Without going into the tiring provincial politics that lead to the fair’s demise or even pretending to be  informed of the inside details, one can still speculate what this might mean for the city’s artscape.  A question that comes to mind is “Does this city, with its fabled concentration of working artists and equally storied lack of a real collector base, really need an art fair after all?” 

As anyone who spends time at art fairs knows, no matter how much an art fair is dressed up with exhibitions, experts’ talks, and other often interesting distractions, it always remains very much a commercial endeavor.    And commerce is definitely not what Mayor Klaus Wowereit’s “poor but sexy” city does best.  Thank god – at least as far as art in concerned.

While Berlin is radically cleaned up, developed, and even relatively corporatized since the wild 1990’s, there is still plenty of room for adventure, experimentation, and discovery.  Just ask the organizers of Kulturbahn, a collaborative multi-media exhibition set in the Spreepark, an abandoned GDR amusement park in the eastern half of the city.  (Motto:  “Amusement parks can be ground for freedom thinking and cultural work. They can be landscapes of awareness.”)   Twenty-two years after the fall of the Wall, such freaky, put-a-smile-on-your-face venues are still to be found in this town – and exploited by the creative types who, thanks to the dearth of commerce, can still afford to live and think there.

Spreepark, Berlin (photo Anthony Spinelli)

The Berlin Art Forum once provided a great jumpstart of hype for a long-isolated city.  But with the capital’s art calendar more energized by the Gallery Weekend in May, perhaps the art fair has really run its course.  And, although somewhat sad to close such a significant chapter, maybe this is not such a regrettable thing.   Mal sehen.

Isenheim Altarpiece

Alsace-Lorraine For Lunch

Next on the agenda was a hike to the nearby Goetheanum, an early feat of Rudolf Steiner concrete Expressionist architecture which has to be seen to be believed.

Goetheanum

And lastly, it was lovely just to stop and smell the roses (literally!) at the monastery where I usually stay, to dine solo in the garden with a view of the mountains on provisions picked just a few feet away, and to take a deep breath before the art fair madness began

Monastery View

Sometimes the highlights of an art trip lie beyond the main event, the best works of art being the place where you are sitting.  For me, this was certainly true this year of Basel where Art Parcours provided endless nocturnal mystery, and of Venice where the empty Giardini on Monday morning (yes, I actually took a train into Venice to find the Biennale closed) was a tranquil haven in a tourist-stuffed town.

Art Parcours: Federico Herrero's fishing hut by night.

Kris Martin's bronze confetti on the floor St. Alban's.

Art Parcours: Ugo Rondinone at the St. Alban churchyard

Most edifying of all was going nowhere – or rather staying put in the 16^th-century villa discovered during our first biennale road trip from Berlin  in 1999 and home base for every biennale since.

Afternoon at the villa.

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).

The 15th edition of the Art Forum was, compared to the energy of Frieze just one week later, a relatively staid affair — and that was not necessarily a bad thing.  As always, the event was held at the Messe Berlin, the monumental exhibition hall built by the Nazis — and notably used as the setting of this fall’s luxe Bergdorf Goodman’s catalogue.  The adjoining Palais am Funkturm’s terrace café, formerly a 1950s social haven, has now been re-opened, and the stars aligned this year to bring the competing abc (art berlin contemporary) exhibition to the nearby Marshall-Haus, an undulating, mid-century gem built by the Americans under the Marshall Plan for the German Industrial Exhibition.

The opening day fair crowd, dressed almost exclusively in black and gray, was manageable; the art on display was mostly good quality and non-experimental.  Some very nice pieces, no real surprises.  The highlight of the main hall was a Douglas Gordon installation at Yvon Lambert (allegedly purchased by a European collector for $500,000) and Contemporary Fine Arts’s solo show of Max Frisinger’s vitrines filled with Berlin junk.  A signature Neo Rauch canvas could be found at the reliable Eigen + Art, and London’s IBID Projects offered a captivating Christopher Orr painting.  Bright, geometric works by the late Dane Poul Gernes (a discovery at last year’s fair) with healthy price tags were available at both Copenhagen’s Galleri Bo Bjerggaard and Berlin’s Ben Kaufman.  (A retrospective of Gernes work opened concurrently at Hamburg’s Diechtorhallen.)

In terms of layout, the younger Focus sector was moved from the periphery to the core of the main hall this year, and the twelve young dealers selected were allowed to invite another emerging gallery to exhibit. That’s how Tanja Wagner — a Max Hetzler protégé in business for less than two weeks — found herself with at booth at the very hub of the fair.  She was gleeful.

A walk (or golf cart ride for some VIPs) across the verdant garden dotted with white contorted benches by Danish artist Jeppe Hein led to the abc show, a rival yet cooperative event staged by the founders of the very successful Gallery Weekend now held each May. Curated by Marc Gloede and called “light, action, camera,” the exhibition aimed to demonstrate the influence of cinema on art — and inadvertently provided a flashback to the first Berlin Art Forum a decade and a half earlier when every other booth had a video rolling and many insiders were proclaiming painting to be dead.

But even with two other younger events now in the game – Preview Berlin held at the now-defunct Tempelhof airport and Berliner Liste at the former state mint — the ambitious vitality that had characterized the fair during the 1990s was absent. With a preponderance of Northern European galleries, Art Forum Berlin seems to have settled into being a respected yet more regional event à la ARCO and FIAC.

Back in 1996, as Berlin was still in the thick of the post-Berlin Wall rebuilding frenzy, thirteen German dealers banded together to initiate the new art fair. This move was both a protest and a leap of faith.  A challenge to the once-venerable Art Cologne which had become bloated and without focus, and an attempt to re-establish Berlin as the cultural metropolis it had been back in the days of the Cassirers and Herwarth Walden’s Sturm. The Berlin upstart, would be a smaller fair (about half the size of Cologne), would be easy to navigate, and would concentrate on works produced after 1950.

The time was ripe:  the federal government had just narrowly voted to abandon Bonn for the city on the Spree, a few Cologne dealers had already bravely relocated there, and the artists were steadily infiltrating the empty apartments, shops, and factories left vacant in the Wall’s wake.  While the city had no collector base, the world-class historical collections established during the Kaiserzeit — even if still divided in the former two halves of the city – were there, providing the city with art historical bedrock.

During the early years of the fair, the tension was palpable:  how many galleries from the Rhine would defect from the mother ship? How many international galleries would participate – meaning, after the WWII devastation and Cold War isolation, could “provincial” Berlin ever become a truly cosmopolitan capital again?  Could the city resume its role as the bridge between East and West, a true Weltstadt? And without any collectors at home — would anything sell?

Back then, Art Forum Berlin had momentum, energy.  New York and London galleries, dealers from Asia and Slovenia entered the mix, collector groups from San Francisco and Minneapolis showed up, landing at the Paris Bar late in the evening and returning in throngs when Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Reichstag in 1997. The crescendo was reached around 2003 when the fair’s organizers put VIPs up in the stylish new Grand Hyatt Hotel on the reconstructed Potsdamer Platz. And then came Frieze in 2005.  And the energy shifted.

So it was a shot in the arm to step out onto the Palais am Funkturm veranda this year, the blast of fall sunshine and high-squirting fountains a reminder of those merry black-and-white postwar photos of 1950s revitalization.  It was on this very patio at the Messe where, once the war rubble had been cleared, Berliners dressed in suits and tea-length crinoline skirts gathered to enjoy a communal coffee or cocktail under the umbrellas, to celebrate what they referred to as Wir Sind Wieder Wer or “we are somebody again.”

True to its original mission, the Art Forum Berlin 2010 was a focused affair.  And, fifteen years down the road, the gallery scene in Berlin has burgeoned beyond what anyone could have imagined, the splendid public collections are reunited in exemplary starchitect renovations, the city is touted in The New York Times as nothing less than the cultural capital of Europe, and hundreds of creative young people from Brooklyn and around the globe are pouring in each year.  Berlin is no longer in the throes of becoming; it has arrived.  And Art Forum Berlin no longer has anything to prove.  It may not be the top edgy European fair, but – with its tight, professional presentation and intriguing architectural backdrop –it is somebody.