One of the Fun Fairs

PALM BEACH, Florida—There’s more to this seaside town than Trump’s Mar-a Lago & The Breakers, at least judging from the action at Palm Beach3, the 11-year-old art fair that just finished its three-day run (Jan. 11-13) at the Palm Beach County Convention Center.

Approximately 90 galleries offered a compote of wide-ranging wares in contemporary art, photography, and design. There was way too much crafty glass (including a hand-blown, life-size sitar) and decorator-oriented mush for this observer’s taste, but hey, this isn’t Basel.

Which is a good thing to some, especially an otherwise anonymous Boston/Palm Beach collector who clearly enjoyed the atmosphere, which is considerably less frantic and competitive than at last month’s Art Basel Miami Beach.

“The good thing about this fair,” said the collector after buying Candida Hofer’s baroque photograph Biblioteca Geralda Universidade de Coimbra #6 (2006)—number 3, and the last available, in an edition of 6—for approximately $85,000 from Montreal’s Galerie de Bellefeuille on Saturday, “is it’s not so crowded. Even opening night here was empty. I saw [the photograph] on opening night and came back today to take a second look. You can’t do that in Miami.” (Ironically, the sale fell through on Monday after the client’s architect arrived to measure the photograph [95 ¼ x 78 ¾ inches] and determined it couldn’t fit in the client’s freight elevator. But the gallery managed to sell the Hofer [again] on Monday afternoon to a Miami Beach photography collector, according to gallery owner Jacques de Bellefeuille.)

First-time art-fair exhibitor Nicholas Robinson from New York’s Chelsea district was pleased with his debut, selling a small George Condo painting of a weird-looking clown, Blue Diamonds (2003), for $100,000 and a Cy Twombly work on paper, Untitled from 1965, for $175,000, as well as three 2007 watercolors by gallery artist Kim McCarty at $9,000 each.

“It ended up being a good fair,” said Robinson, "and was worth trying for a number of reasons, like building up rapport with new clients and taking the stuff to places other than the four walls of the gallery.”

Robinson also sold several secondary-market McDermott & McGough platinum/palladium prints of antique-looking still-life interiors, at $15,000 apiece.   

Art-fair veteran Christa Schuebbe of Dusseldorf’s Galerie Schuebbe Projekt was also pleased with the action, selling 32-year-old Chinese avant-garde painter Li Jikai’s Sneaker for €45,000 ($66,000) and a smaller work from his “Buy with Mirror Image” series for €12,000 to a young Citibanker from New York.

“He was in a big hurry,” the dealer said of her new client, “and certainly knew what he wanted.”

Schübbe also sold a figurative painting by Ivo Lucas from 2007, from a series made especially for the Palm Beach venue, for $12,500. Lucas was a student of superstar German painter Albert Oehlen.

New York’s Barry Friedman Ltd. showed a sophisticated pastiche of paintings, photography, and design ranging from a circa 1923 cubist work by Albert Gleizes to new designs by Wendell Castle.

Friedman sold a Wendell Castle floor lamp in the mid-$20,000 range, a five-foot-high porcelain totem with glass insert sculpture, Blue Mist Objet (2007), by Kondo Takahiro for $45,000, and five vases of hand-blown Murano glass by Yoichi Ohira, all priced in the $20,000 range.

“It’s one of the fun fairs,” says Friedman, who wore one of his trademark handmade, brimless hats, “and the only one that enables us to show different periods and different mediums.”