The Art of Visiting an Art Fair from Afar

There’s lots to see and learn online — plus, thoughts on art tariffs

W hen I was a curator and a museum director, I never went to the art fair held by the European Fine Art Foundation, or TEFAF, an annual extravaganza held in Maastricht in the Netherlands. It’s the world’s premiere art fair, with dealers offering the best and freshest “magna opera,” and every one of this year’s 265 or so stalls is a mini museum. It’s closing today. TEFAF in ye olden days displayed very little American art, and I was an American art curator and director of a museum exclusively of American art. There was no reason for me to go, but I was once a provincial, I’m sorry to admit. Every art lover should go. It’s an essential and unforgettable experience.

I couldn’t go this year, since I’ve got a busy travel schedule and I’m going to the Biennale in Venice in May. But I’ve found that even a simple country soul like me in rural Vermont can have an enriching TEFAF experience from afar.

First and foremost is the fantastic art. I love a good portrait, as readers know from my coverage of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. So, at TEFAF, I tend to focus on the best portraits newly on the market. At Maastricht, there’s rarity, astonishing rarity, including Velázquez’s Portrait of Don Sebastián García de Huerta, from 1628 or 1629, offered at Colnaghi.

I knew the portrait as The Inquisitor, and García was indeed the secretary of the Inquisition, and I don’t mean that he took minutes and made the coffee. As one of Spain’s enforcers of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, he scheduled visits of the least fastidious to the iron chair, the rack, and the thumb-screwer. The painting is among Velázquez’s earliest as a royal court artist, but it’s before his first trip to Italy in 1629 to savor the work of Titian and Tintoretto; the masters of the Bologna Baroque; and the Roman Mannerists. García’s portrait is darker, more sculptural, austere, and, hey, looks like someone who loved doing the Torquemada Two Step.

This is the best of Maastricht. Velázquez probably painted fewer than 300 works, most of the Spanish royals, so they’re in the Prado in Madrid or the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. García’s portrait stayed with his family until the 1920s, when it went to a private collection — whose, no one knew. Colnaghi pried it from its current owner, a German, and though I couldn’t pry the asking price from them, I bet it’s around $5 million. As a grace note to my stories last year on the Norton’s superb show on Rembrandt and friends last year, I see the Leiden Collection bought Man with a Plumed Red Beret, by Willem Drost, a star Rembrandt pupil.

For fare that’s lighter but just as formidable, and talk about doubleheaders, see Alon Zakaim, a London dealer and Impressionist specialist. He’s offering Monet’s L’église de Vernon, temps gris (Gray Day) and L’église de Vernon, soleil, that pretty little Norman town on the Seine in sunlight. Monet is famous for his serial views of cypress trees, Rouen Cathedral, and haystacks in different weather. Sometimes one series would have 20 or 30 variations, but the Vernon series, done around 1894, is only seven, and these two haven’t been together for 130 years. They’re £20 million ($26.8 million) for the pair.

Not everything’s flat. The Belgian greyhound brooch offered by dealer Epoque Fine Jewels is pave-set, meaning that the diamonds are held on a row of tiny metal beads or prongs like pavement, not flat but ever so slightly arched to enhance sparkle. Cartier made it around 2000. This pretty young canine lady sports emerald eyes, an onyx nose, and a collar made from sapphires. She’s noble and refined, known for speed and grace, and no cellulite at all! The brooch is 3 inches and can indeed stand if it’s not clasped to an evening gown or, these days, a tuxedo. The jewelry dealers at high-end art fairs will never disclose prices unless you look like a serious buyer. And, if you go to Maastricht, be forewarned. The jewelers tend to post armed guards at their booths.

It’s not jewelry, strictly speaking, and I’m not sure it’s even art, but the collar of Lord Byron’s much-adored dog, Boatswain, is for sale at Desmet Fine Art, also Belgian. Boatswain, a Landseer (a kind of Newfoundland dog), was surely the poet’s best friend. He “possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man without his vices,” so sayeth Byron, who also wrote a poem in Boatswain’s memory. What to do with it? A display piece, for sure, but I’m practical. It’s 5 inches in diameter, so it can be worn as a bracelet or, if you’re a paroled felon, to disguise an ankle monitor. Call it sartorial entrepreneurship.

And not everything’s old. Michael Hoppen, the London photography dealer, is offering panoramic and unusual aerial city views by Sohei Nishino (b. 1982), a Japanese photographer who combines photography, cartography, and collage to make large prints of urban landscapes. He wanders the streets of, say, Venice, for months, shooting hundreds of rolls of film of every scene and from every angle he likes. Then he assembles a bird’s-eye view, cutting out parts he doesn’t want. He’s done London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Havana, and more.

They look abstract and jagged at first, but after a moment, the geographic features we know — the canals in Venice and Amsterdam, or the Thames in London — become clear. It’s a new way of seeing three dimensions in one plane. The object for sale is a limited-edition photograph for his finished puzzle. In a clever move, Hoppen is displaying a group of city views in a booth shared with Daniel Crouch Rare Books, the London dealer specializing in old maps, among other things. Nishino’s work, priced at around €30,000 ($35,000) a photograph, is shown next to 16th- and 17th-century maps.

Speaking of maps, Peter Harrington, a rare-book dealer with shops in London and New York, has the earliest complete map of Europe, The Rex Tholomeus portolan map, dating from 1375 to 1400. It’s on vellum, or sheep’s skin, and far less wearable than the Cartier greyhound brooch. What an object. It stretches from the barely known Atlantic islands off Europe to the steppes of the Golden Horde. It shows Crusader strongholds, the last Moorish cities in Spain, and Byzantine imperial sites. We also see the shifting frontiers of France during the Hundred Years’ War. The map was used for navigation, with diagonal crisscrossing lines for plotting bearings — an early version of GPS. It’s big — 114 inches wide — and probably made in Venice, though Sicily, Corsica, and Cyprus are in bright colors to catch our eye. At £5.6 million ($7.5 million), it might literally be the Mother of All Maps and an emblem of the start of the Age of Discovery.

Over the years, I’ve seen the Maastricht fair evolve from the place where Old Masters ruled the roost to an event balanced between Old Masters and antiquities on the one hand and modern and contemporary art on the other. Younger collectors and museums focusing on younger visitors drive this. There are more dealers than ever selling art of this century and the tail end of last. A group of superb Helen Frankenthaler prints was the focus of one booth, Robert Mapplethorpe another, and many booths mixed old and new. Collectors younger than, say, 50 tend not to focus but to go eclectic.

Still, the fair’s all about quality, rarity, and market freshness. David Tunick, the American print dealer and among TEFAF’s veterans, is selling an early, first-edition, bound set of Goya’s Caprichos for mid-six figures, probably among the sets sold by Goya himself. When Goya made this set in 1797 or 1798, lots of artists still produced their prints in bound books. Since then, nearly all have been disassembled by dealers and owners, to be sold individually.

Once focusing only on the best antiquities, the London dealer Charles Ede broadened his business three or four years ago to sell ancient sculpture, as well as British and European painting and drawings. This reflects the interests of buyers in eclectic collecting. The move is going well. Ede has offered and sold one of the few drawings that Géricault did leading to The Raft of the Medusa, his 1819 opus depicting a real-life disaster that was as poignant in his day as the Titanic is in ours.

TEFAF’s website has gotten better and better. During the Covid mass hysteria, hypnosis, and hallucination, dealers and art-fair organizers had to devise new ways of reaching people, and they did. Some fairs went online. There was no live Maastricht fair in 2021. The site shows more than 570 works of art, out of the thousands at the fair. They’re illustrated in high-quality color, and they link to a page prepared by the dealer packed with information on the object — provenance, exhibition history, the artist, and detail illustrations, with additional links to similar works at the fair.

While looking at nearly all of them, I was drawn immediately by Lovers with a Birdcage, a Meissen porcelain from 1736 made near Dresden at just about the time porcelain came to Europe. Trias Art Experts, owned by young dealers, wrote a luscious entry on the object’s daring colors – the woman’s black hoop skirt with India-style flowers and her yellow manteau with blue flowers make for quite the look, and he’s no slouch, either. This piece was in the first “gallant” group in Meissen’s inventory. Those are anecdotal groupings of witty, sassy porcelain figures. The bird in the cage suggests that the woman’s innocence is still intact, though imperiled as the man fingers it. Trias is Munich-based and specializes in early Meissen. One thing we don’t get in this part of the TEFAF site is prices, but it’s €95,000 ($110,000), and I didn’t even need my spies! The younger dealers are far less cagey.

Looking through hundreds of images is a feast. If I went to the fair, I probably would have overlooked the website. Even if we don’t click on an image to get the skinny on it, it’s all a great education on what catches the eye. It’s an efficient thing to use if you want to start collecting art. What catches your eye?

More and more dealers are putting virtual tours of their Maastricht stalls online. Oh, the geezers are in tears. “No one will come” if booths can be seen virtually, but they really mean, “I’m ashamed that I have no idea how to do this.” The London drawings dealer Stephen Ongpin  does it well. A good website is publicity for the Maastricht fair, not a substitution for it. The technology and adventurous spirit of dealers will only go up and up.

I’ve been talking to friends familiar with the impact of tariffs on TEFAF sales. With the fair about to end, the buying has been brisk, but people often take their time. Museums especially take forever, since trustees often have to approve purchases. The Trump tariffs were a huge monkey wrench for almost all the art fairs, especially as they changed country by country and with short notice. Now the American tariff is 15 percent, with exemptions for old paintings and sculpture but not for antiques — basically everything else. There’s an exemption for an antique that’s “historically significant,” something like “Cleopatra used this commode at Actium,” but that’s an iffy proposition. Europe has a value-added tax, but compliance paperwork is enough to give you gout.

All of this hasn’t moved dealers to pass on a Maastricht booth. It’s the most prestigious art fair in the world. Getting a stall is by invitation only and means that the dealer sells the best of its kind. Once you have a slot, you’re unlikely to part with it. And when a visitor with taste, money, and aplomb visits the Maastricht fair once, he or she will want to go back again.