EYE ON DESIGN: Richard Wright by Andrew Myers

Sold! To paddle number 123, the gentleman in the front row and the latest proud possessor of a unique table in metal by Paul Evans. Thank you very much, and now to our next lot: Richard Wright, 45, co-founder, owner and auctioneer of the Wright auction house in Chicago, which since its Big Bang launch in 2000 has arguably made modernism – especially postwar American design – a prime auction category with “evening-sale” prices and collector base to match. That said, the Wright range for decorative arts has from inception extended the entire 20th century to the last Tick of the Now in the 21st, from geometric tableware by Austrian architect-designer icon Josef Hoffmann to whimsical stuffed-animal armchairs by boys from Brazil, Fernando and Humberto Campana, and has included 20th-century art from day one as well, such as silkscreens on paper by Josef Albers. This range was further elongated in 2006 with the additions of categories for design and art books, and, with the marquee, $3.186 million sale of Case Study House #21 by Pierre Konig from the late 1950’s real estate.

Documentation for Mr. Wright is extensive. He has been included in many prestigious journals, House and Garden [ITALICS], T: The New York Times Style Magazine [ITALICS], Art + Auction [ITALICS] among them. But while his deep-voiced soft-spoken erudition and considered discretion are as remarked upon as his business acumen, market timing, impassioned love of design and, yes, wit, Wright’s provenance bears remark and scrutiny. So, although it is unorthodox to speak from the lectern about a proffered lot – a breach of professional decorum Mr. Wright would never be guilty of as auctioneer in Wright’s “Mass Modern” or “Important Design” sales – in a bow to his road-less-traveled-but-many-byways-explored success, an exception shall be made.

Wright’s aesthetic journey began during his childhood in Maine, in the small towns he called home, in his well-traveled grandmother’s apartment that, filled with Oriental rugs and African artifacts, he found full of the promise of beauty, the exotic, and of a world beyond. Broader vistas first came through several years at the University of Massachusetts, and then through a girlfriend, a van, and the road. There were swap meets, second-hand shops, vintage clothes, buying in the Midwest and selling on the coasts, and Wright’s evolving eye, which soon focused on mid-century bric-a-brac – ashtrays and kitsch, later lamps and finer finds.

After several years as a picker, traveling to New Orleans and along old Route 66 through Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, with sales destinations Pasadena’s Rose Bowl and New York’s 26th Street Flea Market, he and the girlfriend, Martha Torno, settled in 1988 in Chicago, where they set up a booth in an antiques mall followed a year later by a 700-square-foot shop, Torno Wright, dedicated to mid-century decorative arts and a good half decade before mid-century started to gain its marketplace might. Two years on, no longer with Torno, Wright rechristened the space Richard Wright, and his carefully culled selections of designers such as Ray and Charles Eames, Harry Bertoia, and T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings did so well he decided in 1993 to move to New York, where in the pre-Internet days much higher prices could be commanded.
The move never happened. Julie Thoma, an Iowa-born, Chicago-based interior designer of much repute and a sometime Richard Wright customer, learned of Wright’s imminent departure and invited him to a long lunch. Wright moved in with Thoma and her son a short time later, and the couple married in 1995. “I’ve certainly been lucky – and one of the luckiest things was Julie walking into my little shop,” says Wright, who nevertheless closed the little shop, intending to take some time off and finish his bachelor’s degree – a plan interrupted by an offer to join the new modernism department at Treadway/Toomey Galleries, cooperative auction houses based in Oak Park. In short order, Wright became the department’s head, an ideal position from which he devised an audacious plan in response to what he suspected would be a revelatory, watershed mid-century exhibition of works by Ray and Charles Eames, scheduled for the spring of 1999 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. With more than a year to organize and gather consignments, Wright prepared for a complementary, coinciding Eames auction: an enormous success that garnered $600,000, lots of attention, and an idea.

“I think small, that’s my conservative, even pessimistic nature,” says Wright, crediting Julie as giving him the courage to go independent. “We had no money – we’ve never had a backer – but she always thought big, and she would plan like she could see the end result and it was inevitable.” Their auction house, succinctly called Wright, was born in April 2000, a rented rehabbed 5,000-square-foot loft on West Fulton Street, and its first auction – with lots featuring designs by George Nelson, Poul Kjaerholm, Erwine and Estelle Laverne, among schools of others – hammered in on June 4, amassing $455,866 (including buyer’s premium). Over the next seven years, the number of annual auctions multiplied (reaching a high of 13 in 2006), sales grew at a sprinter’s pace (reaching $28 million in 2007), the physical location shifted in 2005 to a 60,000-square-foot two-story red-brick building that once housed a printing company (which Wright purchased in 2007), and the house established a new standard as well as a specific, lucrative niche within the auction world (thanks to what might be called Wright’s three C innovations that include (1) catalogues of high design, (2) a curatorial approach to the consignments and their display for viewings, and (3) categories of an innovative nature, say, design books, and country/theme-specific auctions, such as Important Italian Design).
“I wish I could say we had a great sense the mid-century and contemporary markets were about to take off,” says Wright, acknowledging that his and Julie’s market timing was perfect, “but our birth and growth have all been more driven by emotion than rationally planned.” That notwithstanding, Wright rebuffs the idea that theirs was an overnight success. There was Julie’s extensive knowledge of design and years of interior design work – not to mention her managerial and marketing flair and overall fearlessness. And as for him? “It’s more that I’ve plodded a line continually,” he says. “But I do feel it’s important that I’ve done every part of this business, from picker to shop owner to appraiser to auctioneer. Overnight? No, it’s an evolution over decades.”
Wright’s sense of personal evolution – “The strong belief that I am trying to evolve, that I keep challenging myself” – buttressed him through the downturn last fall, and although the auction house’s 2008 sales fell to $15 million and staff from 17 to 12 (a necessity that to Wright was especially painful), he feels that the market has stabilized, and is back on track with “correct values.” (He points out that the test will be the sell through rate at his forthcoming auctions: “I will feel good with a 90% sold rate, which is the gold standard.) As importantly, Wright feels revitalized, freshly reconnected with the love of “real” design that has propelled him for decades. “It’s expansive. I’ve always lived with designs by the Eamses, and while I’ve always loved them they’re starting to look fresh to me again, which of course makes me reexamine the Bauhaus. And when I realize there are pieces such as original bent-chrome Breuer chairs with original fabric available for $2,000, I know we are still at the beginning of a long story.”
So, ladies and gentleman, that is Richard Wright’s lot. Evaluate. Appreciate. Even salivate. Shall we now start the bidding?

* Julie Thoma Wright, co-founder and co-owner of Wright auction house as well as Richard’s beloved wife, mother of their two children and her child from a previous marriage, died of colon cancer in 2007.

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All the Wright moves: Is Wright positioned to thrive by an increased buyer base and by gobbling market share from big boys Sotheby’s and Christie’s and bigger boy Phillips de Pury during the current shake-up? Wright says yes. Why?
1. He’s selling more less expensive pieces. “Our average lot last year was $7,500; this year it will be more like $5,000.”
2. Which is not to say that there is any corresponding decline in quality, rarity or pedigree. First, Wright explains he’s seeing “opportunities” that simply weren’t available a year ago. Second, he’s being especially stringent in estimates. “I’m often called the grumpy old man of modern, but I feel a responsibility to the people who buy not to push the pricing too far.”
3. Technological adaptability. Just as Wright used the Internet early on to great effect, its nimbleness allows it to use tools such as Face Book to reach out and expand its client base. “The Internet allowed our company to exist and to become world class,” says Wright, “Face Book and other social networking sites, such as my blog, afford us opportunities not available to much larger companies. Good content wins, and we know we have that.”

Wright prognostications: One facet of the postwar design market that Wright finds especially interesting is that one single preeminent collector has yet to emerge. “No one yet has shown the breadth and determination to buy the very best pieces cross categorically. It’s happened in Arts + Crafts, and will invariably happen in postwar, which is too strong an area for it not to, especially if you look at the history of design. Still, it hasn’t happened yet.”

Wright debate: There has been much spirited back and forth about what the financial crisis will mean to the world of design. Michael Cannell’s New York Times [ITALICS] piece “Design Loves a Depression” argued that lean times inspire the best and shake out the excess, whereas Murray Moss’s rebuttal on the website Design Observer, “Design Hates a Depression,” asserted the converse. Wright rests somewhere in between, but sees great work coming from designers and artists such as Martin Baas, Ron Gilad, and Sam Hecht.

Wright Problem: What Wright bemoans is the paucity of young, fresh American design. “I’m in active search of it,” he says. The main reason for this absence, he believes, has less to do with talent – “We’re a large country with vibrant thinkers and a history of terrific design” – but rather with the lack of a manufacturing base. “I’d love to find a way to change that.”