Maine Antique Digest April 2015

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Maine Antique Digest, April 2015 9-B
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What a winter. Everyone seems to be talking about
the weather. We’ve been lucky here, keeping
mostly warm and never losing power—until
the day after Hollie wrote this sentence. There’s hardly
an experience more jarring to young Americans than los-
ing power (unless perhaps losing Internet access), espe-
cially to us, as our whole little house runs on electricity.
You think, “Oh well, as long as the power’s off, I’ll go
do the dishes—oh, well pump,” or “I’m just going to go
sit in a hot bath and—oh, water heater,” or “Fine. I’ll
just go read with a nice cup of tea. Just need to turn the
kettle on—oh, stove.” You tend to forget quickly about
that which is all around you, that which you use as auto-
matically as the arm you reach out for it with.
As Apuleius, a Roman philosopher, put it, “Familiar-
ity breeds contempt while rarity wins admiration.” (Ol’
Apuleius managed to avoid that whole familiarity prob-
lem pretty handily, as he’s not at the top of the list of
Roman philosophers who typically jump to mind.) The
most common of things are those about which we care
the least, and to a certain extent, this makes sense. We
don’t suggest that we’ll chuck our Oldenburg, Indiana,
wardrobe out in favor of a Victorian-style mass-produced
armoire and certainly not in favor of an Allen-wrench-
and-an-afternoon version. In other ways, though, this
fuels the worst parts of the good-better-best paradigm,
leading to exalting some categories of antiques beyond
what can necessarily be justified while resigning others
to contempt, based not on quality or aesthetics or history,
but based simply on volume. As we’ve learned through
work on Andrew’s latest exhibition, A Tradition of Prog-
ress: Ohio Decorative Arts 1860-1945, which is open
through May 17 at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio in
Lancaster, sometimes that which appears common still
has an incredible story.
We admit to having our professional biases or, often-
times as much as anything, just professional “potholes,”
empty places in the midst of our knowledge. We work
in a business of accumulated knowledge after all, where
you can make efforts to attend conferences and read arti-
cles and browse auction catalogs, all of which are heavily
aligned along the “best” margin of the discussion. Let’s
put it this way: percentage-wise, how many photos in
a publication or slides in a lecture have you ever seen
of things that you absolutely wouldn’t want to own,
wouldn’t stop to pick up free on the side of the road?
Very few, we’re willing to bet, personal aesthetics aside.
Learning about marginal things, things that are actually
marginal because of how common they are, can be tricky.
You won’t necessarily learn about Cambridge glass, for
instance, just by working at an auction company, other
than to learn that people who have lots of it are often
disappointed with current market values and that often
the standard answer about value is that it’s sold in group
lots with a goal of a $200 estimate. Learning colors, pro-
duction lines, pattern names, and years of manufacture of
something like Cambridge glass is, in a sense, something
that requires an opportunity—an enormous collection
that needs to be appraised, for example—because other-
wise, despite volume, quality time with such things can
be rare and financially hard to justify.
In a sense, the things that we eschew as being so com-
mon and ordinary as to be beneath notice are not truly
familiar to us at all. Part of this is because there are fewer
“history” or “antiquarian” collectors than perhaps there
used to be. An antiquarian collector, to us, is a scholar,
someone who will buy a very ordinary, undecorated
stoneware canning jar because the mark on it was used
only for a short time; someone who will buy an old
company catalog for $7 just to have an actual historical
record of what was manufactured during a documented
period of time.
This struggle to raise the ordinary to our attention can
work its way into museums as well. Andrew encountered
this when putting together his object list for the Tradition
of Progress exhibition. Pattern glass, sometimes referred
to as early American pattern glass (EAPG) or just as
pressed glass, is, to put it succinctly, essential to telling
the story of Ohio decorative arts between 1860 and 1945,
the years covered by the exhibition. Andrew had to cover
the material and cover it well. It led him to visit places
such as the Heisey and Cambridge museums we talked
about a few months ago. When asked to choose just a
few pieces to tell the story of any one of the early Ohio
glass factories (or potteries) covered in the exhibition, it
would be easy to choose the three things that have the
most monetary value or that are in patterns with the most
appeal to modern collectors, but looking at these objects
solely in terms of good-better-best and dismissing a sig-
nificant portion of them as not being rare enough to be
interesting would be missing much of the story.
He opted to include pieces like Anchor Hocking’s
Harding pattern vase simply because they are very typi-
cal, very familiar, and he has pointed it out in tours as an
example of how museums often try to highlight a range
of material. He spent 30 minutes in an antiques mall
recently and saw nearly a dozen (five in red and six in
green), purchasing one of each. The total bill with tax
was under $10, but for that, we now have two classic
pieces of mid-20th-century Ohio glass that represent the
best-known, if not necessarily the best, work by one of
the most important glass companies in America. (If you
want to see these and learn a little more about them, stop
by our Facebook page.)
This is one of the challenges museums face. Art muse-
ums move to the pure art end of the spectrum and, as
many people believe they should, try to educate people
about the highest ideals of art. In theory, people do not
want to go to an art museum and see something they
themselves could have done. (Cue grumblings about
modern and contemporary art.) They go to see the pos-
sible transcended, to see the achievement of incredible
skill applied to artistic endeavors. Historical museums
are different, in that they typically, again, in theory, try
to function as completists, stewards of the whole history,
not just the flashy part. They often show the ordinary
parts of everyday life from a different time. In the early
1900s, that ordinary life included unfathomable quanti-
ties of American pressed glass.
For us that was the discovery, the story, because every
single glass factory is its own fascinating story, if you tell
it right. Creativity, innovation, obsession, bankruptcy,
lawsuits, failed partnerships, resurrections—it’s all there,
often in colorful detail. They can also all in their own
ways be woven into larger narratives about the Amer-
ican working and middle classes, the role of American
industry in World War II, the impact of the Great Depres-
sion on consumerism, you name it. Many pieces of early
20th-century glass may be filling boxes at tag sales and
shelves at thrift shops, but the stories of their creation are
rich and varied and deserving of audiences.
It is easy to fall into this pattern, though. In older
antiques, what often makes something rare and thus inter-
esting and/or valuable is how much is known about it rel-
ative to how little is known about comparable things. We
acknowledge that there is a different kind of delight to
a researcher who is working through a handful of clues,
combing through census records and family trees on
Ancestry.com to discover connections, than that which
comes from the seemingly less romantic task of photo-
copying sterile company files. But by that definition,
most current things will never become rare antiques, as
their histories are far more firmly attached.
We may find that we will have to realign our current
criteria for appreciation over the next 50 years or so.
While the number of Chippendale chests, good, better,
best, or otherwise, is apt to remain fairly stable, the vol-
ume of pressed glass is likely to decline just through
attrition and disposal because of the current lack of value
and appreciation. But it will never acquire the mystique
of the unknown. It will always be known, identifiable,
well documented. As modern materials become antiques,
they will call for a significant shift in our value system.
That’s a shift that history and museums are already
beginning to make. For the last 40 years or so, arguably
beginning or at least picking up speed with the publica-
tion of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United
States, history, which for pretty much all time had been
a top-down discipline, has executed a radical reversal,
working from the “bottom,” the common folk. That’s a
shift that has yet to affect the antiques marketplace, at
least to the same degree, although the exceptions—such
as the pots of slave David Drake of Edgefield, South
Carolina, for example—are often financial booms. This
change in approach may actually be the point at which
academia and the trade began to diverge more widely.
It may also be the point at which the folk art/Outsider
art trade began to diverge more widely from the main
antiques trade, as it is one of the larger exceptions of
great value being placed on the work of common folk
without formal training.
We should have a better knowledge of that which is in
our own backyards. We’ve noticed a similar thing with
educational efforts for kids. Thanks to zoos and aquari-
ums, small children are often widely exposed to a whole
array of exotic wildlife. Five-year-olds can rattle off facts
about elephants and lions. Those animals are important;
they are rare; they are endangered. Yet these same chil-
dren may have no awareness of and thus little apprecia-
tion for and little sensitivity to the creatures that live all
around them—deer, chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, all
fascinating creatures with unique abilities that deserve
the consideration that comes with a deeper understand-
ing and familiarity. To live in a world where you love and
understand things only from afar, things that are curated
for your consumption, is to live in a small world after all.
We welcome ideas, tips, criticisms, and ques-
tions regarding “The Young Collector.” We may be
reached by e-mail
digest.com>, on Facebook
YoungAntiquesCollectors), via our blog
antiquescollectors.blogspot.com), or by writing The
Young Collector, c/o Maine Antique Digest, PO Box
1429, Waldoboro, ME 04572.
The Young Collector
In Defense of Pattern Glass
by Hollie Davis and Andrew Richmond
The most common of things
are those about which we
care the least.
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