Forget the oysters. The US museum presence is what Tefaf Maastricht is all about. During the preview days of the fair, when I ask dealers how it’s going, they rarely discuss sales. Instead, as if on cue, they start listing the American institutions that are in the building.
In part, this is a game of confidence. In 2020, when Covid curtailed the fair, the sight of US curators scurrying from the exhibition centre towards hastily rebooked flights seemed an omen of difficult times ahead for the fine art market. Last year, for the first time since the pandemic, I heard the old refrain along the aisles of “Cleveland, Chicago, Minneapolis…”. The buoyancy was back. Happy dealers make sales happen.
Of course, that confidence is grounded in anticipation. Many US museums bring buying power to the fair—and arrive eager to wield it. “At every Tefaf Maastricht, we intend to acquire,” says Frederick Ilchman, MFA Boston’s chair of European art.
As Salvador Salort-Pons, the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, points out, America’s top collecting institutions often have funds restricted for the acquisition of “non-contemporary European visual and decorative arts”—and the fair is the pre-eminent place to spend them. “Tefaf allows our curators to see and select some of the best works new to market,” he says. “Non-attendance very often means missing out.”
There is an unwritten contract in operation here, an understanding between questing curators and expectant dealers that springtime in Maastricht is worth the trip. Salort-Pons notes that many exhibitors at Tefaf successfully cater to two markets at once: private collectors, who may have particular tastes or interests, and institutions seeking to prioritise “art-historical perspectives, historical context, learning opportunities or representational equity in
their galleries”.
Valuing under-appreciated works
That last imperative is crucial. Among the dealers in European art who thrive at the fair are those who source, research and promote work by artists whose stories have been told less frequently. Visitors from US museums are not about to give a rediscovered Rembrandt the cold shoulder. But these days they also travel to Maastricht anticipating a broader range of new encounters.
“It’s exciting to see work that has historically been undervalued find prominence at the fair,” says Claire Whitner, the director of curatorial affairs at Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts. For her, Tefaf Maastricht increasingly provides opportunities to view pre-modern works by women and people of colour. She name-checks Marguerite Gérard and Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema, as well as the French neoclassical painter Guillaume Lethière.
A 17th-century Safavid mirror was sold at Tefaf last year to the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto from Lisbon’s São Roque gallery
TEFAF/Loraine Bodewes
A slow dance has been struck up between the US museums, many with reframed collecting policies, and those dealers seeking to place work by underrepresented artists in institutional collections. The passage from discovery to decision-making can take time. “An artist or movement can come on to our radar at the fair,” Ilchman says. In 2023, MFA Boston acquired a self-portrait by the German-Swedish modern painter Lotte Laserstein from Agnews at Tefaf, several years after Ilchman had first contemplated buying her work.
Another trend that plays to North American museums is the presence of works of art at the fair that encapsulate cross-cultural connections. Leading institutions such as the Toledo Museum of Art are eager to display global art histories in their galleries—and are actively buying in order to do so. (Disclosure: the TMA is a client of Marks|Calil, the strategic consultancy I co-direct.) Among the objects to capture my imagination at Tefaf Maastricht last year was a 17th-century mirror with the Lisbon-based gallery São Roque, its rare surviving Venetian or Netherlandish glass housed in a frame painted in Safavid Isfahan and depicting scenes from Persian poetry. It sold to the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.
There will no doubt be some nervousness at Tefaf Maastricht this year about what the second Trump presidency could mean for the transatlantic trade in fine art. But it seems that the fair recognises the existential nature of its relationship with US museums and has been working to build its resilience. Its global advisory board features a host of US museum directors, around a quarter of its 200-strong vetting committee are based in the US and four out of ten places on its recently established curator course have this year been filled by American curators.
The journey from the US to reach Maastricht will always be a hike. But once they arrive, US museums and their patron groups seem to relish the concentration of the fair as much as ever. So many objects, so many networking opportunities, and indeed, so many oysters. “The location is more of a positive than a negative,” Ilchman says. “People have a commitment to being there and to using their time well.”
• Thomas Marks is the co-founder of Marks|Calil, a strategic consultancy that works with international museums and art businesses. From 2013 to 2021 he was the editor of Apollo magazine
