The European Fine Art and Antiques Fair (Tefaf), which is taking place in Maastricht until the end of this week, is arguably the most important fair for Old Master and antiques dealers on the calendar, and has significant sections of modern and contemporary art to boot. Housed in a hangar large enough to contain five football pitches, the fair's contents this year are valued at some $2.7 billion (£1.8 billion). That's equivalent to Sotheby's entire sales
for 2009.
At the opening last week, thousands of guests, some flown in by private jets, thronged the aisles of the fair, hungry for art, but even hungrier by the looks of things for the canapés and champagne that were liberally distributed. Maastricht is a big social occasion, too.
Its traditional power base is for Old Master paintings and antique works of art, and, with the supply of masterpieces drying up, dealers have struggled to bring the best. London dealer Jean-Luc Baroni, for instance, was displaying a gorgeous Giambattista Tiepolo of a semi-clad girl for which he bid a record £2.8 million at Christie's last year for a client – but it was not for sale, just something to show off. The Tiepolo was one of numerous works that had found their way to Maastricht via the salerooms.
Last year Konrad Bernheimer exhibited Lucas Cranach the Elder's 1534 painting of David and Bathsheba, which he had acquired eight months earlier for £2.1 million, and asked £4.6 million for it, without success. This year he sold it with an asking price of £4.8 million, demonstrating both how long it can take to sell a picture and how the market is improving.
One thing private collectors can be sure of at Maastricht is that they are in good company. Museum curators always shop here, and this year has been no exception. Washington's National Gallery of Art bought a 17th-century winter landscape with skaters by Adam van Breen for €910,000 (£830,000), and advised a client on the purchase of a six-figure sculpture of Othello by the 19th-century artist Pietro Calvi, which will be loaned to the museum. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art from Connecticut was scouring the fair and bought a fine late-17th-century painting, The Astronomy Lesson, by the court painter François de Troy, among other works.
Another American museum bought a fine 17th-century bronze bust of Louis XIV by François Girardon, priced at $1.5 million, from Daniel Katz. The bronze looked like the model for Jeff Koons's 1986 stainless-steel sculpture that so outraged the French when it was shown at Versailles, priced, no doubt, far higher than the original.
But the questions hanging over the pricing of leading modern and contemporary artists meant that there was nothing of note by either Koons or Francis Bacon, both artists waiting to recover from the recession. The top asking price of $25 million was shared by a Gauguin at Simon Dickinson from London and works by Modigliani and Giacometti at Robert Landau from Montreal.
Since Sotheby's sale of the $104 million Walking Man by Giacometti earlier this year, prices for his work have gone up. Landau had the smaller bronze of Three Walking Men, which he had bought at Christie's two years ago for $11.5 million. Last year he asked $19 million for it, and this year, $25 million. Landau had other blockbusters, including the largest known painting by Marino Marini, priced at $7.5 million. His early sales were at a more affordable level, including three small Henry Moores, priced between $250,000 and $400,000 each.
Warhol prices, which collapsed over a year ago, have also been an issue, and were thought to have recovered after his 200 One Dollar Bills sold for $44 million in New York last November. A 4ft sq painting of flowers, bought by an American collector in May 2007 for $8 million, is back on the market with L&M Arts from New York, with a hopeful asking price of $9.5 million.
Though none of these big-ticket items have yet found buyers, other modern art dealers are making sales. Lefevre from London had notched up £6 million of sales by the weekend, including a small Mark Rothko painting at $3.8 million. Hauser & Wirth, from London, Zurich and New York, disposed of half a dozen works in the opening 24 hours for about $2 million.
Most of the bigger stuff, however, could take much longer to shift.