For Gerard O'Brien, Super Sunday arrives this weekend, and it has nothing to do with football. The owner of a midcentury furniture gallery in Los Angeles is painstakingly preparing a playbook to help him score at three simultaneous modernist auctions.
Over the course of 10 hours, three houses in Los Angeles and Chicago will take bids on 1,800-plus works by hundreds of designers -- including architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and decorator Dorothy Draper -- in styles ranging from Mission to Memphis.
O'Brien, who will be manning a booth at an antiques show in San Francisco, can't make it to the Los Angeles Modern Auctions sale at the Pacific Design Center or to the two in Chicago, at the Wright and Treadway-Toomey galleries. So, by thumbing through hefty catalogs, he has narrowed his choices to 15 that he will bid on via cellphone.
The influence of home decor television shows and the accessibility of EBay are leading more buyers to participate in live auctions, even if the newbies show up by remote.
Some 300 buyers are expected in person at each auction this weekend, but the houses anticipate nearly four times as many patrons to place absentee bids or to join the modernist marathon over the phone and the Internet.
Although large auction companies such as Christie's and Sotheby's commonly stage themed sales on the same day or during the same week, the practice is a more recent development for smaller independent houses such as L.A. Modern Auctions, or LAMA.
"The first time this happened, in June 1997, everyone was upset and nervous and thought it would be horrible," recalls Peter Loughrey, director of the L.A. auction house. "It turned out to be one of the best sales we've ever had.
"The market is so healthy that offering 2,000 lots on one day is nothing. There's easily that many every day on EBay."
Few of those online offerings, however, can duplicate the research and lavish presentation found in the three current catalogs. LAMA's 430 lots fill a 160-page edition, and Treadway-Toomey packs more than a thousand items into a 224-page volume handsome enough to grace a coffee table.
Wright spent an estimated $50,000 on its current 335-page edition for the "Modernist 20 Century" auction; it looks and reads more like a museum monograph than a sales catalog. Wright catalogs have met with such success that the company is venturing into publishing, with a book on George Nelson's iconic Atomic Age clocks due next year.
