The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht last month was not so much an art fair as a running 10-day museum experience. Now in its 26th year, the event has earned its reputation as the world’s leading art fair by eschewing the usual competitive clamour associated with contemporary-art fairs like Art Basel, Frieze and the Armory. Its emphasis on old masters, antiques and fine works on paper makes it a fair that glories in a long view of art.
Not having attended TEFAF before, I asked my American colleagues the night before about what kinds of stories they expected to file. Some were travel writers who saw TEFAF as an early start on the spring/summer art season, and the fair’s memorable generosity with installations of fresh-cut tulips would add some Dutch spice to their travelogues of high-end art-world adventure. Others were well schooled in the historical art objects being chased at the fair, like a 1630s Velászquez portrait that had recently resurfaced after being long misattributed to a minor 19th-century British artist. Another writer brought along his aging Canon G10 camera with the aim of touring the fair and posting flash-lit photos on the website of an international contemporary art magazine that showed an insider’s view of the dealers, artists and other notables who came to Maastricht for the first weekend of the fair. Others, including myself, were relying the annual TEFAF Art Market Report and a related symposium to deliver a topical, newsy centre to a story that was inescapably about old art finding its way to a new market in the heart of old Europe.
Once a Roman settlement in the age of Augustus Caesar, Maastricht has a history that includes a stint during the Middle Ages as the heart of the Carolingian Empire, founded as a proto-pan-European state by Charlemagne. This history made Maastricht a fitting place in 1992 for the signing of the Treaty on European Union, also known as the Maastricht Treaty, which notably gave birth to the currency we call the Euro. As a river town—it borders both sides of the Meuse—it has imaginative ties to the rivers of money that until recently flooded the new Europe of the post-Soviet era. Maastricht is a symbolic site as much as a site of convenience. Germany, Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the rest of the Netherlands are all within easy driving range from the large parking lot that stretches like an array of asphalt fields around MECC, the convention centre where the fair takes place.
Inside the convention centre, away from the river’s history and the ever-present reminders of Northern Renaissance landscapes, TEFAF’s designers crafted a compact High Street universe for the fair. A glance upwards indicated one was on Madison Avenue, or Fifth Avenue, or New Bond Street, or Sunset Boulevard as one crossed the Champs Elysées, Place Vendôme, Place de la Concorde or Trafalgar Square. This corridor signage served as a wayfinding system through the fair. Banked with tulips at every corner, the routes housed some 265 galleries and dealers from 20 countries. They brought with them antiques, antiquities, design objects, furniture, jewellery, manuscripts, paintings, photos and drawings that dated from ancient Greece and Mesopotamia through the Renaissance and the 19th century to the early Modern era and the stalwarts of the late 20th century. On Madison Avenue at Gagosian Gallery’s space, there was the thoroughly contemporary experience of a seven-foot-tall, glowing blue and bulbous Metallic Venus created by Jeff Koons.
TEFAF is a treat, to be sure. One of the American journalists told me to prepare myself for a display of opulence beyond any other art fair, and I can fairly say that I underestimated what that might mean. At TEFAF, a juried selection of the world’s most prestigious galleries show off their best. Canada’s own Landau Fine Art from Montreal was among them, and on one of the outside walls of the gallery’s booth was an Emil Nolde watercolour to die for. The same could be said for a De Chirico and a Soutine inside. (You can find out more on Landau in our Winter 2013 issue.) A few steps away, another gallery had a wall with drawings by Caspar David Friedrich. Around the corner was a small painting of a lion’s head by Eugène Delacroix. Elsewhere, at Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, from Duke Street in London, was a framed seven-line, handwritten letter with watercolour illustrations of plums and cherries from Édouard Manet extending an invitation to a friend to lunch. Maurice de Vlaminck never looked better than with the dashed-off painting of a village street under a moody winter sky shown by the New York gallery Daphne Alazraki Fine Art. The small ivory figurines elegantly displayed by the Brussels-based gallery Bernard de Grunne Tribal Fine Arts looked ready-made to go on an international museum tour. By and large most of the booths, with their careful lighting, artful displays and luxurious décor appointments, felt like mini museums. TEFAF was an ongoing discursive exercise in the art of collecting, and it proudly declared in its promotional materials that committees of independent experts check the works of art “to ensure their authenticity, quality and excellent condition” prior to the fair.
If you were looking for a living definition of the word “vetted,” TEFAF was it. At the press launch before the VIP opening (an agenda which in itself was a lingering anomaly of earlier art-world habits), dealers confidently surveyed their booths, understanding that many of the sales at the fair would happen in the following hours. A moment I will remember: after the doors opened to the VIPs, being subtly maneuvered aside by young man in a suit and earpiece—part of moving security team making safe, wide passage for a tour of the fair by a couple who turned out to Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser bin Abdullah Al Ahmed Al Thani of Qatar and his wife. They were followed by an array of collectors, curators and consultants who had come equipped with a long chain of email advice from professional contacts or had pored over the online catalogue for the fair available on the TEFAF website. TEFAF includes a business section, and one the busiest spots on the floor involved a demonstration by a lab-coat-clad man and woman showing off customized lighting systems that would appropriately confine and shape auras of eco-friendly, non-UV, non-infrared LED lights to brighten the colour balance of any and all artworks. The enthusiastic questions from those who gathered around suggested a prosperous future for the lab-coated pair and their company.
As for the art market proper, Irish cultural economist Clare McAndrew discussed some of the themes included in the latest TEFAF Art Market Report, which she authored, at the fair’s symposium. The overview confined itself to a report of a cooling Chinese art market and a comparison of the Chinese market with the emerging market in Brazil. McAndrew was followed by Thomas Galbraith, director of global strategy for Artnet, who proceeded to click through some intricate PowerPoint graphs of upward-sloping prices. For a moment, the art market seemed reduced to a math game, and it took the following presentation by veteran Boston collector George Abrams to remind the audience that some people were in it not for the rising curves of prices, but for the love of the art on the wall.
Still, the TEFAF report had some interesting numbers worth pondering. In 2012, for instance, according to McAndrew’s survey, “36% of sales made by dealers were through local or international fairs, an increase of 5% on 2011.” And: “Sales in the private retail and dealer sector reached an estimated total of €22.2 billion.” And: “Despite the rapid growth in domestic sales in some emerging markets, cross-border trade is low compared to the traditional market hubs. New York and London account for the majority of trade with 64% of world imports of art by value and 62% of exports.” And: “Over the last five years the art market in China has been the strongest growing in the world, and the most important of the emerging markets, both in terms of the size of its domestic sales and the international significance of its buyers.” And, “It is estimated that in 2012, auction houses accounted for just 21% of domestic sales, with dealers and galleries accounting for 79%.” Together, the numbers paint a picture of a slow, if sturdy, recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, with an art world still grounded in traditional art centres yet facing major cultural shifts to non-Western interests.
The museum-like aspect of TEFAF, then, sits on shifting waters. Canadians are used to seeing major art in public institutions, and it took a bit of adjustment to get used to watching the dynamism of the private market at work in Maastricht. Much of what I saw over two days in Holland will now disappear for a time into private hands and the logistics of private-collection loans and donations—and published scholarship—until it returns to public audiences. The question, though, is where these audiences will be standing. The recent gallery-building energy in the Gulf states, from which the Sheikh of Qatar hails, is a prelude to what is now also happening in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore. I wondered where the Manet, the Friedrichs and the Delacroix I saw will eventually reside, and what works they might hang alongside. Who will describe that experience? Who will organize the new, evolving routes of art tourism? Where is Canada’s foothold on this process?
Thanks to TEFAF, one sees the globalization of art in a clarified context. We are looking at a restructuring of cultural imports and exports, a new ebb and flow. For a metaphor, one need only stand on a bridge in Maastricht and look out over the water. The river, in this art-world context, no longer moves north; rather, it now flows west to east.
