A Wunderkammer of an Art Fair

Andy Warhol Yayoi Kusama Jim Dine Christo Tracey Emin Yves Klein Jean Arp Niki de Saint Phalle

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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 Guggenheim’s 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.