Wright Auction

Automatons

While shopping at the Brimfield Antique Flea Market in Massachusetts, Blackman stumbled upon a life-size monkey with an apple in his hand. He appeared to be climbing a tree branch, and when picked up, his head nodded. Blackman bought him. he wasn't the only one enamored with the monkey's lifelike demeanor, craftsmanship, and soulful glass eyes. As he walked through the market, treasure in hand, a swarm of dealers followed Blackman to ogle or ask if he'd sell. That peculiar pied piper moment began his fascination with nodders and automatons. 

These mechanical wonders are not toys. Meant to be admired, not touched, they're considered an important part of nineteenth-century French art history that incorporates sculpture, painting, costume, and mechanics. For millennia, people like the ancient Egyptians have designed objects capable of movement, but French automatons were a product of the Industrial Revolution. The narrow alleys of the Marais neighboorhood in Paris were once home to an array of workshops that manufactured what one observer, in 1867, characterized as "charming frivolities" and "objects of our most capricious fancies." 

Blackman came to love and admire those animal automatons specifically made by Roullet & Decamps, who exported their creations all over the world: from Parisan drawing rooms entertaining the glitterati to pashas and maharajas. Over the years, Blackman has built quite a collection—a menagerie that includes smoking monkeys, squealing pigs, lumbering polar bears, musical cats, prowling tigers, and marching elephants. 

Most arrive into his care battered and broken. These complex machines with complicated clockwork movements, bellows, and handmade gears are an endangered, rare species that require the skilled hand of an aerospace engineer to bring them back to delight. 

Stacie Stukin, excerpted from Beauty & Mischief

High Fantasy: The Enchantment(s)
of Blackman Cruz

Adam Blackman and David Cruz officially embarked on their venture, Blackman Cruz, in 1993; in the three decades since, they have created—and helped create—countless worlds, purveying objects of beauty and curiosity (dare we say magic?) culled from around the world. Operating from Los Angeles, the pair first showed their wares in a West Hollywood showroom on La Cienega and, in 2007, moved into their current home on Highland Avenue—an expansive space that was formerly the infamous gay nightclub Probe, known not least for basically playing itself in American Gigolo.

If discussing patina and provenance over a once booze-soaked bar seems incongruous, one might argue that such incongruity is characteristic of both Los Angeles and Blackman Cruz. At the center of the “dream factory,” worlds collide—and collision is perhaps what Blackman and Cruz do best. The pair’s “odd couple partnership,” as the New York Times put it, is the force behind an aesthetic sense that is delightfully difficult to pigeonhole. As the title of their recently released book Beauty & Mischief: The Design Alchemy of Blackman Cruz suggests, Blackman Cruz’s eye together encompasses the serious, sexy, and silly, and the myriad permutations therein. You might find, as one does in this auction, a stunning 1902 Carlo Bugatti chair (itself a treatise on material alchemy) next to an antique drum-playing rabbit automaton (restored to working order by an aerospace engineer), or a painstakingly beaded papoose from Borneo alongside an iconic mid-century modern sofa by Poul Kjærjolm, or a softly glowing snake lamp by Frank Gehry. Or impossibly elegant Gazelle lounges by Dan Johnson, or...Or. Or. Or.

Significantly and much to their credit, Blackman and Cruz have not shied away from certain elements of the archetypal curiosity shop. “We’re merchants,” their website declares. “We sell life enhancers.” In leaning into the longstanding lineage of rarity-purveyors, they show that they recognize the preciousness of curiosity itself—and the adjacent elements of surprise and fantasy. They let themselves be led by the search, and the excitement of the find is gleefully passed to their audience. That said, there are certain figures who serve as touchstones for the pair, designers whose sensibilities mesh well with Blackman Cruz’s vision: Bugatti is among them, as well as Pepe Mendoza and Arturo Pani, both from Mexico City and featured amply in the collection offered here. And then there is the Blackman Cruz Workshop, founded in 1998 by Blackman, Cruz, and creative director Lika Moore, offering limited edition lighting and furniture; among the works selected here are two metalworked lamps by Moore and the uncannily “dripping” Leary marble table.

Design is typically a studied thing, where precision takes precedence. Blackman Cruz breathes a little refreshing chaos into the discipline, finding a comfortable perch amidst a multiplicity of exciting tensions: ancient and contemporary, scientific and spiritual, restrained and resplendent. In our era of ubiquitous quantification and optimization, Blackman Cruz extends an invitation to not be afraid of what draws us in—even if it can’t be named or measured. In other words, to revel in the possibilities of enchantment.