 | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(October 2019) |
Brian Balfour-Oatts (born 1966) is a British art dealer, collector and writer. He published William Scott: A Survey of His Original Prints, a catalogue of William Scott's graphic work.
Born in Edinburgh in 1966, Brian Balfour-Oatts grew up in Hawick in the Scottish Borders, and was a child carer to his mother who suffered from Huntington's disease. Educated at Hawick High School, he left Scotland to seek and take up a position at Sotheby's auctioneers in London, aged 18.
In 1988 he was hired by Mayfair Fine Art in Conduit Street, London as curator and gallery manager, specializing in Impressionist and Modern paintings. Aged 22, he sold a Pablo Picasso portrait of Dora Maar to the collector Heinz Berggruen for an undisclosed sum. The painting became part of the group of 75 works loaned by Berggruen to the National Gallery in London, now in the collection of the Berggruen Museum in Berlin. Other notable transactions included the sale of a painting from the famous Haystack series by Claude Monet, which had been acquired after a protracted negotiation with Daniel Wildenstein of the Wildenstein art dealing dynasty.
In 1991, he founded Archeus Fine Art (later ARCHEUS) at 65 New Bond Street in London (1991–2000), focusing largely on German Expressionism.
Balfour-Oatts staged the controversial exhibition The Difficulties of Attribution in 1994 after being introduced, by art dealer Julian Hartnoll, to the famous forger Eric Hebborn. The exhibition of "recently discovered Old Master Drawings", complete with a mock auction catalogue [1] was widely covered in the press and drew large crowds, earning praise and criticism in equal measure. He subsequently purchased the rights to Drawn to Trouble ISBN 1851583696, Hebborn's 1991 confessional autobiography, which was republished as Confessions of a Master Forger ISBN 0304350230 following Hebborn's death in 1996, with an epilogue written by Balfour-Oatts. In 1997 he completed and published The Art Forger's Handbook ISBN 0304349143 from Hebborn's manuscript notes, a book that achieved notoriety amongst the art student and art crime communities, a second-hand copy of which can command a price of several hundred dollars. Speaking about the project in a recent interview with the BBC World Service, he said "I didn't realise what a fuss it would cause and how we would still be talking about it, so much, twenty years later."
During the late 1990s Balfour-Oatts began to deal in Modern British Art, which was exhibited alongside German Expressionist paintings and woodcuts, placing works in public collections such as the Moritzburg Museum, Halle, Germany and the National Portrait Gallery, London, amongst others.
ARCHEUS moved to 3 Albemarle Street, London (2000–2008) and embarked upon a programme of Modern British and International contemporary art, curated by Balfour-Oatts. In 2005, Balfour-Oatts curated a comprehensive exhibition of William Scott's graphic work and published William Scott: A Survey of His Original Prints ISBN 0-9549418-0-2, which has become the standard reference work and de facto catalogue raisonné of William Scott's printed works. Other notable exhibitions included the first commercial one-man show of Dan Flavin's work to have been held in London, Nothing As Full As The Air, [2] and The Unseen Hand: Minimalism and Anonymity, featuring rare works by Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin in 2005 and 2006. [3]
In 2007, Balfour-Oatts became well known for his part in events that would lead to the reclassification of Andy Warhol's famous 1968 Brillo Boxes by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. Four years earlier, Balfour-Oatts had visited the elderly curator and former director of the Pompidou Centre, Pontus Hultén, at his home in France. In what was seen as a feat of art-dealing detective work [4] Balfour-Oatts negotiated the purchase of the last 22 Brillo Boxes remaining in Hultén's collection. These boxes had, according to Hultén, been exhibited in his celebrated 1968 Warhol exhibition held at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, of which institution he had also been director. Balfour-Oatts consulted the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board prior to completing the purchase, and duly received 22 certificates of authenticity, confirming they were indeed original works by Warhol. [5] 12 of the boxes were sold to the American collector Don Fisher, founder of The Gap, and later presented to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The remaining 10 works were sold by Christie's to Warhol's former dealer Anthony d'Offay, who presented the works to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. [6] After Hultén's death, it became apparent that most of the Brillo Boxes may not have been manufactured in 1968, and had possibly been made later, under Hultén's direction, with, Hultén claimed, Warhol's permission. In 2007, the Authentication Board declared that it "… cannot determine whether or not these boxes were produced in accordance with the terms of a verbal agreement Pontus Hultén made with Warhol in 1968." [6] The certificates of authenticity remained in place, although the boxes themselves were subsequently reclassified by the Board as "exhibition copies". [7] D'Offay subsequently, and unsuccessfully, sued Christie's. [6] Legal actions, brought over many years, were cited as the reason for the dissolution of the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board in 2012. [8]
A further work purchased from Pontus Hultén by Balfour-Oatts, Boulangerie, 1961 by Ed Ruscha, created news for an altogether different reason: having sold to novelist and collector Michael Crichton, the work came to auction as part of the Crichton collection at Christie's in New York in 2010, where it made the second-highest sum ever paid for a Ruscha work on paper at the time, $1.14m. [9]
In February 2023 Balfour-Oatts co-curated Pierre Soulages: Une Lumière Infinie, the first major posthumous exhibition of the work of the French painter and printmaker at Phillips (auctioneers) in London. [10]
Brian Balfour-Oatts was appointed advisor to the Estate of Emily Fisher Landau for art related matters in 2023. The evening auction of Emily Fisher Landau's collection in November 2023 at Sotheby's New York brought $406.4m, the 4th highest sale total in Sotheby's history and the most valuable sale ever devoted to a female collector in auction history. The star of the sale was Pablo Picasso's 1932 painting Femme à la montre, which made $139.4m and was the most valuable work sold at auction that year. The average lot value was $13m and 5 works sold for more than $20m, including iconic paintings by Jasper Johns and Ed Ruscha. Artist's records were set for Agnes Martin and Mark Tansey and the value of the collection made it one of the top 5 single-owner estate sales in history, alongside those of Peggy and David Rockefeller and Paul Allen. [11]
Brian Balfour-Oatts presently curates and deals for ARCHEUS / POST-MODERN , handling significant secondary market works by Bridget Riley, Sam Francis, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha [12] and Pierre Soulages.
Brian Balfour-Oatts is the grandson of military figure Lieutenant-Colonel Lewis Balfour Oatts.
Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, and filmmaking. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental film Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.
The year 2002 in art involves various significant events.
Eric Hebborn was an English painter, draughtsman, art forger, and later an author.
Ely Sakhai is an American art dealer and civil engineer who owned Manhattan art galleries The Art Collection and Exclusive Art. He was later charged and convicted for selling forged art and was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for fraud. After his release he continued to operate The Art Collection in Great Neck, New York.
Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. He is also noted for creating several artist's books. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California.
Louise Lawler is a U.S. artist and photographer living in Brooklyn, New York City. Lawler’s work has focused on photographing portraits of other artists’ work, giving special attention to the spaces in which they are placed and methods used to make them. Examples of Lawler's photographs include images of paintings hanging on the walls of a museum, paintings on the walls of an art collector's opulent home, artwork in the process of being installed in a gallery, and sculptures in a gallery being viewed by spectators.
The Gagosian Gallery is a modern and contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. The gallery exhibits some of the most well-known artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. As of 2024, Gagosian employs 300 people at 19 exhibition spaces – including New York City, London, Paris, Basel, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong – designed by architects such as Caruso St John, Richard Gluckman, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, and Annabelle Selldorf.
Karl Gunnar Vougt Pontus Hultén was a Swedish art collector and museum director. Pontus Hultén is regarded as one of the most distinguished museum professionals of the twentieth century. He was the pioneering former head of the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm and in the 1970s he was invited to participate in the creation of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, where he was the first director of the Musée National d'Art Moderne (MNAM) in 1974–1981.
Heinz Berggruen was a German and American art dealer and collector who sold 165 works of art to the German federal government to form the core of the Berggruen Museum in Berlin, Germany. He was the father of John, Olivier and Nicolas Berggruen.
Jose Mugrabi is an Israeli businessman and art collector of Syrian descent. With a family net worth estimated at $5 billion, he is the leading collector of Andy Warhol, with 800 artworks.
Greg Colson is an American artist known for his works and sculptures using scavenged materials.
Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA) is the first auction house to specialize in 20th century Modern art and design. Founded by Peter Loughrey in 1992, LAMA especially champions Modern and Contemporary works by California and West Coast artists and designers.
The Berggruen Museum is a collection of modern art classics in Berlin, which the collector and dealer Heinz Berggruen, in a "gesture of reconciliation", gave to his native city. The most notable artists on display include Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Georges Braque, Paul Klee and Henri Matisse. The Berggruen Collection is part of the National Gallery of Berlin.
Lucien Smith is a multidisciplinary artist whose abstract works and diverse projects have earned him international acclaim. A graduate of The Cooper Union, he was twice featured in Forbes "30 Under 30" in the category of "Art & Style". Smith was hailed as the art world’s "wunderkind" by The New York Times. He has exhibited at prestigious blue-chip galleries such as Skarstedt and Salon 94, and has had solo exhibitions mounted at major museums. His collaborations span across creative fields, including partnerships with artists like Travis Scott and Virgil Abloh, and he directed a short film narrated by Glenn O'Brien, which was shown at Gagosian Gallery in New York City.
Jeffrey Deitch is an American art dealer and curator. He is best known for his gallery Deitch Projects (1996–2010) and curating groundbreaking exhibitions such as Lives (1975) and Post Human (1992), the latter of which has been credited with introducing the concept of "posthumanism" to popular culture. In 2010, ArtReview named him as the twelfth most influential person in the international art world.
Charles Lutz is an American painter born in 1982 near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Lutz studied Painting and Art History at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, and Anatomy at Columbia University, NY. He earned a BFA from the Pratt Institute College of Art in 2004. Lutz lives and works between Red Lion, PA and Brooklyn, NY.
Les Femmes d'Alger is a series of 15 paintings and numerous drawings by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The series, created in 1954–1955, was inspired by Eugène Delacroix's 1834 painting The Women of Algiers in their Apartment. The series is one of several painted by Picasso in tribute to artists that he admired.
Olivier Berggruen is a German-American art historian and curator, described by the Wall Street Journal as playing "a pivotal role in the art world."