NEW YORK— A fair offering something for everyone might sound like a good thing, but in the case of the annual International Fine Print Dealers Association Print Fair, which was at the Park Avenue Armory last Thursday, October 30 through Sunday, it can feel like a liability. This is not a huge fair by present standards, with fewer than 90 dealers present, who have in common only that they offer prints of one sort or another. As a result, the range of works shown is huge — you have old masters rubbing shoulders with secondary-market moderns, and Japanese woodblocks up against contemporary small presses. With the energy of individual booths pulling in different directions, there is no cohesive mood to the affair, and the result feels more confused than diverse. Berlin's Jörg Maass Kunsthandel, for example, had a special display of the German Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s prints, while right next door New York's Two Palms was featuring the über-zeitgeisty Elizabeth Peyton, and opposite them the booth of C. & J. Goodfriend, also in New York, offered everything from the Renaissance to Max Beckmann.

The Peyton display at Two Palms (which even included the final cast of 6 of her first editioned sculpture, 2007’s Pati, at $90,000) was typical of another characteristic of this fair: dealers attempting tie-ins with current museum shows. Both Osborne Samuel and Redfern had special Vorticist displays (for collectors who’d enjoyed “Rhythms of Modern Life” at the Met, presumably), and Pace Prints devoted half of their booth to Mary Heilmann (who, like Peyton, is currently at the New Museum). That the other half of the Pace display was made up of Chinese artists – Bai Yiluo, Zhang Dali, Zhang Huan, Qin Feng, and the Luo Brothers – was one of the fair’s few conscious acknowledgments of shifts in the market. On the other hand, anxieties about the current economic uncertainties didn’t do anything to pick up the fair’s energy level, with dealers admitting privately that “everybody’s trying to stay as upbeat as possible, even though we know it’s not going to be a good year,” as one put it, or, in another’s words, “nobody’s going to break any records.” Gordon Cooke of London’s Fine Art Society, whose booth featured a wall of Whistlers among other things, summed up the problem like this: “People are interested, but in the present climate, they just don’t know what they should be paying.”

Still, by fair’s end on Sunday, many dealers were smiling. Advanced Graphics London did particularly well with Albert Irvin’s brightly colored “Nebraska” series (2008). In editions of 35 at $1,300 a print, these proved an attractive way to get something by the venerable Royal Academician. Kristin Soderqvist at Graphicstudio (part of the University of South Florida) was delighted to have sold the last unique cyanotype of Christian Marclay’s most recent project with them, Memento (The Rolling Stones) (2008), for $57,500. Roseanne Colachis at the Lyons, Colorado–based Shark’s Ink. was just as happy, though she admitted that she had been nervous before the fair opened. Among other things, the gallery had sold four (from an edition of 30) examples of Enrique Chagoya’s entertaining concertina-fold Histoire Naturelle des Espécies … for $2,800 each. Those Chinese artists at Pace also did well, with Bai Yiluo’s large-scale Yuan and Dollar prints proving particularly popular at $3,000 each (or $5,000 for the pair) in editions of 60. Redfern’s Vorticist display paid off, particularly with prints (by Cyril Edward Power, for example) from the same edition as works actually included in the Met show. Flowers, from New York and London, sold work by Glen Baxter, Bernard Cohen, and Patrick Hughes, among others. And, in a shameless attempt at topicality, Marlborough displayed a 2002 Red Grooms lithograph depicting the New York City marathon. It sold.