market (for years a decorative mecca), and now one of the leading decorative dealing streets in the capital. He lives and does most of


worked hand in hand with the interior decoration industry and David Juran speaks of a synergy between them. The Decorative Fair itself was founded in 1985 by the


prescient Patricia Harvey to serve this burgeoning market. As a decorative dealer herself (she still has a shop in Church Street and stands at the fair), she noticed back then the increasing sales from her sector of the trade to interior decorators, particularly Americans. Decorators flocked to the new fair and are still a vital factor,


although there are not so many Americans these days. Fuelled by decorators, who were rapidly becoming major


players, the decorative market blossomed and there was a time when even the most traditional and staid of antiques fairs suddenly became “antiques and decorative”. Over the last decade, however, this mania has abated. The


decorative tag has disappeared from determinedly undecorative events. It is not so much that it has gone out of fashion – and at all levels antiques are, to an extent, about fashion – but that an area where fashion and style reigned has become diffused. The current buzzword is vintage. Vintage was, and surely still


is, part of the decorative antiques trade, but nowadays vintage is what organisers append to their fair name. And I cannot help but notice how many fairs are now using “Mid-Century Modern” in their publicity. Another buzz phrase perhaps? Not too many years ago in the UK, 20th century design was


the province of the decorative trade, as was Art Deco some years before that. But by the 1960s, when it was realised that excellence did not stop with the dawn of the Victorian era, the Deco period was recognised as producing work comparable to the best of earlier design. And again with justification, the serious dealers in 20th century design stock pieces worthy of far more attention than decorative antiques imply. The best of this work even features at TEFAF Maastricht. I have emphasised the seminal role decorators play in the


“Paradoxically, dealers at the top end welcome the decorators but still use the word decorative in a pejorative sense”


his buying in France, started as a rug dealer with his father but moved into a new area when he discovered he had a good eye for the decorative – in the decorative trade a “good eye” is perhaps the most prized asset. They “are not necessarily the purest of their type and have a


crossover appeal. They have quality but also a bit of lightness and frivolity,” says Juran. “These are antiques to be lived with, not always of high value. A decorative antique is not so precious that you have to live your life around it.” Other dealers echoed the point that a decorative piece has


to work with the room, whereas traditional, expensive antiques often have to be the focus of the room. Having said that, you can also buy a statement piece in the


decorative field as well, although there is more latitude in terms of marriages, restoration and “slight adjustments”, as one dealer put it, than in the higher ranges of the period antiques scene. The decorative antiques trade as we know it has always


decorative market, but they do not just buy decorative antiques. Depending on the interior designer’s brief, they shop at the very top end of the antiques trade, as we saw last summer when Masterpiece opened specially for Californian interior designer Rose Tarlow, who was buying with her client Oprah Winfrey. But it is the decorative


trade which relies most on the decorators. The Wiltshire grouping of 18 dealers, Blanchard Collective, for example, thrives and was set up specifically to service the decorators.


The decorative scene has had a profound effect on all aspects


of the trade. Style and presentation are basic requirements for successful decorative dealing and this has influenced the look of even TEFAF Maastricht and Masterpiece. Until the decorative boom, antiques fairs almost prided


themselves on their lack of presentation (remember Grosvenor House in the 1970s) and dealers who dressed their stands were considered suspiciously showy. How that has changed. Taking the decorative approach to stand sets makes sense in


an age when buying and collecting has largely moved away from the academic. Accessibility is all. Paradoxically, dealers at the top end welcome the decorators


but still use the word decorative in a pejorative sense. Not that the decorative dealers mind. They know their market


and how to work it. Decorative antiques may be problematic to define but the dealers know what they are.


INTERVIEW A fond


■ MARK BRIDGE talks to Julian Hartnoll about starting again after 50 years on Duke Street


ONE day in the mid 1980s, London art dealer Julian Hartnoll found himself sorting through all the accumulated artwork in the Hastings studio of the once highly fashionable ‘Kitchen Sink’ artist John Bratby.


He had deliberately gone in search of


Bratby because, like many of the artists he has championed in his 50-year career, he considered that he has “unjustifiably neglected”. “I was sifting through all this stuff and


putting some pieces to one side, when Bratby said ‘You can’t choose, if you want to buy, you have to buy everything’. So I did”. “At the time I really could not


understand Bratby’s attitude, but I do now, because I am doing exactly the same thing – clearing everything out and making a fresh start.” On February 21 Julian will be offering


his accumulated stock of Bratby and other paintings at Holloways in Banbury and appropriately there will be a two-day view on February 12-13 at 8 Duke Street in St James’s where Julian Hartnoll has been an almost permanent presence during those 50 years. In fact the sale represents many


phases of his career, with Pre-Raphaelite and other earlier work as well as John Bratby, Edward Middleditch, Jack Smith, Derrick Greaves and the Indian artist Francis Newton Souza all represented. The sale is intended to mark a new


chapter in his career, but he will not be foresaking Duke Street where he now occupies what has been styled the smallest gallery in London. “I shall stay here. The shop window


works,” he says, pointing out that in the three years since he moved there from larger premises just off the street in nearby Mason’s Yard he has sold two or three pictures a month from the window. He says he will now be handling more


contemporary and Outsider art, but he also intends to remain the main source of expertise on Bratby, having bought the entire archive of 40 boxes including the big scrapbooks in which Bratby pasted all his press cuttings and correspondence alongside fascinating lists with running totals of the value of pictures sold. From this archive Bratby emerges as


an artist obsessed with money who liked Rolls-Royces and expensive hotels. “He worked out that he needed £100,000 a year to live on. He could have painted two great paintings, but he often


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