Miami – Part I

Miami is filled with antiques shows and exhibits. We started at the biggest, the Original Miami Beach Antique Show, with over 800 dealers selling all types of antiques, especially jewelry. Later we visited the Miami Modernism show, devoted to the best made after the 1920s.

The Original show attracts dealers of expensive, ornate antiques from many countries. There was so much, we can only report on the objects that caught our eye. One was a Japanese silver punch bowl that looked like a 1950s piece but probably dates from the early 1900s. It was marked with Japanese characters and cost $1,500. A Tiffany silver soup ladle in the Japanese pattern was also $1,500. Many other soup ladles were selling for $300 and up.

We stopped at a booth filled with nothing but Catalin radios and clocks. Prices for the radios ranged from $80 to $15,000. Clocks were $200 to $1,000. Plastic sells well if it is colorful and old. We admired the fossils and rock specimens in another booth. They aren’t usually found at antiques shows, but they certainly met the age requirement.

We were looking for vintage cut crystal beads to give as a gift and found many strings. Most were about $25. Garden figures were in a New Orleans dealer’s booth. He was a contractor rebuilding the houses destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Gardens are being rebuilt, too, and his statues and urns sell quickly, he told us. We liked a 19th-century cast stone figure of Diana. It was over 6 feet tall and priced $5,900.

A very large, weird chair stopped us. It was shaped like a seated skeleton with realistic carved-wood bones. It had belonged to Vincent Price, the horror-movie villain. Price: $7,600. The dealer in a booth with nothing but perfume atomizers, hundreds of them, gave us a lesson in how to recognize the best (dealers love to teach you while you’re looking). His most expensive bottle was an Imperial glass piece at $2,500. Atomizers by Steuben, Cambridge Glass and Fry were also high-priced.

Handel lamps were shown at surprisingly high prices in a booth filled with nothing but lamps with glass shades. A Handel with a 9-inch-diameter floral chipped-ice shade was $35,000. We came back the next day and that lamp was sold, along with many of the others. A nearby dealer with Tiffany lamps and glass said he had “a remarkable show”; by the time we returned to his booth, it was almost empty.

A London dealer was selling mid-century jewelry. The Ed Wiener 1950s “dancing lady” silver pin was $2,000. A Sam Kramer abstract silver pin with a real glass eye was $4,000. Another dealer told us that the precious jewelry by name designers was still expensive, but it was not interesting many buyers at this show. Last year the same type of pieces sold well.

Dramatic, big bronzes, especially those by American sculptors, sold out in one booth the first day at prices in the thousands. Enameled French boxes were moving, too. A vintage clothing dealer said her hottest items were Pucci blouses and beaded purses.

to be continued…