http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/arts/design/the-salon-art-design-a-fair-at-the-park-avenue-armory.html 2014-11-14 01:13:17 ‘The Salon: Art & Design,’ a Fair at the Park Avenue Armory “The Salon: Art & Design” at the Park Avenue Armory features upscale pieces with international influences that span many categories. === “ The Salon’s 55 exhibitors skew European, with nearly half coming from Paris (the fair is a sibling of the Paris Biennale). This makes it an excellent source of Art Deco antiques, Jean Prouvé furniture and other French specialties. But its understated gray-and-white booths also hold Japanese ceramics, German Expressionist drawings and African and pre-Columbian sculpture. Many exhibitors, alas, were still unpacking when I was there (opening night was Thursday), meaning that the main virtue of this fair — the sense of booths as veritable period rooms or carefully chosen collections — was not yet in evidence. (Complicated construction and staging was underway at the Belgian dealer and interior designer Axel Vervoordt and at the Parisian 18th-century furniture specialist Kraemer Gallery, to name two that looked particularly ambitious.) What follows is a necessarily incomplete list of highlights, generally single standout pieces of art or furniture and, in a few cases, entire booths that were close to finished. At Ulrich Fiedler, a Berlin gallery new to the fair and prominently situated by the entrance, the precisely placed high-modern offerings include a red wooden armchair by Gerrit Rietveld (one of just five known examples). Also here is a red, yellow and blue stained-glass window by Theo van Doesburg (a de Stijl disciple with Rietveld and others), and a striking black-and-white tapestry by the Bauhaus artist Gunta Stölzl. Across the aisle, Brussels’s Yves Macaux has all things Wiener Werkstatte: notably, a pristine set of 10 dining chairs (and two armchairs) designed by Josef Hoffmann for the Viennese arts patron (and Klimt portrait subject) Over at the booth of the Tiffany specialist Lillian Nassau, a clever little trompe l’oeil table by the American contemporary woodworker Wendell Castle stands somewhat incongruously among the stained-glass lamps. (It has a carved-walnut “tablecloth.”) The Salon’s art-meets-design ethos notwithstanding, the design offerings tend to overshadow the art. This is especially true of the contemporary furnishings, which are quite adventurous. At the Paris-based Scandinavian specialist Galerie Maria Wettergren, Mathias Bengtsson’s wooden “Growth Table” dazzles with its intricate base (which seems to owe something to Mr. Castle and something to an algorithm). And in his own organic-looking table over at Todd Merrill Studio Contemporary, the young Irish designer The painting selections are less stimulating, though pleasant enough: a late Chagall, Contemporary art by living artists is generally not a big category for the Salon, but significant exceptions seem to have been made for art-design crossovers. One is the outstanding Japanese ceramist Another is the American painter