Bronze Age

NEW YORK—Some two dozen pieces of furniture and sculpture in bronze, most displaying patinas that usually betoken several thousand years of existence, take over Cristina Grajales’s Manhattan gallery, at 10 Greene Street, from May 6 to June 14. They are the work of the father-and-son artists Philip and Kelvin LaVerne, who from the 1950s to the 1980s turned out bronze objects that they aged with their own secret process and decorated with distinctively etched and enameled Oriental, Classical and Etruscan motifs. Their designs were produced in editions of no more than 12, in a seven-story building on SoHo’s Wooster Street, where Kelvin, now 72 and retired, still lives. (Philip died in 1987.) The exhibition includes coffee tables and dining tables, mirrors, bookcases and wall hangings, as well as several sculptures, at prices ranging from $6,000 to $90,000.

"Bronze Age" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.