By 4 p.m. on Thursday, the aisles of TEFAF New York at the Park Avenue Armory should have started thinning out. Instead, dealers were still pinned into conversations, collectors crowded around vitrines, and the low roar that had echoed though the building since the doors opened for its VIP day at 11 a.m. had barely let up.

“This is probably the best TEFAF I’ve seen for a long time,” dealer Sean Kelly said after making several laps around the fair. “People are really, really enjoying this thing. It’s as if, after years of keeping our heads down and trying to get through the depression the Trump administration has forced of the country, everyone’s decided start enjoying themselves again.” 

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That sense of momentum hovered over the entire fair. TEFAF, which runs through Tuesday, May 19, has always occupied a different lane from the rest of New York’s May fairs: the lighting is warmer, the champagne more effervescent, the pace slower. And, this year’s edition also arrived with a sharper sense of confidence than the market has seen in months.

“Collectors feel bullish,” art adviser Ralph DeLuca told ARTnews. “There’s less confidence in assets like stocks and things. There’s more confidence in hard assets like art, antiques, and collectibles.” 

That may help explain why TEFAF, now a decade into its New York run, continues to feel distinct even amid the city’s increasingly crowded spring fair week. The fair’s identity rests on its unusual balance between art from the 20th and 21st centuries, mixing antiquities, design, modern art, and contemporary work under the same roof. In practice, that means a collector can walk from an Egyptian stele to a Calder mobile to a brand-new figurative painting in less than two minutes.

And people were doing exactly that all day.

At London-based Alison Jacques, visitors clustered around a booth that paired two ghostly Dorothea Tanning paintings with striking large-format photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Gordon Parks. On one wall hangs Mapplethorpe’s stark American Flag (1977), while nearby hangs his painted wooden Stars, arranged like fragments of patriotic theater. Jonathan Maisie, the gallery’s managing director, described TEFAF as one of the few fairs where discovery not only feels possible, but is part and parcel with the whole experience.

“It’s never a feeding frenzy,” he said. “You allowed take time, learn about what’s on offer. And you can be sure at this fair you’re not going see the things you see everywhere else.” 

A few aisles away, Sean Kelly Gallery had assembled one of the fair’s stronger booths, weaving together historical and contemporary work. The intertwined figures and curling forms in Shahzia Sikander’s mosaic The Hour Glass shimmered alongside Sam Moyer’s stone paintings that push slabs of marble and granite into arrangements resembling pressed plants or geological samples.

Kelly himself sounded almost relieved by the atmosphere. “I think everybody’s been so depressed by the state of the country for so long,” he said. “I think everybody’s just basically decided, fuck it. We’ve got to actually live our lives and enjoy ourselves again. And they’re coming out and when they’re seeing quality, they’re reveling in it.” 

The newly launched, secondary-market-focused Pace Di Donna Schrader Galleries made its TEFAF debut with a bevy of heavyweight material: a smoky Eugène Delacroix lion study from 1841, a loose and luminous Willem de Kooning painted in East Hampton in 1976, and a delicate Calder mobile that had remained in the same family collection since the artist gifted it in 1946. 

“It’s been insane,” cofounder Emmanuel Di Donna said of the crowds, noting that the booth was only quiet for a few brief moments in the early afternoon. More interestingly, he pointed to the broader mood surrounding the market. “Sentiment is what drives everything,” he said, adding that a strong showing at next week’s New York auctions, at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Philips, was giving collectors and dealers alike a welcome boost of confidence. 

Elsewhere, TEFAF’s appetite for historical range was on full display. London antiquities dealer David Aaron sold a 3,300-year-old Egyptian limestone stele depicting Pharaoh Thutmose IV presenting offerings to the god Atum. The object came with one of those improbable provenance stories only the art market can produce: it had once belonged to bodybuilding entrepreneur Ben Weider, who received it in Cairo in 1964 from the United Arab Republic of Bodybuilding Federation. 

Meanwhile, Yares Art staged a quieter but elegant conversation between Robert Motherwell and David Smith alongside works by Helen Frankenthaler and Anthony Caro, echoing the gallery’s concurrent New York exhibition about the friendship and artistic dialogue between the two artists.

One of the more visually dynamic booths belonged to Thaddaeus Ropac, which dedicated its stand to new paintings by the Danish artist Eva Helene Pade. Her huge canvases, installed almost theatrically on floor-to-ceiling posts, depict crowds dissolving into smoke, shadow, and flesh-toned blurs. In Jagt (Hunt), naked figures and hounds emerge through clouds of rifle smoke, while Opstand (Surge) turns a tightly packed mass of bodies into something between a nightclub and a political uprising. The paintings carry a strange mix of beauty and dread, like history paintings viewed through fogged glass at 3 a.m.

Another highlight is Salon 94’s presentation, which was staged less like a conventional art fair booth and more like a collector’s apartment designed by a slightly deranged perfectionist. A huge John Kacere painting of silk underwear and bare flesh, Marianne R. (1973), hangs above a fireplace against dark wood-paneled walls, echoing the way artist Fernando Botero once displayed the work over his bed in Paris. Around it, Tom Sachs’s rough-edged furniture and lamps gave the booth the feeling of a functioning workshop crossed with a bachelor pad, while ceramic vessels by Shoko Suzuki soften the whole presentation with earthy, hand-built forms. Nearby hang Ed Clark paintings from his “New Orleans Series” and “Egyptian Series,” where giant broom-driven sweeps of paint turned abstraction into something almost architectural. It was sexy, strange, and unusually cohesive for a fair booth, and the kind of presentation that made visitors slow down and stay a while.

That tension between the historical and the contemporary may ultimately be what continues to make TEFAF work in New York. In a week crowded with contemporary fairs optimized for speed and spectacle, the fair, amplified by its setting at the historic Park Avenue Armory, still offers something slower and stranger: a place where collectors can look at a stele of a pharaoh, a vintage Mapplethorpe photograph, and a fresh-from-the-studio painting of a riot scene in the span of one aisle, then stand there talking about all three over champagne for 20 minutes.