Editor's letter.(Editorial)

What connects Albert Sack to Dominique de Menil? You may well ask. This magazine has often been a miscellany of articles in recent decades, but the September issue has an unusually wide range of subjects--eighteenth-century American silhouettes, mid-twentieth-century Danish furniture, late nineteenth-century ivory-handled silver by Gorham, early nineteenth-century European porcelain, American arts and crafts, a tribute to the great collector Dominique de Menil, and the memoirs of Albert Sack. There are also two short pieces, one on a desk that may have belonged to John Hancock, a study in provenance, and the other on Christian Deydier, sinologist and president of this month's Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris, a peek at what future fairs may hold for those of us who love things of the past. Whew!

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How do these articles cohere? They come together in much the way that Max Ernst collages, tribal art, Victoriana, and classical antiquities do in the Menil house. In other words, they are connected by an enthusiasm for their quality and their challenging diversity. Dominique de Menil was prescient in her view of culture since World War II as global. While she was putting rococo revival furniture together with Rothko paintings in the 1960s, this magazine was showing the best pieces of Americana along with fine French furniture, Wedgwood medallions, and sixteenth-century Italian lace, though not all in the same room! I love looking at those old issues of ANTIQUES. I am entranced by how firm the consensus was about what was of value, how wonderfully familiar everything seemed across the boundaries of time and ...