TEFAF Sales Report

Otto Nauman of New York sold a Carlo Marrata (1625-1713) painting at an asking price of $4.9m
Wartski sold a Lalique necklace with a price tag of €1.3m
Littleton & Hennessy Asian art sold well to Chinese collectors, including two €1m works.
Ben Janssens said he had a fantastic start and by the first Saturday evening had sold 50 pieces with one client buying seven.
International collectors like Ralph Lauder were shopping and, most importantly almost every curator of note was there for the preview, and they were buying.

Early Sales Indicate that Despite the Gloom Outside the Maastricht Magic Is Still as Potent as Ever (Master Art)

Carol Vogel focused on museum acquisitions:

NY’s Metropolitan Museum: “Virgil’s Tomb in Moonlight,” a 1779 painting by Joseph Wright (Wright of Derby) that is on view here. It is the first British landscape the Met has bought since 1944.
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: Richard Feigen sold a marine painting by the 18th-century French artist Eugène Isabey
Johnny van Haeften: The Mauritshuis acquired “Saint Jerome Praying in a Rocky Landscape,” by the Flemish Baroque artist Paul Bril. (see below)

Museums Go Shopping at Maastricht (NYTimes)

Judd Tully has the litany of sales from TEFAF:

Johnny van Haeften: Jacob Jordaens undated Homeric painting from the 1630s, “The meeting of Odysseus and Nausicaa,” for $6.5 million, according to the gallery. Van Haeften acquired it at Christie’s London in December 2012 for £2.1 million; a small-scale and rare Paul Bril oil on copper, “Saint Jerome praying in a rocky landscape” (1592), for approximately £750,000 to the Mauritshuis, an important Dutch museum. (Like a number of works at TEFAF, this one had recently sold at auction, going for £505,250 at Christie’s London in December.)

Richard Green: a Pierre Bonnard painting of a young woman at breakfast from 1918, and a Salomon Ruisdel river scene. Each was approximately one million euros.

Tomasso Brothers Fine Art also had a successful preview day, making five sales including a bronze by Giuseppe Piamontini (1664-1742), “Milo of Croton.” It was sold to a European private collector, with the asking price said to be in the region of €650,000.

Hans Kraus, Jr., the noted classical photography dealer, chalked up several early sales, including Captain Linnaeus Tripe’s mirage-like “Rangoon, South Tazoung of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda” (1855), a coated salt print from a waxed paper negative, which sold to an American collector for $125,000. Kraus also sold a striking Anna Atkins’s cyanotype photogram, “Mediola Arginica (Bangor U.S.)” (1852-54), for $25,000.”

Daniel Katz Gallery: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s “Daphne et Chloe,” carved marble and signed and dated 1874, to an American museum against an asking price of $3 million

Sperone Westwater, the gallery sold a handful of works, including Carla Accardi’s “Rosso Scuro,” a shaped abstraction in enamel on sicofoil, a type of clear plastic from 1974, in the €200,000 range; Otto Piene’s “Untitled” (Raster Bild) from 1957-1958 in the six-figure range to an important German collector of the movement;and “Dream of Drowning” (2010-12) by Jan Worst, for €125,000; Ali Banisadr, “Paper tiger,” a small, vividly colored 16-by-16-inch abstraction from 2013 for $18,000

Christophe van de Weghe sold Pablo Picasso’s “Homme au cahpeua” (1964) in oil and ripolin on canvas for $8 million to a European collector, as well as Roy Lichtenstein’s mixed-media collage on board “The Den” (1990-96) for approximately €525,000

Galerie Odermatt-Vedovi, Christopher Wool’s floral patterned abstraction, “Untitled (P66)” (1988) in alkyd and flashe on aluminum panel, sold for approximately $1.4 million.

Axel Vervoordt Gallery: Kazuo Shiraga, black-and-red abstraction “Chizosei Shomenko” (1961) for approximately €1.2 million