BETTISON Giles (1966) Lot n° 1

Vista #83, 2001 Verre fondu avec technique de murrines et baguettes. Texture travaillée à froid. Signé. H: 22,5 x 16,5 cm Fused, blown and wheelcut murrine glass. Signed. 8 7/8 x 6 1/2 inches Barry Friedman: Prescient Eclecticism by Tina Oldknow On the occasion of the sale of contemporary works in glass in the possession of Barry Friedman and Barry Friedman Ltd., I was asked to write a few words. My first impression of Barry's gallery sums up, for many people, what is so special about Barry. When I walked into the upstairs rooms at E. 67th Street, I saw a colorful contemporary vessel by Toots Zynsky posed (and poised) on top of an Art Deco sideboard by Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann. Many years later, I am still thrilled by this visually rich pairing, a historically unorthodox type of display in which museum curators can rarely indulge. Around Barry, there is always an element of the unexpected and enigmatic. He is a man of surprises, aesthetically-speaking. Barry is a collector/art dealer of wide-ranging tastes and expertise who is as comfortable presenting Emile Gallé's glass and Wendell Castle's furniture as he is in promoting the paintings of Tamara de Lempicka and the photographs of Michael Eastman. Chairs: they may be the designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Carlo Mollino, Droog, or Ron Arad; cabinets perhaps Ruhlmann or Ingrid Donat. Who knew that Barry once owned nearly 100 chairs by Charles and Ray Eames? No matter: Barry covers the 20th-century, completely and truly, and now he is diving into the 21st. His small, elegant galleries on the upper East Side have been transformed into the impressive, open spaces of his current gallery in Chelsea, built to accommodate more recent and substantially larger works of art in a wider range of media. Yet, as his recent exhibition on the vessels of Michael Glancy attests, he has not abandoned the smaller-scale object. When Barry began to exhibit contemporary glass in 1997, he made the important connection that so many in our f