The Road to Maastricht
In fifteen+ years of attending all the major art fairs, first as a correspondent for The Art Newspaper, then as a private art collection professional, I had not once made it to the fabled Maastricht fair, a.k.a. TEFAF — “The European Fine Art Fair.” Never had I found a way to justify an isolated junket to middle of the Netherlands or a visit to an “Old Masters” event. And besides, who would I actually have known there? The demographic was understood to be a select, insular Benelux crowd. But I had always heard this fair was the best, the crème de la crème.
At an introductory meeting with a Boston-based collector a year ago, I began to see an avenue. Considering the connection had been made through a Hong-Kong based acquaintance I had once met on a Berlin playground, it was astonishing how much our interests were allied, from die Brücke prints to Düsseldorf School photography. We had even graduated from the same small liberal arts college, just one year apart.
“What about Maastricht? Have you been?” I shouted with what remained of my voice over the after-work din of a midtown bar.
“It’s absolutely the best. No question, you must go,” he said.
That was it. My colleagues in the Art Business program at Sotheby’s Institute of Art had long been debating where we would take our students the following year (art travel is integral to the M.A. degrees offered). Would it be China? Dubai? Russia? Somehow, we could not come to a consensus. (And somehow, the thought of a thirteen hour-flight with seventy students made me uneasy…)
“Okay then, Maastricht it is. Maybe we’ll see you there?” I suggested to this person I hardly knew.
A year later, after a very full program in Amsterdam, our double decker bus arrived at our unremarkable hotel on the bleak outskirts of Maastricht on a grey end-of-winter day. This uninspired welcome was hardly assuaged by the generic shopping mall one has to navigate in order to reach the exhibition halls of TEFAF itself.
But after handing the ticket over at the admissions gate, the gasp-inducing odyssey began, starting with the crimson entry walls composed of fresh carnations. Just steps into the fair, a Pieter Breughel painting, the likes of which one only sees in places like the Prado or the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, was spotted to the right. A few feet from that, a frothy Fragonard. Cattycorner across the hall, the 47-million dollar Rembrandt (“Man with Arms Akimbo’), splendidly illuminated behind the velvet rope. Behind that, sharing the same wall at the Otto Naumann booth, a stunning 1640 Van Dyke self-portrait. And this was just the first ten minutes.
A visit to TEFAF has been likened to shopping in a museum. Anyone experiencing this singular display of four billion dollars worth of art has to take a series of time-outs. Not just because it spans the equivalent of five football fields, but because it is necessary to stop and process the abundance one is seeing. What you don’t think about before your virgin visit to this “Old Masters” fair is the astounding breadth of the treasures that await: Wiener Werkstätte desks and silver, 15th century polychrome German sculpture, modern paintings, contemporary installations, Medieval tapestries and rings, manuscripts and haute joaillerie. I never even made it to the Works on Paper section.
When my phone rang at 6:45, just a quarter of an hour before closing, I was physically depleted and intellectually saturated. It was the Boston-based collector.
“I found a pair of Roman earrings, 200 A.D. The price is unbelievably reasonable. You have to get over here now…”
Summoning a reserve of unknown energy, we finished off the day at The Courtauld Institute reception at the exquisite Kruisherenhotel, housed in a former monastery. There, we were joined by my old friend and former Courtauld classmate Emmanuel Di-Donna who is soon to open a new gallery with Harry Blain at the Carlyle Hotel.* Despite a long and successful career at Sotheby’s, it was also Emmanuel’s first foray to TEFAF.
Not only were there a couple of people I actually knew at the fabled Maastricht fair, but I now have a unique pair of earrings to remember this experience by.
* Harry Blain will be making a second, Christie’s-free go of it in Berlin with partner Graham Southern when he opens a new space in the former Tagespeigel printing press off Potsdamerstrasse. (Read Tim Neuger’s and Martin Klosterfelde’s refreshing, on-the-mark explanations for the failure of Haunch of Venison’s Berlin venture in this April’s Art & Auction).