Holland's billion-dollar baby

Art in America, June-July, 2004 by David Ebony

One of Europe's largest art fairs, and widely regarded as one of the world's most prestigious, the European Fine Art Foundation Fair (TEFAF), also known as the Maastricht Fair, offered for sale an estimated $1 billion worth of art this year. In its 17th edition, the fair was held Mar. 4-13 in the southern Dutch town's vast (290,000-square-foot) Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Center (MECC), located in an industrial area outside the ancient city's historic district. Sponsored principally by AXA Art, the German-based art insurers, the fair hosted 203 galleries from 14 countries, which showed off topnotch, museum-quality pieces in almost every imaginable field from arms and armor to Asian, African, Oceanic and pre-Columbian art, furniture and decorative arts, and all periods of European and American art, with an extra-generous helping of Dutch old masters.

One exceptional aspect of the Maastricht event is the large number of vetting committees that, every year, comb the fair before the opening. Nineteen groups comprising 130 international experts in every field to be represented verify the authenticity of each work offered. Dealers are required to immediately remove from their displays any questionable objects. Collectors are therefore unlikely to acquire a fake at Maastricht, hence the fair's reputation as a place where museums come to purchase major works and where many multi-million dollar objects change hands each year.

Participating dealers have more than a week to prepare their booths, so the fair contains many elaborate and sometimes over-the-top installations. One can get lost inside booths designed to resemble museum galleries, palatial 18th-century salons or cozy 19th-century parlors. It took this reporter, as a first-time visitor, nearly two full days to get a reasonable overview of the fair's contents. Respites were provided for exhausted viewers, however. Here and there, throughout the fair, art displays gave way to tulip-lined lounge areas with champagne bars serving caviar and fresh strawberries. In contrast, it seemed to me both incongruous and humorous that the fair, which caters to the super-rich, could not forgo the European custom of having an attendant charge everyone 25 cents to use the toilet.

According to its organizers, this year's fair was a runaway success. The 75,000 attendance total was up 15 percent over last year, attributed in part to the reemergence of American visitors who stayed away the previous two years because of terrorist fears and the war in Iraq. Most dealers reported brisk sales to private collectors and intense interest and purchases by museums and other institutions.

Among the museum-quality pieces at the fair, Zurbaran's large painting Flight into Egypt (1638-40), offered by Agnew's of London for $3.7 million, was one of the media darlings. Showing the Madonna and Child riding an exquisitely painted donkey, with Joseph standing to one side, the work had been in private hands for many years and was rarely exhibited. Another painting that generated attention was a recently discovered Nicolas Poussin, Arcadian Landscape with Pan and Bacchus (ca. 1625), featured by Adam William Fine Art of New York.

French and Company (New York and London) wowed visitors with a large, sweeping landscape by Italian painter Giovanni Segantini, Springtime in the Alps (1897), priced at $20 million; that impressive work hung next to a major Meindert Hobbema panel painting, An Entrance to a Wood with a Farm and Horseman (ca. 1665), being offered for $6 million.

A major Frans Hals, A Portrait of a Man (1643), was presented by London's Johnny van Haeften, while Milan's Rob Smeets brought Luis de Morales's haunting Christ the Man of Sorrows (ca. 1550) and Luca Giordano's mesmerizing Euclid (1660). London's Rafael Valls presented a diamond-shaped 1615 painting, Vulcan, by Hendrick Goltzius, and New York's Salander-O'Reilly showed a large, resplendent Snowy Landscape with Deer (ca. 1868) by Courbet. Dickinson of New York and London presented Botticelli's Madonna and Child (ca. 1500), along with an unusual Venetian night scene by Canaletto. Galerie Canesso from Paris, devoting its entire booth to a handsome solo show of works by 16th-century Italian Mannerist Luca Cambiaso, reported selling a number of these rare pieces to museums.

This year's fair was marked by a particularly strong showing of international modern and contemporary art, most of which was presented in a special 32,000-square-foot area. Galerie von Bartha from Basel showed an elegant 1931 Hans Arp construction, along with Auguste Herbin's 1920 Composition Symmetrique. San Francisco's Anthony Meier presented a large untitled 1980 Agnes Martin painting with pale pink, yellow and blue bands, and Sperone Westwater showed late works by de Chirico alongside major Picabias and Warhols, elements from a striking show seen earlier this year in New York. Borzo Kunsthandel of the Netherlands featured large minimalist paintings by Dutch artist J.C.J. Vanderheyden, while Paris's Galerie Applicat-Prazan hosted a 1950s painting extravaganza featuring luminous examples by Hartung, Mathieu, Viera da Silva and Fautrier. Galerie Thomas of Munich showed major works by Feininger and Schmidt-Rottluff, as well as a riveting large painting, Female Figure (1969-72) by Horst Antes. One of the fair's most engaging displays, by Montreal's Landau Fine Art, included major paintings by Modigliani and Jawlensky, plus a room filled with 16 late and lively Picassos.