New York Times, 25.11.2011

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THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2011
Holiday Gift Guide
Caravans Between Covers
The lengths that collectors will
go to, the money and legwork
they will sink into exotic antiques
completely unrelated to their daily lives, can make for transporting reading. The
year’s five best books
in the genre show how
owners have traveled,
researched and
ANTIQUES bought obsessively,
and pressed dealers
for background information on
every acquisition. The collections
slowly fill homes and storage
spaces, survive wars and natural
disasters, and occasionally turn
up on public view far from their
homelands.
EVE M.
KAHN
AFRICAN GOLD: JEWELRY AND ORNAMENTS FROM GHANA, CÔTE
D’IVOIRE, MALI AND SENEGAL IN
THE COLLECTION OF THE GOLD OF
AFRICA BARBIER-MUELLER MUSEUM IN CAPE TOWN (Prestel,
$45). The subtitle alone of “African Gold” suggests long-distance
shipping. Joseph Mueller, a Swiss
manufacturing heir, founded the
collection in the 1920s, while also
focusing on Modern paintings
and antiquities. His daughter and
son-in-law, Monique and Jean
Paul Barbier, kept buying for
their museum in Geneva. A decade ago a South African mining
company bought the family’s African gold to display in an 18thcentury Dutch slaveholder’s
house in Cape Town.
This book, by the British historian Timothy F. Garrard, explains how miners panned for
gold dust at remote riverbanks,
and then blacksmiths formed the
nuggets. Carved cuttlefish bones
served as molds for casting gold.
Different tribes developed tastes
for flanged earrings, granulated
beads and animal amulets. Africans sometimes traded the metal
for European guns, chairs and
umbrellas, but export by theft
was more common. A British soldier wrote in the 1870s about seizures in Ghana that resulted in
mounds of “gold plates and figures, nuggets, bracelets, knobs,
masks, bells, jaw bones and fragments of skulls, plaques, bosses
— all of the metal as pure as it
can be.”
VODUN: AFRICAN VOODOO (Hirmer Publishers, distributed by the
University of Chicago Press,
$85). Jacques Kerchache, a
French tribal-art gallerist, received many of his eerier African
objects directly from practitioners of voodoo in Benin. “He met
Art for Sale
9002
La Belle Epoque Vintage Posters
Moved to 115A Greenwich Ave., NYC
Extensive collection of investment
quality vintage posters. 212-362-1770.
Tues-Fri. 11:30-7; Sat. 11:30-6; Sun 12-5
www.la-belle-epoque.com
Flea Markets-Shows
9004
EAST 67th STREET MARKET
Antiques, Flea & Farmers Market
Open Every Sat 6am-5pm, rain or shine.
E 67th St btwn 1st/York Avs 877-4E67-MKT
GREENFLEA IN/OUTDOOR MKT
Columbus Ave. btw 76/77 St.
Antiques/Collectibles/Crafts
Fashions/Jewelry/Home Furnishings
Saturday & Sunday, 10-5:30
Free Admission-Families Welcome
www.greenfleamarkets.com/212-239-3025
NJ BOOK/EPHEMERA FAIR
Ramada Hotel, 130 Rt. 10 W, East Hanover,
Fri, 12/2: 5-9 & Sat, 12/3: 10-4. $5 w/This Ad
Appraisals Sat: 1-3
FlamingoEventz.com / 603.509.2639
Wanted
9006
RUSSIAN ART WANTED
Top prices paid. Call or email - ABA Gallery
212-677-2367 [email protected]
STERLING SILVER WANTED
Tiffany, Buccellati, Georg Jensen,
Chinese, all flatware sets, tea sets,
any sterling silver.
NELSON & NELSON ANTIQUES
in the Pierre Hotel Lobby 212-980-5825
2 East 61st Street, NYC .
Buying & selling for over 35 years.
CLUE OF THE DAY
MODERN AMERICAN
ART NOVELS
THE TITLE OF THIS
1981 PULITZER PRIZE
WINNER COMES FROM
A JONATHAN SWIFT
LINE ABOUT HOW
LESSER MINDS UNITE
TO OPPOSE GENIUS
FOR THE CORRECT
RESPONSE, WATCH
JEOPARDY! TONIGHT
OR LOOK IN THIS
SPACE MONDAY
IN THE TIMES.
Yesterday’s Response: What
is Stockholm syndrome?
Watch JEOPARDY!
7 p.m. on Channel 7
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES;
ILLUSTRATION BY CATHERINE COLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
its priests, was initiated into its
rituals and was struck by the astonishing forms invented by its
sculptors,” his wife, Anna
Douaoui, and the curator Hervé
Chandès write in “Vodun.”
The Fondation Cartier produced the book for an exhibition
of about 80 voodoo sculptures
that Kerchache, who died in 2001,
had amassed. The carvings,
made in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, were meant to
protect homes, promote family
harmony and harm enemies. The
human and animal figures are
snarled in ropes, chains, beads
and bones, and pierced by nails
and wooden stakes.
“Neck bindings are supposed
to cause aphasia in the adversary; chest bindings attack the
breath of life, those around the
lower abdomen attack sexual potency, and leg bindings lead to
paralysis,” Kerchache wrote in a
1986 essay about his collection.
The objects were photographed
for the book on stark black backgrounds, and worn patches on
the wood surfaces gleam.
TURKMEN JEWELRY: SILVER ORNAMENTS FROM THE MARSHALL
AND MARILYN R. WOLF COLLECTION (Metropolitan Museum of
Art, distributed by Yale University Press, $60). Tribes in Turkmenistan warded off evil by
wearing carnelian and turquoise
disks inscribed with Islamic and
pagan prayers. They also draped
themselves in silver coins,
spheres and plaques to boast
about how much wealth they
stole on raids into Persia.
“Turkmen Jewelry” shows 188
promised gifts to the Met. The
Wolfs assembled them over 30
years, “whether traveling to Central Asia and buying directly in
the bazaars of Bukhara and Samarkand or bargaining with determined dealers steeped in the local lore and market parlance of
Istanbul or Tehran,” the art curator Layla S. Diba writes. Dictators in the 20th century destroyed much of the country’s
folk traditions.
“Nothing is known about the
beginnings of Turkmen jewelry,”
Ms. Diba writes. She has pored
through Victorian explorers’ accounts of trips to Turkmenistan,
observing how women among
the nomads balanced the weight
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THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2011
Holiday Gift Guide
Caravans Between Covers
From Weekend Page 37
of silver on their heads and backs
and “produced the sound of ringing bells as they moved.”
TURKMEN CARPETS: MASTERPIECES OF STEPPE ART, FROM
16TH TO 19TH CENTURIES, THE
HOFFMEISTER COLLECTION (Ar-
noldsche, $95). Peter Hoffmeister, a rug scholar and collector in
Germany, has spent 40 years researching how Turkmen tribes
designed, wove, used and repaired their tent hangings and
floor coverings. “Turkmen Carpets,” by the Russian textiles historian Elena Tsareva, analyzes
168 weavings. Mr. Hoffmeister
has subjected them to carbon
dating, and individual knots of
goat and camel hair have been
counted.
Ms. Tsareva has determined
which tribes favored different
shades of red madder dye, ranging from salmon pink to purplish
brown. The zigzagging rug patterns represent pomegranates,
wheels, vines, birds, trees and
serpents. The pile textures are
subtly ridged because makers intentionally dropped stitches here
and there. A single textile could
take years to produce.
Ms. Tsareva writes that weavers would hunch over gossamer
strands on outdoor looms “only
during the hottest summer period, primarily in mountain pastures where the dry air helped to
prevent the warps sticking together.”
EXOTIC TASTE: ORIENTALIST INTERIORS (The Vendome Press, $75).
Peter Hoffmeister has followed in
centuries of footsteps of Westerners fascinated by Asian artisans’
most laborious hand techniques.
In “Exotic Taste,” the French art
historian Emmanuelle Gaillard
describes how aristocrats scattered from Russia to Portugal
would invest heavily in imports.
PRESTEL PUBLISHING
An ornamental lion from Ghana in “African Gold,” by
the British historian Timothy F. Garrard.
“It had cost an infinite sum,”
Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia
wrote about the 1730s Japanese
lacquer panels with images of
courtiers that she had installed at
her Bayreuth castle. Minarets
and pagodas arose on estates
where no Muslim or Shinto would
ever live, and European factories
figured out how to produce imitation Siamese silks and weave Tibetan goat hair into Indian paisley motifs for shawls.
This book makes particularly
good holiday reading because of
Ms. Gaillard’s descriptions of jolly multicultural parties and in-
tense shopping sprees. The
French writer Pierre Loti, who
lined his 1880s house with Moorish tiles and serrated arches, set
up a simulated opium den for his
guests. He had them dress up in
“Chinese costumes, some as
dancers, others as warriors or eunuchs.”
During one 1880s trip to Japan,
he filled his luggage with half a
ton of antiques, including a crosslegged statue of a six-armed god.
He summoned a rickshaw for delivery, he wrote in a memoir, “and
the god took his place in it like a
living person.”
Distinctive Titles for Bibliophiles
From Weekend Page 39
ville House, $19.95)
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE HUMAN CONDITION: SELECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS, 1989-2010
by Geoff Dyer. Mr. Dyer, a shapeshifting British writer, is among
the best essayists on the planet,
and this book includes some of
his finest work. He casts an almost perversely wide net here.
There are pieces about Ian McEwan and the photographer
Jacques Henri Lartigue and the
jazz cornet player Don Cherry.
He goes on tour with the aging
rockers in Def Leppard and goes
up in a decommissioned Russian
MIG-29 fighter plane. He wanders though Camus’s Algeria. He
reflects upon the joy of having
sex in good hotels. What these essays impart is ecstasy. (Graywolf
Press, $18)
PULPHEAD: ESSAYS by John Jere-
miah Sullivan. From a demonically talented Southern writer, essays on topics as varied as Axl
ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN REDNISS, FROM “RADIOACTIVE”
“Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and
Fallout,” is an illustrated biography of a collaboration.
Rose, Tennessee cave systems
and the Southern Agrarian literary movement. The putty that
binds them is Mr. Sullivan’s
steady, subversive and unhurried
voice. Reading him, I felt the way
Mr. Sullivan does while listening
to a Bunny Wailer song called
“Let Him Go.” That is, I felt “like
a puck on an air-hockey table
that’s been switched on.” (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, $16)
RADIOACTIVE: MARIE & PIERRE
CURIE: A TALE OF LOVE AND FALLOUT by Lauren Redniss. This il-
lustrated biography of Marie and
Pierre Curie lays bare their childhoods, their headlong love story,
their scientific collaboration and
the way their toxic discoveries,
which included radium and polonium, poisoned them in slow motion. This book is an unusual and
forceful thing to have in your
hands. Ms. Redniss’s text is long,
literate and supple. Her drawings
are ambitious and spooky. Her
people have elongated faces and
pale forms; they’re etiolated Modiglianis. They populate a Paris
that has become a dream city. (It
Books, $29.99)
TOWNIE: A MEMOIR by Andre
Dubus III. This is a sleek muscle
car of a memoir that growls like
an amalgam of work by Richard
Price, Stephen King, Ron Kovic,
Breece D’J Pancake and Dennis
Lehane, set to the desolate
thumping of Bruce Springsteen’s
“Darkness on the Edge of Town.”
Mr. Dubus is the son of the writer
Andre Dubus, a father who
wasn’t around for most of the author’s difficult and impoverished
childhood. This book could become, and I mean this fondly, one
hell of a Ben Affleck movie.
(W. W. Norton & Company,
$25.95)
THE VOYAGE OF THE ROSE CITY:
AN ADVENTURE AT SEA by John
Moynihan. This posthumously
published book, from the son of
New York Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, tells the story of how
the author left Wesleyan University during the summer of his junior year and joined the merchant marine. He spent four
months crossing the equator on
an oil supertanker called the
Rose City. This is a young man’s
book, for sure; it was written
when its author was barely 20.
But Moynihan has a good story to
tell, one that’s flecked with briny
bits of Melville and Conrad and
Raban. His unshowy prose has
genuine immediacy. He’s never
less than frank, funny company
on the page. (Spiegel & Grau,
$22)