Maastricht
Before the doors of Tefaf open, and the security agents carefully inspect the bags of those invited to the preview of the most important ancient art fair (and not only) in the world, there is an hour in which the press and some selected collectors can visit the gallery owners’ stands: this year there are 280 of them, arriving from twenty countries, and from today to 14 March they will be exhibiting in the fair pavilion of the Dutch city the absolute best of painting, sculpture, design and archeology that can be found on the market.
Tefaf and museum shopping: everyone wants women artists
by Lara Crinò
In a still muffled atmosphere we head to where the highlights are displayed, the “pieces” with the highest price, the rarest and most desired. This year the record is Murnau With Church II, painted by Wassily Kandinsky in 1910, when his painting oscillated between figurative and abstraction: returned in 2022 to the heirs of the Stern family, persecuted in Nazi Germany, it was then auctioned by Sotheby’s last year and is now on sale by Landau Fine Arts, legendary gallery in Montreal, Canada.
A painting with a fascinating history, which embodies the revolutions and dramas of the 20th century, as the owner of the gallery says Robert Landau to the special visitors who observe it with him: the collector Ronald Lauder, heir to the cosmetics empire Estee Lauder and founder, in New York, of the private museum New gallery, and daughter Aerin. The tone of the conversation is friendly and many words are spent praising the value of the work; after all, everyone knows that the price at which Landau is willing to sell it must be higher than what he paid for it: 50 million dollars.
Not all trading taking place at Tefaf concern similar figures, and yet there is no showcase like this to understand where taste is headed and where the market is going, that of Old Masters (the great painting between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries), but not only that. The edition got off to a great start, the director of the fair explains to us, Will Korner«with 20 percent more attendance during the preview compared to 2023» and with the ambition of more involving contemporary enthusiasts (the sector with the most stellar prices), creating a mix that ensures the success of the event over the years to come.
In addition to the presence of galleries that deal with the 20th and 21st centuries (including the Italian Tornabuoniat the fair with a Space concept, 1956, by Lucio Fontana, from the Baroque cycle, on sale for 2 and a half million euros) the novelty is the Focus section; monographic stands (extraordinary that of Robert Bowman are Auguste Rodin, with a shortened version of the very famous one Thinker created by the French sculptor in 1903) and others in which different worlds meet. The antique specialist Charles Edefor example, collaborate with Sean Kelly, proposing ancient Attic ceramics in dialogue with the painter’s works Calum Innes.
From the Macchiaioli to Picasso, from Kiefer to Hals, all the exhibitions in Italy and abroad to see in 2024
by Lara Crinò
Among the galleries participating for the first time in Tefaf (Showcase section) the Milanese stands out Tommaso Calabro, which celebrates the centenary of Surrealism by proposing works by Leonor Fini, Stanislao Lepri e Fabrizio Clerici. They are suggestions for collectors and at the same time indicators of trends, because the past here is anything but still, rather it is a land of discoveries.
From Tenzing Asian Art, one of the few galleries in the world specializing in ancient Tibetan art, Iwona Tenzing shows us the piece de resistance he brought from San Francisco: it is the portrait of Tashipel, founder of the Taklung monastery in Tibet in the 12th century. Painted on fabric and in perfect condition despite its eight hundred years, it tells us about the Middle Ages on the other side of the world. Alessandra Di Castrohead of the historic gallery in Piazza del Popolo in Rome, vice-president of the Antique Dealers of Italy and on the board of Tefaf, this year proposes a focus on inlays (with the wooden inlay created around 1530-1540 by Fra’ Damiano Zambelli) but also the works of an eighteenth-century artist from Lecce, Marianna Elmo, master of the “glued thread embroidery” technique which simulates pictorial effects. And the attention for women artists of the past is very high everywhere.
Artemisia still causes controversy
by Bettina Bush
Motivated by the desire of large museums, particularly American ones, to enrich their collections with women’s works (a desire that then influences private collectors) the gallerists turn to Tefaf buyers, institutions and private individuals, offering works by women on their stands: this is the case of Portrait of Antonietta Gonzales (1592) exhibited by Rob Smeets Geneva, where Lavinia Fontana tenderly portrays the bearded daughter of the “man of the woods” Pietro Gonzales, famous at the time because he suffered from hypertrichosis, who remained for over a hundred years in a private French collection, or ofArtemisia Gentileschi for sale by Londoners Robilant + Voena, one Penitent Magdalene (c. 1625-30) hitherto hidden in a private collection in Florida; in both cases these are sales of over 4 million euros.
And again, Artemisia’s favorite theme, Judith with the head of Holofernes it is found here in the form of another seventeenth-century painter, the Bolognese one Elisabetta Sirani, in the canvas presented by Porcini Gallery, Naples, together with the monumental Rape of Europe of Diana De Rosa, known as Annella, who met Gentileschi during his Neapolitan stay. The prices of these works range from 5 million to 600 thousand euros.
The female gaze, the gazes that bring another perspective, which have become so central in current artistic discourse, are also reorienting the search for the ancient. It is no coincidence that a large museum like the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam announces that it has purchased from Tefaf, from Zebregs&Röell, the Portrait of Moses ter Borch at two years: Gesina ter Borch, belonging to the family of Dutch artists of the seventeenth century, painted it as a tribute to her brother who died early, and now it shines with the light of rediscovered wonders.
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– 2024-03-31 07:51:42
