Maarten van Heemskerck’s The Entombment (around 1550) is for sale at Tefaf Maastricht from the dealers Caretto & Occhinegro. The artist was a leading exponent of Italian Renaissance style in 16th-century Netherlands
Courtesy Caretto & Occhinegro
This month sees the 38th edition of Tefaf Maastricht, the last remaining major international fair that primarily showcases pre-20th century art and objects. The event allows Old Masters, which for centuries were the trade’s most valuable and coveted items, but which have now fallen out of fashion, to briefly enjoy a little limelight in a market now dominated by the contemporary.
Dating back to 1988, Tefaf Maastricht, which this year features 266 participating dealers, has become an outlier. As private collectors’ tastes have shifted towards the 21st century, museums have increasingly become the target buyers of the fair’s most serious historical works. Last year, Tefaf Maastricht said that more than 300 museum directors attended the event. Lavinia Fontana’s much talked-about 16th-century portrait of a hairy-faced “wild woman”, priced at €4.5m on the stand of the Geneva-based dealer Rob Smeets, was acquired by the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.
Yet the challenges facing this venerable Dutch fair nonetheless reflect the broader issues of an art market in which knowledge and basic levels of interest have become just as important factors as wealth in generating sales.
Take the case of Maarten van Heemskerck’s The Entombment, one of the standout Old Masters on show this year at Maastricht. The recently rediscovered 3ft-high panel painting, dating from around 1550, is being offered by the young Italian dealers Caretto & Occhinegro for €500,000.
On the one hand, a visiting museum curator might think: “This Entombment looks like a significant addition to the corpus of works by Van Heemskerck, the leading exponent of the Italianate Renaissance style in 16th-century Netherlands. It was the central panel of a triptych, whose side panels are in the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, and appears to be the primary version of a composition hitherto known from a painting in the Albertina Academy, Turin. The price doesn’t seem excessive in the current market.”
On the other hand, a wealthy private individual might think:“Who is Van Heemskerck? Never heard of him. Why are there two versions of this picture? Is it a copy? What if I hang an old painting of the dead Christ on my wall? Will my friends think I am weird? The price seems high. I could buy an Airbnb apartment in a major European city for that. The property would increase in value and I would have income from my investment. How can I be sure I will make money out of this painting?”
Of course, there are some wealthy private collectors who still value serious Old Masters in the way they were appreciated by previous generations. The American private equity executive Stephen Schwarzman recently paid around £25m for a Joshua Reynolds portrait to hang in his Wiltshire country mansion, according to the Financial Times. But the fact remains that in most cases the tastes of the art-buying 0.01 percent have shifted towards contemporary, making Old Masters a harder sell, particularly at a time when big-name masterworks are in ever scarcer supply.
“The connoisseurship isn’t there. It’s a lifestyle thing. People buy for decoration. If you have to explain that this picture is by a pupil of so-and-so, forget it,” says Hugo Nathan, a founding partner of the New York and London-based art advisory, Beaumont Nathan, who was in New York in February for a less-than-stellar series of Old Masters auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Sotheby’s managed to sell a Rubens Annunciation oil sketch for $4.8m with fees, but this had been bought for $5.4m in 2014. A 15th-century Tuscan triptych by the little-heralded Master of Pratovecchio failed to sell at Sotheby’s against a low estimate of $600,000. This had been acquired by its private owner for $902,500 with fees at auction in 2011, when the work had been de-accessioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. “The auction houses are having a difficult time attracting works for sale with these lower valuations,” says Nathan. “All the best things are being sold privately,” he adds. Like that Reynolds.
The world’s great museums will always employ highly-qualified curators with the scholarship to appreciate the significance of artists like Fontana or Van Heemskerck. But with Old Masters, and most other categories of art, now unable to offer dependable financial returns, wealthy private buyers are having to make purchases because they too appreciate them as works of art, rather than as just a name and a number that always goes up. When the market dips, knowing and caring about art becomes important again.
“We are sitting on a lot of knowledge and a lot of expertise. We have to do something with it,” says Dominique Savelkoul, the new director of Tefaf Maastricht, who previously led the Mu.Zee museum in Oostende, Belgium. She is aware of the role that education can play in future-proofing the fair. “We are integrating education initiatives, we are fostering future generations of curators, collectors and dealers,” adds Savelkoul. This edition offers a comprehensive array of online interviews and live talks to enlighten that three-pronged audience.
But an art fair—or an auction house or gallery—can only do so much in terms of education.Money isn’t the problem in the art market. It hasn’t been since 2011, when demand bounced back after the financial crisis, thanks to government bail-outs and asset-boosting stimulus packages. Aggregate billionaire wealth has more than doubled since 2011, while, seemingly paradoxically, global art sales have flatlined, according to recent Art Basel and UBS art market reports. Could it be less than coincidental that this same post-2011 period of sales stagnation also saw a dramatic decline in the humanities learning that underpins interest in the visual arts, both historical and contemporary?
In the United States, the number of undergraduate degrees in the classic humanities subjects fell by almost a third between 2012 and 2022, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has noted similar declines across 24 countries in the world. In the UK, the number of home-based undergraduates studying art history dropped 28.5% between 2009 and 2019.
Tefaf Maastricht is offering a comprehensive array of live and online talks to educate potential buyers
Courtesy Tefaf
Hard-held beliefs among both lawmakers and students that Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) make graduates more employable and higher-earning is the standard explanation for this crisis in humanities education. “We’re reaching a kind of existential tipping point for a lot of departments that could lead to their elimination,” Rob Townsend, a director at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, said last year in Canada’s Globe and Mail. The University of Otago in New Zealand and La Trobe University in Australia both scrapped their BA Art History courses in 2020.
A humanities bounce-back seems highly unlikely now that Donald Trump has again become the president of the US. Details of his new administration’s education policy have yet to emerge, but Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for government that has influenced much of Trump’s thinking, recommends “the censorship of academic learning and book banning in schools” as a federal priority, according to America’s National Education Association.
“I’m not against Stem subjects. It’s just that it should be Steam, not Stem. There should be an A [for ‘art’] in there to create a well-balanced education,” says the Turner Prize-nominated artist David Shrigley. In October, Shrigley returned to his secondary school in the UK to work with pupils on an animatronic sculpture project to highlight the importance of arts education amid widespread funding cuts. Campaign for the Arts in the UK reported in 2024 that enrolment in arts GCSEs and A-levels in England, Wales and Northern Ireland had fallen by 47% and 31% respectively since 2010.
“They’re not going to be interested in art, because they’ve never seen it, they’ve never been exposed to it,” says Shrigley, bewailing state secondary school pupils’ depleted access to art teaching and museum visits. “We all know that engaging with the arts is good for people’s health and wellbeing, and for society as a whole,” adds Shrigley. “If you withdraw funding from art subjects the economy will suffer.”
And, seemingly, the art market suffers too.
The sector could benefit from cross-over buyers influenced by fashion designers and institutions looking to diversify collections
The category’s extraordinary works sell well, but the middle and lower ends of the market are in need of new ideas
While auction houses are more aggressive and newer works dominate the global market, Tefaf’s exhibitors remain resolute
A shorter runtime, a new Focus section and outreach to young buyers show promise as a way forward for the venerable Dutch fair
