Smack in the center of Western Europe and a capital of the EU, Brussels has recently grabbed the art-world spotlight as a burgeoning hub for contemporary work, with heavy-hitting dealers like New York’s Barbara Gladstone and Paris’s Almine Rech opening branches there last fall. Yet the city has long been a center for historical art and antiques — in particular tribal objects — and its 54-year-old Brussels Antiques and Fine Art Fair, which opened January 23 and runs through February 1, and now goes by the snappy acronymic nickname Brafa, is now striving for international appeal.

The event is angling for a spot on the global art fair circuit by attempting to slough off the more parochial image it’s had for the better part of its existence. Just six years ago, when the fair was held in central Brussels, it had only 55 dealers, 90 percent of whom were Belgian. But in 2004, it moved to the sprawling Tour & Taxis exhibition halls in the northern party of the city near the Willebroek canal and began to expand. At this year’s version, about half of the 130-odd exhibitors are foreigners, and for the first time Brafa has attracted American dealers — two of them, in fact. The 54th edition is an eclectic wunderkammer of a show, where you’ll find everything from a 19th-century rhinoceros-horn walking stick (€5,750 [$7360] at London dealer Finch & Co.) to an 1897 painting by Pierre Bonnard once owned by English writer W. Somerset Maugham (€360,000 at Galerie Berès of Paris).

Judging by the energy during its first few days, Brafa has come some way toward achieving its goal, despite a faltering global economy that has brought several Belgian banks, including Fortis and Dexia, to their knees. Belgium’s Queen Paola attended the fair’s vernissage, to great fanfare in the local media, and, according to the fair’s vice chairman, Brussels dealer Bernard de Leye, who is also an exhibitor, the fair’s attendance in the first few days was up 15 percent over the comparable period in 2008, when the overall number was 38,000.

Sales during the opening days were difficult to gauge, both because of dealers’ tendency toward discretion, and because the collectors here tend to take their time on purchases. But sales were being made, and many dealers were hopeful that art — particularly historical masterpieces (the fair is carefully vetted by a panel of outside experts) — would prove to be what the French and Belgians were calling a “valeur refuge” — an investment haven at a time when banks and stocks look increasingly shaky.

“Collectors have been a bit anxious,” said de Leye. “But people who don’t have confidence in the banks are looking to invest in something else. People want to buy, but are asking for a longer time to pay.” In de Leye’s stand was one of the more unusual — and pricey — objects in the fair: a silver ink stand in the form of a boat, made in 1752 by Francois-Thomas Germain, silversmith to Louis XV. Embellished with porcelain flowers and a miniature clock, it once belonged to the king’s finance minister. The work was priced at €1.6 million, and de Leye said it had seen interest from museums.

Another of the fair’s historical masterpieces was a limewood retable with figures representing the Virgin and Child and Saints John and Peter, priced at around €1 million, at the booth of Brussels dealer Jan Muller. Made around 1490 and recently attributed to Niklaus Weckmann of Ulm, the piece retains much of its original polychroming, and its casing is original, which is relatively rare with such objects. The dealer feels that the Belgian market might be a bit small for such an object, and has hopes to see it land in a museum; he says he has reason to believe it will go to America or Russia. In general, he said, the fair was going well for him, and given the relatively reasonable booth price — about €25–30,000 — that it made sense for him to do it.

“Contrary to modern and contemporary paintings, we’ve not been affected by the crisis,” says Francoise Lasisz of Paris’s Galerie Claude Vittet, which was displaying a small, exquisite painting of the Virgin and Child by the atelier of Gerard David, dated 1520. “At the beginning of the crisis people say they will wait to see what happens. Now people want to buy old paintings because the banks may not be a good idea — but that is only true for exceptional artworks.”

De Wit, a well-respected tapestry restorer and dealer from Mechelen, Belgium, reported selling a 16th-century tapestry depicting a duck hunt in the €50–80,000 range. The work, which comes from the southern Netherlands, went to a Belgian collector who said he will install it in his home in France.

Among the Asian objects collectors picked up were a pair of Tang period horse sculptures for €12,000 apiece and a stone head of an old man from the Song dynasty for €8,000, both at Artcade-Corinne Van der Kindere of Brussels. Paris dealer Eric Pouillot sold a terra cotta figure from the Han dynasty representing a female figure for around €50,000.

In tribal art, Pierre Dartevelle of Brussels reported selling 10 pieces by the end of the fair’s first day, including a terra cotta statue of a pregnant woman from Mali, for €100,000.

Two new American exhibitors at the fair were optimistic despite the ill winds in the economy. Tony Anninos Asian Art from Sausalito, which has been developing clients in the Benelux region by doing the Brussels Oriental Art fair in June for five years, was doing “not too bad” so far at Brafa, according to Anninos. It’s a “gorgeous” fair, he added. Among other things, he said he’d sold a bronze head of Buddha for €6,000. He’d also had interest in higher-priced objects, like a four-armed Avalokite figure in sandstone from late-10th/early-11th century.  

The booth of New York dealer Sophie Scheidecker included a 1967 triptych by Yayoi Kusama, one of the first the artist made, priced at €750,000, as well as a group of 14 small wooden sculptures by Jean Arp that the artist created in 1960–66, just before his death, and which were used to print illustrations for an album published by Louis Broder. A unique artwork, the 14-piece set was priced at €1.6 million. “If you sell modern art, it's good to be around historical material,” said Scheidecker. She praised Belgian collectors for their “eclectic” and “knowledgeable” approach, and thinks the art market in Europe is doing better than in the U.S. In the early days of the fair, she had done business and made “very good contacts,” she said.

Modern and contemporary art have become more prevalent at Brafa in the past five years. This year, first-time exhibitor Guy Pieters of Knokke, Belgium, placed a risqué neon by Tracey Emin spelling out the words “People like you need to fuck people like me” outside his booth, facing one of the elegant bars where visitors can order wine, coffee, and aperitifs. An older gentleman, walking by the display, was heard to mutter to his companion, “C’est un peux provocant.”

By the afternoon of the fair’s third day, red dots had cropped up on Pieters’s walls, next to sculptures by Jim Dine, Wim Delvoye, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Yves Klein, and several works on paper by Christo.

Every year Paris’s Antoine Helwaser brings a Warhol or two, and this year he had the artist’s portrait of Sarah Goldsmith. Although that work, priced at €350,000, hadn’t sold by the third day of the fair, a 2008 screen print of Barack Obama by artist Russell Young sold to a Paris-based Belgian collector for around €20,000.

Galerie Le Minotaure of Paris and Tel Aviv swiftly sold for an undisclosed price a striking 1964 Jean Arp sculpture, an abstract form in black glass mounted in wood that had once been in Peggy Guggenheims collection in Venice.

“Clients have been telling me the banks are losing our money so we prefer to buy a small painting, something we can put on the wall,” says Le Minotaure’s Benoit Sapiro. Buyers aren’t gravitating toward art just because it may be a safer investment, he clarified, but because they can also enjoy living with it, even as it serves as a repository for monetary value.

Call it the dividends of pleasure. If fairs like Brafa continue to hold attraction for dedicated collectors, they will remain solid venues at which to shop.

Sarah Douglas is Staff Writer at Art+Auction. She blogs at The Appraisal.