Last year was a dark one for the big auction houses, with the economic slump and September 11 hitting an industry already rocked by the Sotheby’s and Christie’s price-fixing scandal. But according to Richard Wright, his young West Loop auction house is on the upswing. “Our business has thrived, while Sotheby’s closed the Chicago location,” he says. “I just see that there is a place for someone who is not a multinational corporation.” Except for Phillips (the number three house), he also thinks the bigger houses haven’t picked up on the recent surge of interest in midcentury design: “They are missing the boat. A lot of this work is important and will go up in value.”
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The utopian, largely American-led school of design that characterized the 50s has been rediscovered in recent years thanks to magazines like Wallpaper, which packages modernism as a lifestyle. Now names such as Eames, Knoll, and Saarinen roll off the tongues of those who grew up with neocolonial and Ethan Allen. Wright attributes the rediscovery to “a generational thing,” but also to modernism’s inherent integrity, optimism, and utility. Also, modernism was a bit ahead of its time on the first pass. An original Isamu Noguchi paddle fin table can now fetch $18,000 at auction, but it flopped in the marketplace when copies of the ovoid, three-legged table were mass-produced.
In 1987 he drove his hatchback to Chicago with his girlfriend Martha Torno (now an owner of Wicker Park’s Modern Times). For two years they ran a shop called Torno-Wright on Lincoln Avenue before parting ways. Next, Wright built up modern sales at Oak Park’s Treadway Gallery, which did most of its business in Arts and Crafts furniture. Wright left in 1999 and opened Wright Gallery in 2000 with his wife, Julie Thoma-Wright, an interior designer.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
