Rothko, Basquiat Boost Art Fair as Billionaires Defy Price Rise - Bloomberg.com
March 23 (Bloomberg) -- Works by Mark Rothko and Jean- Michel Basquiat sold at the world’s largest art and antiques fair in the Dutch city of Maastricht as U.S. collectors and museums spent millions.
Other buyers at Tefaf, the 23rd annual European Fine Art Fair, took time to adjust to price rises after record results in auctions. The 10-day event, organized by dealers, offered $2.7 billion of museum-quality artworks, antiques, design and jewelry from prehistory to the present day.
Dealers raised some prices after surprise auction results for classic contemporary works such as the 65 million pounds ($103.4 million) paid for Giacometti’s 1961 bronze “Walking Man I” and the double-estimate 23.2 million pounds for the Lenz collection of “Zero Art” at Sotheby’s London last month. In the event, few collectors were willing to pay comparable prices at Tefaf, said dealers, though no totals were available from the record 263 galleries from 17 countries.
“Auctions are almost a separate market,” said Paolo Vedovi, director of the Paris- and Brussels-based Galerie Odermatt-Vedovi. “We don’t see many of those people. Art fairs aren’t as spontaneous. Buyers are cautious and they need to think.”
Among the contemporary works to sell for more than $1 million was the 1967 Rothko oil-on-paper abstract, “Untitled (Red, White, Orange),” offered by London-based Lefevre Fine Art. Gallery director Alexander Corcoran wouldn’t divulge a price. Two other dealers with knowledge of the matter said the European buyer paid more than $3 million.
$2.4 Million Basquiat
Basquiat’s 1982 painting “Busted Atlas 2” was bought by a German collector for $2.4 million from New York gallery Van de Weghe Fine Art, said director Christophe Van de Weghe.
“There may be some people who went a little overboard at the auctions,” said David Leiber, director of the New York gallery Sperone Westwater, one of several dealers offering European postwar “Zero” works. He was showing a 1965 painted relief by the Dutch artist Jan Schoonhoven at 550,000 euros.
“Collectors are adjusting to the new values. We have to charge these prices because we can’t replace these works,” Leiber said in an interview.
Schoonhoven was one of 19 Zero artists to set records at the Lenz auction, when a 1962 white relief sold for 780,450 pounds. Sperone Westwater’s piece had yet to attract a reserve on the fair’s final weekend. A U.S. collector bought a 1967 nail relief by the German Zero artist Guenther Uecker, priced at $400,000, from New York dealer Luxembourg & Dayan.
More Visitors
Tefaf attracted 72,500 visitors, an increase of 7 percent on 2009, said organizers. A total of 171 private aircraft landed at Maastricht/Aachen airport.
The predominantly white, middle-aged American and European crowd included Bernard Arnault, chairman of luxury goods maker LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA, and New York collector Leon Black. Chinese artist and architect Ai Weiwei was also spotted.
Hamburg-based medieval manuscript specialist Joern Guenther sold a 15th-century volume of 22 drawings to a New York buyer who a year ago was a collector of contemporary art. The manuscript by the Sienese artist “Il Vecchietta” was priced between 900,000 euros and 1 million euros.
“The collector thought the market for contemporary art was a bubble,” said Guenther. “You can’t get as much for this kind of money in the contemporary market, and yet medieval art is still abstract.”
Old Masters
Demand for Old Master pictures, the traditional mainstay of Tefaf, appeared to be patchy. Some dealers in Old Masters, who in the past have confirmed dozens of sales, were this year reluctant to discuss transactions.
London-based dealer Bernheimer-Colnaghi sold a 1534 oil- on-wood painting of “David and Bathsheba” by the German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder to a European collector. The asking price was 5.3 million euros. The painting had been acquired by Bernheimer-Colnaghi at a Sotheby’s auction for 2.1 million pounds in July 2008.
Fellow London dealer John Mitchell Fine Paintings sold a 1611 winter landscape by the Dutch painter Adam van Breen to the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. It had an asking price of 910,000 euros.
Middle Market
“Though people are still buying the mega-pictures, the middle market is on hold,” said gallery director James Mitchell, pointing to a row of 19th-century European paintings priced under 50,000 euros that had failed to attract any red dots. “In the past we used to pay for our booth with these. No one seems to want to buy them anymore.”
There was a profusion of green dots, signifying formal reserves, on the booth of Dickinson. The London dealer had found prospective buyers for about 20 major-name works, mostly on consignment, said gallery director Hugo Nathan.
These included the 1926 Picasso painting, “Tete,” at $3.5 million and an 1834 Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot view of Florence, bought by Tefaf exhibitor Daniel Katz and priced at $2 million.
Katz sold a 17th-century bust of Louis XIV by Francois Girardon, priced at $1.5 million, to a U.S. museum. A private collector from the U.S. snapped up a set of 30 plaster caricatures of 19th-century French musicians by Jean-Pierre Dantan priced at 750,000 euros.
