Where You Can Sell the Walls Of Your French Chateau, But Probably Not a Picasso

While many dealers reported brisk business at the opening weekend of the famed Maastricht art fair, few Americans were in sight. Aside from the obvious deterrent of a weak dollar, the Gods conspired to keep overseas travelers away from this year’s European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf). The Dutch claim they rarely see snow, but last week the heavens dumped several inches, closing all but one of the runways at Amsterdam airport and leaving late-arriving American collectors in the lurch.Certainly most of the 202 dealers are European. While 20 came from the United States, 45 were English, 40 Dutch, 31 German, and 21 French. One dealer, London’s Ben Janssen, who specializes in Asian art, estimated that around 5% of the visitors to his booth in the first two days were American – far fewer than just five or 10 years ago.Among the few Americans who made the trek to opening day were a few museum groups – including one from the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Some 31 patrons and trustees from the Detroit Institute of Arts came over with the museum director and European painting curator to accompany the exhibition of Dutch, Italian, and French Old Master paintings and sculptures from its collection that the museum had sent over.American decorators, who are usually in view at American fairs, typically don’t trek to Maastricht. But this year an enterprising antique piano dealer, Max Rutten, organized a junket specifically for a group of American decorators and collectors. The 39-year-old, who sells pianos from his office in Manhattan, is a native of Maastricht. He has competed in Ironman triathlons and is studying part-time for an MBA from Oxford. He admits many buyers for his fancy pianos, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, buy the instruments not to play them but as a status decoration.Even if one isn’t a decorator, or aspiring to the chateau lifestyle, Tefaf has something for anyone who loves to look at wonderful things. For more than a million dollars, a German dealer, Albrecht Neuhaus, was willing to part with the interior walls from an 18thcentury French chateau, while Salander-O’Reilly wanted $15 million for a 1941 painting by Arshile Gorky – making a 1965 Picasso portrait on sale from Canadian dealer Robert Landau seem a relative bargain at $12.5 million. London silver and jewelry dealer S.J. Phillips had a couple of diamond tiaras, but if you have to ask the price…The fair hired new designers to spiff up the decor, which this year included 100,000 white tulips, arranged as part of the architecture, stacked in rows around columns or in small square formations in sitting areas. “We wanted to make it fresh,” said David Bentheim, a London-based designer who helped create the look of the fair – in other words, to make it look younger. The average fairgoer is not particularly young however, with a half-century seeming to be the entry point, except for some tall, slender 30-something women (third, or maybe fourth, wives) on the arms of some of the robust white-haired fellows.The fair is divided by category, so antiques and decorative arts are all in one area, while the modern art and Old Masters are in another. Old Master dealers are the stars of the fair, especially the Dutch paintings dealers, including Robert Noortman, De Jonckheere, Salomon Lilian, David Koetser, and Johnny Van Haeften. These booths hark back to Holland’s golden age with lush floral still lifes, Rembrandtesque lighting, and raucous taverns scenes. Works by museum stalwarts Jan Lievens, Jan Steen, and Balthasar van der Ast line the walls.While the Dutch pictures get star billing, there is plenty of serious Italian art – though perhaps not quite as much as was expected. The fair had promoted a work by Perugino, being brought by Parisian dealer G. Sarti. Several turns around the Sarti booth showed a host of putti, but no Perugino. The gallery reportedly told some inquirers the work had received interest and was taken off view.An official from the Dutch tourism board, however, confirmed the work had been impounded to a bonded warehouse when its attribution was questioned during the pre-fair vetting process. The fair organizers take this step of actually impounding works they are uncertain of in order to prevent a dealer from showing a work back in a hotel room or away from the fair. Security guards also check all visitors’ bags going into the fair (as well as out) to prevent anyone from bringing unvetted objects into the fair – perhaps hoping for a little “Antiques Roadshow”-style free appraisal.Fair organizers have made efforts to attract more modern and contemporary art dealers. But during the opening days of the fair, attendance in the modern art was sparse. “I think the buyers all get sucked up with the interesting stuff” in the Old Masters section, said New York and Cologne, Germany, dealer Michael Werner, looking around his empty booth, with its wild jumble of mostly German works by contemporary artists the dealer helped shepherd to fame, including A.R. Penck, Georg Baselitz, and Jorg Immendorf.Nearby, dealer Nicholas Acquavella tapped away on his laptop computer, sitting a few feet from a massive, seven-figure Lucian Freud, “David and Eli,” that had already been placed on reserve by a European museum the gallery met at the fair. Sperone Westwater had made a couple quick sales, including a large painting by Julian Schnabel, but many of the more expensive works had yet to find interest.The contemporary section of the fair has only begun to cultivate sellers and buyers. “The first few years at the fair were a nightmare,” admitted Mr. Landau. When modern and contemporary dealers were added to the fair in 1991, collectors seemed not to notice. Acquavella gave it a go three years ago, but lackluster sales prompted them to turn down an invitation to return. This year they elected to try again. Maastricht may be the one place where dealers in contemporary art – the hottest section of the market right now – feel like the ones on the outside looking in.London contemporary art dealer Tim Taylor brought major pieces to the fair, including a 1975 Philip Guston, “Waking Up,” priced at 3 million euros. He filled a wall with small drawings by Marcel Dzama, priced at just $1,600 each. By the second day of the fair, there were no takers for the Dzamas, but some observers had taken time to note that the works – delicate drawings of eccentric fantasies, including genitalia and weaponry – were “rather rude.”

Where You Can Sell the Walls Of Your French Chateau, But Probably Not a Picasso

Where You Can Sell the Walls Of Your French Chateau, But Probably Not a Picasso

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