The San Francisco Fall Show: COUPAR Sponsors the Authors' Alcove

How do young connoisseurs collect now? Art historian, designer, and author Michael Diaz-Griffith explores this topic in his book The New Antiquarians: At Home with Young Collectors. His compendium will be one of the books featured at the COUPAR-sponsored Authors' Alcove during The San Francisco Fall Show. The annual event is the West Coast's leading international art, antiques, and design fair, showcasing over 40 top dealers. Held at Fort Mason Center Festival Pavilion, it runs October 12-15, 2023 – the Opening Night Gala will be on October 11, 2023. La Dolce Vita is the theme of this year's show, celebrating poetic beauty, breathtaking art, and groundbreaking design.

Richard Hallberg knows all about La Dolce Vita. The Las Angeles-based designer's debut monograph, Worlds of Wonder: Richard Hallberg Interiors, juxtaposes the iconic California Look with European classicism. Hallberg's hallmarks include the sound of trickling water from a rustic stone fountain, mixing contemporary art with fine antiques, natural organic materials utilized as tables, French 18th-century green faience, and eclectic tablescapes incorporating Han pottery, Roman fragments, quartz bowls, Picasso drawings, and vellum books. Hallberg, who co-founded the furnishings company Formations with designers Barbara Wiseley and Daniel Cuevas, dedicated his book to the late Wiseley. 

Scott Powell's historical work, Frances Elkins: Visionary American Designer, looks at the early 20th-century grand dame of design's extraordinary career. In 1918, at the age of thirty, the Milwaukee native launched her California-based decorating business. Elkins, the younger sister of renowned Chicago architect David Adler, visited her brother while he studied. architecture at École des Beaux-Arts. The two traveled through Europe, where she met avant-garde artists, including Jean-Michel Frank and Alberto Giacometti. Elkins incorporated Frank's minimalist furnishings and Giacometti's sculptural fixtures into her interiors, boldly mixing them with French and English antiques, American rugs, and chinoiserie.