The 247 international dealers who exhibited at The
European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in March brought many and varied treasures to sell yet one stood apart from all the rest: Instead their usual chic twenties and thirties French design pieces, Galerie Downtown turned its stand into an evocation of a nineteenth century American Shaker dwelling--part meeting house, part living quarters. In the
middle of the fair's hoopla and hubbub, a glance at the purity, beauty and the feeling
of quiet peacefulness it promised lassoed me in. It was even better inside.
I saw many objects I coveted at the fair and loved every
exhausting day I spent there but the Shakers alone would
have made the trek to Maastricht rewarding enough. I wasn't alone. It was very popular with visitors and everything sold fast.
The Shakers, devout Christians, capitalist communists, were a celibate sect that began in England in the eighteenth century, flourished in America during the century that followed and that still, if just barely, survives today. The last community, in Maine, has three members. A Quaker breakaway, they got their name from the dancing and trembling that was a feature of their meetings. They believed in and practiced racial and sexual equality but in practice it was on the separate but equal side: the women cleaned and cooked and the men crafted some of most powerfully simple yet magnificent furniture made in America. Those fellows could not have had more steady hands or more perceptive eyes when they set to work
creating the objects with the Shakers lived--whether it was a large chest of drawers,
a twenty foot long dining table, a straight back chair, a straw hat or a box for storing needles and thread. 
A book about the galleries collection which was curated by Francois Laffanour and Phillipe Segalot was launched at the fair. “Shaker: Function, purity, perfection,” is a fine introduction to the Shakers and their way of life; the Museums devoted to it (former no longer populated communities), the extraordinary furniture they made and its continuing influence n contemporary designers. That endures; the same cannot be said about the allure of celibate communes.
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| \\\\A Shaker retiring room Metropolitan Museum of Art |
