The large, dealer run show has everything from Rembrandt to Renoir's painting of Monet's first wife. Bloomberg puts the total value of art at the show around $1.4 billion. The Rembrandt, Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo purchased in 2009 by Las Vegas collector Steve Wynn for $32.2 million at Christies is being offered for $47 million (see image). As can be expected, there will be a strong emphasis on dealers showing Chinese art in order to take advantage of the current market strength in this sector.
The article states that quality shows, such as Tefaf are now competing with the major international auction houses, and the number of quality dealers is shrinking.
To read the full Bloomberg article, click HERE.Its 260 galleries, showing museum-quality artworks from four millennia, are competing more than ever with auctions, where rich collectors are bidding millions for trophies.
“We now see players in the art market with unlimited means,” Jacques Billen, director of the Brussels-based antiquities dealership Galerie Harmakhis said in an interview. “The auction houses are extremely successful. Though the dealer market is shrinking, Maastricht is still an opportunity to meet people who are not looking for us.”
Tefaf’s dealers in antiquities are placed near specialists in 20th- and 21st-century works in the 100,000 square-foot exhibition space. As a result, about 10 percent of Harmakhis’s buyers at the fair are contemporary art collectors, said Billen.
He is offering a stone fragment from an Egyptian water clock commissioned by Alexander the Great. It is priced at 150,000 euros.
Rembrandt’s 1658 “Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo” will be shown by the New York-based Old-Master dealer Otto Naumann Ltd. The painting was acquired from the Las Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn, who paid 20.2 million pounds ($32.2 million) for it at Christie’s International in London in 2009.
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