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Antiques

Disputing the Origins of Four-Legged Treasures

New York and Boston butt heads over more than sports teams: Try 18th-century walnut chairs whose origins are at the center of a controversy.

The chairs, unsigned pieces with shell carvings on their knees and backs, descended in wealthy New York families including the Apthorps and Van Cortlandts. Some scholars believe they were made in New York; others have asserted that Boston cabinetmakers produced them.

The dispute has inspired “Boston or New York: Revisiting the Apthorp Family and Related Sets of Queen Anne Chairs,” an exhibition of about 20 works that opens Jan. 20 at the Bernard & S. Dean Levy gallery in Manhattan.

“The field should be big enough for two interpretations,” Philip D. Zimmerman, a curator of the show, said in an interview. His own team questions the findings of Americana experts including Leigh Keno and Alan Miller, who, in scholarly journal articles about 15 years ago, attributed the chairs to Boston carvers.

Those articles in turn had disagreed with longstanding scholarship attributing the chairs to New York makers. The Keno and Miller camp points to 18th-century archival records that detail luxury goods made in Boston and shipped to New York. Mr. Zimmerman argues that the documents do not necessarily represent chairs as lavish as the pieces inherited by Apthorps and Van Cortlandts.

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An 18th-century chair that belonged to a New York family.Credit...Bernard & S. Dean Levy Inc.

Each side also points to arcane details of furniture making, describing particular chair foot forms, seams and brackets as signs of quintessentially Bostonian or New York craftsmanship.

Mr. Miller, in an interview, described the Levy show as “a reactionary, outmoded, retrogressive idea that ignores evidence.” Mr. Keno was similarly skeptical but added, “Anytime that people can get excited and re-examine a group of 18th-century furniture, it’s a great thing.”

Descendants of original owners have weighed in, too.

“My family would never buy anything from Boston; maybe Newport, if we had to,” a Van Cortlandt relative told the Levy gallery owners, in support of the New York workshop theory. Crucial evidence was lost, however, in fires in the 1770s and 1830s that destroyed Manhattan homes and businesses.

“We just don’t know what’s gone from New York,” Frank Levy, an owner of the gallery, said during a preview.

The Levys are borrowing an Apthorp heirloom chair from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum website lists it as originating in New York, but its gallery label has been marked, “Boston or New York.”

A few chairs in the Levy exhibition are for sale, priced from $18,500 to $250,000 each. From Jan. 22 to 25, Bonhams, Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York will offer more walnut Queen Anne chairs attributed to craftsmen in different cities.

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Gossamer webs of wire by Ruth Asawa, who died in August, have been fetching six- and seven-figure prices at auction.Credit...Los Angeles Modern Auctions

A LEGACY OF WIRE WORKS

The artist Ruth Asawa, who died in August, at 87, wove wire into gourdlike abstract sculptures. She lived to see her market boom.

In the past year, these dangling artworks have brought six- and seven-figure prices at auction houses including Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams in New York and Rago in Lambertville, N.J. Two more will come up for auction in the next few months, with estimates between $100,000 and $500,000 each, at Los Angeles Modern Auctions in Van Nuys, Calif., and Keno Auctions in New York.

Ms. Asawa’s archive has mostly gone to Stanford University. Her children are now sorting through possessions at her San Francisco home and deciding what to do with personal materials like her 1940s college love letters, her daughter Aiko Cuneo said in an interview.

Ms. Asawa and her husband, the architect Albert Lanier, who died in 2008, met just after World War II while studying at Black Mountain College near Asheville, N.C. Their mentors included Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller and Merce Cunningham. Mr. Lanier was a judge’s son from a small town in Georgia; Ms. Asawa, the daughter of California farmers, had endured years at internment camps for Japanese-Americans.

She and Mr. Lanier raised six children, while Ms. Asawa slept little and sculpted at odd hours. Her guiding philosophy, Ms. Cuneo said, was that “every minute you were awake, you needed to be connected and doing something.”

Mary Emma Harris, a historian who specializes in Black Mountain College and has written about Ms. Asawa, has been finding institutional homes for related artifacts. College records have gone to the North Carolina state archives, and the Asheville Art Museum is collecting artworks by alumni and staff. On March 7, a typical Asawa lobed web sculpture will go on view at the Pace Gallery in Manhattan.

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Anna Hyatt Huntington in the film “Sculpture in Stone.”Credit...Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Anna Hyatt Huntington Papers; Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries

SOLID, LASTING AND PUBLIC

During her lifetime, the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington financed installations of her animal statues in public places.

Goddess, Heroine, Beast: Anna Hyatt Huntington’s New York Sculpture, 1902-1936,” a show that opens Jan. 22 at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, contains newly rediscovered 1930s film of her carving stone. The wall texts and catalog explain how she and her husband, the railroad magnate Archer M. Huntington, spent much of their fortunes to create museum displays.

Her stone jaguars crouch menacingly on pillars at the Bronx Zoo. On her equestrian bronze portrait of Joan of Arc poised for battle, on Riverside Drive at 93rd Street in Manhattan, the horse’s neck veins bulge, and its forelock bristles.

A curatorial team of Barnard College and Columbia staff and students, led by the art historian Anne Higonnet, discovered forgotten mementos of Mrs. Huntington’s work at the Hispanic Society of America, which Mr. Huntington founded. An aluminum casting that Mrs. Huntington made of her right hand, and her bronze plaques depicting knights, farm animals and Spanish rulers will be on exhibit, on loan from the society.

Her letter opener, in the form of a jaguar gnawing a bone, now belongs to the Conner Rosenkranz gallery in Manhattan. It is not for sale, but the gallery is offering Mrs. Huntington’s bronze portrait of her greyhound Speedy ($60,000) with a panting tongue and visible ribs.

In April, her portraits of two Great Danes will go on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (The pair was purchased for $105,000 at a Skinner auction in Boston.) Last month, at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, an unidentified collector paid $315,000 for “The Torch Bearers,” a 15-foot-tall equestrian group that had been on the grounds of the Discovery Museum and Planetarium in Bridgeport, Conn. The new owner plans to reinstall it in the Lindale Park area of Houston.

On Feb. 27, the National Academy Museum, which occupies the former Huntington townhouse on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, will put her newly restored sculpture of the goddess Diana on display. In a back stairwell are a hoist and chain originally used to move statues around her garret studio.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 39 of the New York edition with the headline: Settle Down, Gently, and Join the Debate. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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