The Pavilion of Art and Design New York, the French design fair that launched a successful stateside edition last November, will not return to the Park Avenue Armory this year. In its place is a new, somewhat more focused fine art and design fair called the Salon of Art and Design, which will specialize in contemporary and 20th-century design. The fair will feature 53 dealers, many of whom participated in PAD, including New York’s Jason Jacques and Friedman Benda and Paris’s Galerie Vallois.
“We’ll have the highest quality of art and design there is, and it will be primarily 20th-century, with just a few dealers who specialize in earlier work,” said veteran fair organizer Sanford Smith, who co-produced PAD NY with Patrick Perrin, founder of the French edition. For his new venture, Smith will team up with the Syndicat National des Antiquaires, a Paris-based association of 400 antiques, art, and design dealers that organizes the respected Biennale des Antiquaires. The partners hopes to recruit new names, like Tel Aviv’s Le Minotaure Gallery, alongside established galleries from PAD NY's roster.
The shift in leadership comes after Smith, who has a five-year contract with the Armory for the second week in November, clashed with PAD’s Perrin. Though Smith said sales were strong at the debut fair, he and Perrin disagreed over how to use resources. Booths at the reconceived design fair will cost dealers ten to 15 percent less than those at PAD, according to Smith, who promises the event will maintain “the same level of creature comforts and more.”
The breakup may be news to PAD. The Pavilion of Art & Design’s Web site currently advertises PAD NY’s return to the Armory from November 7-12, 2012. (Smith says the Salon of Art and Design will run from November 8-12.) A representative from PAD did not return a request for comment inquiring about the status or location of the fair.
The design fair shuffle isn’t the only shakeup happening at the Armory. Two other fairs that were canceled in recent years due to the recession will return. The Works on Paper fair, which took place at the Armory for 21 years before being postponed in 2009, will return to Park Avenue in February 2013. It will run alongside a revived version of the design fair Modernism, which began in 1985 as New York’s first design show but went on hiatus last year. (PAD ran in its usual November time slot.) “I’ll split the Armory down the middle,” said Smith of his plans for the two-part fair, which will run from February 21-24, 2013.
Asked whether he felt New Yorkers had an appetite for more art fairs, Smith said, "I've always thought from the very beginning, in order to be successful you need a target market show. You don't need 20,000 people to attend, you need 3,000 to 5,000 serious people. These are target shows."