NEW YORK, Sept 14 An auction lot like this hasn’t been seen on the market in the last four decades. Sotheby’s will soon auction off a prestigious collection of Meissen porcelain, once owned by the collectors Franz and Margarethe Oppenheimer. The estimate for the collection? Several million.
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In the opening pages of this book, Suzanne Marchand states that she is ‘not deeply concerned with porcelain as a “thing”’ – a rather surprising comment to find in a work with this title. Art historians, collectors and lovers of ceramics will perhaps be disappointed to learn that the book rehashes familiar stories and tropes, without significantly expanding our understanding of porcelain production, its cultural importance or its materiality. Instead, Marchand has chosen to focus on what the inner workings of a luxury industry can tell us about German economic history and the changing nature of work and consumption. In a volume of ambitious scope, she covers more than 300 years of porcelain making in central Europe. We hear the well-known story of princes locking up alchemists and bribing workers, all to discover the secrets of making porcelain, the so-called ‘Arcanum’, and claim the recipe for their own. Marchand m