TEFAF New York: How Modern Art is Done Uptown

Photos by Elizabeth Freeman.

NEW YORK – It’s 1 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon on Park Avenue, hardly a time you’d expect to see limos jockeying for the best spots to divest themselves of beautiful people hungry for art and champaign.

Yet there they were, the elite gallerists, collectors and their worthy cohort gathering for the latest edition of TEFAF, the European art show that opened this week with a dizzying display of high-end contemporary art and design objects. Think of it as an upper east side version of Frieze, with a distinct European flavor.

The annual event, staged by The European Fine Art Foundation, has transformed the 19th Century Armory building into a stage for art, commerce and socializing. There was vintage furniture, to be sure, and some jewelry here and there, but mostly this is a show of modern art: paintings and sculpture, abstract, figurative, surrealist, cubist, minimalist and pop art by the likes of Picasso, Miro, Matisse, Dalí, Warhol, Basquiat and many, many others.

This Dutch art fair, which first entered New York’s spring art schedule in 2017, has established itself as a must-see event at a time when art fairs have evolved into year-round global celebrations of commerce, culture, and creativity. It is distinguished by its museum quality work by established artists and modern masters and by the tony, uptown crowd it attracts.

TEFAF hosts its signature event each year in Maastricht, featuring a wide range of collecting categories with a strong focus on classical fine art and antiques. TEFAF New York, meanwhile, skews much more modern, with contemporary art and design and a smaller mix of ethnographic and ancient art.

The Maastricht show has been held for decades and is a globally significant art and design event. Still, Hidde van Seggelen, president of the TEFAF Executive Committee, described New York as “the center of gravity for the art world.”

“With the convergence of the international art community, the city's vibrant energy is palpable and still unmatched by any other place in the world,” he said, adding that the show’s mission “is to continue the legacy of TEFAF by sharing inspiring objects with art lovers from around the globe."

Here are six must-see works:

Psycho-site E 128 – Site avec 6 personnages, Jean Dubuffet, 1981, acrylic on paper laid down on canvas, presented by Galerie Mitterrand, France.

From the depths of so-called “low art” comes this brilliant work by Dubuffet, the insider’s outsider who pretty much single handedly created the genre he aptly named “Art Brut.” Created four years before his death, Psycho-site exists across just two dimensions and a limited color palette, but it nonetheless delivers a startling depth of energy, emotion and movement. Its juxtaposition of geometry and organic shapes, with fluid lines and obedient squares and dots, the piece issues balance and sway, briniging to life a weeping red face and an infinite flow that ascends toward a central nucleus.

Claustrofobia, Rufino Tamayo, 1954, oil on canvas, presented by Leon Tovar Gallery, New York

Claustrofobia is a surrealistic masterpiece that reflects the artistic climate of the mid-20th century when artists sought to challenge traditional conventions and delve into the realms of the subconscious. With its vibrant reds and pinks, contorted figures, and enigmatic window shape, the painting immerses viewers in a dreamlike realm that invites contemplation about the depths of the human psyche. Its hues create visual tension and emotional intensity, evoking a profound sense of claustrophobia within a confined space.

Le Printemps (Composition lithochronique), Oscar Dominguez, 1939,oil on canvas, presented by Applicat-Prazan, France 

Le printemps highlights the excellence of Domínguez’s painting in the late 1930s. These years saw the development and culmination of his ‘cosmic period’: his endeavour to pursue a style of painting that opened onto a new dimension of time and space. .scar Domínguez in these years is a totally visionary painter—the inventor of decalcomania, surrealist by definition, as well as an excellent constructor of objects, and creator of disturbing oneiric realities. In Le printemps, the painter presents us with colossal, enigmatic characters, half-way between tree shapes and geological forms that emerge as a frenzied forest with strange dream-like resonances.

Long Black, Shirley Jaffe, 1965 – 1966, oil on canvas, presented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia, France 

Born in 1923 in New Jersey, Shirley Jaffe worked and lived in Paris until her death, on September 29th, 2016. Shirley Jaffe developed a visual language inspired by her immediate urban environment, a lexicon of colors and forms that she developed and enriched continuously. By controlling the interplay of forces between the lines, color fields and their frontiers, the artist harmoniously builds an image which circumscribes a dynamic within its framework, the better to make the viewer aware of their own inner mechanism of possibility. While never abandoning the visual seductiveness of its bold color combinations and familiar signs, the solidity of the composition enables the painting to exist in an autonomous, frontal relation to the beholder. Transgressing the foundations of verticality and horizontality, Jaffe manages to achieve an ideal ordering of motifs and achieve an intrinsic unity, an interplay that is never merely decorative.

TOP SECRET 3, Jenny Holzer, 2012, U.S. government document, oil on linen, presented by Sprüth Magers, Germany

Jenny Holzer is known for her work with text, either written by the artist or found and appropriated into stunning paintings, drawings and sculptures. TOP SECRET 3 (2012) stems from her celebrated series of Redaction Paintings. Since the early 2000s, Holzer has culled through US government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, particularly related to US military actions in the Middle East, the so-called War on Terror and cyber counterintelligence. Holzer reproduces these declassified documents, enlarging them and adding color or metal leafing but always faithfully maintaining both their textual and redacted passages. By emphasizing the redactions, she makes visible the hidden power structures and dynamics supposedly keeping Americans safe, while also echoing the histories of twentieth-century abstract painting.

Manichini, Giorgio de Chirico, 1926, gouache on paper, presented by Landau Fine Art, Montreal

The 1920s marked a profound shift in Giorgio de Chirico’s work. The Italian painter, sculptor, draftsman, writer and founder of Metaphysical painting all but abandoned the Metaphysical poetic works for which he was known and turned to traditional Italian painting, from 1400 – 1600, as his inspiration. Aligning himself with the wider artistic ‘return to order’ that prevailed among the post-war avantgarde, de Chirico began to develop a distinctly new style that would define his paintings of the 1920s and 1930s as the subjects that were so prominent in the artist’s earlier work, like his faceless “mannequins” or manichini, underwent a metamorphosis.

TEFAF runs through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave, between 66th and 67th Streets in Manhattan.