Mastering the Old Master Market

In making her case of for the renewed importance of Old Master painting, Susan Moore makes some curious mistakes like suggesting the US National Gallery’s Ter Brugghen sold for $10m was sign of demand rather than a sign of the National Gallery’s determination to win its painting back from a restitution claim. In a bigger slip, Moore then counts the sale of the same painting from the auction winner back to the US National Gallery as another example of the “hot” Old Master market.

No matter. All of this interest in Old Master painting is merely a preface to a great preview of the wares on offer at TEFAF Maastricht which opens later this week:

TEFAF Maastricht is, of course, the most important fair in the world for Old Masters: paintings, drawings and prints. Its 75 or so specialist dealers in this field – from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain and the US as well as the UK – present an unrivalled shop-window to the world’s collectors and curators, major and minor. Konrad Bernheimer, chairman of the fair’s pictura, or fine art section, describes the mood among his fellow dealers as “quietly confident”. He believes that more and more collectors are turning to Old Masters from classical modern and contemporary art, not least because it is one area of the market which is showing stability. He is tempting this year’s visitors with the likes of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s impressive “David and Bathsheba” of 1534, and a rare religious painting by Frans Hals, a “St Mark” from a set of Four Evangelists which had originally belonged to Catherine the Great. Both are priced between €5m and €6m.

Old Masters remain unscathed by the downturn (Financial Times)

Contemporarabia

The Gulf States get coordinated in their approach to art. Jan Dalley looks at the preparations that went into making the event that begins next weekend:

It opens in Doha with events centred around Qatar’s proud new Museum of Islamic Art, the IM Pei-designed building that is a sort of beacon in the area – for all the column inches, hype and furious PR effort devoted to successive announcements about Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island (with its Louvre and Guggenheim and all the rest) and Dubai’s own ambitious plans, the MIA in Doha is the only one that is in existence, filled with treasures, and open to the public.

From Doha, where one discussion topic is “Creating Spaces, Creating Audiences”, a pertinent question in a region that is busy building museums yet has no tradition of exhibition-gazing or gallery-going, Contemparabia’s caravan moves on to Dubai and Sharjah. Tate Britain’s orientalist exhibition Lure of the East is a prominent visitor on show; Sharjah’s biennale is set in its own romantic location, and for the discussion groups in Dubai beachside tents make a wonderful setting. Cultural identity and heritage, the role of the public and private sectors, cities as cultural destinations are among the topics covered.

United Front Bridges the Gulf (Financial Times)

Doing Dubai

Susan Moore charts the rise of Emirati art in five short years:

According to Hassan Sharif, the British-trained “father” of conceptual art in the Emirates, it was the 2003 Sharjah Biennial that “changed the artistic landscape of the UAE”. That year the directorship of the show was taken over by Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi, the daughter of the Ruler of Sharjah, who had studied at London’s Royal College of Art. With the help of curator Peter Lewis, she set a new agenda, not only by bringing in artists from all over the world but new media too – video, installation, digital and performance art – and organised a symposium focusing on globalisation and these new practices.

Christie’s went on to stage its first high-profile auction of international modern and contemporary art in Dubai in 2006, and the first editions of the UAE’s two thriving international art fairs, Art Dubai and ArtParis Abu Dhabi, followed in 2007 (this year’s Art Dubai, March 18-21, coincides with the Sharjah Biennial). Bonhams staged its inaugural Dubai auction last year, and Phillips de Pury has announced its plans for auctions later this year. All these events offer a showcase to established and emerging talent in the region alongside Western – and Asian – art and all have the support of the various UAE governments that are investing large sums in building museums and promoting culture in the region.

The Rapid Emergence of Emirati Art (Financial Times)

The Half-Year of Living Dangerously

The FT’s Patricia Chen on Southeast Asian, especially Indonesian, art’s surprising strength:

Yet for some reason, south-east Asian art did not seem as badly affected as its counterparts in other parts of Asia. While prices for other categories plunged, average prices of contemporary art in south-east Asia slid by only about 20 per cent from their height.

Auction houses argue that the south-east Asian art market is intrinsically different from others. The buying and selling of artworks has been the preserve of a coterie of savvy, passionate and well-heeled art-lovers from Indonesia, and Indonesian works account for 80 per cent of auction volume.

Having weathered many financial crises, the Indonesians are said to have learnt to “crisis-insulate” themselves by remaining fairly liquid. The telling sign is that prized works have not left their collections, yet.

Dark Days, High Hopes (Financial Times)

And Getting Your Affairs in Order

Hard on the heels of the spectacular event at Sotheby’s this week where thousands showed up to view the Valmadonna Trust library–and dozens of those viewers stopped by to thank and congratulate Jack Lunzer, the collector who assembled the trove–comes this story from Ireland. The octogenarian Lunzer’s sale was an attempt to see his great work find a safe home before his frailty catches up with him. Anne Bullitt was not a distinguished collector. She is the only daughter of William Bullitt and Lousie Bryant. He was a US Ambassador to the Soviet Union and France; she the radical made famous in Warren Beatty’s “Reds.”

Anne Bullitt lived in Ireland for 40 years and was a successful horse breeder. But as that business wound down and her health began to fail, her estate, including the contents of her home among which are a Picasso painting, a Ming vase and a pair of pistols given to Lafayette by George Washington. These items are now part of a dispute in the Irish courts. The Irish Times summarizes the cause:

[W]hen her financial advisers came to see her, they had to read out documents, he said. By 1997, she was living in three rooms in the stately home and her bedroom was only ever lit by artificial light, Mr Shipsey added. However, Ms Bullitt was “an independent and determined lady”. She had decided to sell Palmerstown House and discussions took place between her advisers and a number of interested parties.

One of those was a developer who offered IR£8.2 million for the house and estate, counsel said. However, about the same time, the advisers became aware Ms Bullitt, who was 75 and in poor health, had agreed to sell for IR£10 million to Mr Mansfield. This caused “a degree of consternation” with her advisers who had already orally agreed a deal with the first developer, counsel said. [ . . . ] The court would hear evidence that Ms Bullitt’s advisers became concerned about her ability to manage her affairs and they asked that she be made a ward of court. They arranged for a psychiatrist to visit her in July 1998 but to say she was unco-operative was “an understatement”, Mr Shipsey said. The psychiatrist’s interview was “terminated in a very peremptory manner” and in 2000, the president of the High Court made her a ward of court.

Estate of US Socialite Disputed in High Court (The Irish Times)

Roberta Smith shows art dealers some love in her review of The Art Show at the Park Avenue:

In boom times art dealers tend to get demonized on the way up and the way down. They deserve it, some people say. But the art world’s zealously tended hierarchy — artists on top, art dealers at the bottom — has never been right.

Art dealers put their money where their vision is; only artists take greater risks. They help artists do what we all hope to do: make a living at something they love. If the nonartists in the realm of art achieve this state — and some of us are privileged to do so — it is partly because of the strange, tenuous, sometimes infuriating world that art dealers help construct, one day, artist or artwork at a time. [. . . ]

Razzle-dazzle spectacle, stampeding collectors and buy-it-now pressure-cooking has never been the Art Show’s style; neither has aisle upon aisle of booths stretching as far as the eye can see. But the times may be catching up with it.

The Art Show was founded in 1989. This year’s version has, as usual, just 70 participants. It serves as a reminder that the boom-time art world was only a portion of a much larger, less volatile sphere. The vast majority of artists in this sphere never saw their work go to auction, much less fetch stratospheric prices there. Their boats may have floated a little higher, but they weren’t swamped in dough. Most of the dealers did not have month after month of sell-out shows, nor were their rosters teeming with freshly minted M.F.A.’s.

This fair is loaded with work that you will be grateful to see. There’s little grandstanding and few works that reach out and grab you by the neck.

Rewards and Clarity in a Show of Restraint (New York Times)

Holland Cotter puts Piero Manzoni in context:

He was born into an aristocratic family; his full name was Count Meroni Manzoni de Chiosca e Poggiolo. He had an early interest in art but bowing to parental wishes ended up in law school, where he did not thrive. A switch to studying literature and philosophy helped, but not enough to keep him in school. He had prodigious energy. He couldn’t sit still. So around 1955 he turned to making art and taught himself what he needed to know.

The times were right for his adventurous disposition. Cold war Europe was a shifting, uneasy place, traumatized by the past, giddy with new prosperity. Everyone was consuming like mad by day and having nightmares about nuclear bombs at night.

Two different styles of abstract painting reflected the tense atmosphere.

Art informel, the European version of Abstract Expression, was all about that, all about the anguished ego and so on. By contrast geometric abstraction, with roots in Malevich and Mondrian, was about being above it all, about utopia. Manzoni, who was coming to all this from outside the art establishment, had little patience for either position and tried to shake them up.

He made gestural pictures but with gooey tar instead of paint, so they’re not soulful, they’re gross. As for geometric abstraction, he covered canvases with coats of gesso and left them like that, primed, but that’s all. They look blank, as if waiting for a real painter to show up.

He was one of many artists worldwide bent on bumping off art as they’d known it. Lucio Fontana, a hugely influential senior figure, was slashing paintings with knives. Alberto Burri, trained as a doctor, was painting with a blowtorch. In Japan, Yayoi Kusama filled canvases with obsessive dot patterns that left surfaces looking like scar tissue.

Yves Klein, from France, was more hands off. He made production-line art: same-size abstract paintings, all in one brand-name color. And in the United States, as early as 1951, Robert Rauschenberg had done all-white paintings, the only inflections being shadows accidentally cast on the surface.

To Bump Off Art as He Knew It (New York Times)

Elizabeth Eaves confronts to the now-fashionable idea that a crash is good for the arts. In nice piece of reasoning published on Forbes.com, Eaves tackles the notions haunting both the book business and the art world that a return to more modest times will produce great art and literature:

I understand why some artists and writers resist identifying too closely with money. Creative careers tend to be vocations. If you start valuing what you do in, say, dollar-an-hour terms, the result can be terrifying. And the more you let your ego inflate based on a huge sale, the more emotional fallout there will be in that year you don’t sell anything.

Still, money draining out of circulation is bad for the arts and for artists. In the U.S., creative endeavors are often funded by nonprofits. Those organizations’ donors are now disappearing. Would-be art buyers are also struggling, in some cases trying to sell off collections. [ . . . ]

Yet even as the market value of individual works goes down, it’s likely that more–not fewer–people will now seek to become auteurs. That’s because with massive layoffs in more lucrative fields, the opportunity cost of taking a shot at painting or book-writing has just disappeared. [ . . . ]

In The New York Times in January, Holland Cotter observed that financial struggles at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles weren’t the result of “the economic downturn so much as stupidity.”

The museum hadn’t–oops–socked any money away when times were good. Luckily, and unlike other struggling U.S. museums, it received a $30 million bailout from billionaire art collector Eli Broad. A self-made man, he keeps artists in business by paying attention to the bottom line. Money is good for the arts, but until it returns, we can at least be grateful for decent accounting.

Art and Literature, Meet Accounting (Forbes)