IFPDA `caravan' successfully wraps West Coast run in L.A - Show news - International Fine Print Dealers Association - Brief Article

SPECIAL REPORT--Last November, the annual Print Fair in New York found itself homeless with National Guard troops occupying its usual residence, the Seventh Regiment Armory. The expo, sponsored by the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA), was reinvented as a hotel show with special exhibitions hosted at local galleries. The result was a more intimate event that gave attendees a chance to handle and closely examine the fine prints.

Ironically, this kind of small-show intimacy has become the hallmark of the annual West Coast Print Fairs, also sponsored by the IFPDA each January. Now in its third outing, the Print Fair "caravan" is a series of smaller shows held in Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. This year, nearly 20 print dealers from across America (and one from Germany) made the journey down the West Coast, starting in Seattle on Jan. 12 and winding up in Los Angeles Jan. 25 to 27.

Grouping the five shows together over a two-week period makes the West Coast trip feasible for the fine print dealers to travel from afar, said Sam Davidson of Davidson Galleries in Seattle. "It's efficient," he noted. "We wouldn't be able to get the quality of dealers out here for one small show, but they'll come for a group of them."

The first venue, Seattle, is in its second year. "The Seattle show is just getting off the ground," observed Conrad Graeber of Glyndon, Md. "Last year, we didn't know if people would come, but they did. And they did again this year." Indeed, with the local economy in the doldrums, added Davidson, "I was really concerned going into the Seattle show. But it turned out okay."

The Los Angeles Fine Print Fair was much more than "okay," the dealers agreed. Held this year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and co-sponsored by the museum's Graphic Arts Council, the Fair had strong attendance, with more than 300 people attending the opening night benefit preview and nearly 3,000 visitors striding through the doors over the weekend. Importantly, said Graeber, "People were buying art on opening night. And the really dedicated people came back over the weekend and made more purchases."

In Los Angeles, the IFPDA members offered an extensive array of works on paper from the 16th through the 20th centuries ranging in price from $75 to $75,000. Among the many artists on view were Gustave Bauman, Honore Daumier, Frances Gearheart, David Hockney, Rembrandt, Paul Landacre, Fernand Leger, Currier & Ives, Marc Chagall and Max Beckman. Remba/Mixografia Gallery of West Hollywood exhibited works by Tamayo, while Herbert Egenolf of Dusseldorf, as always, brought a large collection of Japanese prints to the fair.

The small scale of the fair encouraged dealers to showcase works by lesser-known artists. Graeber, for instance, showed some tonal landscape etchings and aquatints by William Palmer Robins, an English artist of the 1920s. Richard Reed Armstrong Fine Arts of Chicago showcased Albert Belleroche's lithograph portraits depicting fashionable late-19th-century women. The work of Belleroche, a contemporary of John Singer Sargent and one of the founders of the Salon d'Automne, had lapsed into obscurity after his death in 1944. The Armstrong gallery, which published a catalog of selected lithographs of Albert Belleroche in 1989, specializes in 19th-century and early-20th-century French material. "People here have been very interested in these works," said Bernard Derroitte, a gallery assistant.

Roger Genser, owner of Prints & the Pauper in Santa Monica, Calif., has been an exhibitor and sometimes co-organizer of the many iterations of a Los Angeles fine print show over the past two decades. But this year's show, at the museum, was unprecedented, he said. "The L.A. County Museum has never had an event like this. In fact, museums have always distanced themselves from commerciality. But we delivered a credible group of art dealers and, judging from the response from collectors, it's a real success."

With the West Coast circuit complete, the IFPDA is sponsoring two more art shows this year. A Minneapolis Fine Print Fair debuts April 26 to 29 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. And the Print Fair in New York is scheduled for Nov. 6 to 10 at a location still to be arranged.

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