Incollect Magazine - Issue 2

Incollect Magazine 33 2022 A llan and Penny Katz have been on a journey. The 76-year-old Allan beams with energy and enthusiasm as he stands in his gallery, on the property of an immaculately renovated 1830s historic house on one of the more prestigious streets in the shoreline town of Madison, Connecticut. He’s describing the moment when 51 years ago, he discovered and bought his first weathervane. “I remember that day,“ he says, “the object just totally resonated with me.” It was 1971, and Katz had graduated college with a degree in economics, completed his active duty as an Army reservist and had started an electronics company with his college roommate. Although consumed by his new company, he somehow found time to make the rounds of antique shops that once were abundant in New England towns. Katz had always been a collector. He collected stamps and coins as a kid, and even built a miniature natural history museum in the basement of his home in Queens, New York. He formed his first real collection in the early 1970s, he says, focusing on American stone lithography advertising signs on tin from the 1870s–1890s, continuing to acquire them throughout the next decade. He sold his business in the early 1980s, and by 1983 had developed a growing reputation as a passionate collector of the increasingly popular genre of American Folk Art. The bulk of the material that Katz related to falls into the category of Folk Art that began with objects designed to be used as advertising for merchants, but with a distinguishing creative component or original craftsmanship that takes it beyond the utilitarian. “The category is inclusive, not exclusive,” Katz says, “indeed this is what the category is all about, embracing individual pieces by unknown makers and bodies of signed works.” This is the art of the emerging middle class in America and has a lot to say about the people who came here and how this country was formed. “I always like to say that I didn’t pick Folk Art but rather that it picked me,” he says by way of an explanation as to how he came to specialize. “I didn’t come from a Previous page: Rare Folk Art pieces from the Katz’s collection create a timeless mix combined with the bold forms of modern furniture. The chairs are vintage mid-century Florence Knoll prototypes that were never produced, and the sofa is by Kazuhide Takahama for Knoll. Warren Platner’s iconic and sculptural side table is topped with a vase by Gaetano Pesce. On the wall at left, the playful side of Folk Art (literally) is illustrated with a polychrome decorated gameboard for the Victorian- era game of Halma. The game itself is lost to the ages, but the gameboard has a decidedly Modernist sensibility. An Indian archer weathervane presides over the seating area, a powerful symbol of Americana and an example of glorious artisanal craftsmanship. This page: Allan and Penny Katz at home. Their house is a historic structure and bears a plaque listing it as “The Jonathan Dudley House c. 1830.”