The once-quiet Nahmads are getting lots of press in the art world these days. Artnet profiles Joseph Nahmad who has embarked on a plan to open a few pop-up galleries selling contemporary art. Meanwhile, the site indulges the youngest Nahmad with a little market-making bravado

Joseph Nahmad bought his first painting two years ago — when he was 19 years old. “I saw this amazing Lucio Fontana at Sotheby’s in London, and I called my father,” he said recently over chamomile tea at Café Carlyle. “But I couldn’t reach him, so I bought it on a whim.” It was one of the artist’s slicedConcetto Spaziale canvases, hammered down at £1.8 million. “When I told my father about it, he was not very pleased.” He had sold the very same painting 40 years earlier for about $2,000. […]

A month after Joseph bought the pricy Fontana, David went to the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht. “I go in and I see [veteran Fontana dealer Gian Enzo] Sperone and I said, ‘what are you doing with these prices?’ He said, ‘didn’t you see what happened to Fontana last month?’ Since then, his prices have been gradually going up.”

“I completely changed the Fontana market,” Joseph added.

Nahmad Empire Expands into Contemporary Art (Artnet)

London’s Helly Nahmad went to lunch with the Financial Times’s Jackie Wullschlager last month. The whole story is well worth reading. Nahmad hints at a compelling family story with passionate arguments, saturnine personalities and an overwhelming commitment to Modern art. Though the family deals art, the collection being shown in Switzerland is more than just gallery stock.

Even with the massive changes that have overtaken the art market, Nahmad points out that the annual turnover of the business—which he puts a suspiciously low $15bn figure upon—is comparable to the annual revenue of a small car company. Industrial magnates from Russia, the Gulf States and Europe have greater resources than the family of art dealers he represents:

“The whole argument of the Kunsthaus is to show dealers’ collections are the best. Now we know what the collection is, we see strengths and weaknesses – not that there are many weaknesses; a better Mondrian, there should be a Van Gogh. There will be a lot of buying now with a view to the collection. Inevitably, we will work harder at making this group more coherent, stronger. Bidding for Léger’s ‘Still Life’ this year [the Nahmad family won it at $7.9m], I thought, ‘This is for the Kunsthaus.’ It felt like a museum painting – one notch above what a collector would have. The exhibition accelerates in everyone’s mind that this is a group – our A-team.”Continue Reading

If you’ve followed the often vitriolic debates over the relationship between museums and collectors, where many fret that collectors have used museums to burnish the value of their works for potential resale, then you’ll understand the riskiness of this quote from Helly Nahmad in Georgina Adam’s Financial Times column. Nahmad is discussing whether his family’s holdings — to be seen in a Swiss exhibition — are being shown to be sold:

As some of the works have already been seen in the firm’s New York and London galleries, I ask Nahmad if this is a non-selling show.

“This is not commercial, but the Swiss are very intelligent, they know that finally everything is for sale, at a price, even in American museums,” he answers, adding, “What few people realise is that we have a huge lending programme, at this moment we have 135 works of art from our collection on loan to various museum shows.”

The Art Market: Unseen Collections (Financial Times)

Georgina Adam announces that the Nahmad family is planning an exhibition drawn from their vast holdings. With the recent public exhibition of Giacometti works launched at Eykyn Maclean, the private dealer’s first, some significant figures from the discreet side of the art world are coming out in the open:

For the first time, the powerful Nahmad firm of art traders is showing its “family collection” in a vast exhibition at the Zurich Kunsthaus next year. “It will be the first time even we see all these works, 120 of them, together,” says Helly Nahmad, who runs the family’s London gallery and is organising the show. “It gives us a chance to see what are the collection’s strengths, what are its weaknesses,” he says.Continue Reading