They say the main entrance door to The Warrington is permanently sealed because long ago a customer insisted on riding his horse into the pub. “The theory is that the two doors on either side of the main entrance were too narrow to ride a horse through,” said Dominic Marriott, general manager of The Warrington.
At that time, the establishment then known as the Warrington Hotel had adjoining stables for its customers’ convenience. Maybe that rider wanted to buy his horse a pint?
This week saw the opening of the annual European Fine Art and Antiques Fair organised by the European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF) in the Dutch town of Maastricht. Every March the most prestigious international art and antique dealers assemble at the Maastricht Exhibition and Conference Centre to display their stock to the world’s wealthiest private collectors and leading museum curators.
Many Old Master dealers who show at Maastricht do 60 to 70 percent of their annual business during the two weeks of the fair. This year is likely to be the most important TEFAF fair for many years since it will offer an indication of the extent to which the global recession is affecting the upper echelons of the trade.
Meanwhile, a modestly priced art fair in London this weekend provided convincing evidence that the more affordable levels of the art trade are not just surviving the credit crunch but are actually enjoying improved business in the face of it. The Affordable Art Fair, which takes place twice a year in Battersea Park (in March and October), a stone’s throw from the fashionable and monied Chelsea and South Kensington districts, attracts art dealers from around the world, all of them offering art in the price range between £50 to £3000 ($70 to $4225).
A new retrospective report commissioned by the European Fine Art Foundation, which organizes the annual European Fine Art Fair (Fig. 1) held in the Dutch city of Maastricht, concludes that the art market is now truly global with powerful new developing economies firmly established as key players.
The report, Globalisation and the Art Market, Emerging Economies and the Art Trade in 2008, has been published to coincide with the 2009 fair, which is scheduled to take place in the Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre from March 13-22. However, global economic change is now taking place at such an alarming pace that any attempt at forecasting the future of a particular market runs the risk of being out of date by the time it’s published.
We will have to wait until the February auctions of contemporary art to gauge the extent to which the recession is taking its toll on what has for the last 10 years been the mainstay of the international art market. Meanwhile, elsewhere one might be forgiven for blaming the credit crunch for one or two significant recent events in the antiques trade. However, not everything is as it seems.
This week it was announced that leading London period furniture dealers Mallett are quitting their Bond Street premises to seek out more appropriate showrooms in Mayfair. Meanwhile, another stalwart English period furniture dealer, Norman Adams Ltd., has announced the imminent closure of its Knightsbridge galleries adjacent to Harrods. The Norman Adams stock will be offered for sale at Sotheby’s in April.
Carnavalet Museum in Paris accused of retaining Holocaust looted assets In recent years museums all over the world have come under increasing pressure to conduct and publish exhaustive research into the provenance of any material in their collections that might qualify as Holocaust-related assets – objects looted by the Nazis. The vexed issue of restitution generally tends to focus on looted paintings, but one of the most high-profile of current cases concerns an important suite of 18th-century French furniture in the collection of the Carnavalet Museum in Paris.
Christie’s decision to shut down lines of credit, even to its longest-standing and most trusted clients, was the main issue raised by dealers showing at the Winter Fine Art and Antiques Fair at Olympia in London this month.
“I’ve had an account with Christie’s for twenty-five years,” said London-based specialist textiles dealer Joanna Booth, “but they never told us they were changing their policy on lines of credit. You only get this news when you come to [pay for and collect] your objects.”
With all eyes on the marquee in Regents Park where the sixth annual Frieze contemporary art fair opens on Oct. 16 in an atmosphere of nervous apprehension [full report to appear soon on Auction Central News], it was easy to miss one or two other newsworthy items developing elsewhere in the capital.
Over at the recently opened SaLon Gallery in West London, work by young British contemporary artist Sarah Maple has been incurring the wrath of The Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), according to UK broadsheet the Daily Telegraph.
The oil painting in question, titled Haram, shows the artist, herself a young British Muslim, wearing traditional Islamic dress and cradling a pig. According to the Daily Telegraph report, Mokhtar Badri, a spokesman for MAB, objected to the work on the grounds that Muslims are “taught to keep their distance from pigs because they are unclean”. The Telegraph item said that MAB “plans to visit the SaLon Gallery to demand that it remove Maple’s painting” when the exhibition opens on Oct. 16. Understandably, SaLon Gallery increased its security provision ahead of the opening.
On Sept. 16, controversial British artist Damien Hirst drove a chainsaw through established conventions governing the art trade by selling £70.5 million ($127 million, inclusive of buyer’s premium) worth of new art at Sotheby’s in London. Sidestepping his dealer agents – White Cube in London and Gagosian Gallery in New York – Hirst consigned directly to Sotheby’s, which also broke the rules by agreeing to auction literally new artworks.