Triumphant TEFAF

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn Sir Peter Paul Rubens Balthasar van der Ast Jan Brueghel Francis Danby Jan van Goyen Anthonie de Lorme Manet

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

When desirable works sell briskly all the way down the financial scale, you know for sure that the art market is doing well. This means that it is not controlled by speculators looking for big profit or investors in search of a safe niche for liquidities, because speculators and investors both focus on high-profile pictures or objects.

The European Fine Art Fair, which opened at Maastricht, Netherlands, with a private viewing on March 12 and ended 10 days later, delivered the most thorough bill of health that market professionals could hope for. Unlike the Paris sale of the collections amassed by the late couturier Yves Saint Laurent and his friend Pierre Bergé, which was a historic success in late February, the Maastricht fair was not an unrepeatable event, mythologized by the media before it even started.

It was a regular gathering of art dealers that, in its 22nd year, could easily have been in danger of suffering from a feeling of déjà vu, and it did not benefit from the additional psychological factor that helps auction houses by the very nature of the bidding process — the necessity of making a decision there and then. On a dealer’s stand, you can reserve an object, examine it at length and even try to beat down the price. It is a fundamentally different ball game.

Dealers know that only too well. Even the most powerful among them made no effort to conceal a certain apprehension as they finished setting up their booths days before the opening.

They need not have worried. As the private viewing began, a record number of visitors rushed in, eager to be the first to see treasures they might covet.

Take Old Master paintings, the quintessential example of traditional collecting at the top of the market: Buyers instantly pounced on the obvious targets, as they had done in years past.

Within minutes, William Noortman of Maastricht parted with an extremely rare picture by Gabriel Metsu. The portrait of an elderly woman having a meal in the solitude of her home is a far cry from the usual genre scenes for which the 17th-century Dutch master is known. The small picture, which carried a hefty €3.6 million ($4.6 million) asking price, was picked up by a regular client of the gallery who had no doubt seen (and admired) it before, when William’s father, the late Robert Noortman, sold it in 1996 to its previous owner.

Konrad Bernheimer, who owns galleries in London and Munich, had been lucky enough to discover a previously unknown portrait of a young man painted by Rubens around 1610-13. The German dealer told Art+Auction that the picture, for which he was asking about €5.5 million ($7 million), could have been sold three times over that evening.

Johnny Van Haeften of London, the European leader in Dutch and Flemish paintings, did as well as in 2008, which was an exceptional year for him. The diversity of the pictures that left the dealer’s stand in the first two days says all about a thriving market in which collectors from different cultural backgrounds, with highly diversified interests, are actively looking for the kind of works that makes their adrenaline flow.

A magnificent view of a Flemish town for which the theme of The flight into Egypt, unobtrusively dealt with in the distance, serves as an excuse was signed by Maerten Ryckert and dated 162* (the last digit cannot be made out). A collector who had missed it at a New York auction that he had been unable to attend had rung the dealer before the opening, asking to reserve the Ryckert until he had a chance to see it. At the private viewing, he made a beeline for it, the €860,000 ($1.1 million) price tag notwithstanding. Beauty matched by mint condition always helps.

An important view of a Flemish town by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Joos de Momper the Younger followed at about €700,000 ($900,000).

But it was a far less expensive picture that said a lot about the resurgent role of true collectors. The Interior of a Barn, discreetly signed with initials by Herman Saftleven, ranks among the great masterpieces seen at Maastricht. The light and the mood, with its sober rendition of the hardships of extreme poverty, send back echoes of Rembrandt. The asking price, €49,500 ($64,000), was astonishingly low. A German collector quickly bagged that one.

When dealers who do not enjoy the high profile of professionals long established on the international scene also sell hand over fist, this confirms that genuine collectors are calling the shots — investors and speculators instinctively turn to famous galleries. Salomon Lilian, an up-and-coming Amsterdam dealer who looks set to become one day the new Robert Noortman of the Dutch trade, shares Van Haeften’s willingness to make clients benefit from his luck when he buys cheaply. He too had a stunning masterpiece that was modestly priced, at €300,000 ($387,000). This time, though, it was the work of a major Dutch master, Jan van Goyen. The marine on panel with a sailing boat bending in a gale-force wind over choppy waters is painted with a freedom and lightness of touch in the brushwork that gives it the feel of a study from nature, as if the painter had set up his easel at the edge of the sea. Here again, the price struck me as very low, even if Lilian insists that this partly reflects the austere character of the composition, all in shades of brown. At the time of writing, a university museum in the American Midwest that had requested the picture be sent for approval by the trustees was working hard to muster the funds.

As elsewhere, rarity proved a powerful selling point. Lilian displayed one of the largest still lifes on record, by Balthasar van der Ast. By now the €750,000 ($966,000) picture must be hanging in a Dutch collector’s home.

Here and there, price corrections were made, slightly reducing the price inflation of the past three years.

Lilian tells a revealing story about a fine winter landscape done around 1640 by Aaert van der Neer. Skating townsmen are playing the ancient game of kolf, with sticks resembling those of modern golf, on a vast expanse of frozen water. When I saw it hours before the private viewing, the picture rang a bell. Yes, Lilian confirmed two days later, he already had it on consignment in 2008. The price then was in the region of €550,000 ($708,000). The owner now really wanted to sell it and had cut down his ambitions by 20 percent. That same day, a German collector who had yearned for the picture in 2008 and had found it too expensive gleefully bought the desired picture.

Indeed, a factor that contributed to the overall success of Old Masters at Maastricht this year was the sprinkling of extremely good pictures at the bottom tier of the price scale, including masterpieces of museum quality.

Rafael Valls, whose London gallery on Duke Street is a few steps away from Van Haeften’s, had laid hands on three pure gems. One was a bold still life in an unusual, highly personal style. Each of the carefully selected flowers rising out of a vase is handled in a sculptural fashion that gives the small panel a striking monumentality. The consummate skill adds to the mystery of an artist whose signature, "C. van der Radt," was previously known from just one other picture, a genre scene dated 1676.

Two other interior scenes are related to van der Radt’s 1676 picture, and that is as much as is known about the oeuvre of the artist whose name does not appear in the records of any of the Dutch guilds. Since membership was mandatory for painters intending to exercise their activity as professionals, the conclusion must be that he was a wealthy man indulging in a private passion. This might explain how such a brilliant artist came to fall under the radar of his contemporaries and of succeeding generations of art historians. The laughable €95,000 ($122,000) price tag, which reflects the painter’s obscurity, hardly does justice to his mastery. At three times that figure, the van der Radt would still be worth a go. It left the stand on the opening day.

If anything beat the still life among the works offered by Valls, it was the view of a church interior signed and dated 1640 by Anthonie de Lorme. Light falls from an invisible source high up in a dome and runs down the classical piers that support it. Tiny characters standing in the middle look up as if struck by some astonishing sight. In mint condition, the panel, 11 inches long, had a €19,000 ($25,000) price tag.

I happened to be there when a New World museum curator approached and closely peered at the panel. The art historian slowly edged away, came back to take another close look, inquired a second time about the price, and as the dealer made it clear that he was prepared to come down a bit, settled for it. This was for his personal collection, the curator volunteered. A fraction too small and too understated to justify display in a major museum, the de Lorme easily qualifies as the bargain of the month as Old Master paintings go.

To put Rafael Valls’s picture in perspective, Van Haeften showed in the same fair a very large and very grand church interior also signed by de Lorme. The asking price for the picture, dated 1645, was €630,000 ($812,000). This is the quintessential museum piece, both in size and complexity, by a master whose stature has yet to be fully acknowledged.

Surprisingly, painters closer to our time have similarly escaped the tribute of admiration that they deserve. This is often true of English school artists. Take the Irish-born Francis Danby. Agnew’s of London displayed a stunning landscape signed by the artist in 1833. "View in Norway," as an inscription on the stretcher calls it, was painted in London, where Danby settled in 1824. Memories of Scandinavian scenery continued to haunt the master and inspired him with intensely poetic compositions. The asking price, €85,000 ($110,000), was a joke compared with those of scores of better-known artists. Yet it was available as I left the fair.

Katrin Bellinger, who runs a drawings department under the Colnaghi umbrella, had better luck with a wonderful study of a young woman portrayed three-quarters back by Adam Töpffer. The French-style hairdo dates it to the early 1830s. The name is familiar to collectors in his hometown of Geneva but means little to the international public. The red panel on which touches of reddish paint are briskly applied with the tip of the brush is as good as anything done in later years by the masters of early Impressionism. At €8,000, just a little over $10,000, the asking price was about one-fortieth of what a study in oils of that size by Édouard Manet might cost.

The effort to strike a balance between highly important works of art and low-priced, quality discoveries could be verified in every area.

The London dealer Ben Janssens, who is best known for early Chinese art, displayed as usual some Buddhist stone sculpture and lay terra-cotta figures. A €100,000 ($130,000) Northern Qi torso of the third quarter of the 6th century a.d. went to a collector of Chinese art who had never yet bought a sculpture, and a standing character, possibly an entertainer, of the early Tang period (618-907) also went quickly, even though the asking price was a comparatively substantial €38,000 ($49,000).

In his search for novelty, Janssens had found some rare yet easily affordable Japanese bronze vessels from largely neglected periods ranging from the early 19th century to the 1930s. A beautiful bronze jar with a purplish red and dark green patination imitating certain stoneware glazes, which was signed by Murata Seimin in the early 1800s, had a €7,500 ($9,700) price tag. A French collector picked up that one at the private viewing.

When asked about business at the fair, the usually smoothly self-controlled Janssens could not refrain from a broad smile. A regular participant in the Maastricht show for the past 12 years and the head of its executive committee, he had done better than ever. His turnover was up by one-third, at a conservative estimate. The experienced dealer had rarely observed such eagerness from collectors, old and new.

Some of the dealers selling antiquities from the ancient Middle East, Greece and Rome recounted similar experiences. At the private viewing, Rupert Wace of London parted with a splendid Hellenistic marble statue of Aphrodite dating from the 2nd century B.C., which was worth (continued on page 98) around €500,000 ($646,000). On the same day, a German couple enthusiastically bought a Sardinian bronze figure of a man wearing a rigid felt cape of a kind still known in the highlands of Turkey and Iran. Exceptionally large in its category, the bronze, for which Wace was asking about €120,000 ($155,000), had once adorned the collection of a close friend of Oscar Wilde. It takes connoisseurs to engage with this kind of object at that price level. But Wace also sold some remarkable stone and bronze vessels worth a few thousand dollars.

The ultimate symbol of art lovers buying for pleasure was a bronze finial displayed by Michael Petropoulos, owner of Rhéa, the renowned antiquities gallery in Zurich. The asking price, €1,500 ($1,900), would have induced an investor to dismiss it as a negligible quantity — assuming that he or she would have taken any notice of the small piece, only about two inches wide. Petropoulos saw it as a Greek bronze of the 7th century b.c. The foreparts of two stylized mythical quadrupeds seen back to back actually point in the direction of the steppic immensity over which the nomadic Scythians and later the Sarmatians roamed from the 6th century b.c. to the 2nd century b.c. But until archaeological excavations yield more precise leads, the object will retain its mystery.

At the private viewing, Joel A. Rosenthal, the famous American jeweler who has been based in Paris for the past 30 years and signs with the initials "jar," fell in love with the finial. Together, the German couple’s prompt acquisition of the Sardinian bronze and Rosenthal’s equally swift purchase of the bronze finial symbolize the newly recovered control of the art market by connoisseurs. And that makes the market as secure as it has ever been, because a true collector’s impulse to go after a desired work of art is stronger than any fears inspired by economic problems.

Souren Melikian is the international editor of Art+Auction.

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