The Netherlands: Art -Tefaf: going Dutch has never felt better - by Gareth Harris

Where in the world can you see long and good-humohibitionred queues waiting to get into an art fair at three o’clock on a weekday afternoon?” asked the correspondent in our assessment of the European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf) in Maastricht 11 years ago.

This undisputed grande dame of art fairs has proudly polishing her silver this month to mark her jubilee (16-25 March). Twenty-four years ago Tefaf Maastricht, now in its 25th edition, launched in the Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre (MECC) with 89 participating dealers, the majority of them Dutch. Most of the 17,672 visitors to the fair in 1988 traveled at most a few hundred kilometres. “Sunday was Belgian housewife day when they would come in and criticize all the frames,” says Peter Fairbanks, president of the San Francisco-based Montgomery Gallery, which has participated in all but three fairs since 1988.

This month, more than 270 international dealers will bring their most important inventory to Maastricht situated at the southernmost end of the Netherlands, close to the Belgian and German borders. “All the dealers save their best things for Maastricht” has become an art market truism. The queues, peopled with collectors from the US, Asia and across Europe, are just as long; indeed, fair organisers have struggled with the volume, raising ticket prices in 2007 after 84,020 visitors pressed their way down the aisles in 2006. The fair appears to have outpaced its rivals such as the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris, maintaining a lead when other fairs, including London’s Grosvenor House and the Haughton International Asian Art Fair in New York, have fallen by the wayside.

Crucially, trade specialists still see Tefaf as a market bellwether. “It is universally accepted as the master of its art and the focal point of traditional market activities,” says James Goodwin, the head of the art market course at Maastricht University. Richard Green of the eponymous London gallery, which deals in Old Masters, is one of the fair’s most fervent supporters. “It goes from strength to strength because it shows high quality paintings, fresh to the market and correctly priced,” he says. The stakes are high, with a substantial number of exhibitors making at least 30% of their annual turnover at Maastricht, but a post-crash “flight to quality” benefits certain sections such as Old Masters and modern blue-chip works.

For more: Tefaf: going Dutch has never felt better - The Art Newspaper