MASTER OF ANTIQUES DVD:1

10 profiles on one DVD

US$27.50 including 7-10 working days international AIRPOST delivery.

LONDON

The great quality of these Cremonese violins is you can hear a soft 'dolce' sound in the back of the hall and that is why people spend several million dollars to buy a great Cremonese violin.

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ATHENS

Greece is a love affair. Greeks are like me. They are made from old and new materials. People visit because it is one of the few 'real' places on earth now.

Art is talent. Talent is spirit. What do artists use? They use oxidized colours, just powder colours, so this man has received the gift from God, whoever God is for everybody, to be able to transform this simple inexpensive material into something moving, something acceptable by everybody, something which could change the world. So the molecule of that is art. Art is very powerful. It is like a volcano, and it will sit and sleep for a very long time but eventually it will erupt.

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MILAN

When you go in a church in Italy you enter a marvellous world like 'Alice in Wonderland'. You see one fresco here, one painting there and I started to understand that the beauty of life, of the world, was in Art.

I am very excited when I discover something that has never been seen before or has never been published. It is like a geologist, when he finds oil. Then another type of work commences, the work of study like a Sherlock Holmes detective story. Then when you have all the facts, you publish it and share your discovery with the world. Sometimes I don’t have enough pages to dedicate to a story and flesh out all the details. God is in the details.

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PARIS

Art is invention. Science is art. When Einstein invented the theory of relativity it was maybe from his heart and not from his head.

In 1995 Puiforcat was living on its past. We were selling to you 17, 18, 19th century products, and Jean Puiforcat designs and the problem was that our awareness was limited to people of more than 60 years old and with that you die with your customers. I told the board of committee , I think we have to transform our shops into museums. At least we will gain some money with the visitors. It needed a broom and creation, creation, creation. All our business with my team in the last few years has been to build the first new breath of Puiforcat.

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LONDON

What we are looking at is the product of something like 800 skilled man-hours. We start with barrel making, with forged drilled tubes, hand striking those to get the shape.Then you have the action filer. You have the lock maker. You have the ejectors in here and the triggers and the furniture here, as a separate trade there are people who only do that.

You then have got the woodwork of the stocking from seasoned walnut. Taking a pile of bits from all these different trades, and putting it together as a homogeneous whole and making it work is without exaggeration, an accumulation of hundreds of years of knowledge and skill, which has been passed down from master to pupil.

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LONDON

'You find something which is nothing and you put a name on it and you make a profit - that is how you do it'.

I looked at every illustration in my fathersvast library twice in one year. At some point I remember opening a book which had a painting by an artist called Pierre Cugiere and I saw this picture and thought 'but my father has a picture by the same artist which he calls something else'. Then I went and checked and I had made an attribution. Now when you do that I thought 'That's my business, I love this'. Because by making an attribution you have discovered something. It is the detective work and then of course eventually it is transformed into cash as well.

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MUNICH

It was 1747, and the idea was to make gold, not to find it somewhere but to make it. August the Strong, the Prince elect of Saxonia then Driessen and then Meissen hired this guy called Votgart who did not succeed in finding gold but he succeeding in finding 'kaolin'.

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PARIS

When you have a headache in your life you need art, and without art you keep your headache and you have no chance to survive. With your art you are in a different world. But people out of art cannot understand. Each of us has a personal approach with art. You have a personal taste and you love or you hate but nobody can understand why. Your eyes become more astute, you open books, you visit museums and you see comparative things and you understand why the object is fabulous or not. The discovery of art gives you the desire to improve your knowledge. And this is the most important thing, we need the notion of art like we need water every day.

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SYDNEY

I'm interested in how a physical experience comes from the mind or is linked to the mind. The things that I create, I think of as female experiences actually, and I dare to put up what might be classed as incidental experiences. Fantasies , memories or clothing. They are seen as incidental and not real art.

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PARIS

If you find the work of the French writer named Octave Mirbeaux, he said in his book that Rafaelle is no good at all. I loved Rafaelle. There was an exhibition of Rafaelle a few years ago in a museum in Paris and I went to see the exhibition and I think that Mirbeaux was right and I was wrong.

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PARIS

Lalique came to the glass activities by accident. He was a close friend of Mr. Coty who was the inventor of the modern perfumery and asked Lalique to design a perfume bottle. This bottle was a big event because for the first time the bottle was expressing the fragrance inside the bottle.This bottle was such a success, maybe it was also due to the perfume, that everybody wished to work with Lalique. Lalique has designed about 400 different models of scent bottles and today people are collecting those antique scent bottles. At a recent auction one bottle was sold for 500,000 Euros!

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MUNICH

When I was still a student, I saw in a small auction house here in Munich a very dirty picture, but I was convinced that this was a masterpiece. I was convinced that it was a Baltazar Fantastique, so I bought it for very little money and I had if for some time until a dealer came and asked what I had there. I Told him 'I believe it is a Baltazar Fantastique!'. He said in a very shrewd much older art dealer voice, 'Oh no I mean this is pure fantasy but it is a nice picture, how much is it?'. To make a long story short I sold it for some profit, but I mean for the price of a copy. A very short time later this painting was shown at an Art Fair at this man's stand for a huge price. Of course it was a Baltazar Fantastique!

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