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Maastricht 2003

by Lita Solis-Cohen

TEFAF Maastricht is the measure of all antiques fairs. American collectors and show organizers should see it for themselves to enjoy its ambiance and to observe sophisticated European taste first hand. They will marvel how a convention center is converted into an elegant department store for the finest works of art and witness thousands of European collectors shopping and seeming to know and to appreciate what they see.

Maastricht is well located in the southern corner of Holland, closer to Brussels than Amsterdam. Liège in Belgium and Aachen in Germany are half an hour drive away. Brussels, Cologne, and Düsseldorf are an hour and a half drive. Luxembourg is a morning's drive, and Paris and London are about three hours by train.

The TEFAF fair is a lesson in marketing, design, and standards of excellence. Sculptor, architect, and designer Tom Postma of Amsterdam is responsible for the overall plan that has been used since 2001, the first year the number of exhibitors exceeded 200. An entrance tunnel lined with 55,000 roses bathed in pulsating light propelled visitors into the show, leading them into a special flower-filled fantasy world. Easy-to-follow, color-coded maps of the floor plan were on stanchions placed strategically in the wide carpeted aisles. The dealers' stands are huge, uniform in their exterior architecture, and individual inside. They come with carpet tiles and electric outlets, but each stand is designed by the dealers themselves with good lighting to set off their treasures. Restaurants provide a quick buffet in the huge terrace area or more intimate formal dining with reservations necessary. There are champagne bars and coffee bars and benches for resting throughout the fair.

Two and half days is not long enough to see it all, though Robert Schwarz, dealer in American paintings, and his son and daughter spent just one exhausting day from 11 until 7 and got a taste of what was there. Four days would be ideal and leave enough time to see the rest of Maastricht, a charming medieval town with pleasant walks, museums, and fine restaurants, and perhaps a morning excursion to Aachen to see Charlemagne's throne and treasury.

One ticket for admission to the fair cost 30 euros (a euro equals about $1.12) and includes the thick telephone-book-size color-illustrated catalog, which is too heavy to carry home but worth mailing. The price of admission for two and one catalog is 42.50 euros, and 50 euros buys what they call "a season ticket" and a catalog. Individual catalogs are 17.50 euros, 70 euros by mail. Senior citizen tickets are 10 euros without a catalog. Children ages 12-18 cost 5 euros, and children under 12 accompanied by an adult are free.

TEFAF stands for The European Fine Arts Foundation, which is a nonprofit educational and lobbying alliance and a sort of club. There are 20 trustees. Most of them are dealers, one is a museum director, and five are collectors, including the chairman, Willem Baron van Dedem. Three are Americans: Peter Sutton, director of the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a Dutch paintings expert; New York City dealer Otto Naumann; and collector of Old Master drawings George Abrams of Boston. TEFAF underwrites studies of the European art market and most recently published a report demonstrating the deadening effect of value added tax (VAT) on the trade, suggesting that a uniform VAT throughout the EU would be beneficial.

The TEFAF board of trustees employs a full-time staff to stage the show and to report to the executive committee. Amsterdam dealer Dave Aronson is chairman of the executive committee.

When a dealer is invited to exhibit at Maastricht, he or she must pay a one-time initiation fee. The initiation fee does not insure life membership. Dealers have been denied space if their stand does not consistently meet the standards of the vetting committee. The founding dealers said they charge an initiation fee (no one would reveal the amount) because new dealers profit from the reputation the show has built over the years and should not get a free ride.

There were 13 new exhibitors this year. They brought the best they could muster. Nevertheless, new dealers find themselves on the back streets. It takes time to work up to the main drag (called Champs Èlysées) in the equivalent of the center of town. The cost of a stand is said to be no more, and perhaps less, than other top-tier shows such as the Paris Biennale or New York City shows.

The preview from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. on the day before the show opens is mostly by invitation. Dealers invite their best clients and pay for their tickets. Drinks and food are served. "This opening is the highest concentration of world-class collectors, anywhere," said George Abrams.

This international fair is more diverse than any other. For example, there is a specialist in 16th-century leather wall coverings; another in Roman coins; several in medieval ironwork; one in Continental pewter; several in medieval manuscripts; along with the expected specialists in painting, furniture, ceramics, and silver. There are separate sections for jewelry, modern and contemporary art, antiquities, tribal arts, and paintings, drawings, and prints. Oriental works of art are in the section called "Antiques and Works of Art."

Many of the dealers do not exhibit in the United States because they believe that serious collectors will find them at Maastricht or at their shops. Other dealers are well known to Americans and show regularly at the Haughtons' international fairs in New York City, the New York Winter Antiques Show, or the New York Ceramics Fair.

American dealers made up less than 10% of the exhibitors, but they brought their share of masterpieces. Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, New York City, exhibited the largest and most highly finished terra-cotta sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the modello for his Fountain of the Moor at the southern end of the Piazza Novona. (The price for the model was 15 million euros.) It was a highlight of the fair.

New York City dealer David Tunick showed a four-panel screen, La Promenade, an icon of Nabis decorative art (825,000 euros). Tunick also offered a selection of Eug<138>ne Atget photographs, duplicate vintage prints from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, at prices ranging from $3000 to $150,000.

A La Vieille Russie, New York City, had a $3 million Fabergé Easter egg. New York City dealer Eric Shrubsole offered four silver candlesticks made in London in 1677 and said of them, "In seventy years in business I have never seen four William and Mary silver candlesticks of this size and weight." The four were $600,000.

Los Angeles dealer Lee Biondi offered fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A fragment of the book of Isaiah was $400,000. Jerome Eisenberg of Royal-Athena Galleries, New York City, had to take a nearly life-size 1st-century Roman torso of Dionysus to Maastricht to sell it to an American. Torkom Demirijan of Ariadne Gallery, New York City, asked $550,000 for a 2nd-century Roman mosaic from North Africa. New York City dealer Anthony Blumka, who shows with Munich dealer Julius B<148>hler, offered a Limoges enamel reliquary, another showstopper.

There was little from America. Dealers Lin and Emile Deletaille of Brussels offered fine examples of Northwest Coast Indian carvings and sold an American Indian mask to a European museum. Philippe Denys sold chairs by 1950's designer Dan Johnson of California. The much-touted American-made 100.57-carat Star of America diamond, the world's largest D flawless octagonal step-cut diamond, was offered for $20 million by Graff, an international firm. Enormous interest was reported but no sale. It was first shown at the opening of the Graff salon at 721 Madison Avenue in May 2001.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston made a major purchase: a Regency bed with two carved, ebonized greyhounds with gold collars, attributed to Thomas Hope. It bought it from Pelham Galleries, London. The price was reportedly around $300,000.

Some complained that there were no blockbuster pictures this year. With war around the corner, dealers had lowered expectations, and some said dealers in paintings held back masterpieces so as not to burn them with over- exposure. Nevertheless, there were plenty of very good paintings for sale by well-known and not so well-known masters. By the end of the fair, Rob Noortman, whose gallery is in Maastricht, had sold 16 pictures, including a Sisley and a Manet. London dealer Johnny Van Haeften sold Dutch pictures (both interiors and still lifes). Bernheimer-Colnaghi sold a large French picture to a German museum. London dealer Richard Green, another of the major dealers in the most desirable location near the center of the show, had red dots on pictures sold.

Many dealers said they were surprised that business was OK. They had low expectations with war on the horizon. The war in Iraq began on the fifth day of the show, but it was pretty much business as usual. Antiquities dealer Charles Ede of London said he sold better than last year. He sold a Roman bust of a boy, circa 135 A.D., which went to a museum at Cornell University.

Philippe Denys of Brussels, who switched from his usual Art Deco to post-Second World War Scandinavian and Italian design, sold most of his booth. He sold a set of ten circa 1962 chairs covered in natural leather by Arne Jacobsen for 57,000 euros, and a woman from Texas bought nearly every piece by Tapio Wirkkala in wood, silver, and glass. One Wirkkala leaf tray was marked 16,000 euros. Denys was the only dealer in 20th-century decorative arts at the fair.

Oriental art dealer Ben Janssens of London sold 22 pieces on the opening evening. Vanderven and Vanderven of the Netherlands sold very well; an English collector paid 350,000 euros for their Kangxi monteith bowl. A set of three blue and white palace vases with raised designs was bought by a Brazilian collector for 550,000 euros. The Peabody Essex Museum bought a rare Chinese export porcelain copy of a 17th-century Westerwald ewer.

Robert Bowman of London sold a small cast of The Kiss by Auguste Rodin to a European private collector for 380,000 euros.

Dave Aronson, chairman of the TEFAF executive committee and a Delft specialist, sold a very rare dark brown Delft garniture decorated with yellow slip to a Dutch collector. He had many red dots on Delft cows and bowls and plates.

Axel Vervoordt, well known for mixing all periods of art, made numerous sales, including a Classical Greek marble nude to an American. He took groups of collectors to his Castle and Kanaal showroom just an hour away where more sales were made.

Generally, midrange material sold well. "We sold usable silver, dinner plates, soup tureens, candlesticks that look nice on the table," said James McConnaughy of S.J. Shrubsole, New York City. "We made a number of new clients. We were pleased, but it doesn't help business when war breaks out, especially a war not popular with most people at the fair."

Much publicity was given to young New Yorker Braham Wachter, 13, when he bought his first work of art, a Rembrandt etching, The Agony in the Olive Garden, from David Tunick. Wachter spent all of his Bar Mitzvah money. (He must have made a good haul.) George Wachter, his father, heads Sotheby's Old Master paintings department.

TEFAF was not born full grown. It developed from the Antiquairs International & Pictura Fine Arts Fair in Maastricht, which became the European Fine Art Fair in 1988 when it moved to the Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre along with a new section of carpet and textile dealers called Textura. (Of the dozen textile dealers in 1988, when there was a special exhibition of "Carpets in the 17th Century Dutch Paintings," only two textiles dealers remained in 2003.)

The following year The European Fine Art Foundation took over the organization, and the fair has prospered. The category of modern and contemporary painting was added in 1991. Le Haute Joaillerie du Monde became a special section in 1992. The following year the categories of books, manuscripts and maps, and Classical antiquities were added, and the number of exhibitors increased to 158. In 1994 the number of visitors exceeded 60,000, necessitating a new floor plan in 1995 and making room for more international dealers. In 1996 the fair adopted the name TEFAF Maastricht. In 1997 TEFAF, celebrating its tenth anniversary, increased the number of exhibitors from France. By 1998, there were 175 exhibitors from 14 countries and almost 65,000 visitors.

In 2000 TEFAF included "Good Title" in addition to authenticity and quality as part of the vetting process by using the services of the Art Loss Registry. In 2000 there were 198 exhibitors from 13 countries and more than 66,600 visitors. In 2001 the number of exhibitors exceeded 200 for the first time, and attendance exceeded 76,000. Chubb Insurance Company became its principal sponsor. In 2002 the fair was extended one day to spread the number of visitors during the first few days of the fair.

This year attendance was down 13% due to the worldwide economic downturn and the war in Iraq. Nearly 65,000 visitors came to the 11-day fair, March 14-23, and the special preview on March 13. Nevertheless, there was a line every day before the doors opened at 11 a.m., and many people stayed until closing time at 7 p.m.

The majority of visitors drove to Maastricht for the day. The organizers report that 55% of the visitors came from the Netherlands and that most of the remaining 45% came from Belgium, Germany, and France. Only 3% were from the U.S., half as many as in years' past. Many of the Americans were museum curators with donors in tow. There were fewer from the U.K. than in years' past, even though 46 exhibiting dealers came from the U.K. The 203 dealers exhibiting came from 13 countries. There were 40 Dutch dealers, 17 from nearby Belgium, 29 from Germany, three from Austria, 21 from France, two from Monaco, nine from Italy, and three from Spain. Of the 20 American dealers, most were art dealers. There was one art dealer from Canada.

Seven percent of the visitors actually bought at the fair, the same percentage as the year before. Americans and South Americans were among the major buyers. Dealers said that sales are made all year as a result of Maastricht.

Sales in the 50,000 to 100,000 euro range were plentiful. Million-dollar sales were few and far between. "The art market is not as vibrant nor as speculative as it has been," commented George Abrams. "This was a good time to test prices. Dealers were realistic."

TEFAF is a great escape. Visitors seemed to forget that a war was going on and lost themselves in the world of art. It appears that even in this politically and economically fragile world, TEFAF Maastricht will go on again next year. The dates are March 5-14, 2004.

For travel information, call the Netherlands Board of Tourism at (888) 464-6552 or visit the Web site (www.goholland.com) or check the TEFAF Web site (www.tefaf.com).