T he Frieze Art Fair and the Met’s Costume Institute gala start the May art season, which flowers in all its mercenary, status-seeking, and acquisitive splendor. I covered the Met gala on Thursday and wrote a bit about the Frieze last week, after scouring its virtual booths, which offered “beaucoup de merde,” as Voltaire might have said. Today, I’ll parse New York’s version of TEFAF, the European Fine Art Fair, which ran for five days at the Park Avenue Armory, and the American Art Fair at the Bohemian Hall on 73rd Street. The big auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips unfold over two weeks, with molti moolah already spent.

The fairs and auctions suggest tepid rather than moribund markets with lots of sales but lower prices than during the boomlet two or three years ago. Then, the Covid mass hysteria made the rich richer. Country retreats got serious makeovers. Working more and more from home, executives couldn’t bear looking at posters for old movies. They wanted real art. I went to both fairs on their final day, so the atmosphere was quiet. In TEFAF’s case, it was downright listless and not only because dealers awaited the yabba-dabba-doo whistle.

First, I’ll accentuate the positive. The American Art Fair, of all the art fairs, is my favorite, not only for quality but because American art’s my academic specialty and the dealers are the old-timers. It’s a small fair, usually only 15 booths, but a spacious one, spread over three floors of the elegant Renaissance Revival building that was once a community center for Manhattan’s Bohemians — the ethnic ones — as well as the borough’s Moravians, Gorals, Silesians, and Slovaks.

Thomas Colville Fine Art, still run by Colville, has been selling art of the highest quality since 1972. I first knew him through his expertise in all things Whistler, Inness, and La Farge, but he deals in American Modernism, the Hudson River School, and Barbizon and Impressionist art. He’s got the eye of a connoisseur, market knowledge that’s encyclopedic, and a nose for art with pedigree. Jan Matulka’s Composition, from 1927, startled me, and that’s not easy. It’s a very, very good painting.

Matulka (1890–1972), born in Bohemia but later an American, is an unheralded presence in American Modernism. He amalgamated Bohemian folk art, Paris avant-garde art from the 1910s and ’20s, and American figure realism to produce something new and attractive. For a time, he was the only teacher at the Art Students League of New York who was pushing modern European styles, which made his classes popular and influential.

Composition owes much to Picasso and Léger, but I love its lovely, taut composition and snazzy color. It hasn’t been on the market since 1970, when Tom Armstrong, later director of the Whitney, bought it. It’s $145,000. Matulka was, even for an artist, viewed as inordinately tempestuous. This hurt his reputation, as did a bad case of depression and a hermetic lifestyle. His work is always good and a very good value. He ran well with the big enchiladas of his day — Matulka, Stuart Davis, John Graham, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, and David Smith, mostly young men having a cutting-edge sensibility, part abstractionist, part Surrealist.

Colville’s booth is a mini-museum surveying American art from about the 1850s to the 1950s. Other booths were more narrowly focused. David Schorsch and Eileen Smiles sell work by mostly itinerant and largely self-taught American artists from the 19th and early 20th centuries, or what’s called folk art. I don’t like the term “folk” or the collective “folks,” used by pols as a sugared euphemism for Obama’s clingers.

Ammi Phillips (1788–1865) was a superb designer and colorist whose clients in little towns east of Albany wanted straightforward likenesses low on flash and airs, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t want charm and elegance. His Portrait of Ruth (Haynes) Palmer, from around 1817, is planar, even essentialist. Palmer, a young bride, projects a pretty, delicate, honest presence. She lived in Hoosick, N.Y., on the Vermont line about 40 miles east of Troy and, in her day, a bustling mill town. She died in 1873 so might have known Grandma Moses, born in Hoosick in 1861. Moses descends from Phillips, style-wise, in some ways. The portrait stayed in Palmer’s family until the 1970s. It was sold when I saw it, so I didn’t get the price.

Near it was another profile in purity, of the feline kind, and purely majestic, too — Cat Seated on a One-Armed Rocker. Folk art is literal, but it could be called Empress or Emperor Enthroned. It’s probably by Harriet Guilford (1861–1953), who worked in Allegheny County in New York State in the 1880s and 990s. It’s $55,000. Who said cats don’t make eye contact? This and the Palmer portrait are a sweet pair. These two portraits are very American. They’re direct, homey, and utilitarian, given that they’re art and thus less practical than, say, a plow.

Adelson Gallery offered a pair of American portraits that are direct and personal, to be sure, but they also have dash and sparkle and are very French. John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Henri Lafort, from 1882, is among a tiny group of bravura bust portraits of artist friends, so they’re fresh and intimate. The subject is alive, down to his red lips, brown, inquisitive eyes, and full, ever-so-slightly-damp forehead.

Smiling Sara in a Big Hat Holding Her Dog is by Mary Cassatt (1844–1926). Scholars date it to between 1905 and 1915, when Cassatt was making portraits of children with their dogs. It’s a pastel counterproof, a rare and rarified genre. Cassatt took a pastel portrait of smiling Sara, now lost, laid a damp piece of paper on top of it, and ran it through a printing press. The press produced a reversed, more abstract image. Bright or saturated colors turn muted and velvety. Often the original pastel was destroyed as part of the process.

Pastel counterproofs were a new idea. I’ve seen a few of Cassatt’s and some seem flat. Adelson’s works, though. What it might lose in liveliness and a brighter palette it gains in dignity and stateliness — for a child and a dog. The dealer doesn’t want prices published, which is fine. New York State law mandates prices at galleries and art fairs be posted somewhere, which Adelson and all the other dealers do. I can say, though, that the Sargent seems very expensive. It’s fantastic and was painted the same year as Madam X, so it’s peak Sargent, on the one hand. On the other, it’s informal and a sketch, though refined and resolved. The Cassatt price seems reasonable.

These two are as suave and stylish — and French — as the two folk-art pictures are lucid and solid — and American. They are an odd quartet, though Sargent and Cassatt, French-acculturated as they were, considered themselves American.

Right after seeing the two pairs, with doubles on my mind, I went to TEFAF. There, the London antiquities dealer Charles Ede offered a black-figure belly amphora by, we think, the Antimenes Painter and dating to around 530 b.c. Like most high-end Greek vases, it’s two-sided. One side shows the hero Herakles wrestling the Nemean Lion, who is not only ferocious but, with a pelt as dense as armor, impossible to kill with conventional weapons. Herakles, reared on a diet of Popeye spinach and Wheaties, strangles him.

It was the first of Herakles’ Twelve Labors. Why was he charged with this assignment? The goddess Hera, envious of Herakles for spending so much fun time with her husband, Zeus, cast a spell on the warrior. In a state of induced rage, Herakles murdered his wife and children. The Twelve Labors were his penance. After strangling the lion, Herakles skinned him with his dismembered paw. He wore the lion’s coat afterward as a hidden source of strength and, soon, as his trademark, like Batman’s cape.

The other side of the amphora shows the god Hermes, a multitasker among gods. Hermes is famous as the gods’ messenger, which means he moved often and freely between the divine and human worlds, as did Herakles, part god, part mortal. He was the god of boundaries, travelers, and shepherds. Like Herakles, he got around.

Sometimes two-sided pots depict scenes that don’t align, but this one does. Black-figure vase painting is outline-oriented, not too far from Phillips’s and Guilford’s style, and low on details. Figures are flat. Red-figure vases, coming later, allowed for detail and modeling. It’s $200,000.

New York’s TEFAF has been fraught since it premiered in 2016 as a companion fair to Papa TEFAF in Maastricht in the Netherlands, which is the world’s grandest, classiest, museum-quality art fair. The New York portfolio would be contemporary art and modern design, neither of which figure hugely in Maastricht. Maastricht might be a small Dutch city, but it’s easily accessible. Being small and Dutch, the city offers little to distract from the fair aside from friendly locals. New York, though chockablock with distractions, is where the big-bucks buyers are. Rich Europeans, Arabs, and Asians love visiting New York, especially if they have armed guards to protect them from a zestful mugger class.

Maastricht is still known for old masters, Romantics, and the French avant-garde up to Picasso. It, too, however, is moving modern. Fewer than half the 250 or so dealers exhibiting at the Maastricht fair I attended in early March were old-master specialists. There are more and more dealers of modern and contemporary paintings, and more dealers selling modern furniture, ceramics, textiles, glass, and sculptures.

I don’t know whether or not duplication explains, in part, why the TEFAF fair this week seemed so themeless. Aside from the absence of old masters, the New York fair felt like a mini Maastricht, and I’d just been to maxi Maastricht. Some of the dealers exuded a “why am I here” vibe. Many had already displayed at Maastricht. Some of those who hadn’t were Europeans who want to galvanize a New York presence. Overall, the New York fair was a little of this, a little of that, all of the highest quality, but with a shortage of dazzle.

Again, accentuating the positive, I looked for artists I didn’t know. There are always lots of them, since I don’t know living Asian artists, for example, or jewelry makers, or many of the top, new designers. That’s one of many reasons I love my job. I learn so much. Friedman Benda, the New York dealer specializing in cutting-edge design, offered a majestic bronze reception desk from 2020 made by Misha Khan (b. 1989). It’s bold and capricious, crazy and modern, but with an old-master presence. He works in a contemporary Baroque style. At Friedman Benda’s booth, the desk was pushed against a wall, so I thought it was a dining-room side table. It’s priced in the very low six figures.

I’d heard of Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) but knew her for her big, colorful Nana sculptures, which are gaudy and tacky and, worst of all, three-dimensional Boteros. A crazy celebrity who gravitated between New York and Paris, she was an acolyte of Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and the Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely.

That said, her wall sculpture Le Château de Gilles de Rais, from 1962, is fabulous and a revelation. Gilles de Rais was a medieval French knight and baron and Joan of Arc’s right-hand man. Saint Phalle’s life was chaotic enough, but she found a parallel in the busy but insane life of Rais, who was executed in 1440 for treason and occultism. Le Château is cryptic and packed but completely bewitching. It was at Galerie Vallois’s booth for $800,000.

New York TEFAF might suffer from a surfeit of art fairs. TEFAF-Central has already ditched one of its two annual New York art fairs. Its New York iteration has top quality but so does the Winter Show, which is design-heavy, and the Art Dealers Association show. In a market like today’s, more blah than soft, TEFAF is struggling to find the niche where it’s essential to an audience beyond critics and art groupies like me.

After TEFAF, I walked back to the American Art Fair for a dose of coherence and found one last treat. Kraushaar Galleries’ Pigeon Cove, by Gifford Beal (1879-1956), is a bracing waterfront panorama painted in 1925 in Rockport, near Gloucester in Massachusetts. Pigeon Cove is $65,000, a great deal, and at four feet wide can carry a room. Beal’s not as famous as he should be. Pigeon Cove is a bright, happy picture and evokes the feel of a chilly breeze and smell of salt air. It’s a very American picture.