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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. Despite this promising start, Mayfair Fine Art did not survive the severe downturn in the international art market in 1991, which would last several years.
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]
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 [10] and Pierre Soulages. Brian Balfour-Oatts was appointed advisor to the Estate of Emily Fisher Landau for art related matters in 2023.
Brian Balfour-Oatts is the grandson of military figure Lieutenant-Colonel Lewis Balfour Oatts.
Eric Hebborn was an English painter, draughtsman, art forger and later an author.
The Musée National d'Art Moderne is the national museum for modern art of France. It is located in Paris and is housed in the Centre Pompidou in the 4th arrondissement of the city. In 2021 it ranked 10th in the list of most visited art museums in the world, with 1,501,040 visitors. It is one of the largest museums for modern and contemporary art.
David Stein was an artist who, until 1966, had been frequently sentenced for theft by the French courts before becoming an art forger and art dealer with 15 aliases.
Gavin Turk is a British artist from Guildford in Surrey, and was considered to be one of the Young British Artists. Turk's oeuvre deals with issues of authenticity and identity, engaged with modernist and avant-garde debates surrounding the 'myth' of the artist and the 'authorship' of a work of art.
Events from the year 1996 in art.
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.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, is a state museum for modern and contemporary art located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, opened in 1958. In 2009 the museum opened the Moderna Museet Malmö in Malmö.
The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc. was a private corporation that certified the authenticity of works by the artist, Andy Warhol, from 1995 to early 2012.
Georges Anthony d'Offay is a British art dealer, collector and curator.
The Gagosian Gallery is a contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. The gallery exhibits some of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are 16 gallery spaces – five in New York City, three in London, two in Paris, and one each in Basel, Beverly Hills, Rome, Athens, Geneva and Hong Kong.
Lars Nittve is a Swedish museum director, curator, art critic and writer. He was the founding Director of Tate Modern in London; former Director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm; the founding Director of Rooseum – Center for Contemporary Art – in Malmö, Sweden; and Director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark.
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-born 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.
The Ferus Gallery was a contemporary art gallery which operated from 1957 to 1966. In 1957, the gallery was located at 736-A North La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles in the U.S. state of California. In 1958, it was relocated across the street to 723 North La Cienega Boulevard where it remained until its closing in 1966.
David Roberts is a British property developer, contemporary art collector and founder of the Roberts Institute of Art.
Artist Rooms is a touring collection of international modern and contemporary art in the United Kingdom, established through the d'Offay donation in 2008. Comprising over 1,500 works by 38 artists, it is owned by National Galleries Scotland and Tate which care for the collection together and arrange for its presentation throughout the UK in museums, galleries, and exhibition spaces. Each "room" is devoted to a specific artist with the aim of providing an immersive and comprehensive experience of that artist's work, a format described by Nicholas Serota as being "without precedent anywhere in the world."
Greg Colson is an American artist best known for his works that straddle the line between painting and sculpture, which address concepts of efficiency and order. Using scavenged materials, Colson allows the physicality of his makeshift constructions to intrude on the precise systems he paints or draws upon their surfaces - striking a balance between subject and context, image and support, order and chaos.
Charles Lutz is an American Painter born outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1982. Lutz studied Painting and Art History at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, as well as Anatomy at Columbia University, NY. He received a BFA from the Pratt Institute College of Art in 2004. Lutz lives and works between Red Lion, PA, and Brooklyn, NY.
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."
John Henry Berggruen is an American art dealer who owns Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, California, which has been a fixture in the Bay Area art scene since 1970.