Greetings from Maastricht

At one end of the Wildenstein & Co./Pace Wildenstein booth here at TEFAF, a pasty Renoir and a delightful Degas pastel look out at the Old Masters section of the art fair better known as Maastricht.

As I walked through the Wildenstein rooms, time advances through impressionism and into the 20th century. In the middle of the booth are two of the worst Bonnards I've ever seen. The canvas on the left is almost entirely consumed by a chunky cow. The one on the right is bisected by a starving horse, with the need for equilibrium between the paintings clear but never reached. By the time I exited Wildenstein by way of a red-white-and-blue Dubuffet, a Rauschenberg, and a Lichtenstein 'Asian landscape' painting, I was in the modern-and-contemporary wing of the fair.

It was a good example of the markets that this fair is trying to bridge. (The Wildenstein booth was surely intentionally placed.) Maastricht is an uber-luxury fair, a marketplace for old master paintings, fine jewelry, antiquities, 19th-century canvases, old silver, 20th century works on paper, and, most recently, modern and contemporary art. (I'm here on a press trip funded by the Dutch.) This is my first visit and it's nothing like other fairs to which I've been. I've seen good stuff, such as other Bonnards, lots of Magritte, and one divine van Dongen. I've also seen mistakes waiting to be AmExed, such as more 19th-century British seascapes than you can point a compass at. Oh, yeah - you can buy antique compasses here too.

So what do I think? Maastricht is nothing like contemporary art fairs. The carpet was better, softer. About ninety-five percent of the male visitors wore suits. A higher percentage of the women have left their original breasts intact. The attendees are older, and so are the dealer staffs. The lighting was obscenely bright, perhaps partly to help those aging eyes. At the opening day all-you-can-drink wine came with the invite-only admission, though naturally TEFAF doesn't speak Sizzler-ese. The quality of the art was fair-level. There were some real finds and some real horrors. Over the next few days I'll share with you more about what I'm seeing here - and I don't just mean the art.