Art Dealer Gerald Bland
It is as much a mystery to Gerald Bland as to anyone how he came to be a standard bearer for taste at a time when vulgarity is enshrined in the culture and every thumb-tapping boob with a social media account can be styled an instant expert. “Maybe I’m the last man standing,” says the handsome and modest antiques dealer, whose gallery—a serenely curated Aladdin’s cave on the top floor of the Fine Arts Building in Manhattan’s Designer District—is a mandatory destination for the elite of society, design, and fashion, perhaps even more so during a year when the pandemic spooked many into fleeing the city for new homes in the suburbs.
“What frames Gerry Bland is that he has this unique natural sense of what is proper, what is boring, and what is de trop,” says Louis Bofferding, who deals in rare examples of 20th-century high design. “I used to think I was disinterested in taste and only cared about what was important,” he adds. “Now that any unwashed billionaire can buy a Leonardo, you begin to appreciate taste in a different way.”
Yet what is it? Is taste, as the design great Ward Bennett once argued, a set of responses and preferences developed over a lifetime? Or is it some mysterious quality innately possessed? Possibly it is a bit of both, Bland says one recent afternoon from his 3,000-square-foot loft, where the genial 69-year-old sits on a French Directoire armchair surrounded by an array of objects as disparate as an 18th-century mahogany Chippendale breakfront, a silver-mounted Edo-period lacquer and marquetry cabinet, a bronze-mounted Louis XV bureau plat, and a steel center table of his own design with a distinctly Dr. No flavor.
He is laying out for T&C the unlikely route he has followed over the course of four decades, from college dropout who began his career in the trade at Sotheby’s, age 23, to auction house expert to private dealer, becoming in the process a reliable arbiter of taste during a period when the decorating, antiques, and auction businesses have been, counterintuitively, booming. If this seems implausible, given the current state of the economy, consider that while average Americans have spent their lockdowns scrolling the internet for novelty Crocs, apex feeders have been busy buying and furnishing houses. “Decorators I know say they’ve never been busier,” Bland says.
The best of them turn by reflex to a man who grew up in Wilmington, on the North Carolina coast, son of a homemaker mother and an engineer father whose obsession was automobiles. It was on childhood road trips to his grandparents’ place that Bland first developed his knack for analyzing and diagramming the material world.
“My father would assign my older sister and me a car company,” he says. “And we were supposed to identify them by design features—you know, domed headlights, tailfins, three exhaust vents in the fender. That was the beginning of my learning to look and categorize.”
The lessons took. During summers in his college years, Bland worked as a waiter in Nantucket at, as he once said, “the type of restaurants where you went home with the guests.” It was there that he made the serendipitous connections that eventually led him to Sotheby’s, and then along a steadily upward trajectory through the rarefied spheres of English furniture, French decorators, Italian grandees, and the wealthiest of Americans.
All the while, Bland, a reluctant shopkeeper in his early days, has done trade with plutocrats and dukes, Tom Ford and Middle Eastern princes, and somehow maintained an easygoing pragmatism and wry Southern bonhomie. When decorating tastes in this country shifted, and the English antiques in which he long specialized were condemned as brown furniture, he moved along with the times. He expanded the scope of his eye so that in rooms arranged by him, objects of wildly divergent styles and periods are juxtaposed, a Baroque Sicilian table keeping company with a gilded ceramic rockpile by the artist Eve Kaplan.
“You used to see a lot of men like Gerry” in the antiques and decorating businesses, says the eminent English decorator Veere Grenney. “People of elegance and refinement, like David Hicks and Mark Hampton, who had taste coming out of their fingertips.”
Those professionals of another era, Grenney adds, not only possessed a knack for mixing the grand with the modest but managed to distill their tastes to a point where little remained that was inessential. Like Bland, such characters may have had “gifts from God,” as Grenney puts it, referring to a genius for scale and proportion. They also put in Malcolm Gladwell’s requisite 10,000 hours amassing impeccable bodies of knowledge.
“There is just a harmony in the way he mixes things that is so elegant and accessible,” says the decorator Alex Papachristidis. “It all very much originates in the classical orders.”
Or, as Bland puts it, “It all starts with Palladio.” In fact, on their honeymoon Bland and his wife, the Italian watercolorist and noblewoman Mita Corsini (whose family tree includes several cardinals, a pope, and a saint), embarked on a pilgrimage to see all the villas by the Renaissance genius scattered throughout Italy’s Veneto region.
“The first and last thing you learn from looking at Andrea Palladio is to value strength and purity of form,” he says.
There is something bracingly instructive in that offhand observation, even for those of us who cannot ever seem to figure where to place a fiddly fern or park the sofa, a shortcoming that months of peering into other people’s lives on Zoom suggests is both widespread and chronic. That’s because, while Bland’s stock is likely beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, the lessons of his taste are accessible to all. How? Go to @geraldblandinc on Instagram. for the IRL experience: 232 East 59th Street, 6th Floor, 212-987-8505.
This story appears in the April 2021 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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