A spotlight on “The New Antiquarians: At Home with Young Collectors” by Michael Diaz-Griffith
A Collector of Art Collectors
By David Masello
In speaking to Michael Diaz-Griffith, the young chronicler of his fellow young art collectors, he describes symptoms he and others experience while pursuing their mission to acquire fine things. He cites, for instance, a “vibrating in place” when standing in front of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, among the world’s greatest repositories of a lifelong collecting pursuit — and also an institution for which the now-37-year-old Diaz-Griffith once served as executive director of its American foundation. While he lives in what he calls a “shabby Upper East Side brownstone right out of the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” he continues to dream daily about dining and sleeping in Gothic Revival rooms like those of Soane. “But I am so catholic in my tastes,” he admits, “I could get excited about recreating almost any style or period.”
Jeremy Simien — one of more than 20 individuals Diaz-Griffith profiles in his revelatory book, The New Antiquarians: At Home with Young Collectors (2023, Monacelli) — admits to feeling “a bit embarrassed” as he continues adding to his collection of mostly 19th-century portraits of native Louisianans. When asked, for example, how many paintings he has acquired recently, he replies, sotto voce for fear his wife or others in his Baton Rouge home might overhear, “I may, I guess, have bought, I think, three or four more in the last month.”
And when the Brooklyn-based antiques dealer Collier Calandruccio describes the symptoms that overcome him when he finds a pristine Duncan Phyfe chair or yet another 17th-century Dutch portrait (particularly a tronie, a study of an anonymous person), he uses such phrases as “heart racing.” It makes sense, then, that he feels a “grieving” when he is compelled to sell an object he loves to someone else. “Becoming a dealer required that I make peace with feeling the need to hold things to myself,” Calandruccio notes. “But because I live with most of the pieces, I get to enjoy them before they’re sent on to their next home.”
In his book, Diaz-Griffith recognizes a new breed of art collectors, and in fact he himself collects fine objects, including 19th-century American painted furniture, portrait miniatures, reverse-painted glass portraits, and 19th-century watercolor portraits of interiors. In his ability to recognize that like-minded young people exist (most are also in their mid-30s), he is a kind of cultural anthropologist.
The New Antiquarians not only uncovers select collectors (and characters) living in America and Britain who embrace the past, live amidst it, and promote it, but Diaz-Griffith also tells us why such youngish people exist and how they live with it. Ultimately he convinces readers why we should be glad to know them, regardless of our own age.
“There are a lot of us who want to look, to learn, and to begin acting on the collecting vibe within us,” the author says reassuringly. While he admits that “collecting has never been a young person’s game,” he also acknowledges that such a breed does exist and that their “tastes are much more in line with our grandparents’ than, say, our older siblings.’”
Continue reading this article in Fine Art Connoisseur magazine, January/February 2024. Fine Art Today covers artists and products we think you’ll love. Linked products are independently selected and linked to for your convenience. If you buy something using a link on this page, Streamline Publishing may receive a small share of that sale.
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