Dealers and collectors strolling the aisles have 52 booths to look forward to, from Richard Nagy LTD, a London-based 20th-century fine art dealer specializing in Schieles and Klimts, or New York dealer Lillian Nassau’s collection of Tiffany lamps and glass, or French Art Deco from Paris’s Galerie Vallois.

For those passing through the Todd Merrill booth, what looks like a traditional toile de jouy wallpaper from a distance is actually a three-dimensional installation; and what looks like a very prim and whimsical pattern turns into a very subversive narrative. “It’s a very Edward Gorey dark humor,” New York-based artist Beth Katleman told ARTINFO. She constructed “Folly” ($200,000), the handmade ceramic wall with 35,000 individual handcast pieces of kitsch she’s amassed over the years, including wedding cake figurines and Eiffel-Tower-shaped pencil sharpeners. Each cluster of pieces tells a story that gets progressively darker as the eye moves along it — a bridal party loses a member as she slowly drowns in a pond. 

Each piece has formed its own story on its way to the Pavilion, including the piece of jewelry that contributed to Harry Bertoia’s death at Didier LTD. The London specialist in jewelry by postwar painters and sculptors (and has, at one time or another, possessed least a quarter of the pieces in the Museum of Arts and Design’s “The Artist as Jeweler" show), presents a collection of pieces by Man Ray, Georges Braque, Picasso, and many others. Bertoia crafted a fan-like beryllium bronze necklace ($30,000) in 1962 for his daughter Lesta on her 18th birthday. Normally innate, this particular metal is toxic when heated (which was unknown to Bertoia), and was the ultimate cause of his  death in 1978, when he was only 63. Didier Haspeslagh, the company's eponymous dealer, insists the jewelry to be worn rather than put on display, he told ARTINFO. “It comes alive once it’s on a person. Otherwise, it’s dead.”

New York's Galerie Downtown boasts works by 20th-century pioneers in the arts décoratifs, from Charlotte Perriand to Pierre Jeanneret. What really caught our eye was the Jean Prouvé Lecture Hall Armchair ($240,000), whose sculptural aluminum framework embodies everything we love about the celebrated designer and engineer . Commissioned by a university for student use, he designed and built 100 of these in 1952. In the 1970s, all but 10 were destroyed. One is on view at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and another is at the Pavilion of Arts and Design.

Another chair struck a chord with us at Stockholm’s Modernity. Its simple black frame, made of rectangles and straight lines accented in blue, red, and yellow, brings to mind the simplicity and primary colors of a set of Legos, and the De Stijl styling of the Rietveld-Schröder home where it originated. Gerrit Thomas Rietveld built the Red and Blue chair ($42,000) forTruus Schröder-Schräder in 1918. Architect Hans Schröder, one of Schröder-Schräder’s three children and greatly inspired by Rietveld’s work, commissioned another chair in the 1950s as a memento of her childhood home and mentor. It came to Modernity directly from her estate following her death two years ago.

And along with that of several other equally irreverent contemporary designers, Carpenters Workshop Gallery presents designs from ever-ironic Dutch duo Studio Job. Their Wrecking Ball Lamp (price undisclosed) tackles the subject of industrial decadence with a weighty solid bronze, delicately crafted to look like a piece of heavy machinery with the lightbulb suspended as a wrecking ball. The piece was specially commissioned for Carpenters Workshop Gallery, encapsulating  their signature sense of humor with an underlying social commentary.

In addition to these, there is plenty to peruse, ogle, and learn — even for those who haven’t amassed the necessary fortune to bring a piece home.