“This could be a daring acquisition to make,” stated Frederick Ilchman, the chair of European work on the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He and his workforce of curators had been gazing, fascinated, at a Sixteenth-century portrait of Antonietta Gonzales, a lady with hypertrichosis, a uncommon congenital situation that causes extreme facial hair development. The elegantly dressed younger woman holds an inscription stating that she is the daughter of Don Pietro, a “wild man” from the Canary Islands who lived within the court docket of the Duke of Parma.
This extraordinary, long-lost portrait by Lavinia Fontana was an excellent instance of the numerous works by girls artists on present Thursday on the bustling preview of the TEFAF Maastricht truthful within the Netherlands. (The occasion opens to the general public Saturday and runs by March 14.) The Fontana portrait was priced at 4.5 million euros, about $5 million, on the sales space of the Geneva-based dealership Rob Smeets. Throughout the aisle, Artemisia Gentileschi’s lately rediscovered “Penitent Magdalene,” from about 1626, was out there on the sales space of the sellers Robilant and Voena at $7 million.
Ilchman has frequently traveled from Boston to TEFAF since 2007; in that point, the main target of his acquisitions has developed. “Final yr we purchased 5 work in someday: three of them had been by girls. This has been a precedence in the previous few years,” Ilchman stated. “We don’t have a number of work by girls painters or ornamental artists. It looks as if a helpful activity to amend this discrepancy,” he added, acknowledging that museums with giant holdings of pre-Twentieth-century artwork can appear disconnected from the twenty first century’s cultural considerations.
Museums are more and more vital consumers at TEFAF Maastricht, because the variety of personal people buying outdated grasp footage, sculptures and antiques has declined. Accumulating tastes have modified within the digital age, and the overwhelming majority of latest artwork consumers are drawn to modern works. The acquisition funds of many establishments, notably in the USA, encourage purchases that keep the encyclopedic nature of museum collections. On the identical time, curators are searching for outdated artwork that may resonate with a brand new viewers.
The delegation from Boston — which additionally included Matthew Teitelbaum, the museum’s director, and the board of trustees president Marc Plonskier — was certainly one of some 20 teams of curators and patrons from well-funded American establishments on the first preview day of TEFAF Maastricht, in line with Magda Grigorian, the truthful’s head of communications. Grigorian added that round 300 museum administrators can be among the many occasion’s 50,000 anticipated guests.
“The truthful has turn into tougher. It isn’t like 10 or 15 years in the past,” stated the Geneva-based outdated grasp specialist Salomon Lilian, certainly one of some 270 sellers exhibiting this yr. “The museums compensate for the decline of personal shopping for,” he added. “A1 high quality work are nonetheless very a lot in demand; small Dutch cupboard work are rather more tough.”
TEFAF Maastricht has tried to maintain up with the occasions. This yr, galleries specializing in trendy and modern artwork outnumbered sellers in additional conventional footage by 55 to 52. Whereas few modern collectors regard it as a must-attend occasion, the truthful now has a reputable roster of latest galleries, together with White Cube, Galeria Continua, Mennour and Sean Kelly.
“We all know the collectors at modern artwork festivals. Right here we meet completely different shoppers,” stated Kelly, whose gallery relies in New York and Los Angeles, and who was displaying at TEFAF Maastricht for a second time.
Kelly was one of many few modern sellers to embrace the historic range of TEFAF Maastricht — works from his secure of artists had been hung subsequent to complementary older objects — and he additionally supplied a fascinating work by an in-demand artist of the second: Kehinde Wiley’s imposing 2020 “Portrait of Issa Diatta,” priced at $650,000.
Discovering, discussing and pricing museum-quality works from the final 7,000 years — and typically even shopping for them on the spot — stays the first mission for the curators at TEFAF Maastricht. In the course of the first hours of the preview, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts acquired a touching terra cotta portrait of a boy by the French Napoleonic-period sculptor Joseph Chinard, priced at $90,000 on the sales space of the London-based sculpture specialist Stuart Lochhead. Lochhead stated an American museum, which he declined to call, had additionally bought a late Sixteenth-century Giambologna bronze of the striding conflict god Mars, with an asking value of $4 million.
Gerhard Lutz, a medievalist in a gaggle of half a dozen curators visiting from the Cleveland Museum, was impressed by a small stone statue of the prophet Isaiah attributed to the 14th-century Flemish sculptor Claus Sluter, priced at €500,000 on the sales space of the London vendor Sam Fogg. Lutz’s Ohio-based museum accommodates three characterful weeping alabaster statues by Sluter’s pupil, Claus de Werve. “Works like this could make clear issues that we personal,” Lutz stated.
Curators had been additionally drawn to the hauntingly minimal 1641 canvas, “A Pear and Apples on a Pewter Plate,” by the Spanish nonetheless life painter Juan de Zurbarán, priced at $2.8 million with the New York vendor Nicholas Hall. Others marveled at a uncommon group of work by Nazarene artists — Nineteenth-century Germany’s precursors to the English Pre-Raphaelites — on the sales space of the Texas-based Gallery 19C.
“You don’t get the historic depth or the standard at another truthful,” stated Eric Lee, the director of the Kimbell Art Museum, Dallas.
However what did he consider the growing variety of modern sellers displaying on the truthful? “It’s an incredible concept. It brings in new collectors who may get taken with older artwork,” Lee stated. “You should buy a significant outdated grasp portray for the worth of a third-tier Andy Warhol.”
Making an attempt to persuade in the present day’s artwork fairgoers that older works are good worth for cash is the important thing problem for the organizers and exhibitors at TEFAF Maastricht. For the museum curators who proceed to purchase outdated works, it’s convincing the general public that such artwork is related.
