From the May 2026 issue of Apollo.
It is 10 years since the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) held its first edition in New York. Since then it has distinguished itself from its older sibling in Maastricht as a venue for works with a more modern and decorative edge. Below are some of the pieces to seek out at the Park Avenue Armory this month (15–19 May).
‘Birches and Irises’ window (c. 1915), Tiffany Studios, New York
Macklowe Gallery, New York
The Hudson River School meets art nouveau in this rare stained-glass window, which lacks an inscription and was likely made for a domestic setting.
The Hour Glass (2025), Shahzia Sikander
Sean Kelly, New York
After revitalising the art of miniature painting, the Pakistani-American artist has in recent years turned her attention to mediums including animation and mosaics. The female figures with tendrils for arms and legs closely echo in form the figures on a stained-glass window Sikander made for the Venice Biennale in 2024.
Peinture 162 x 114cm, 29 août 1958 (1958), Pierre Soulages
Waddington Custot, London/Paris/Dubai
The large paintings Soulages made between 1953 and 1959 are rare – he made only 39 of them – and sought-after. ‘What matters to me is what happens on the canvas,’ the painter said, and what matters in this work is his ability to play with surfaces to reveal hidden depths. Here, broad and glossy black strokes have been pulled over a more thinly applied dark grey that has, in turn, been scraped away in places to reveal warm yellow underpainting. The effect is like looking through a latticed window – and as good an example as any of Soulages’s balancing of the figural and abstract in perfect tension.
Earrings (2026), Hemmerle atelier
Hemmerle, Munich
Who wouldn’t want to sport a pair of earrings bearing the likeness of a figure who set Europe by the ears? Hemmerle’s atelier has taken two medals of 1813 – commemorating a chamber of commerce in Orléans and a tribunal in Rouen – and put them in a modern setting. The result is an eye-catching marriage of history and novelty.
Escalier à Cagnes (c. 1923–24), Chaïm Soutine
David Lévy & Associés, Brussels/Paris
Soutine painted more than 200 landscapes in the two years he spent in the south of France in 1923–24. He may have told his dealer that he hated the town of Cagnes-Sur-Mer (‘a landscape I can’t stand’), but it was the subject of several paintings deploying similarly distorted perspectives and swirling forms. This particular work is more colourful than others of the same period and its twisting trees and paths push up against each other with greater dynamism, too.
TEFAF New York is at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, from 15–19 May.
From the May 2026 issue of Apollo.
