It may be small and quiet, but Maastricht is still the perfect place to buy art
On face value no one would believe that the small, dull Dutch city of Maastricht hosts the world’s biggest art fair, but on 8 March the evidence was clear, when the 8,000 richest private collectors in the world milled about among £500m worth of art, clutching champagne glasses.
The nearby airport at Aachen was choked with private jets – 200 of them arrived during the fair, 20 times more than the average at other times of year. In the 1990s the airport had to expand because it found itself diverting the conga line of planes elsewhere for lack of space. ‘Without wanting to sound arrogant, many collectors now see the fair as an unmissable event,’ says Ben Janssens, president of The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF) and a dealer in Asian art.
TEFAF proved itself even stronger this year due to the appearance for the first time of Sotheby’s and Christie’s – the big talking point among visitors. TEFAF is an event for dealers, but these auction houses, although they are large, international companies with excellent client lists, felt that they could not miss the opportunity to lure another collector. Many dealers were secretly smouldering with rage that the auction houses had muscled in on the fair, but for the collectors it meant more choice.
The collectors in question buy the very best, and the dealers oblige. On show was the last history painting not yet in the ownership of a museum by the great French artist Jacques-Louis David, yours for about £6m from Stair Sainty of London. Galleria Moretti of Florence had a portrait of St Anthony Abbot by Italian painter Lorenzo Monaco, who died circa 1424. Johnny Van Haeften showed off a winter scene by the jolliest – and perhaps the greatest – Dutch Old Master, Pieter Brueghel the Younger.
In terms of 20th-century masters, Richard Nagy offered a view of Trieste harbour by Austrian Egon Schiele for nearly £2m. Looking east, Littleton & Hennessy had a 2,500-year-old Chinese bronze figure of a tapir (a pig-like mammal). Since there is only one other in the world, in a Taiwanese museum, the gallery was reasonably enough asking £6m.
As for the auction houses, they did not flaunt their brand names, but instead discreetly sold works through their own dealerships. Sotheby’s, through its recent acquisition, the Dutch gallery Noortman, offered a succulent still-life painting of fruit by Dutch Old Master Judith Leyster, and a landscape by Impressionist Alfred Sisley. Christie’s, through its private sales subsidiary King Street Fine Art, was particularly strong on Impressionist, modernist and contemporary art, with a Renoir, a very colourful Kees Van Dongen and a bright geometric work by Frank Stella.
If the success of the fair is surprising when you consider its location, it is positively shocking given its modest beginnings. ‘Ten or 15 years ago, it wasn’t like this,’ says Janssens. The fair began as the Pictura Fine Art Fair in 1975, when there were just 28 exhibitors. Business was so quiet that some dealers played boules in the corridors between the booths. The fair then amalgamated with another, and in the 1980s it encouraged dealers from abroad to get involved.
‘It became self-perpetuating,’ says Janssens. Dealers came from ever further afield with increasingly strong stock, which was then snapped up by the growing number of visitors. Dealers of almost every artistic discipline are now represented. The London-based antiquities gallery Charles Ede joined in 2001, and this time he enriched the fair with a 2,500-year-old Greek vase decorated with cockerels. Asian art is also strongly in evidence, and prominent dealer John Eskenazi returned this year with a terracotta plaque dating from 1BC India.
Contemporary galleries have also come on board, from Marlborough in London to Sperone Westwater in New York. A highlight this year was a new sculpture by Anthony Caro from Annely Juda Fine Art – a play of lines and volumes covered with deep brown rust.
The statistics underline the transformation at TEFAF. In 1986, there were just 25,000 visitors. Last year there were 84,000. In the early 1990s about 140 dealers attended. This year there were 220.
There are many reasons behind the fair’s success. First, there is the sheer number of paintings by Dutch Old Masters on show.
About 75 per cent of the Dutch Old Masters available for sale anywhere on the planet will be displayed at Maastricht. If this is your area of interest, there is simply no alternative but to attend. Second, there are the very high standards that everything on exhibition is held to, with all works being independently vetted so that visitors can be confident they are buying the best.
Then there is the openness of the organisers to displaying different types of art, and not letting the commercial success of traditional work become a cause for complacency. Witness the South American galleries, such as Eguiguren Arte from Buenos Aires, which exhibited an 18th-century silver holy water bucket. Even more unusual was the historic wallpaper. Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz offered some from 19th-century France, depicting Incas. Janssens asserts that at future events he would like to include exhibitors of old glass and historic musical instruments – there is always room for improvement.
Surprisingly, Maastricht’s particular geographic location and ambience may also contribute to TEFAF’s success. It is within striking distance of collectors in affluent European countries such as Germany, France and Belgium – not to mention those in the Dutch capital, Amsterdam.
Moreover, there is so little to do in Maastricht that collectors only visit if they want to buy, and aren’t lured away by distractions. Janssens also sees the sober style of the Dutch as conducive to an atmosphere of serious acquisitiveness: ‘People come to the fair to see objects, not to see the people,’ he explains. Small and quiet it may be, but Maastricht has shown itself to be the ideal location for this international art fair.
www.tefaf.com