Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007 - (Page 30)

When the makers of the 1990 Oscar-winning ﬁlm Reversal of Fortune were looking for furniture to recreate the home of wealthy socialite Claus von Bülow, they turned—as generations of Broadway productions, TV shows, and movies had before—to Newel Art Galleries on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But they didn’t have to settle for period antiques that merely resembled the furnishings of von Bülow’s luxurious home. They were able to rent furniture and antiques that had actually belonged to the millionaire whose conviction for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny, was overturned on appeal. “Claus von Bülow sold off his 5th Avenue apartment, and we bought many of the pieces,” Lewis Baer ’72 recalls. “We could literally duplicate it exactly.” Originally founded as a “prop house,” Newel remains a major supplier of period antiques to the theater, motion picture, and TV production industries. Antique sales now constitute 70 percent of the gallery’s business, but the roughly one-third devoted to rentals is what Baer refers to as “the glamorous side of the antique business.” “My grandfather started the Newel gallery in the 1930s,” Baer says. “While I was a student at Lehigh, I used to come to New York during my summer and winter vacations and move, wax, and clean furniture for some extra money. Thirty-ﬁve years later, I am still moving, waxing, and cleaning furniture …” Only now, he does it as president and CEO of Newel (www.newel.com), a sprawling, sixstory home to thousands of historical pieces encompassing 17th-century European Renaissance styles through mid-20th-century designs. The building on East 53rd Street originally served as a warehouse for Bloomingdale’s department store. The antiques housed in Newel have graced the sets and stages of hundreds of famous productions, from the classic gangster films The Godfather and GoodFellas, to the Broadway musicals My Fair Lady and Mame, to the TV hits Sex and the City and 30 Rock. And they have touched each and every one of them in a unique and special way. “One of the things that makes Newel unique is that we do not specialize in any one period,” says Baer, who is the third generation to head the family business. “We have the traditional as well as the nontraditional. We have been able to remain flexible about the styles we house so we can stay current with the trends. You can get a classical Chippendale chair and you can ﬁnd a Jordan chair in a style that you would never expect to see. We have a full gamut of historical designs, from rustic pieces to bamboo.” Antique sales now constitute 70 percent of the gallery’s business, but the roughly one-third devoted to rentals is what Baer refers to as “the glamorous side of the antique business.” The collection of furniture is so varied and large that it is almost overwhelming, says Amy Forsyth, associate professor of art and architecture at Lehigh, who took her furniture design class to Newel earlier this year. “There are pieces of so many eras and styles, and they are often quirky and unusual,” she says. For instance, there are a couple of reading chairs that were designed so you sit on them backward, and there’s a lectern on the chair “back” to hold a book. The antiques at Newel are rich with history, both in their design and when you consider the actors and actresses they have shared sets with over the years. “Back in the early days, in the ’30s and ’40s, Newel supplied a lot of the army war pictorials and Broadway shows, like My Fair Lady,” Baer says. “But the business really took off in a big way in the ’50s when 30 lehigh http://www.newel.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007

Table of Contents From the President's Desk Mailbox On Campus Arts & Culture Sports Research Cover Story - Forward March Little Man Overcomes Huge Odds Lights, Camera...Antiques Linderman Renewed From the Publisher's Desk Alumni News

Alumni Bulletin - Fall 2007

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