Thoughts on Maastricht Fair’s Future as Old Master Appeal Fades

Heritage and art history must always be TEFAF’s secret sauce.

O n Thursday I wrote about some of the fantastic art I saw at the European Fine Art Fair, called TEFAF or, simply, “Maastricht” by connoisseurs, collectors, and art professionals. The experience is like ray after ray of sunshine casting light on our dank, dark world. TEFAF is now in its 37th year as the world’s grandest art fair. I’ll write about a few surprises and pick one or two more of the best but, mostly, I’ll muse on whither goest this bit of Arcadia.

Next month — April 15 — is the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist Salon, a commercial and critical flop but, still, the radical art fair that changed French art, which means European and American art. There’s little birthday fuss over it today. At TEFAF, I saw only two first-rate Impressionist things. Wildenstein offered Two Anglers, by Monet, a small and signature Impressionist scene of everyday life from 1882. It’s soothing and expertly dabby, and the aerial view gives it some spice. It’s lovely.

Next door, at Richard Green, a pretty, also soothing Caillebotte seascape sold at the TEFAF preview. The gallery wouldn’t confess what the new owner paid, which is understandable — it was probably $10 million — and was squirrely about giving me even a fact sheet, but no matter. It’s beautiful and fresh though ever-so-slightly obvious and not Caillebotte at his best, which is to experience nirvana, or at least those moments when the flaneur turns voyeur. Caillebotte is a master water painter.

I saw subpar Renoirs here and there, but it doesn’t take a Poirot to deduce that peak Impressionist material has been mined. While by no means an Impressionist, Van Gogh got a sale, for around $5 million, for Head of a Peasant Woman, from 1884. It’s a Dutch Van Gogh, painted a year earlier than The Potato Eaters, but, like it, dark, bulbous, and frank. It went to “a museum outside the European Union,” I’m told, and I suppose if you really want a Van Gogh, it’s better than nothing. A prime Van Gogh after 1887 would be ten times as much, but there’s so little that’s available. M. S. Rau, the New Orleans dealer, sold it.

I’m shocked at how few American museums are even bothering to do an Impressionist exhibition in honor of the event. The Clark Art Institute, one of my local museums and whose calling card is Renoir, is mounting its big summer exhibition, not on Impressionism, which isn’t on its docket for anything new, but on the one French neoclassical artist who happens to have been black, or half black.

The Covid mass hysteria and subsequent vacation from reality, the BLM “mostly peaceful” riots, and an uptick in European malaise and disgruntlement have together led to an inquisition of past practices everywhere. This includes the Maastricht fair. The fair’s purpose is buying and selling, and far be it from me to challenge Mr. Market, who might be saying “reform or die.” The Old Master market, which has always defined TEFAF, has been fading in little increments for years, but now the lights seem to be dimming at warp speed. Again, the dearth of masterpieces is a problem, but so is a dearth of serious buyers and collectors.

Why is this most prestigious of art fairs in Maastricht? That’s a good place to start since Maastricht — the place — helps define TEFAF — the brand and event. Maastricht’s a small, old city at the very bottom of the Netherlands, near Cologne and Düsseldorf to the east, Brussels and Antwerp to the west, and accessible to Amsterdam, Paris, and London. TEFAF started nearly 40 years ago as a fair almost exclusively for Old Master and 19th-century dealers and collectors, and Maastricht won the location, location, location contest.

The fair has changed over the years as the art market has changed. There are fewer and fewer Old Master dealers. This round at TEFAF, only about a dozen specialize in Dutch art, and now there’s a critical mass of contemporary dealers. I didn’t see a single Cuyp cow, possibly because they’re so boring to the modern eye that they’re indetectable, but actually because most of the dealers and collectors of such fare are now cavorting for eternity among those puffy Low Country clouds. This is the first Maastricht fair where Old Master dealers of any stripe — painting, sculpture, furniture, porcelain, silver, or works on paper — are a minority. When I first went to Maastricht, art after, say, 1900 was of hen’s-teeth rarity. There was no American art.

This year I saw a lot of Dubuffet, Miro, and German Expressionism but also lots of New York and London dealers selling the work of living artists. This leads to a loss of magic. Everyone in New York and London knows who’s doing — and selling — what. Among the prewar art dealers, that is, pre–First World War, we still see those miraculous finds like the ancient Roman cameo of Postumus I profiled on Thursday. That’s TEFAF’s historic calling card. Maastricht’s still a not-bad location. It’s a sweet little place, to be sure, but there’s nothing else to do there. You’ve hit Golconda. If you like art, the fair’s the thing.

The magic of Maastricht is, of course, its combination of great art and art history. At Weiss Gallery, a London dealer, I experienced this traditional magic of Maastricht in two paintings. Portrait of Joan van der Merckt, a portrait of a Zeeland grandee by Isaack Luttichuys, from 1657, is light and crisp in contrast to the moody and mysterious chiaroscuro of Rembrandt, who was his contemporary. It’s been in the sitter’s family for 350 years. Weiss got the family to sell it only after years of relationship-building and intelligence gathering.

Weiss is also showing Corneille de Lyon’s little — it’s a bit over 5 by 4 inches unframed – 1536 portrait of Madeleine of France, the daughter of King François I and, very briefly, the wife of Scotland’s James V. Accustomed to sunny France, Madeleine arrived in Scotland as a new bride and promptly died at age 16. She’s called “the Summer Queen,” as is the painting. A sudden widower, James soon married Mary of Guise, a French aristocrat, thus continuing Scottish kings’ habit of marrying well-connected French wives. These French ties helped keep the covetous English from troubling Scottish autonomy.

James’s and Mary’s daughter was Mary, Queen of Scots, and their grandson was James VI of Scotland and England’s James I. All for Madeleine’s fatal case of la grippe. The Summer Queen has been in a French private collection since at least the 1850s and possibly long before that. Getting the consignment meant relationships in France and powerful scholarly and connoisseurship skills.

Alas, as the Old Master market fades and the Old Master dealers retire, out goes the magic. Contemporary and Modernist art dealers may or may not have these skills, but they don’t need them. They’re working with artists or artists’ widows and estates. They’re working with collectors, too, and collector estates, but the mystery and depth of heritage just aren’t there. And I just can’t get excited about million-dollar art fresh off the easel, paint barely dried. It doesn’t have patina, and neither does its story.

I visited well over 200 of the 270 or so booths at the Maastricht fair, skipping many of the jewelry dealers since they’re bloodhounds when it comes to who has money. I live in Vermont, and they might smell sap or mud or manure. Their sixth sense tells them that tiaras and flannel aren’t a good fit, so they greet me with a chill that turns to tundra when they learn I’m a journalist. I do visit the Modernism and contemporary booths and often know, especially among the Modernists, that they’re not sending their best things.

I snapped this photograph of a booth showing European Modernism. I like German Expressionism but these two paintings by Kirchner don’t make my heart go pitter-pat, and it’s not an issue of taste.

Many of the 20th- and 21st-century art dealers at Maastricht also show at Art Basel, Miami Basel, or Frieze. They rank what they bring where. TEFAF in Maastricht has enormous prestige, but collectors focusing on these eras and looking for what I call fresh, choice meat aren’t naturally drawn there. Why risk overexposing a good, much less great, work of art by premiering it at Maastricht and then showing it at fairs where the buzz is programmed around the art of now or not too long ago?

I’m worried about how the Maastricht fair evolves, since its brand and history are so tied to art before 1900 and especially to Old Masters, the decorative arts, and antiquities. Change might be inevitable, because the collector base is dwindling and many of the dealers are retiring. The state of the International Fine Print Dealers Association fair, the premier print fair, might show us Maastricht’s future. When I started going to it in the 1990s, most of the dealers there sold Old Master prints. When I visited and reviewed the 2023 IFPDA fair, I counted the Old Master dealers on one hand.

One of the forces keeping the Old Master market kicking is, I’m told, American museums. There were, I learned, about 300 American museum directors and curators at Maastricht. Living on a dirt road on 20 acres of land in rural Vermont, I sleep well, benefiting from clean, crisp mountain air as well as from my confidence that no one whose vapid or fake exhibitions I’ve dissected can find me. In Maastricht, I’m risking a stiletto slipped between the ribs. Praise the Lord for metal detectors.

Stiletto or no, I hear from directors and curators wanting Old Masters that “we’re looking for women” — artists, that is, tarts-for-hire — and dealers hear it, too.

American curators and directors like buying at Maastricht since it’s prestigious for them and good trustee cultivation since trustees and big donors often join them. Women artists before, say, the Impressionists are very rare, as are women admirals, executioners, barber surgeons, or countless other professions, and this raises prices to unwarranted heights. I saw Lavinia Fontana’s Portrait of Antonietta Gonzalez, from 1592, at the Rob Smeets Gallery. Gonzalez had hypertrichosis, or werewolf syndrome, as did her siblings and her father, an attendant in the court of the French King Henri II. Her parents’ marriage is said to have been the basis for Beauty and the Beast, published in 1740.

The buzz — not from an electric razor — surprised me given the subject, the simple fact that Fontana isn’t a great artist, and the painting’s $5 million price. American museums with serious acquisitions money were actually considering it, at least last week. I question their judgment, to be diplomatic. It’s an oddity and something that would be fun to have as a gift but not as a big-dollar purchase. I’m told the picture kindles warm and fuzzies about empathy and what it’s like to feel “othered,” but that’s for those who have ODed on feminist fairy tales. I think people will snortily wonder whether she’s Chewbacca’s mother. Yes, that Chewbacca. From Star Wars.

By the by, the painting, then unknown, sold at a French auction last year for $1.4 million, so there’s quite a markup but not as great as Robilant + Voena’s hike on its Penitent Magdalene, from 1626, by Artemisia Gentileschi, a courageous and rebellious artist to be sure. It’s priced at $7 million, a lot of dough, but last sold at auction in 2021 for $129,000. Granted, the dealer put a mammoth effort through scholarship and technology to deliver an Artemesia attribution accepted by everyone. Still, her sex and personal story inordinately drive the price.

Markups aside, too many of the new American dealers at Maastricht are showing obvious things. As much as I think Kehinde Wiley’s pictures look like wallpaper, he has a shtick, and he’s not overpriced. His Portrait of Issa Diatta, from 2020, at Sean Kelly goes for $650,000. Every American museum with a taste for fad and sparkle and money to blow wants one in the cause of diversity, but why not buy the work of young, unestablished black artists? Why not offer it? Wiley hit a gusher with his portraits of President Obama and Michael Jackson. They all look the same. They evoke Old Master swagger portraits and are certainly flashy, but seen one, seen ’em all.

Geoffrey Diner Gallery from Washington, D.C., is one American dealer who gets it right. This is Diner Gallery’s first time at Maastricht. They specialize in the best Arts & Crafts and American Modernist furniture, so they brought rare, very high-end things by George Nakashima (1905–1990). European connoisseurs and collectors don’t know Nakashima well, but he’s an American original and, in our young country, one of our Old Masters, he’s been dead for only a bit more than 30 years. His Sanso dining-room table and chairs are from 1981 and were a private commission sold by the family for whom Nakashima made them. The book–matched walnut slabs are symphonic. Also at Diner’s is a buckeye maple-burl coffee table that’s craggy, all-muscle, and very American. It’s from 1982.

The Geoffrey Diner Gallery has done something that the best of the Old Masters dealers at Maastricht do — spent the year saving their best things and looking for fresh-to-the-market objects. Their booth is welcoming and comfortable, but also serious and heritage-focused. I believe they see their appearance at Maastricht as a career pinnacle, so they’re not thinking about Art Basel, Miami Basel, Frieze, or even TEFAF’s upcoming New York iteration.

“There is no such thing as a good new idea,” Burke is supposed to have said, and I know of no aspect of humanity where Burke was wrong. If Maastricht changes, I hope it’s around the edges and not its heart and soul, which are unique and add so much to high culture.

I got the last-minute, end-of-fair press release from TEFAF. In a coda, I can report that Charles Ede, one of the finest antiquities dealers, sold his Hellenistic Head of a Seleucid Ruler, from about 250 b.c. It’s an exquisite bronze head, about 4 inches tall, with wavy hair and an inlaid garland made from niello, a black alloy of sulphur, silver, and copper. Ancient bronze sculpture is so rare. Big ones were eventually melted for weapons, but this little devil’s head managed to hide. The Seleucid kings ruled new states after the division of Alexander the Great’s empire. This bronze head probably represented one of his great-grandsons. Ede, by the by, saw about half of his TEFAF offerings sold.

On an entirely different front, Domingos António de Sequeira’s Descent from the Cross, from 1827, found a happy home. In the midst of darkness and a chaotic Mount Calvary, a dead Jesus is lowered. Sequeira packed the painting with half a dozen passages from the Passion of Christ, using red figures to keep things organized. He was one of Portugal’s few great painters. Colnaghi, the dealer, moved mountains to ensure the picture went to a Portuguese collector, finding one who promises to lend it for public display. And Ressemblance garantie at Dickinson, which I liked so much, sold for $131,000, seeming to tell us that “quality’s guaranteed” at this greatest of art fairs.