Art: Something Old

Past the pink neon, away from Hot Dog Johnnie’s and the Tower of Pizza, off the asphalt and under the elms, thousands of tourists were finding the peace of quiet ways and the charm of old things. Browsing through side-road antique stores, they gratefully swelled a business that has grown for four decades now, and keeps right on growing. Are antiques art? The mid-19th century farmer who carved a mold for his wife to make cookies for his little daughter’s birthday would have smiled at the thought. He was an artist nonetheless, a creator of images and stretcher of imaginations in the days before TV. And unlike commercial art or entertainment, what he made had the warmth of his hands upon it.

At the artists’ colony of Woodstock, N.Y. last week, Hudson River valley antique dealers staged their annual fair of prize finds. The setting was itself an antique: a 60-ft.-long barn dating back to the middle of the 19th century. More than 1,000 people a day jammed the four-day exhibition, which comprised some 2,000 items, ranging from buttons to bureaus. The ladies who put the show together were mostly grandmothers, but they smilingly shifted furniture that would have given a stevedore pause. As each unveiled her best discoveries, the others clustered like birds. A Civil War soldier’s shaving kit, with slide-out mirror, was admired for its ingenuity. Six people spread out a patchwork quilt, which some country lady had made from her husband’s neckties a century ago, and debated the name of the pattern. Said the oldest hand decisively, “Steps to the White House.” Price of the quilt, which must have cost many weeks of loving labor: $35. In general, prices were not much higher than those of modern machine-made objects.

But imaginative, not monetary, values were what drew the crowds. Forty-five dollars bought a century-old bird cage patterned on a Gothic chapel; no amount of money could ever buy the notion of creating such a thing. Eighty-five dollars bought a rocking horse, carved by some boy’s loving father, which had doubtless earned over a million dollars in fantasy races. Best in show, perhaps, was an iron weather vane in the shape of a rooster, presented by an appropriately named antiquarian, Myra Tinklepaugh. “They’re hard to find,” Mrs. Tinklepaugh briskly allowed. “I’m dickering for another one right now, not far away, only nobody wants to climb up to get it without insurance.”