Art & Antiques Go Dutch

MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — Just when American traditional art and antiques fairs are flagging in spirit, sales, and attendance, along comes the grande dame, the European Fine Art Fair. The 20th annual fair, which opened Thursday and runs until Sunday, covers the area of four football fields at the Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Center. The fair drew 30,000 people in the first four days alone, each of whom paid 55 euros (that’s $72) to attend. It offers showmanship and connoisseurship rarely spied at American fairs, and as a consequence it draws a spirited band of New Yorkers despite a trek of more than 3,000 miles. Those invited to attend the vernissage last week nibbled salmon canapés and foie gras, served on porcelain plates by waitresses wearing satin dresses and silver stilettos.“We began as an Old Masters event,” a dealer who heads the London and Munich Bernheimer Colnaghi galleries, Konrad Bernheimer, said. Mr. Bernheimer was instrumental in founding TEFAF, but the fair has widened its reach since then. This year, 219 dealers — twice as many as at the first fair — are participating. Antiques are predominant, with 96 specialty dealers, while Old Masters dealers number 62, and Modern art, 42. Antiquities, jewelry, and manuscripts make up the remaining 20 dealers.There are 25 Manhattan dealers in attendance. “We see so many European clients,” Mark Schaffer, whose family heads up A La Vieille Russie on Fifth Avenue, said. Belgians and Germans whispered over Fabergé enameled bell pushes, picture frames, and inkwells on his stand. “They’re seeking their heritage,” a Manhattan dealer of works on paper, David Tunick, said of the crowds clustered around his offerings of Albrecht Dürer engravings and Rembrandt etchings.Two other Manhattan galleries offered paintings that drew crowds. Acquavella Galleries showed Renoir’s 1882 oil painting “Among the Roses” for $45 million, while Marlborough Gallery offered a Francis Bacon 198-inchlong triptych, “Three Studies of the Human Body” (1970) for $36.9 million.The low dollar hardly seems to faze Americans. Manhattan socialite Audrey Gruss attended because she is furnishing a new home in London. The former chief executive of Chanel USA, Arie Kopelman, who serves as Winter Antiques Show chairman, was attending his 15th TEFAF. “It’s important to get out and see the market,” Mr. Kopelman said, lingering over a pair of 1860 English globes priced at $975,000 at the booth of the London firm Mallett, which also has a Madison Avenue outpost. An art adviser in New York and Paris who also serves TEFAF board member, Michel Witmer, was leading several clients through the stand. “I wouldn’t think of missing TEFAF,” Mr. Witmer said.Museums shop at TEFAF, too. “We’ve seen curators from the Getty, the Louvre, the Detroit Arts Institute, and the Metropolitan,” a Manhattan dealer of Old Masters, Jack Kilgore, said. He shares a stand this year with another New York Old Masters specialist, Otto Naumann. Together, they offered 60 paintings. On Friday, they sold “Isaac and Rebecca” by Gerbrand van den Eekhout (1621–1674), a pupil and friend of Rembrandt, for a six-figure amount.Although the American trade is outnumbered by 51 British dealers, 40 Dutch, and 31 Germans, many of the New York galleries are among the most prominent at the fair. Wildenstein & Co. and PaceWildenstein, for example, commanded a power booth, and offered Maurice de Vlaminck’s 1905 painting “Le Hâvre, les Bassins,” as well as six Louise Nevelson sculptures. A show of Nevelson’s work will be mounted in May at the Jewish Museum, and the chairman of PaceWildenstein, Arne Glimcher, is hoping to capitalize on rising interest in the sculptor.Representatives of French & Co., based on East 65th Street and renowned for their French Impressionists, were courting newly rich Russians. Front and center at their stand is Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin’s 1879 oil painting “A Sandy Coastline,” priced at $4 million. “We saw Russians here last time, so we’re hoping they will return,” owner Martin Zimet said.Although paintings sell well in Maastricht, antiques including religious objects, Meissen porcelain, and heavy furniture are still predominant. A Manhattan dealer, Tony Blumka, offered medieval and Renaissance marble Madonnas and angels in polychrome marble, as well as 16th-century ceramics. “We will sell everything on the stand,” Mr. Blumka said. So far, so good: In the first weekend, he sold two pastiglia caskets dating from 1500.For some, TEFAF serves as a reassurance that, despite the attention paid to contemporary art fairs in Basel and New York, the market for older artwork is viable. “Maastricht proves there is still a large contingent of Old Masters collectors and enthusiasts buying in Europe,” a vice president of Richard Feigen Gallery, Frances Beatty, said. Her booth offers Orazio Gentileschi’s “Stigmatization of St. Francis” (1600) for $2.8 million.“The crowds are serious,” Ms. Beatty said. “It’s not like they’re only interested in contemporary art which they plan on purchase to immediately flip at auction.”

Art & Antiques Go Dutch

Art & Antiques Go Dutch

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