The International Herald Tribune‘s art maven, Souren Melikian, gives a lusty and enthusiastic tour of TEFAF Maastricht’s myriad charms and delights.

The soaring fortunes of Surrealism over the last decade have not left many major paintings by leading artists of the movement lying undetected in dark corners — Max Ernst least of all after the remarkable retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005 (IHT, April 16, 2005). Yet a “Landscape with Seashells,” signed by the master around 1927-28 remained unrecorded in a Paris collection which it entered shortly after its completion. It now hangs here, on the stand of the Galerie Berès of Paris, amidst a host of little-known Cubist works.

Next door, Jacques de la Béraudière of Geneva shows one of the finest pictures of the Paris school of Expressionist Abstractionism. This is a 1962 composition by Pierre Soulages — black bars at a slant, suggestive of wooden planks, cut across a blue and white ground. Further away, at Salis-Vertes of Salzburg, Austria, one of Maurice de Vlaminck’s great Fauve pictures dating from 1906 has turned up after a long absence from the market. In an unusually classical, well-constructed composition of an Île-de-France landscape, bold strokes of green, blue, white and green, and touches of bright carmine red, make the picture sing.

The European Fine Art Fair Kicks Off in a Blaze of Discoveries (IHT)