A Tale of Two Art Fairs

TEFAF, the European Fine Art Foundation fair, and Frieze overlap, and they couldn’t be more different.

O ne of my favorite art fairs, from the European Fine Art Foundation, or TEFAF, opens today at the Park Avenue Armory, and my least favorite fair, Frieze, opened yesterday at the Shed in Hudson Yards in Manhattan. It seems the spring art fairs are packed in one weekend this year as the culturati hope to dodge whatever apocalypse looms, however contrived.

I’ve covered TEFAF for years at its fair in Maastricht in the Netherlands, anchored by Old Masters, and its New York fair, which shows, mostly, modern and contemporary flat art, furniture, and ceramics. TEFAF shoppers value history and heritage, and the fair caters to serious collectors and connoisseurs inspired by art history. Drawing, analogously, from the Met Costume Institute Gala, TEFAF is Chanel, Balenciaga, and Christian Dior. Frieze is Marc Jacobs, Versace, and Pharrell Williams. The differences between the two brands aren’t money or class but taste, style, and depth, though at TEFAF, they serve oysters at the preview. I followed the shucker and his bucket.

Now, to the art at TEFAF and the Armory, which, by the by, was packed. I didn’t know Paul Jouve (1878–1973), the French painter, illustrator, and sculptor specializing in animals, but I have to say his Black Panther Combating a Python, from 1928, is a showstopper. I’ve had the 100th anniversary of the first Art Deco fair — in Paris in 1925 — on my mind, and this picture, later translated into a mosaic, is an apt icon for a movement that’s about chrome, ebony, and prismatic shapes but that also rejoices in sleek, attenuated power. Fred and Ginger danced with effortless grace. Our panther and python fight to the death with the élan. Jouve puts the savage into geometry. The painting’s big, at 52 by 78 inches, and the centerpiece at Galerie Lefebvre’s booth. It’s under $2 million. I wouldn’t bet on either panther or python. They seem an even match.

The Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell and Art Deco have next to nothing in common except a 100th birthday in 2025. I’ve never written about Mitchell only because I’ve never found the right moment, but she’s the birthday girl and her triptych at Mennour, the Paris dealer, though small, packs a punch. She painted the three pictures, together only 17 inches wide, in 1965, inscribing the triptych to Jean Fournier, the Paris dealer who showed her work and the work of other young Americans. I like it not only because I tend to prefer small things. Yes, it’s abstract, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t represent something. In the mid-1960s, Mitchell moved from frilly, colorful, allover, and cryptic scenes to primordial pictures that can be interpreted as dense, choppy seascapes. It’s under $1 million.

Both of these works of art are great rarities, as is most everything at TEFAF. The New York show is mostly 20th-century, so we don’t see paintings that have been tucked in a family castle for hundreds of years, as we do in Maastricht, but we do see special, distinctive art. Jouve’s and Mitchell’s pictures express an epoch and movement, but they’re nonpareil, as is Giorgio Morandi’s Still Life, from 1921.

Morandi (1890–1964), the master of calm and repose in the pandemonium of post-WWI Italy, is from Bologna, so I’m not surprised that Galleria d’Arte Maggiore, the Bologna dealer, found what’s one of his earliest mature still lifes. Morandi had an emotionally debilitating war, as did all of Italy, but he had the insight actually to have a nervous breakdown. He’d trained as an artist before the war, and once he’d recovered and gone through a jittery Futurist phase, he found his own future in tender, doleful still lifes. They’re made with modern rigor but in diaphanous, dim browns and grays, with such Italian colors as terra-cotta and muted blues and greens. They’re not pastel colors but the faded colors of old Italian buildings. For him, “after the deluge” didn’t mean chaos but melancholy and solitude.

Still life, as a genre, is as old as painting but Cubism, the movement gorilla in the house of European art, was a nervous, jagged, city phenomenon. Morandi put warmth and wisdom in the mix. The TEFAF picture has been in all the big shows about Morandi. It’s €2.4 million ($2.7 million).

I’ve been going to art fairs for nearly 40 years now so I see dealers come, go, and evolve. Charles Ede was, for years, a distinguished antiquities dealer but, in the business’s early days, Ede sold modern art and also, after World War II, published high-end illustrated books. After so much austerity and pinch, these books were a pleasure. Ede’s dead, his son’s retired, and now the business is back to selling very important antiquities as well as modern art, but with a twist.

At TEFAF, Ede is offering two drawings, both of young women, one by R. B. Kitaj, who’s American, and the other by Walter Sauer, a Belgian artist I didn’t know. Both are fantastic, but you don’t sell antiquities for decades without developing an eye for the otherworldly, even the bizarre. Sauer (1889–1927) was a Symbolist, an odd bent in the Teens and the Jazz Age, and he specialized in the female figure. His Portrait of a Young Woman with a Ribbon in Her Hair, from 1921, is an eye-catcher and displayed at the entrance to Ede’s booth. Ultra-composed, with enormous almond eyes, a large, pale face, full lips, long, lustrous, black hair with a hint of frizz, and a black dress, she’s not sweet. She looks like one of the second-generation goddesses, maybe Persephone — young but with the look of experience, some scary, and wisdom beyond her years. Belgian artists are peculiar, as are Belgians, betwixt and between as they are. Ensor and Magritte are the two heavy-hitter Belgian Modernists. Sauer died too young and was very limited in subject matter, so he’s not famous. Still, what a good artist. His drawing at Ede is $42,000.

Kitaj is famous but impossible to classify. He’s American, born in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in 1932, but he worked mostly in the U.K., where Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, and Frank Auerbach were kindred spirits. He died in 2007. He’s a romantic, eccentric realist. Dominie (Dartmouth), his black-pastel drawing of his daughter from 1978, certainly holds a wall. It’s displayed on the other side of Ede’s booth from Sauer’s drawing; the two make for a pair. Kitaj’s is more affectionate — she’s his daughter, after all — but that it plays so well with a Symbolist work tells us how idiosyncratic Kitaj was. It’s $125,000.

The London dealer Richard Nagy has been in business since the early 1980s, specializing in Schiele, Klimt, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, and then expanding to artists outside the German-speaking world but still focused on angst, exaggerated gestures, angular forms, and intense, warped feeling. He sells work by Ensor, Francis Bacon, and Lucien Freud, too. Like most of the dealers at TEFAF, he’s a scholar and a connoisseur, too, and known for his museum-quality exhibitions. Of all the Weimar Republic artists, Dix (1891–1969) is the one whose work oozes trauma, in war and peace. Nagy’s two watercolors, both from the 1920s, depict life in the gutter, whether with a prostitute with pendulous breasts — the man under her is likely Dix — or a gnarly sailor searching for a fling, not a fairy tale romance. They’re each around $500,000 and, even for Dix, they’re tough stuff.

A big part of the fair is its vetting process, done by outside curators and scholars who rule on not only authenticity but also quality. Most art fairs, especially contemporary art fairs, leave much of this work to the dealers themselves. My eye’s not bad, I think, but I believe in art that has stood the test of time. I’m naturally wary of, say, pricy art where the paint’s barely dry.

* * *

Now, to Frieze. Frieze is an international art-fair franchise that started with a contemporary culture magazine in the early 1990s and grew to mount art-dealer shows in London, Los Angeles, New York, and Seoul. My impression, having gone to three or four iterations, is that it caters to rich people who think of themselves as socially concerned, international, and having a taste for the avant-garde. In this vein, Frieze belongs to the Gallery Climate Coalition, a group trying to control the weather, of all things. A wall panel at the fair touts the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, which “advances and sustains politically engaged art practice.” Many Frieze shoppers seem to be the types who put those idiotic “In This House” signs by the gates of their walled estates. Likely uninterested in American politics are Frieze’s Asian buyers, who are numerous and influence what the dealers display.

Ari Emanuel, the Hollywood mogul and, yes, Rahm’s brother, just bought the Frieze brand, which includes the fairs, the magazine, and the cultural programs. Enough said.

I went to Frieze in New York once before and saw only one thing I liked — out of many hundreds. It was a wall textile by Sheila Hicks. This time, I saw some beautiful things, here and there. I left thinking that Frieze well serves decorators working for clients who want to seem like they have edgy taste but who also want things that play well with a preferred color scheme. I’m sure others are well served, too. Frieze in London and in New York used to be extravaganzas, with hundreds of dealers showing art. This round, there were only 65 or so dealers. At least in New York, it’s been right-sized to allow for close looking and discovery.

I like learning about artists I don’t know. Too many people in the arts, and that includes critics, curators, and scholars, think that if they haven’t heard of an artist, that artist can’t be any good but the world’s a big place. Moon Kyungwon (b. 1989) paints grisaille snow scenes that are immersive and soothing. She’s new to me. Though Korean, she would be at home in Vermont and among Robert Frost fans. Gallery Hyundai in Seoul represents her and displayed a series, most priced at between $50,000 and $100,000. I liked El Ramo de Tirana debajo de la Tierra, by Patricia Iglesias Peco (b. 1974), painted this year and $55,000 at François Ghebalay’s booth. It depicts flora, fauna, sea, and sky as, it seems, Earth was beginning to coalesce. I love her work and now know something about a living artist south of the Canal Zone. The painting I saw is both Old Master and New Age in look but, goodness, at ten feet wide, it’s so big! Less is more is my advice to this very good Argentinian artist with a knack for vibrancy.

The big-enchilada dealers — Gagosian, Pace, White Cube, James Cohan, and Zwirner — are bunched together in prime fair digs. Gagosian sold at least one of Jeff Koons’s Hulk sculptures, balloons made of polychromed steel that play music, one from a mock tuba, another from organ pipes. Don’t expect “Some Enchanted Evening,” alas, which would have been the only thing they have going for them. I’m told the tunes are loud and unknown to consonant harmonies. My spies also tell me they go for $3 million. Cohan sold all his Alexander Calder–inspired mobiles by Tuan Andrew Nyugen (b. 1976), a Vietnamese-American artist. Calder is among the most overrated artists of the last century. I like the Black Dada paintings by Adam Pendleton (b. 1984). They all sold the day of the fair’s preview, but asserting that they’re about “Blackness and its relationship to abstraction and conceptions of the avant-garde” is jive talkin.’ It’s marketing lingo aimed at rich, guilty honkies. They went for various prices between $175,000 and around $400,000. All of these dealers are distinguished, but they aim at brash and banal because they think that sells to the Frieze crowd.

Sales at Frieze are, so far, good, I heard. Though I tend to disguise myself in Vermont-wear when I go to art fairs, I saw museum cronies who confirmed that institutions were in a buying mood. Their budgets were approved months ago, so stock market turmoil isn’t among their immediate worries.

Frieze, I’m happy to see, isn’t exclusively involved with name brands and artists who do look-alike work. A revelation was the French painter Jean Claracq (b. 1991). He paints tiny things Résidence de prestige, from 2024, is around 8 by 5 inches — packed with details and having an Old Master look. He starts with images he finds on Instagram and dating sites and then creates a fantasy scene that leaves us guessing and thinking. His work is at Galerie Sultana, one of the few French dealers at Frieze. Résidence de prestige goes for $32,000. There were three or four of his paintings, which I’d call miniatures, on view, all exquisite.

I didn’t know Ann Craven (b. 1967), but her Moon (April, Red) 2025, is beautiful in a witchy way, with luscious pink, blues, and whites creating an aura surrounding a salmon-colored moon. Her specialty is moonscapes, though she does other things, and while she lives in New York, she works in Maine. I’m a sucker for the art of Maine. Craven mixes nocturnal mystery with country playfulness. Like Vermonters, Mainers live in the wild. Her dealer is Karma, who’s asking in the high five figures.

TEFAF is always great, Frieze has been, in part, rehabilitated. Life being life, though, we never know when black clouds will come. I learned on Monday that Julia Alexander, one of my closest friends, died suddenly Sunday night of a heart attack at 57. We went to school together, became fast friends, and stayed close for nearly 35 years. My husband and I are the godparents of her 22-year-old twins.

Julia was the very successful director of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore and just went to the Kress Foundation as its president. Only God knows His reasons but, right now, her death is incomprehensible. I’ll write more about her later this month after the funeral in Baltimore when, I hope, my thoughts are more composed. I knew Julia very well, but I’m amazed at how many lives she touched.