Recession? What Recession?

MAASTRICHT—Despite a hefty admission fee of €55 ($84), this year’s European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) drew a crowd of 25,000 visitors on opening weekend, and the invitation-only private preview on March 8 attracted just shy of 10,000 visitors, 10 percent more than last year. The fair, which is more than 30 years old and bills itself as “the world’s leading fine art fair,” is known for its extraordinary quality, and this year’s version did not disappoint. “To walk through the fair is like walking the pavements of heaven,” raved exhibitor Geoffrey Munn, owner of London’s Wartski Gallery.

Early sales did not disappoint, either. Dealers had lowered their expectations before the fair in response to the current economic climate, but buyers seemed undaunted opening weekend. Lewis Smith, co-owner of Koopman Rare Art of London, reported his gallery had already sold more high-end items this year than ever before. Summing up the mood of many gleeful dealers, he said, “If this is a recession, then long may it continue.”

On Friday, ARTINFO ran a report on sales in the modern and contemporary sectors of the fair. Below are reports on three further areas: antiques and works of art, old master paintings, and antiquities.

Antiques and Works of Art
European works of art—an area that includes sculpture, furniture, and objects from the Middle Ages through the 19th century—is one of the highlights of Maastricht.

Among the medieval standouts was an early-13th-century bronze aquamanile of a falconer from Lower Saxony, which sold to a European collector for around €2 million ($3.1 million), according to Tony Blumka, owner of New York’s Blumka Gallery.

Bernard Descheemaeker from Antwerp, one of the seven young dealers invited to participate in TEFAF Showcase—a new section this year established to showcase up-and-coming dealers—said he sold six medieval pieces at the opening, including the mid-15th-century walnut sculpture The Flight Into Egypt, which went to a Belgian collector for €40,000 ($61,000). Deborah Elvira, director of Spain’s Luis Elvira gallery, brought a wonderful selection of everyday medieval and Renaissance iron pieces, such as an elaborate 16th-century doorknocker priced at €90,000 ($138,000) and a forged iron sculpture by Dutch artist Xander.

Kunstkammer Georg Laue of Munich had a special exhibition of 45 kunstkammer cabinets dating from the 16th through 18th centuries, several of which contained the sort of wondrous objects such cabinets were designed to show. One extraordinary example, made of ivory, ebony, mahogany, tin, agate, carnelian, copper, and brass in 17th-century Augsburg, Germany, sold on opening day for an undisclosed sum.

Diego Lopez de Aragon from Madrid, who has been participating in the fair for 14 years, sold a finely made 18th-century gold chalice from Guatemala decorated with 35 emeralds that carried an asking price of €175,000 ($268, 500).

Among the furniture highlights was a roughly one-by-two-foot ebony cabinet with bronze and silver mounts at the booth of Galerie Neuse from Bremen, Germany, that carried an asking price of €3.6 million ($5.5 million). Designed by Louis-Constant Sevin, and with bronzes by Ferdinand Barbedienne, the cabinet was exhibited at the World Exhibition in London in 1862, where it sold to Said Pacha, Viceroy of Egypt, for 1,000 livres, a price that Galerie Neuse owner Volker Wurster calls “an absolute fortune” for the time. Two identical cabinets are in the Peterhof Palace near St. Petersburg.

Alan Rubin of Pelham Galleries of Paris and London said they had their best-ever opening day this year in terms of the number of pieces sold. Among them was a pair of English Adams-style pedestals designed after two Roman candelabra in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which went to a European collector for a six-figure price. The piece on Pelham’s stand that attracted the most attention, however, was a pair of 17th-century Genoese gilded torchieres in the form of Classical figures holding baskets of fruit. The pair, priced at €650,000 ($998,000), is attributed to Filippo Parodi, the leading maker of such pieces in that period; they were shown holding blue-and-white Delft vases from the late 17th century that were priced at €110,000 ($169,000).  

H. Blairman & Sons of London had an unusual pink-painted writing cabinet by 19th-century English architect William Burgess that was discovered by a collector in a country auction and described in the catalogue as an “Unusual Traveller’s Companion Bureau.” It now carries a price tag of €680,000 ($1 million).

Old Master Paintings
A powerful painting that might also be an important discovery was at the booth of Galerie Arnoldi-Livie of Munich. Bruce Livie paid $250,000 at Sotheby’s New York in 2006 for a painting the catalog listed as by an “Italian 16th-century follower of Michelangelo Buonarroti.” Livie and other art historians now believe that the work, priced here at €2.5 million ($3.8 million), is a replica of Michelangelo’s lost cartoon for The Drunkenness of Noah, a scene in his Sistine Chapel ceiling, and was painted by Jacopo da Pontormo for the papal banker Bindo Altoviti.

Another painting that attracted favorable attention was Jan Steen’s The Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1671), on the stand of London/New York gallery Simon Dickinson. A dramatic description of Agamemnon’s agony over sacrificing his daughter to appease the wrathful god Artemis and successfully sail to Troy, the painting went for an undisclosed price to an undisclosed buyer. The work, which once belonged to Dutch dealer Jacques Goudstikker, was looted by the Nazis in 1940, recovered by the Allies in 1945, and held in the custody of the Dutch government until February 2006, when it was handed over to Goudstikker heir Marei von Saher. The asking price was €8 million ($12.3 million). “You just can’t find a picture like that today,” said Ian Kennedy, a curator of European painting and sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.