At Art Fair, the A-List Includes Rembrandt
Collectors, curators, museum directors and auction house experts have flocked here in record numbers in recent days to browse through Rembrandts, Warhols, opulent French furniture and rare antiquities at the European Fine Art Fair. Yet so far sales have been mixed, many dealers said.
“It seems slower this year,” said Richard Nagy, a London dealer. “People involved in the stock market are feeling less flush.”
On Thursday, the fair’s invitation-only preview, officials reported 9,500 visitors, a thousand more than last year. NetJets, the private aviation company, said it had flown in 60 planes for the Thursday opening alone, a 20 percent increase from 2007. Based on early figures, officials estimate that 76,000 visitors will attend by next Sunday, compared with 71,000 a year ago.
Rembrandt self-portrait being offered at the Maastricht fair.
There was a moment of drama at the preview festivities. Thieves, apparently with fake passes, stole a 1948 diamond necklace valued at $1.8 million from a dealer’s booth. Two women from Mexico and a man from Costa Rica were arrested, said Titia Vellenga, a spokeswoman for the fair, but as of Sunday evening the necklace had not been recovered.
The authorities believe that more than five people were involved, Ms. Vellenga added. “We think it was stolen by an international ring, but the police are not revealing any details,” she said.
While fair officials declined to identify the robbery victim, dealers at the fair said it was Hancocks, the London jewelers.
George Shackelford, chairman of the department of European art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, said the fair’s prestige guaranteed a healthy turnout. “There are a huge number of American collectors who wouldn’t be anywhere else, whether they buy or not,” said Mr. Shackelford, who with several other curators and Malcolm Rogers, the museum’s director, were shepherding 16 patrons around the fair. Hearing that business was mixed, he said, “A lot of people are discouraged by the exchange rate.”
Many American museum officials make the annual pilgrimage to Maastricht. James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, attended with several curators as well as trustees. Officials from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Toledo Museum of Art and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., were spotted, as was a relative newcomer: Michael Govan, who took over as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art two years ago. He arrived on Thursday with Geoffrey Palmer, a real estate developer, collector and museum trustee.
Among the prominent collectors combing the booths were the Sheik Saud al-Thani of Qatar, trailed by an entourage of bodyguards and art advisers; Alicia Koplowitz, from Madrid; and Mark Fisch, an old-masters collector from New Jersey who is on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Hours after the doors opened at the giant Maastricht Convention Center on Thursday, some exhibitors were already reporting brisk sales, but not all.
Some fair veterans said that patchy sales did not surprise them because they found the offerings a bit disappointing. “There were not enough star pictures,” said Ian Kennedy, curator of European paintings and sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. “Dealers simply can’t find them.”
Apart from the scarcity of undeniably great works, auction houses are muscling into the private-sales turf once dominated by dealers.
This being the heart of old-master country, however, there were a few exceptional examples. Noortman Master Paintings, a Maastricht gallery bought by Sotheby’s two years ago, was showing a Rembrandt self-portrait from 1632 priced at $27.7 million. “It’s the last Rembrandt self-portrait to buy in the world,” said William Noortman, who has run the business since his father, Robert, died last year.
Painted when Rembrandt was just 26, the work depicts him in a wide-brimmed black hat and a white ruff.
“The Sacrifice of Iphigenia” by the Dutch master Jan Steen.
Some experts singled out “The Sacrifice of Iphigenia,” a 1671 mythological scene by the Dutch master Jan Steen, as the finest painting in the fair. Dickinson, the London dealer, sold it late Friday afternoon on behalf of descendants of Jacques Goudstikker, a prominent Dutch dealer who fled Amsterdam in 1940, leaving behind works that his heirs recouped only two years ago. The asking price was $12.3 million.
Johnny Van Haeften, the London dealer, was offering a haunting portrait, from about 1630, by the Dutch artist Jan Lievens of an old man in a fur-lined coat holding a skull. Mr. Van Haeften bought the painting at Christie’s in London only three months ago for $4.3 million, but is asking $7.2 million for it now.
The Manhattan dealer Richard Feigen said that his booth was doing good business because the prices of old masters remained reasonable. He said he already had a buyer for “Christ on the Cross,” an 8-inch-by-6-inch Rubens once owned by David Bowie and now priced around $1 million.
The hope of surprising discoveries is always a big lure for curators and collectors. This year there was much talk about a full-size “Drunkenness of Noah,” a replica of one of the scenes from Genesis that Michelangelo painted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The work, an oil on canvas, measuring about 6 feet by 8 feet, is thought to have been based on a lost cartoon by Michelangelo for the fresco. Arnoldi-Livie, the Munich dealer offering the painting, said the artist is believed to have been Jacopo da Pontormo. Elizabeth Pilliod, a Renaissance art historian from Princeton, N.J., suggested that the cartoon was a gift from Michelangelo to the papal banker Bindo Altoviti, who is said to have commissioned Pontormo to make the copy around 1540.
Modern art was plentiful, too. During the last few years the show’s organizers have tried to strengthen the modern and contemporary selection to compete with Art Basel in Switzerland, which is held every June. At Mr. Nagy’s booth, for instance, there were examples of German Expressionist artists who have been all the rage recently. Among the stars were “Woman From Pozzuoli,” a 1925 portrait by Christian Schad priced at $3 million, and an Egon Schiele watercolor “The Dancer Moa,” offered for $4.5 million.
Haunch of Venison, a London gallery that Christie’s bought a year ago, was here for the first time. Although it was excluded from Art Basel and the Frieze Art Fair in London because of its new auction-house association, it was accepted at Maastricht because of the presence of Sotheby’s-owned Noortman Master Paintings. In the center of its booth, in a small darkened room, is “Isolde’s Ascension (The Shape of Light in the Space After Death),” a video by Bill Viola priced at $300,000. While video art is old hat at contemporary art fairs, this is believed to be a first for the European Fine Art Fair. It was the first thing the gallery sold on Thursday.
Harry Blain, a director of Haunch of Venison, said that collectors in other fields like old masters and the 19th century were beginning to migrate to contemporary art. “So this is the perfect arena,” he said.
Via N.Y. Times
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