Colorado’s hearty modernist collecting crowd can thank Denver writer and fine arts critic Michael Paglia for igniting a passion for collecting in Robert Delaney, a bellwether among the city’s vintage furniture and art dealers.
The two men have been friends for more than four decades, and life partners most of that time.
It was during the late ’70s that Paglia gleaned from one of his own arts mentors that midcentury furniture — selling back then for a song in thrift and secondhand stores — was the Next Big Thing in antiques and collectibles. He passed that tip on to Delaney, whose very first midcentury piece was a Wolfgang Hoffman side table, which he found for a few dollars at a Colorado Springs thrift store.
“It was basically just to furnish the house,” Delaney, 56, says of the early furniture in his own vintage collection. “From there we just developed this industrial look.”
Delaney is the artist behind grand kinetic sculptures at the Colorado Convention Center, the New Frontier Bank building in Greeley and downtown Denver office buildings. He has also been a fixture on Denver’s Antiques Row for 27 years.
Just about anyone around the state who favors furniture and artwork from the 1930s through the 1970s has passed through Delaney’s store, Popular Culture, located now at 1957 S. Broadway.
These days this artist and retailer is quite the collector. Among Delaney’s passions are Venetian glass, American pottery, belt buckles, cocktail shakers and rayon bathrobes.
“My dressers at home don’t have clothes in them,” he says. “They have stuff.”
But it is the man’s art deco cigarette lighters that speak most acutely to his eye for design. Delaney started hoarding them around 30 years ago because they were affordable, and they matched the Space Age look of his house.
And he still loves them — not just because he’s a smoker or because over the years their value has mushroomed.
“Each piece,” he says, “is like miniature architecture.”
