Antiques & Design

For 40 years London dealer Indar Pasricha has been collecting Indo-European furniture, a hybrid genre that was a byproduct of the spice trade that brought the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, French and English, to the Indian subcontinent and its island neighbor, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). “The ebony furniture, with its low-relief carving, looks extraordinary in a modern setting,” says Pasricha.

Intrigued by the idea of transforming inexpensive materials into original and highly decorative artworks, the Swiss Art Deco artist Jean Dunand mastered the painstakingly meticulous technique of dinanderie. This method of hammering forms out of a sheet of metal such as brass or copper, which was then laid over a shaped mold, became the foundation for Dunand’s early creations.

When Donald Kaufman was a boy in Massachusetts in the 1930s, he wished for a pedal car but never got one. As an adult, though, he fulfilled his childhood desire more than 200 times over, by amassing one of the greatest collections of pre-World War II toys, including 200-odd pedal cars, over almost six decades. This month, Kaufman, a 78-year-old retired toy company executive, is selling it all through Bertoia Auctions of Vineland, N.J., a specialist in pre-World War II toys that will disperse the hoard (which exceeds 10,000 objects) in at least five sales, the first of which will be held March 19–21.

When Raoul Dufy’s intricately carved woodcuts first debuted in 1911, as illustrations for Guillaume Apollinaire’s book of poems Le Bestiaire ou cortège d’Orphée, the quality and importance of the French artist’s technique went relatively unnoticed by his contemporaries. Yet one man, the couturier Paul Poiret, recognized Dufy’s gift for innovation and would later offer him an opportunity to expand his talents through textile design—where Dufy would make a vibrant impact on the world of fashion.