ALBANY — “The collection is a mirror of this man’s mind. How variant he was, how curious he was about things and how passionate he was about things he liked,” said Robert Meringolo, of the Appraisers Road Show. “I’ve done this for almost 40 years and I have never encountered so many interesting items.”
He is referring to the estate of Hans Toch, a founding faculty member of the School of Criminal Justice at UAlbany, where he taught from 1967 until his retirement in 2008. Toch died earlier this year at the age of 91.
“He was just a very fascinating, brilliant man but he also collected the entire time he was here,” Meringolo said.
On the block during an in-person auction are hundreds of items with an emphasis on Asian and Americana. It is an eclectic lot, featuring everything from hand-painted Chinese teapots to 19th century Shaker chairs and stoneware to ceramic, decorative spittoons to some 200 oil paintings — many of which Toch purchased from a San Francisco street artist.
Of all the items on display at the Overit offices on New Scotland Avenue and at Toch’s home in Loudonville, Meringolo’s favorite is a round, Chinese storage jar with four individual compartments and a number of hand painted people about one-inch tall circling each compartment.
“If I was going to own one piece this would be it,” he said while holding the item at the church converted to the Overit marketing firm’s offices.
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About 25 percent of what Toch collected over the years is at the New Scotland office and it will play host to a live auction on Saturday, Aug. 28. The rest of his collection will be liquidated at his former home near Siena College during a yet to be determined number of estate sales.
While the in person bidding won’t happen until this weekend, the auction world has changed over the years and there are people already bidding on items via the internet. There is one piece — a mini-chippendale blanket chest made out of tiger maple wood and signed by the builder — that had a high bid of $700 as of Friday, Aug. 20.
There will be the traditional fair warning of “going once, going twice” before the hammer bangs down and the highest bidder is awarded, but now-a-days people can bid live from their homes rather than attend in person. That was already a popular way to bid on items at auction, Meringolo said, and was only exacerbated during the COVID pandemic.
Another popular auction technique follows the wildly popular online auction site, EBay. Rather than be in a bidding war with a person in the same room, a person can be alerted by phone or email when the highest bid is trumped and by how much and given an opportunity to raise the stakes.
Even with modernizations of the business activity that dates to ancient Greece, the “antique market has collapsed in America,” Meringolo said.
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“The older dealers have passed away and the young people rejected most all of the collectibles with the exception of the Chinese and the exception of the top of the market,” he said. “They want mid-century, 1950s or 1960s, modern and they want chrome and fiberglass furniture. There was a time when there would be 18th century American furniture and people would fight for it, now a piece that would once go for $5,000 is going for $600.”
Over the course of his career, Meringolo found a chair in a “modest cottage” at the north end of Lake George that was given to the Chinese emperor in 1736. It sold for $1 million. More recently, a woman came to him with a painting that had been in her closet for some 40 years. It sold for $350,000.
How much the Toch estate is worth is anyone’s guess, he said, but is predicting the extensive Chinese teapot collection could be the highlight of the auction. Each one is hand-painted and signed by the artist and there is still a market for top-end Chinese antiques.
Toch
Toch was born in 1930 in Vienna, Austria. He escaped the holocaust and initially emigrated to Cuba and then to the U.S. He earned his bachelors at Brooklyn College in 1952 and his Ph.D. in psychology at Princeton in 1955. He served in the U.S. Navy, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Norway, a visiting lecturer at Harvard, and a member of the Psychology Department at Michigan State University before coming to UAlbany.
He authored more than 30 books on the different viewpoints of the criminal justice system including those focusing on the police, the perpetrator, the incarcerated and the corrections officers. Some titles include “Violent Men: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Violence;” “Living in Prison: The Ecology of Survival;” and “Stress in Policing,” according to his obituary.
“As an obsessional and expert collector of antiques and art, Toch enjoyed nothing more than death-defying drives (automotive skills were not among his strengths) to remote, country antique stores to browse for Shaker furniture or porcelain dogs and good-naturedly haggle with the owner over ‘extortionate’ prices,” according to his obituary. “He cultivated the image of a curmudgeonly grouch, but all who came to know him soon discovered the heart of gold that lurked beneath the ostensibly gruff exterior. For his many friends and colleagues, Hans is fondly remembered for his brilliant intellect, his ineffable buoyancy, quick wit, eloquent prose, and his unfailing commitment and enduring contributions to rigorous social scientific scholarship and social justice.”
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