Amidst financial uncertainty, Old Masters dealers may have been nervous over the past few weeks heading into their biggest sales event of the year. The prestigious and widely acclaimed TEFAF [The European Fine Art Fair] has grown to account for a critical portion of annual turnover. In lieu of Old Masters’ price stability over the past few months,however, news out of the fair’s home in the sleepy Netherlandish town of Maastrict has been upbeat, if not unsurprising.
One dealer remarked to OMNP that the fair was: “(N)ot quite the unprecedented boom of last year, and visitors (are) fractionally down, but all the good collectors are here and there appear to be sales throughout.” In their observations from the fair, The Economist painted some vivid scenes of commercial satisfaction:
Would buyers stay away, unconvinced by those optimists who say that art is the new copper-bottomed, inflation-proof investment?
In the event, there was little need to worry. Nearly 10,000 people showed up for the grand vernissage the day before the formal opening, and Maastricht airport saw the arrival of 55 private jets, only two fewer than last year.
Johnny van Haeften, a Dutch 17th-century specialist and one of the fair’s stalwarts, sold six pictures in the first hours after the show opened, including a river landscape by Maerten Ryckaert with a small family and a donkey in a punt representing the flight into Egypt. It sold for £800,000, after fetching roughly half that price at Sotheby’s in New York just two months earlier.
At Colnaghi, meanwhile, a Peter Paul Rubens portrait of a young man, painted between 1610 and 1613, was snapped up for just over €5m. Colnaghi’s ebullient director, Conrad Bernheimer, remarked, “If there is a crisis, it must be somewhere else.”
News Coverage:
Art-Fair Prices Cut by 20 Percent as Collectors Buy Old Masters [Scott Reyburn, Bloomberg]
Spring Sprung: Encouraging news from Europe’s leading international art fair [The Economist]
Old Masters remain unscathed by the downturn [Susan Moore, Financial Times]
Rare Beauty in Maastricht [More Intelligent Life]
Optimism and Jitters at Art Fair in Europe [Carol Vogel, NY Times]
Further Coverage:
TEFAF Maastricht 2009 Art and Antiques Fair Opens Today With Quality, Rarity and Beauty [Art Daily]
[...] stock market winners Walmart, IBM and McDonalds, the new buyer will demand the tried and true, and the Old Masters market stands to benefit. Rare works that bestow status and legitimacy will continue to be prized by collectors, but that [...]