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The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) is an annual art, antiques, and design fair organized by The European Fine Art Foundation in the MECC in Maastricht, Netherlands. It was first held open in 1988.
For ten days each year, 260 of the world's leading galleries from twenty countries, TEFAF Maastricht showcases the traditional areas of Old Master paintings and antique works of art currently on the market. In addition, visitors can view a variety of classical modern and contemporary art, such as jewellery, 20th-century design, and works on paper. There were 266 dealers from twenty countries at the fair's 2015 edition, showing museum-quality pieces ranging from classical antiquity to the 21st century, valued at 4 billion euros. [1] TEFAF was reviewed by the Global Art Magazine. [2]
TEFAF Maastricht is the offspring of two Dutch fairs launched in the mid-1970s: Pictura and De Antiquairs International. Pictura was the first international fine art fair in the Netherlands and launched in 1975. Antiqua, an antiques fair launched in 1978, became De Antiquairs International in 1982. Both fairs merged in 1985 under the banner of the Antiquairs International and Pictura Fine Art fair, held at Maastricht's Eurohal. [3]
A 10-day event organized by dealers under the umbrella of the non-profit European Fine Art Foundation, [4] TEFAF Maastricht was subsequently launched at the MECC in 1988, with 89 participating dealers, the majority of them Dutch. [5] It grew to rival known art centers like Paris and London and targeted wealthy collectors in Germany and Switzerland. [6] Though the fair was founded as a fair for dealers in old masters art, more than half the participants have other specialties, including antiquities, furniture, decorative artwork from medieval times to today, rare books and jewellery. By 2014, 43% of dealers at TEFAF specialized in antiques (119 out of 274 galleries). [7] A shortage of museum-quality historic paintings and collectors' shifting tastes have resulted in an increasing emphasis on more recent material. [8]
In 2000, for the first time TEFAF launched an independent study about the size and structure of the European art and antiques market, resulting in the annual publication of the Art Market Report. [9] For years, the fair was considered "a footnote in the annual art market calendar", according to the Wall Street Journal . During the art market boom, collectors put a premium on high-profile contemporary art sales like the Art Basel fairs in Switzerland and Miami and the biannual modern and contemporary art sales of Christie's and Sotheby's in London and New York. [10] The fair celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2012 and is today regarded, along with Swiss modern and contemporary art fair Art Basel, [11] as the world's leading art fair. [12] In 2016, TEFAF formed a ten-year partnership with the Limburg provincial government, the city of Maastricht and the MECC Maastricht convention centre to improve the city's infrastructure. [13]
Participating dealers are admitted only after a strict selection process. TEFAF Maastricht's vetting system involves about 175 international experts in 29 different categories, who examine every work of art in the Fair for quality, authenticity and condition. A number of objects deemed inauthentic or of "poor quality" are regularly placed in storage until fair's end. [14] Moreover, TEFAF has joined the leading platform for stolen art to guarantee transparency towards collectors. [15]
Representatives from about 225 major museums [16] like the Louvre in Paris, [17] the Prado in Madrid, [18] the Frick Collection in New York, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Getty Center in Los Angeles regularly visit the fair. [19] TEFAF's wealthy visitors, many of whom fly in on private planes, have included Saud bin Muhammed Al Thani, Silvio Berlusconi, Calvin Klein, Brad Pitt, Kanye West [20] and Michael Schumacher. [21] One of the youngest buyers was 13-year-old Brahm Wachter from New York, who in 2003 bought a Rembrandt etching at TEFAF, using the money he received from his bar mitzvah. [22]
Between 1995 and 1999, TEFAF Basel was held at the Messe Basel. [23]
In 1997, TEFAF considered launching a fair in New York, but could not find a site big enough to accommodate around 130 exhibitors. The National Building Museum in Washington, DC, was also mooted as a fair venue. [24]
In 2013, TEFAF announced plans to hold a high-end art and antiques fair in China. [25] The new event, which would have been called TEFAF Beijing 2014, was to have been a collaboration between Maastricht and Sotheby's joint venture with China's state-owned Beijing Gehua Cultural Development Group. A venture between a dealer-organized fair and an international auction house would have been unusual, emphasizing the importance of China for the West's art and antiques trade. [26] However, the plans were abandoned shortly after. [27]
In 2016, TEFAF announced plans to hold additional fairs in New York in 2016 and 2017. [28] It has since been collaborating with the New York art advisers Artvest Partners on two annual fairs at the Park Avenue Armory. The first two fairs at the Park Avenue Armory were TEFAF New York Fall in October and TEFAF New York Spring in May 2017. [29] [30] Bank of America has been the leading partner of TEFAF New York since its launch in 2016. The design of the fair's layout has traditionally been carried out by Tom Postma Design. [31]
In 2010, a ring and necklace worth about $1.3 million were stolen from a booth run by Hancocks & Co. [35] In June 2022, the entire fair was evacuated after several men, at least one of whom was reportedly armed, robbed a jewellery stand. [36] [37]
The organizers' decision to continue with TEFAF Maastricht amid the COVID-19 pandemic caused controversy in 2020. For the first time in its history, the fair eventually closed its 2020 edition early, after an exhibitor had been diagnosed with COVID-19. [38] The next fair was held in New York in May 2022, [39] and then in Maastricht in June 2022. [40]
Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, and it has additional salerooms in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Milan, Amsterdam, Geneva, Shanghai, and Dubai. It is owned by Groupe Artémis, the holding company of François Pinault. In 2022 Christie's sold US$8.4 billion in art and luxury goods, an all-time high for any auction house. On 15 November 2017, the Salvator Mundi was sold at Christie's in New York for $450 million to Saudi Prince Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud, the highest price ever paid for a painting.
Sotheby's is a British-founded multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, and maintains a significant presence in the UK.
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.
Robert Christiaan Noortman was a Dutch art dealer.
Art Basel is a for-profit, privately owned and managed, international art fair staged annually in Basel (Switzerland), Miami Beach (USA), Hong Kong (China) and Paris (France). Art Basel provides a platform for galleries to show and sell their work to buyers, and works in collaboration with host cities' local institutions to help grow and develop art programs.
A La Vieille Russie is a New York City-based antique store specializing in European and American antique jewelry, Imperial Russian works of art, 18th-century European gold snuff boxes, and objets d’art. Founded in Kiev in 1851, A La Vieille Russie later relocated to Paris around 1920 and to New York thereafter. From 1961 to 2017, the store was located at 781 Fifth Avenue, near the southeast entrance of Central Park.
The Sladmore Gallery is a London art dealership with two premises, one at 32 Bruton Place off Berkeley Square and the other established at 57 Jermyn Street in 2007. Its speciality is animalier sculptors.
Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo, formerly known as Portrait of a Foreign Admiral or Portrait of a Dutch Admiral, is an oil painting portrait by Rembrandt signed and dated 1658. It is now in the collection of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and measures 107.4 cm by 87.0 cm.
Franck Prazan is a French art collector and the owner of Applicat-Prazan gallery in Paris. He specialises in School of Paris, a Post-War abstract painting movement, whose main artists include Jean-Michel Atlan, Pierre Soulages, Serge Poliakoff, Nicolas de Staël.
Frans van Straaten is a Dutch artist and known for his bronze sculptures. He is a figurative artist and sculptor, who creates bronze sculptures in which he unites force and movement.
Philippe Ségalot is a French art dealer.
The art market is the marketplace of buyers and sellers trading in commodities, services, and works of art.
Highlights – Internationale Kunstmesse München is an exhibition of art and antiques in a wide range from ancient to modern. The art fair dates back to the "Deutsche Kunst und Antiquitätenmesse" initiated by Otto Bernheimer in 1956. The event, located in the Munich Haus der Kunst, is held annually in the fall and runs for 10 days. The current initiators of the exhibition are 19 art dealers who have established themselves at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht, Netherlands, over the last two decades.
Yves Bouvier is a Swiss businessman and art dealer best known for his role in the Bouvier Affair that resulted in criminal charges being brought and dismissed against him in France and Monaco by Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev. He was the president of Natural Le Coultre, an international company specialized in the transportation, storage, scientific analysis, and conservation of works of art, luxurious goods and other collectibles.
Konrad Otto Bernheimer is a German Venezuelan art dealer and collector. He is the chairman and owner of Bernheimer Fine Old Masters in Munich, and was the owner of Colnaghi in London. He sold Colnaghi to the Spanish dealers Jorge Coll and Nicolas Cortés in 2016.
Helly Nahmad is an American art dealer and art collector. In 2000, he founded the Helly Nahmad Gallery in Manhattan, New York, which holds several fine art exhibitions each year featuring artists such as Pablo Picasso, Chaïm Soutine, Francis Bacon, and Giorgio de Chirico.
James Butterwick is a British art dealer, collector, and expert in the field of Ukrainian and Russian art from 1880 to 1930.
John Henry Van Haeften is a British art dealer, who specialises in 16th and 17th century Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings. He has been a fanatical stamp collector from a young age, specialising in the stamps of Malta, and credits stamp collecting with enabling him to develop the eye for detail that he uses in his profession. He began his career at Christie's auction house which he joined at the age of 17 where he worked on the integration of the stamp dealers Robson Lowe into the firm. He subsequently transferred to their pictures department before starting his own gallery with his wife Sarah in 1977. He estimated in 2017 that he had sold 4,800 paintings during his career.
Anna Hu is a Taiwanese-American jewelry designer.
Media related to The European Fine Art Fair at Wikimedia Commons
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