TEFAF New York: A worldly fair overflows with art and design

NEW YORK - If you put the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a blender, you might end up with something like TEFAF New York. One of two annual fairs staged by the European Fine Art Foundation (the other is in Maastricht), it fills the historic Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan to its rafters this week with modern and contemporary art and design objects, even spilling into the hallways and up to the second floor.

This can make for entertaining juxtapositions inside the 1880 Gothic Revival building. This year, Friedman Benda gallery (Stand 101), one of nearly 100 exhibitors, is showing several colorful Ettore Sottsass vases under a permanently installed portrait of Wade Hampton Hayes, a brigadier general in the New York National Guard. Be prepared for a deluge of furniture, jewelry, art and antiquities spanning several millenniums, often in a single booth.

If you decide to...