TEFAF Maastricht

Jean-Michel Basquiat Sir Peter Paul Rubens El Greco A Showdown for Doig at Christie’s From Raging Bulls to Miserable Drips Signs of a Recovery at London Postwar Auctions The Frieze Fringe Christophe Van de Weghe Moves Up and East

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MAASTRICHT—Despite a drop in attendance — 67,755 visitors, down 7.7 percent from 2008 — TEFAF’s 22nd edition saw solid sales in traditional categories. Dealer participation, meanwhile, was the highest ever with 239 galleries on hand. This year marked the debut of the fair’s design section, where Pol Bury’s water-fountain sculpture Fontaine murale, 1983, sold for just under $400,000 at Paris’s Galerie Downtown. The piece is bound for a corporate lobby in Europe.

+ A European collector took home El Greco’s Christ Embracing the Cross, circa 1585, above, which Madrid’s Caylus Anticuario S.A had priced at about $6.3 million. The painting bears three faint lines from being folded in the 18th century, but the gallerist Enrique de Calderón says it’s the "best El Greco to appear on the market in 15 years."

+ The London jewelry magnate Laurence Graff bought Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (The Black Athlete), 1982, from New York dealer Christophe Van de Weghe.

+ London’s Johnny Van Haeften Gallery made six sales during the fair’s preview, including Maerten Ryckaert’s 17th-century oil A River Landscape with the Flight into Egypt for about $1 million.

+ London and Munich’s Bernheimer-Colnaghi mediated a $5.3 million-to-$6.7 million deal for Peter Paul Rubens‘s Portrait of a Young Man, 1610-12, above, on behalf of a client who had bought it from the gallery last year and realized a tidy profit.

"TEFAF Maastricht" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2009 Table of Contents.