Displaying items by tag: Albert Sack

At a memorial service last month for the American furniture dealer Albert M. Sack, who died last year at 96, his son, Donald, gave a eulogy explaining how the family’s Manhattan gallery relentlessly scrounged for stock. Albert Sack would spend his weekends calling countryside dealers and owners to see what underpriced treasures might be for sale, and then drive away on Monday mornings in his station wagon for scouting trips.

“If it was in Podunk, he’d head off to Podunk,” Donald Sack told the mourners gathered under military murals at the Park Avenue Armory’s Veterans Room.

Albert Sack filed away raw notes from his travels, as well as mounds of other paperwork dating back to the company’s founding in 1905. He outlived two brothers who helped run the business that their father, Israel, had started, and after it closed in 2002, Albert moved to North Carolina and kept dealing. He set up a separate apartment to store 200 linear feet of correspondence, appraisals, invoices, auction catalogs, reference books and clippings albums.

In December the Yale University Art Gallery acquired the Sack archive from the estate. (The Americana collector Robert M. Bass financed the undisclosed purchase price.) Last month, Patricia E. Kane, the gallery’s lead American decorative arts curator, used a pearly penknife to slice open the bruised and dented boxes. They had just arrived at a former Bayer aspirin factory in West Haven, Conn., where Yale has set up storage spaces, offices and labs.

“I haven’t had time to actually look through all this stuff and see what I’ve got,” she said, as she leafed through files labeled with shorthand like “Hepp” (Hepplewhite) and “Chip” (Chippendale).

The Sacks scrawled in the margins of auction catalogs and gallery ads, noting prices they paid over the years, past owners and any components that had been replaced and refinished. The brothers wrote “FAKE” across the images of numerous pieces they saw for sale.

They documented their repeated contacts with anyone who owned something they wanted and their disputes with other scholars over authenticity. The Sacks also wrote warnings to one another: “Lady is very peculiar — ‘crazy,’ ” a note from around 1960 reports about a collector worth visiting in Connecticut.

“This is fantastic, truly,” Ms. Kane said. In the boxes she kept finding images to add to one of her pet projects, Yale’s online Rhode Island Furniture Archive, and discovering hints that works already in the database might be fake or heavily restored.

Yale will be digitizing parts of the Sack archive, including material in obsolete formats, like microfiche and glass lantern slides. Researchers will eventually be able to scroll the Web site or make an appointment to learn how a particular American antique fared on the market during the last century, and who squabbled over whether it was real.

RAIL DEPOT TREASURES

When train stations died along Texas rail lines, Roy Gay, an auditor for the Union Pacific Railroad, heard the news early and kept track of closings for 65 years. Upon arriving at obsolete stations, he would collect artifacts for display at a century-old depot that he had moved to his East Texas farm.

He took home railroad car linens, sugar tongs, spittoons, engine components, metal footstools and conductors’ caps, among other items made between the 1880s and the 1950s. But Mr. Gay, who died in January at 86, did not share the contents of the depot with visitors to the farm.

“I had no idea that he had this, absolutely none,” said Scott Franks, a longtime friend of Mr. Gay’s, who owns A&S Antique Auction Company in Waco, Tex. On March 10 and 11 A&S will be auctioning the Gay collection, divided into about 1,000 lots.

Mr. Gay started planning the A&S sale late last year. He told the company how he helped clear out old railroad stations. “He got pick of the litter,” Mr. Franks said.

But Mr. Gay died before he finished listing where everything came from. “We just run out of time,” Mr. Franks said.

Mr. Gay’s most valuable items are rail line advertisements on metal plaques a few feet wide, with estimates in the five figures.

Many will be tempted to regard the passing of Albert Sack, who died on May 29 at 96, as the end of an era. He was the second of three brothers who perpetuated the legacy of their famous father, Israel Sack (1883-1959), continuing the family business for nearly 70 years until its doors closed in 2002.
 
Aside from Bernard Levy, who is 94 and in good health, Sack is the last of the great dealers in early American furniture who built major public and private collections in the middle decades of the 20th century. Along with the Levys, the Ginsburgs, John Walton, Joe Kindig, Jr. and a handful of others, Albert, Harold and Robert Sack were formidable tastemakers who shaped the content, interpretation and presentation of American decorative arts in museums across the country. With his “good, better, best” taxonomy, Albert Sack even devised a simple language for discussing the esoterica of furniture connoisseurship. The system was so seductive that it has been adapted for everything from office products to smart-phone apps.
 
Albert Sack represents the beginning of an era more than its end. A redoubtable Lithuanian immigrant who started the family firm in 1905, Israel Sack belonged to a pioneering generation of self-taught dealers in American antiques for whom knowledge was power. As underscored by surviving correspondence from the 1920s, Henry F. du Pont gravitated to the former cabinetmaker because he was a confident judge of quality, condition and authenticity.

Slight, nimble and impeccably groomed, Albert Sack in many ways resembled the courtly New York dealer Leo Castelli (1907-1999), a master merchant credited with elevating modern American painting and sculpture onto the international stage through a shrewd and much emulated combination of exclusivity and mass-marketing.
 
Like Castelli, Albert Sack harnessed the media for his own purposes. In a detail now largely forgotten, it was magazine editor Alice Winchester who urged Albert to expand an article that he had written for her into his first book, Fine Points of Furniture.  Originally published in 1950, the best-seller was reprinted 24 times before Albert’s protégée, Atlanta dealer Deanne Levison, helped him write its sequel, The New Fine Points of Furniture. Published in 1993, the updated guide added “superior” and “masterpiece” categories to Albert’s original nomenclature.  It is among these “masterpieces” that one finds some of the great objects that Albert Sack turned up during his many years on the road as the principal buyer for Israel Sack, Inc.
 
Though scholar-dealers are the norm these days in the nether reaches of the Americana trade, Israel Sack, Inc. was ahead of its time. The firm realized its mission of public education through its publication of the serialized volumes American Antiques from the Israel Sack Collection, through the brothers’ extensive schedule of lectures and appearances, and with glamorous, gallery-style installations. With these activities, Israel Sack, Inc. did much to professionalize an industry known more for its stubborn unconventionality than its sober business practices. A consummate showman, Albert Sack was at his best when he was sharing his wealth of knowledge with others. He is remembered for his generosity by the younger dealers, curators and auctioneers whom he mentored.

What has changed since Albert Sack first came of age is the pyramid structure of the antiques business, with its intricate wholesale alliances and network of smaller dealers feeding larger ones.  Those relationships were disrupted by the ascendance of the international auction houses in the 1980s and later by digital technology.
 
Some things about Israel Sack, Inc. seem positively quaint. One is the father’s equation of formal beauty with patriotic virtue, a holdover from the day when objects were prized for their historical associations. The other is Albert Sack’s remarkable talent as a storyteller, a gift all but lost in the current generation. Again, digital technology may be partly to blame. As David Streitfeld recently wrote in the New York Times, “Words are not much valued on the Internet, perhaps because it features so many of them.”
 
For Albert Sack, who loved the chase and was always one breath away from his next discovery, the greatest objects were intimately associated with the people who made them and even more electrifyingly with those who had the passion to pursue them.
 
The world is far more ambiguous now. Where there were once old-time practitioners like Albert Sack there are now agents who move discreetly between the market and the academy, dealers who double as auctioneers, conservators who act as dealers and experts who are also television celebrities. It is in light of such complexity that the ordered world of Albert Sack, with its clear distinctions between better and best, most resonates.

Write to Laura Beach at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Many will be tempted to regard the passing of Albert Sack, who died on May 29 at 96, as the end of an era. He was the second of three brothers who perpetuated the legacy of their famous father, Israel Sack (1883-1959), continuing the family business for nearly 70 years until its doors closed in 2002.
 
Aside from Bernard Levy, who is 94 and in good health, Sack is the last of the great dealers in early American furniture who built major public and private collections in the middle decades of the 20th century. Along with the Levys, the Ginsburgs, John Walton, Joe Kindig, Jr. and a handful of others, Albert, Harold and Robert Sack were formidable tastemakers who shaped the content, interpretation and presentation of American decorative arts in museums across the country. With his “good, better, best” taxonomy, Albert Sack even devised a simple language for discussing the esoterica of furniture connoisseurship. The system was so seductive that it has been adapted for everything from office products to smart-phone apps.
 
Albert Sack represents the beginning of an era more than its end. A redoubtable Lithuanian immigrant who started the family firm in 1905, Israel Sack belonged to a pioneering generation of self-taught dealers in American antiques for whom knowledge was power. As underscored by surviving correspondence from the 1920s, Henry F. du Pont gravitated to the former cabinetmaker because he was a confident judge of quality, condition and authenticity.

Slight, nimble and impeccably groomed, Albert Sack in many ways resembled the courtly New York dealer Leo Castelli (1907-1999), a master merchant credited with elevating modern American painting and sculpture onto the international stage through a shrewd and much emulated combination of exclusivity and mass-marketing.
 
Like Castelli, Albert Sack harnessed the media for his own purposes. In a detail now largely forgotten, it was magazine editor Alice Winchester who urged Albert to expand an article that he had written for her into his first book, Fine Points of Furniture.  Originally published in 1950, the best-seller was reprinted 24 times before Albert’s protégée, Atlanta dealer Deanne Levison, helped him write its sequel, The New Fine Points of Furniture. Published in 1993, the updated guide added “superior” and “masterpiece” categories to Albert’s original nomenclature.  It is among these “masterpieces” that one finds some of the great objects that Albert Sack turned up during his many years on the road as the principal buyer for Israel Sack, Inc.
 
Though scholar-dealers are the norm these days in the nether reaches of the Americana trade, Israel Sack, Inc. was ahead of its time. The firm realized its mission of public education through its publication of the serialized volumes American Antiques from the Israel Sack Collection, through the brothers’ extensive schedule of lectures and appearances, and with glamorous, gallery-style installations. With these activities, Israel Sack, Inc. did much to professionalize an industry known more for its stubborn unconventionality than its sober business practices. A consummate showman, Albert Sack was at his best when he was sharing his wealth of knowledge with others. He is remembered for his generosity by the younger dealers, curators and auctioneers whom he mentored.

What has changed since Albert Sack first came of age is the pyramid structure of the antiques business, with its intricate wholesale alliances and network of smaller dealers feeding larger ones.  Those relationships were disrupted by the ascendance of the international auction houses in the 1980s and later by digital technology.
 
Some things about Israel Sack, Inc. seem positively quaint. One is the father’s equation of formal beauty with patriotic virtue, a holdover from the day when objects were prized for their historical associations. The other is Albert Sack’s remarkable talent as a storyteller, a gift all but lost in the current generation. Again, digital technology may be partly to blame. As David Streitfeld recently wrote in the New York Times, “Words are not much valued on the Internet, perhaps because it features so many of them.”
 
For Albert Sack, who loved the chase and was always one breath away from his next discovery, the greatest objects were intimately associated with the people who made them and even more electrifyingly with those who had the passion to pursue them.
 
The world is far more ambiguous now. Where there were once old-time practitioners like Albert Sack there are now agents who move discreetly between the market and the academy, dealers who double as auctioneers, conservators who act as dealers and experts who are also television celebrities. It is in light of such complexity that the ordered world of Albert Sack, with its clear distinctions between better and best, most resonates.

Write to Laura Beach at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..