Turning a Corner: Painting and Sculpture at Palm Beach

PALM BEACH, Fla.—Attendees at this year’s Palm Beach | America’s International Fine Art and Antique Fair, at the Palm Beach County Convention Center from February 1 to 10, can buy everything from 25-carat yellow diamonds to high-security safes in which to keep them. But the overwhelming majority of objects are paintings and sculpture, representing a wide range of periods, styles, and countries, from 17th-century Mexican religious scenes to 19th-century French Impressionism to 21st-century Chinese canvases. “The Palm Beach market is eclectic,” says local dealer Ryan Ross of Arcature Fine Art, whose booth included paintings by Rodin, Motherwell, and Picasso and works on paper by Matisse, Thiebaud, and de Kooning. [To read about the decorative arts and antiques offered at the fair, click here.]

“A lot of people think of Palm Beach as old and rich,” says New York, London, and Beijing gallerist Michael Goedhuis, “but that has changed.” The focal point of his booth is Li Chen’s 1998 bronze Sakyamuni, a representation of one of the manifestations of Buddha, for $750,000. (Just three years ago another from the edition of 8 sold for $75,000.) “You can come to Palm Beach with almost anything,” he says, “if it’s good quality.”

Noortman Master Paintings art historian Eddy Schavemaker, who expects to sell three or four works at the fair, agrees: “If you bring quality, selling is not difficult.” The priciest of the Dutch gallery’s offerings is Jan van Huysum’s Flowers in a Terracotta Vase (1730), for $15 million. “It’s as good a still life as you can get in terms of technical craft,” he explains. Other Old Master highlights at the fair include Canaletto’s Venice, the Grand Canal Looking East from the Palazzo Flangini to the Campo San Marcuola (c. 1738), available from  Florence, New York, and London dealer Fabrizio Moretti’s stall for $17 million, and Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s Winter Landscape with Skaters, painted after 1616, on sale at London gallerist Richard Green’s booth for an undisclosed sum.

However, London dealer Derek Johns, who in his third appearance at the fair says he is still “testing the waters” there, is skeptical that connoisseurs of multimillion-dollar paintings go to Palm Beach. He arrived with more reasonably priced works, including 17th-century Mexican painter Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez’s The Holy Family ($70,000); a sketch by Christo and Jeanne-Claude for their 2005 public art project The Gates ($85,000); and a 1959 abstract linocut by Picasso ($90,000). By the afternoon of the first day, Johns had not made any sales but wasn’t worried, explaining that the pace of the buying is slow, unlike at TEFAF Maastricht, the Netherlands fair to which Palm Beach is most often compared, which he describes as more of a “queue up and run” event.

Not all exhibitors got off to a sluggish start—contemporary wares, in particular, moved quickly. By the end of the opening-night preview, Munich’s Galerie Terminus had already sold six pieces: two small Heiner Meyer bronzes from 2007, one of Mickey Mouse ($10,700), another of a Hermès Birkin bag ($14,600); a Meyer painting, Served With Ice Cream II, also from 2007 ($37,000); a colorful Frank Stella hanging sculpture from 1999 (price on request); and two Peter Anton wall pieces, of a chocolate popsicle ($4,000) and a box of chocolates ($37,000). In fact, the latter was already in the home of a Miami collector by the next afternoon. “There’s more young art at PalmBeach3,” says Terminus co-director Alejandro Zaluskowski, referring to the city’s annual contemporary fair in mid-January. “Here, there are big names.”

That stems from the fair’s vetting procedure, which was amended this year, explains local photography dealer Holden Luntz. Previously, at least three quarters of an exhibitor’s booth had to be works dating from before 1950; this year, the rules stated that all pieces had to be made by artists born before 1970. Luntz is showing photographs by Harry Benson, Ormond Gigli, and newcomer Jean-Baptiste Huynh, among others, and, at the outset of the fair, he had already sold several for prices ranging from $5,000 to $50,000. His buyers were collectors from Palm Beach, New York, and Chicago and one from a museum group from Maine.