The NY Times has an interesting article on British art fairs, from the basic "grass roots" fairs to the high end fairs such as the Masterpiece fair, and also tosses in potential impact of Brexit. The article looks at the difficulties dealers are having at the lower end of the market and compares to the activity of the higher end. Overall an interesting piece with interesting perspectives on the fine and decorative marketplace.
The NY Times reports
Source: The NY TimesA chipped china saucer. A toy cow. A terra-cotta flowerpot. A dog-eared “Peter Rabbit” book. Half a tin of white emulsion paint. A thimble.
“ALL ITEMS £1” said the notice, one of dozens scattered across the agricultural showground in the west of England last Sunday as dealers tried to drum up business at the Shepton Mallet antiques and collectibles fair.
This six-times-a-year showground fair in rural Somerset could hardly have been a more literal embodiment of the “grass roots” of Britain’s antiques trade, far removed from the glitter of London’s international auction houses and dealers. After Britain’s vote to leave the European Union on June 23, the event also embodied a very different Britain.
Somerset is Brexit country. The South West Region of England voted by 53 percent to 47 percent to leave the E.U., in contrast to London, where 60 percent of voters chose to remain. Local West Country dealers, who rely almost exclusively on English buyers, were finding the post-Brexit market for modestly priced collectibles extremely tough going.
Ron J. Mills, a dealer in portrait miniatures based in Bath, was one of some 600 exhibitors at the fair. He had no sales after selling two miniatures to fellow traders for a total of about £500, or about $647, on the first day. “People just haven’t got the money to spend,” he said.
Mr. Mills, 73, is an ardent Brexiteer and needed little encouragement to air his views on Brussels bureaucrats. “It was my one chance to get rid of them,” Mr. Mills said of his vote.
By Sunday, the third and final day of Shepton Mallet, exhibitors outnumbered visitors and mutterings of “it’s been terrible” and complaints about the poor sales could be overheard above the clutter of unsold porcelain and glass ornaments.
“It’s been quiet all three days,” said Jane Burgett, a dealer from Wiltshire who specializes in Scandinavian modernist jewelry. “There aren’t enough youngsters coming in, and those that do just buy retro furniture and jewelry. The market for collectibles has fallen off a cliff.” Ms. Burgett said she sold about 10 pieces of Georg Jensen jewelry for between £90 and £500, comfortably covering the £200 cost of a pitch in one of the fair’s four barns.
Meanwhile, 100 miles to the east in a seemingly different country, an altogether more well-to-do, more international crowd was browsing the upscale Masterpiece fair in London.
The seventh annual edition of the dealer-run fair, which finished on Wednesday, was held, as usual, in a vast tent with a Christopher Wren-style facade on the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea. With its elegant catering and emphasis on luxury collecting across a broad range of historic periods, Masterpiece has become a fixture in London’s summer season in the way that the Grosvenor House Art & Antiques Fair used to be back in the 1960s and ‘70s. This year’s edition attracted 37,000 visitors (attendance figures were not available for Shepton Mallet).
But is Masterpiece a fair where dealers actually sell serious, big-ticket works of art, in the way that they can sell at longer-established European fairs such as Art Basel and Tefaf Maastricht? Or is it more of a social, rather than commercial event – particularly after the shock of Brexit?
“We didn’t think we would sell anything,” said Gordon Cooke, managing director of the Fine Art Society, a dealership based in London and Edinburgh. “Fairs are unpredictable at the best of times, and when the political, economic and diplomatic system falls apart, you do begin to wonder.”
Yet the FAS did sell a fine, if suitably somber 1942 “Grey and Pink Still Life” by the postwar Scottish painter Anne Redpath to a British collector for £245,000.
As ever at “second-tier” fairs these days, sales were sporadic and messages were mixed. The antiquities specialists Ariadne Galleries of New York and London found an American buyer for an ancient Greek marble head of Aphrodite, dating from the mid-2nd century B.C., priced at between £1 million and £1.5 million. “The market feels difficult. There’s a weird atmosphere because of Brexit,” said Hugh Gibson, director of the London modern and contemporary dealers Thomas Gibson Fine Art. But Robert Young, a dealer in folk art based in London, sold 28 objects priced between £3,000 and £26,000 within three hours of the June 29 preview. These included a 19th-century model of a butcher’s shop, snapped up for £25,000 by a Canadian living in London, typifying the fair’s core clientele of locally based internationals.
“The fair has come of age. It doesn’t feel like a try-hard any more,” Mr. Young said. “And the fact there’s no segregation of collecting discipline, so there’s a mix where you don’t know what you’re going to see next, really does work.”
Masterpiece still has an edge of luxury bling – the presence of a Riva speedboat priced at 395,000 euros clearly defined the target audience – but its exhibitor list continues to be bolstered by serious international dealers. This year’s roster of 154 featured 33 newcomers, including the Tefaf Maastricht stalwart Axel Vervoordt of Belgium and M & L Fine Art, specialists in 20th century Italian art based in London.
M & L found a European buyer at about €700,000 for a rare Enrico Castellani 1961 pale green “Untitled (Superficie)” nail and canvas abstract that the fair’s Awards Committee voted the outstanding work by a living artist at the event.
“I should have bought it on the spot, but it sold almost immediately,” said the London collector and dealer Christian Levett, a member of the awards committee. Mr. Levett is a former hedge fund manager whose extensive collection of antiquities is exhibited in his private museum at Mougins in the south of France
He describes Masterpiece as a “mini Maastricht.”
But is it?
With its 270 exhibitors, Tefaf Maastricht is a much bigger fair that gathers together critical masses of specialist dealers, making it a destination event for museum curators and international collectors of historic material such as antiquities, old masters and medieval art. By contrast, Masterpiece does attract what the art trade calls “quality” people, but they are more likely to be in London because they have a home here or have flown in for the summer auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Ultimately, for the superrich, Maastricht is about collecting, Masterpiece is about shopping. While dealers are keen to meet a different crowd of wealthy people, even if only for advertising purposes, Masterpiece remains a challenging place to sell at the very top of the market. Apart from Ariadne’s marble head, there were no confirmed sales of artworks at Masterpiece marked at more than $1 million, such as the museum-quality 1916 Cubist painting, “Nature Morte,” by Juan Gris on the booth of the London and New York dealers Dickinson, priced at $8.5 million.
“What we sell takes a little longer. We regard the fair as closing in about six weeks’ time,” said James Roundell, Dickinson’s director of Impressionist and modern art. Mr. Roundell, like Mr. Mills in Shepton Mallet, was sanguine about Brexit, citing the possible removal of European Union-imposed tariffs, such as VAT on artworks imported from outside the E.U. (Britain charges 5 percent, the lowest permissible rate, compared with 5.5 percent in France and 22 percent in Italy) and Artist’s Resale Right royalties, as potential pluses. “Being out of the E.U. could be good for the U.K.,” Mr. Roundell said.
Brexit is a huge leap in the dark. But as Britain teeters toward recession, and millions of its people potentially end up with even less money to spend, £1 china could be a harder sell than an $8.5 million Cubist painting.
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