The buyer of the Giacometti was widely reported in the press to be Lily Safra, the wife of the late Edmond Safra who died in a fire his penthouse (now the home of Chris and Nick Candy) in Monaco in 1999. Lily Safra will be better known to Spears readers for her recent contretemps with Mikhail Prokhorov, who agreed to buy her estate on the Riviera, Villa Leopolda, for €390m, only to ask for his €39m deposit back when the financial crisis hit. Prokhorov’s Onexim group filed a lawsuit in Nice in January alleging Safra had changed the terms of the sale but a French court ruled in May that Onexim should forfeit the deposit.

There were at least eight serious bidders for the Picasso and the group is believed to have included Kenneth Griffin, of Citadel Investment Group of Chicago, Leslie Wexner from Columbus, Ohio, Steven Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors (who already owns another Picasso in this series acquired from Steve Wynn), Roman Abramovich and Joseph Lau, a property developer from Hong Kong. However, what is most interesting about this sale is that the Chinese press are claiming the buyer was from the Chinese mainland and, if true, this marks the first major acquisition of a western artwork by a Chinese person and could herald a new phenomenon and even higher prices. The late owners of the Picasso, Los Angeles based Frances and Sidney Brody, had bought it in 1950 for US$17,000.

The buyer of the Picasso was in a bullish mood because he also set a further record in the same sale by paying US$10.1m for Georges Braque’s 1953–54 window scene of a Marseilles neighbourhood entitled La Treille. Sotheby’s private client representative for China, Xin Li, has become more active at sales, taking bids on the telephone for her clients and she recently underbid a major Matisse Bouquet de Fleurs pour le Quatorze Juillet, 1919, at US$28m.

These high-profile auction results create the publicity and excitement which drive the art market, but the major sales today are increasingly being conducted behind closed doors in private sales, a trend that has accelerated during the recession as sellers did not want to risk their paintings at auction in uncertain times. When a painting fails at auction there is a perception that there must be something wrong with it and it normally means it is unsellable for at least five years, whereas if a private sale does not work, less damage is done to the picture’s reputation.

Until twenty years ago the auction rooms were wholesalers. Debts, divorce and death brought paintings onto the market, which the rooms then auctioned to the dealers, who bought 95 per cent of the works, which they then offered on to private buyers and museums. Go back even further to the post-WWII art market and it is unrecognisable. Catalogues were slim modest soft-back volumes which published brief picture descriptions with no illustration and no estimate. Attributions were often optimistic and dealers were expected to make up their own minds as to a picture’s merit and value.

However, as the 20th century drew to a close the rivalry between the auction houses intensified as they desperately tried to take market share off each other. In the late 1990s Christie’s and Sotheby’s resorted to price fixing to try and maintain their margins and Sotheby’s is still smarting from the public humiliation it suffered when caught. Christie’s managed to come clean to the US authorities just before Sotheby’s tried to do the same thing to them and gained immunity, whereas Sotheby’s chairman, Alfred Taubman, and its chief executive, Diana Brooks, were found guilty of conspiring with Christie’s to fix commissions. Taubman served ten months of a one-year sentence and Brooks was given a $350,000 fine, six months’ house arrest and a thousand hours of community service.

In more recent times, as well as trying to win market share off each other, Christie’s and Sotheby’s have gone after the share controlled by dealers. Clare McAndrew, the founder of Art Economics, calculates the art market’s most recent peak turnover in 2007 as US$65bn, of which around half is controlled by dealers. Before, when clients considered whether to sell at auction or privately, dealers offered the advantage of a discrete private sale. Sellers often have a preference for a quiet sale because of tax or family issues.

In response to this the auction houses have developed specialist teams to deal with private sales so they can now offer clients the option of a private sale or an auction. To develop this business Sotheby’s bought Noortman Master Paintings, a leading dealer in Old Masters, for US$56.5m in 2006, which allowed them a stand at the Maastricht Fine Art Fair. Christie’s bought the Old Master dealers Hall and Knight in 2004 and the contemporary dealer Haunch of Venison in 2007. Figures for private sales are growing rapidly at both auction rooms. In 2007 Christie’s had private sales of US$542m and Sotheby’s US$730m. In 2009 Christie’s private sales activity grew 3 per cent to 12.5 per cent as a percentage of its global turnover and Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s European president, expects this figure to grow to 20 per cent in the next three years. Pylkkänen says, “We’re much more than an auction room now.”

This push into private sales has already affected the turnover of the dealers. Christopher Gibbs, Sampson and Horne, Hotspur, and Jeremy have auctioned off their stock, and Heim, Colnaghi, Agnews, Leggatt , Partridge, Segoura and Salvatore Romano are either no more or have restructured, changed ownership or downscaled.

In the past, as well as selling to clients, the dealers also used to teach them about art and this means that today’s art buyers have less knowledge than ever before, which is changing the type of art in demand. It may well be that in the future the auction rooms will regret the day they decided to weaken the dealers, as increasingly it is only the most obvious art that they can sell. This art has to be instantly recognisable from across the room, have no hidden meaning, project an impact that strikes the viewer in the gut and require no previous knowledge or education in art; hence the appeal of 2009’s ten top-selling artists at auction: 1. Picasso (US$121m), 2. Andy Warhol (US$106m), 3. Qi Bashi (US$70m), 4. Henri Matisse (US$69m), 5. Piet Mondrian (US$58m), 6. Albert Giacometti (US$51m), 7. Fernand Leger (US$50m), 8. Edgar Degas (US$43m), 9. Raphael (US$42m), 10. Claude Monet (US$40m).

The auction rooms have now had to employ staff who know how to sell art. An advantage of auctions is that the fixed sale date forces buyers to make up their mind. The auction rooms now often use a combination of the private sale followed by auction. They market an artwork for three months or so and then put it up for auction, forcing potential buyers into a decision. In a soft market such as 2008 and the first half of 2009 dealers had a problem in that buyers did not feel they were going to lose a painting by making low offers or delaying. In the past the auction rooms needed: – auctioneers who knew how to work a room, accountants to do the books, specialists to catalogue and organise the sales and good-looking glossy-haired young aristocrats to man the front desks and tour the yachts, villas and stately homes looking for business. Now they have had to add some salesman to the mix because selling art is a specialist skill.

Nobody needs art and art sellers have to understand the essential difference between normal money and art money. Normal money acquisitions can be quantified against something similar, a car against a similar car or a house against a similar house, but art is unique and to buy great art a buyer has to be brave and suspend all his normal frameworks of value. Many businessmen who made their fortune by tough negotiating find this a hurdle, buy cheaper artworks and end up with second-rate collections. Art money is fun money, outrageous money, showing-off money, keeping the score money, which is why those who do not have it can never understand it and find the prices of major pieces so astonishing.

Art sellers have to try and understand the motivation of a client. As Noel Coward once observed, people normally have two reasons for doing anything, the reason they tell you and the real reason. The late art dealer Ernst Beyeler observed that “Passion, speculation, intuition, or the desire to acquire a status symbol” were the main reasons for buying art and said that his major client, David Thompson, with his “slicked-back hair and Clark Gable-style moustache would try every trick in the book when it came to negotiating: kindness, charm, pretence, bluff, passionate outbursts, gales of laughter, the confidential approach…”

With turnovers in excess of US$500m in private sales, Christie’s and Sotheby’s can now be said to be the largest dealers in the world, a trend that is accelerating and dealers have to learn to adapt to the new reality or face oblivion.

The Getty’s beautiful garden vista overlooking the Pacific will have some competition, after the museum’s acquisition of this sweeping view of Rome by J.M.W Turner, for £29 million GBP

The biggest news coming out of London earlier this month was, without a doubt, the new record at auction for J.M.W. Turner. His “Modern Rome–Campo Vaccino” is off to Los Angeles, having been bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum (bidding at Sotheby’s through the London dealers Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox) for £29 million GBP.

There has been some speculation that it could have gone for more if there had been a worthy rival in the bidding. (see sales comments by  the Art Market Monitor below) One would have thought that there would have been several, as Sotheby’s not only bestowed great anticipation for the work, putting it as the final lot in their sale, but also gave it a relatively conservative estimate of £12-18 million. It takes a lot for such a figure to be considered temperate, but “Campo..” was touted as a scintillating collecting opportunity: only five or six works of such magnitude and quality by Turner remain in private hands.
Souren Melikian, always incisive in his auction commentary for the New York Times, saw the sale as evidence of a declining market, saying that “Dealers fought tooth and nail over the very few paintings that deserved serious consideration” because it lacked works of quality and was padded out with drawings and the inclusion of 19th century British art.

It is true that the sale saw a few pieces soaring past their highest estimates, while a majority failed to perform above or even within expectations. We’d beg to differ, however, on Melikian’s overall evaluation of mediocrity on the block. Our previous reviews covered some of the bigger draws from Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Aside from the Turner, Rubens’ “Portrait of a Commander” (see image #2 ) and Guercino’s “King David”, there were also some fantastic works by well knowns like Giovanni Bellini (see image #4), Claude Lorraine (see image #5),  and Theodore Gericault (see  image #6); the latter a possible link to the monumental “Raft of the Medusa”.

Furthermore, a slew of wonderful works by more minor artists went unsold. This included Samuel van Hoogstraten’s “Portrait of Count Ferdinand von Werdenberg” (see image #9), a Giuseppe Rocco still life (see image #7), and a surreal family portrait by the Dutch Golden Ager Pieter Codde (see image #8).

On the drawings side, the majority of our observations from  the week came by way of  Sotheby’s alone, where a featured work by Francisco Goya, “The Eagle Hunter,” (see image #10) sold within its estimate, for  £881,250 GBP, a Veronese study that we likened to an early rock-star demo shot past its high estimate at £67,250, a Pontormo lookalike by Domenico Puglio failed to entice any prospectors, and “Diana and Acteon”, a lively watercolour by Cavalieri D’Arpino reminiscent of Titian’s renowned version of late, sold for £151,250.

The dealer’s side of the spectrum was marked by the second annual Master Paintings week. The show continued the momentum of its inaugural undertaking, as an astute collaboration of renowned galleries showcasing their wares to the droves of collectors in town for the sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Within the relatively small area of St. James’ and Mayfair, a series of special displays in 28 galleries, including the big auction houses, showcased hundreds of works acquired in the capital. As it has for centuries, London looked like the centre of the Old Master market.

This was less an exercise in gallery hopping, and more a descension upon one treasure trove to the next. According to Colin Gleadell of the Telegraph, the highlight of Master Paintings Week amongst the dealer galleries was a rare outburst of painterly brilliance by art historic lightweight Frans Francken II. Known largely as a jack-of all trades during his time, whose studio produced a multitude of different types of pictures for patrons, Francken’s art reputation remains widely ignored- his best works sell in the six figure range today.

This particular canvas, however, has been touted as an exception, purchased by Old Master mogul Johnny Van Haeften for a record breaking price of   €7,022,300 EUR at Dorotheum auction this past Spring. The work is now being offered by the dealer for a princely £9.5 million GBP.

While that amount may have been excessive, it’s easy to see what spurned it, as the quality of the work truly constitutes what makes an Old Master so enchanting today.  It is a  fantastical depiction of a timeless aspect of the human condition: our choice between right and wrong. Centuries removed from today it is both beautiful, mysterious, and complex. The mythical allusions here may be somewhat indecipherable to the contemporary viewer. Yet in the age that we live in, where morality can seem relative, if not compromised; it’s refreshing to see our struggle between good and evil laid out in such stark and clarified terms.

We were also a fan of Philip Mould’s offerings, especially a magnificent full length portrait of Mary Sidney (wife of the Sixteenth century poet Philip Sidney). Dressed in black mourning dress with elaborate ornamentation, Mary was also a poet – one of the most important female writers of the period – and the painting is striking both in its handling, (attributed to Paul van Somer) and historical presence, which towers over us due to its enormous size.

The gallery describes the painting as “a wonderful depiction of passing time and beauty” adding yet another layer to a work that rewarded lengthy examination. Mould was also showing a significant Van Dyck self-portrait, and a beautiful “Study for the head of St Joseph” by the same artist.

Richard Green brought out a collection that echoed the variety of the Sotheby’s day sale – including portraits by Cornelius Johnson featured in the window display. This could be seen as a mark of connoisseurship, for while they were featured by Green, similar works by Johnson did not sell at Sotheby’s. If one’s looking for an explanation behind this disparity, the devil has to be in the details.

Other pieces of note to us from Master Paintings week: Van Haeften’s “The Card Players,” (image #15) by Gerard Ter Borch, one of the most important pieces from the career of an important Dutch painter, and Colnaghi’s whimsical “Oyster Eater,” (image #16) by the little known Henri Stresor, a portrait virtuoso who in this work, may have been poking a little fun at his subject/patron: an ignoble youth besot with gastronomic excess.

Other galleries offered exhibitions organized around themes, including Deborah Gage’s “The Real and Idealised: A selection of European Religious Paintings from the 16^th to the 19^th Centuries,” Rafael Valls’ “The Trompe L’Oeil in European Art,” and at William Thuillier- “Classical Vistas and Noble Sitters: Landscapes and Portraits of the 17^th and 18^th Century.”  By the titles alone, one can imagine the sweeping breadth of material that was on display.

FURTHER:

Christie’s OM Highlights  [Marion Maneker, Art Market Monitor]

Sotheby’s OM Highlights  [Marion Maneker, Art Market Monitor]

In Old Masters Dealers Beat Auction House  [Marion Maneker, Art Market Monitor]

For Old Master’s It’s Dealer’s Choice  [Souren Melikian, NY Times]

In Turner’s Record-Breaking Sale, Further Signs of a Shrinking Market [Souren Melikian, NY Times]

£120 million of Old Master paintings and drawings go under the hammer [Colin Gleadall, Telegraph UK]

New York’s April auctions paved the way for a partial recovery that continued on into the London June sales. In April Christie’s and Sotheby’s offered a reduced total of 125 paintings, drawings and sculpture(48% less than the same sales in 2009) and their selling percentage increased by 26% with 30% of lots failing to find buyers which is about average for the sector. Also 25% of lots that did sell sold above their estimate as to opposed to 18% in 2009.

The auction rooms are keeping the market afloat by being more selective in what they will put on the block and reducing estimates. For example the mid estimate average price over the June sales was $61,876 which is 45% less than in 2007. Perversely, with demand becoming masterpiece driven, and falling in line with the similar trend that has been apparent in Old Masters and Impressionists for some time, 18 paintings were expected to fetch over $500,000 over the June sales as opposed to 9 during the same week in 2009.

The Christie’s sale of 8^th June made £14,466,129 against a pre-sale estimate of £7-10m selling 76% by lot and 90% by value. Alexis de Tiesenhausen, Director of the Russian department at Christie’s: “The sale sent a strong signal to consignors that demand is high and that knowledgeable buyers from around the world are committed to acquiring works of art. Competitive bidding saw seven of the top ten lots sell above their pre-sale estimates and in total 26 surpassing their high pre-sale estimate. The European Royal Collection of Fabergé objects performed very well and realized a total of £746,025 / $1,083,228, highlighted by a bonbonnière in egg form.”

The highest price was paid for Vasya, by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin which sold for £1,833,250 / $2,661,879 / €2,221,899 against a pre-sale estimate of £250,000 to £350,000. The arresting portrait of a Russian boy not seen since its last public appearance in 1932 was sold to an anonymous telephone bidder. Several dealers quietly expressed their reservations as to the painting’s authenticity prior to the sale but the painting looked fine after a cursory examination and they may have been planning to buy it themselves and trying to put off potential buyers to depress the price.

The highest price in the works of art section was paid for lots 177 and 188, two exquisite Fabergé objects, one a little turkey and the other a lamp, each selling for £193,250 / $280,599. The Fabergé section of the sale was sold 95% by lot and 97% by value confirming a growing interest in Russia’s most famous Imperial jeweler and bodes well for the consortium who bought the Faberge name in 2008 and have started making contemporary Faberge(there is an essay entitled ‘They are aiming for the Tsars’ elsewhere on this website which examines this story).

Christie’s reported that buyers (by lot / by origin) for the entire sale were 70% Europe, 22% Americas, 3% Asia and 4% Middle East.
Other highpoints of the sale included: -

• “A Riverside Farm”, by Mikhail Klodt (1832-1902), an imposing and very detailed Ukrainian landscape, sold for £769,250 / $1,116,951 / €932,331 against an estimate of £700,000-900,000.

• “Roses and Apples”, by Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939) – a stunning still-life which was executed during one of the most important periods of his career – sold for £937,250 / $1,360,887 / €1,135,947 against a pre-sale estimate of £100,000-150,000. This represents the third highest price for a work by the artist sold at auction.

• Princess Maria Tenisheva’s two bronze and enamel boxes and covers, one in the form of a fish, selling for £217,250 / $315,447 and the other in form of a pigeon, selling for £157,250 / $228,327 demonstrate the continued demand for rare and exceptional works of art. The Russian works of art section included five works of art selling in excess of £100,000.

• The European Royal Collection of 45 Fabergé works of art realized a total of £746,025 / $1,083,228 / €904,182 and was highlighted by a jeweled and enameled gold-mounted nephrite egg-form bonbonnière, selling alone for £115,250 / $167,343 / €139,683.

Sotheby’s small sale on June 7^th of Important Russian Art sold 17 of its 26 Lots with the highest price offred for a rare and well provenanced African period work by Alexander Yakovlev entitled Titi and Naranghe which sold for £2,505,250 against an estimate of £700,000-900,000. Yakovlev is a mainstay of the Russian art market along with Ivan Aivasovsky, Nicholas Roerich and Konstantin Korovin. In 2009, for example, he was the 4^th highest selling artist at auction with a turnover of $29,066,620 and the highest number of lots at 220. He holds the third highest price ever achieved for a Russian artwork with $5,561,040 after Konstantin Somov ($7,327,952) and Natalia Goncharova ($6,229,793). And yet despite this success between 2005 and 2009 his buy in rate was a high 38%. Perhaps this is explained by the bizarre discrepancy between the interest in his African works and the lack of it in his European works. For example in this round of sales at MacDougall’s there was a fine Capri period work by Yacovlev of an attractive subject entitled the Fruit girl of Capri which barely floated off on its reserve of £36,000…..so there are still bargains to be had in this uneven and young market.

Another fine lot at Sotheby’s was Yuri Annenkov’s portrait of Zinovii Grzhebin which sold for £1,777,250 against an estimate of £800,000-1,200,000. This was a solid but not spectacular result as another similar sized and dated portrait of another important Russian literary figure Aleksandr Nikolaevich Tikhonov had sold for £2,260,500 on November 28^th 2007 at the height of the market.

MacDougall’s auction of Thursday10th June rounded off the week with a total of £7,563,942. One of their top lots was the perennially popular Nicholas Roerich whose The Black Gobi sold for £790,118. Roerich sold 133 lots in 2009 for a total of $37,272,711 and averaged a buy in rate of fewer than 10% between 2005 and 2009, a percentage only beaten by Ivan Pokhitomov. MacDougall’s also did well with Niko Pirosmani’s Arsenal at Night which sold for £1,075,368 and Aleksandr Volkov’s Wedding which sold for £541,168. Their buy in rate was probably higher than Christie’s and Sotheby’s primarily because they are bravely including more Soviet period paintings in their sales, a period which the Russian collectors are still treating with suspicion but which will become sought after in time. MacDougall’s also achieved £1,592,202 for their inaugural sale of Russian works on paper, an area that is surely undervalued at present. On Monday 7^th June, in their Russian sale, Bonham’s had some successes with their top lots such as Vladimir Weisberg’s Portrait of Guinsberg which sold for £186,000 against an estimate of £50,000-70,000 and Erik Bulatov’s Portrait of Olga Andreeva which sold for £150,000 against an estimate of £80,000-120,000.

To conclude the Russian market is nowhere near the level it achieved in 2007 but it has stabilized and the better paintings are selling if at only 2/3rds of their 2007 levels. The demand is skittish, with many items failing to attract any interest whatsoever, and the only the major pieces with impeccable and watertight provenance that almost guarantees the attribution selling well. The taste of the realistic 19^th century artist such as Aivazovsky and Shishkin would also appear to be fading whilst demand for 20^th century works is in the ascendency.

In order to have taste, it is not enough to see and to know what is beautiful in a given work. One must feel beauty and be moved by it. It is not even enough to feel, to be moved in a vague way: It is essential to discern the different shades of feeling. Nothing must escape an instantaneous perception. Here again intellectual and artistic taste resembles sensual taste: Just as the gourmet immediately perceives and recognizes a mixture of two liqueurs, so the man of taste, the connoisseur, will discern in a rapid glance any mixture of styles. He will perceive a flaw next to an embellishment. — Voltaire, 1757

Connoisseurship is a dead language and a dead art. Or so art theorists with disdain for aesthetic judgments would have us believe for some 40 years now. Indeed, connoisseurship has long languished — unfashionable and unpracticed — in academic circles and beyond. But still it matters for many people, and there are signs of a renaissance, even in the most unlikely realms of the art world. The time is ripe for reconceiving connoisseurship as relevant to furthering culture and seeing with maximum powers of observation that which humankind creates.

Connoisseurship is deeply rooted in the past. Etymologically, it derives from the Latin cognoscere (to know), and conceptually, it dates back to ancient Greece, where people began valuing art for its aesthetic merits, rather than for its imagined superpowers to placate deities. By the time a market for classical Greek sculpture was flourishing in Augustan Rome, acknowledged experts were opining on originals and copies and on matters of taste generally. With terms like judicium subtile videndis artibus (subtle judgment in seeing art), the nascent language of connoisseurship invoked the intellect and the senses. Connoisseurship has retained its classical associations ever since.

After waning in the Middle Ages, it regained currency in the Renaissance with a market that included paintings and drawings. The 18^th century was a Golden Age, as connoisseurship entered the English lexicon (in 1719 via painter -collector Jonathan Richardson as “connoissance”) and developed into an intellectual discipline with philosophers like Voltaire penning elegant discourses. More than a century of fine-tuning ensued, with methodologies echoing forms of literary criticism: e.g., “legislative” (judgment based on a priori canons), “scientific” (judgment based on objective criteria), “expository” (explanation without judgment), and “impressionistic” (personal responses with or without judgment). Approaches ranged broadly from striving for scientific objectivity (Giovanni Morrelli’s morphological analysis) to those engaging in subjective appreciation (Anatole France’s “adventures of a soul among masterpieces”).

Though widely regarded far into the 20^th century as essential for collecting, curating, and critiquing, connoisseurship suffered attacks early on. Enlightenment commentators worried that it was easily corrupted by market forces and unduly focused on establishing financial value, rather than on loftier artistic aspects (still true today). Such tendencies spurred protracted debate, but connoisseurship never withered until the 1960s, when champions of Marxism, Feminism, Relativism, Postmodernism, and Multiculturalism began to discredit it as elitist, sexist, unscientific, and irrelevant to socio-political-economic studies of art, among other harsh pejoratives. Today, connoisseurship is largely relegated to identifying valuable works (mostly by long-dead artists) in service of commodification, rather than art appreciation.

The Features of Connoisseurship

To ascertain why it has been so marginalized, one must examine common conceptions and methods of connoisseurship. Certain salient rational and sensual capacities characterize the ideal connoisseur. First, a capacity for prolonged, practiced looking: patient, in-person, close-up examination of countless works of art, comparing and contrasting them to discern their most subtle distinguishing characteristics. Connoisseurs consider the totality of art, practicing what theorist Max Friedländer preached: “He who knows but one master knows him insufficiently.” One thus cultivates a “good eye” through unconscious mastery of the art of perception. This must be accompanied by a keen visual memory. The best connoisseurs, as collectors of visual experiences, have a remarkable Proustian capacity for instantaneous memories of the most fugitive “fragments of existence withdrawn from Time.” They also possess the power of “intuition,” or what Voltaire calls “feeling,” registering the smallest perceptions of a work’s ineffable “essence.” (Think of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling 2005 book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.) Finally, the connoisseur must paradoxically master communicating nonverbal perceptions through verbal opinions and judgments, delivered with sufficient objectivity and authority to carry weight with others.

These attributes may seem beyond reproach, but the fact that it requires considerable effort to become a connoisseur is objectionable to those who criticize anything not equally “accessible” to everyone. Moreover, reliance on inarticulable intuition in establishing authorship and authenticity (in the absence of empirical evidence or logical reasoning) likewise incites mistrust among those already suspicious of the fact that the designation of connoisseur requires no licensing, certification, or regulation (the old fear of “snake oil salesmen”).

Connoisseurship elicits further opprobrium when it seeks to rank works, since aesthetic judgments are subjective and aesthetic experience involves an element of schadenfreude. Detractors also deride it as an ethnocentric vocation of privileged white Anglo-Saxon males, rooted in the era when they practiced connoisseurship on their Grand Tours of Europe. During these long expeditions, young men collected expensive works as signifiers of social status — the kind of connoisseurs admiring paintings and sculptures in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence so spectacularly depicted here by Johann Zoffany. Ironically, democratized art consumption, no longer reserved for aristocrats and blue bloods, has eroded its social cachet.

Today’s Challenges

Add to this the contradictions between connoisseurship and contemporary art. Old-school connoisseurs, who favor “masterpieces” of the past over “mediocrities” of the present, are much to blame in alienating the contemporary art world. Traditional formalist stylistic analysis of visual elements likewise excludes contemporary art objects that have more to do with ideas than with how well something is rendered. When the artist’s hand is absent from ready-mades or commissioned objects, attribution and craft matter little, and conventional connoisseurs have trouble adapting their skills to other purposes. In cases of performance, “process-oriented,” and “instruction-based” art, for which no physical object even exists in a post-medium age, object-based connoisseurship is left out in the cold. (Marcel Proust was prophetic when he said that “Museums are dwellings that house only thoughts.”) Connoisseurship recedes, too, as contemporary notions of visual “culture” usurp “Art with a capital A.”

Other, more benign, factors are eroding connoisseurship. Scientific aids (e.g., x-radiography) are now widely preferred to the naked eye, though connoisseurs must interpret the data. Much of the world’s art can be seen, moreover, in lavishly illustrated books and high-resolution digital images on the Internet. In violation of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s acquaintance principle, we increasingly forgo first-hand experience of the actual works on which connoisseurship depends. Yet no matter how fine, a reproduction can never exactly reproduce color, texture, scale, or volume. In art pilgrimages, cameras replace sketchbooks, minimizing mental and visual engagement before moving on to the next must-see work. Our time-pressed, short-cut oriented society stunts our eye. Probing physical, psychological, and emotional experiences of art are rare for all but the most purposeful art lovers.

Still further erosion of object-based connoisseurship stems from scarcity of great material in the market. What remains moves up the food chain, such that a still-abundant supply of late-period Picassos (once dismissed as incoherent scrawls of a past-his-prime master) now enjoys the same “masterpiece” status once reserved for Blue, Rose, Cubist, and Classical period Picassos. In some cases, rapprochement is merited, and decades of received opinion are rightly set aside, but in others, standards are lowered. Connoisseurs are only as good as what their eye consumes. Fewer great ones may inhabit the ranks of “the Trade” in years to come. Museum curators, enjoying prolonged communion with masterpieces out of unadulterated passion for their subject, may be the greatest hope for connoisseurship. (This is ironic, since museums did not exist when connoisseurship first developed, and were, in their infancy, exclusive playgrounds of wealthy would-be gentleman-connoisseurs before admitting the wide public that now populates them.)

There is hope, too, in the commercial arena now that the recession has purged spendthrift amateurs, recalibrated prices, and forced hidden treasures back into circulation, enabling connoisseur-collectors whose bank accounts remain intact to train their eye on what remains that is superlative. Perhaps now we can give credit to genuine connoisseurs, rather than to those whose sole accomplishment is to throw vast sums of money at art, only to be lauded as great collectors without ever taking the time to fathom their acquisitions. Theirs is legacy-building and status-seeking collecting, often relying entirely on another’s eye. Indeed, in the shadows behind many celebrated collectors is an unheralded connoisseur.

The Road Ahead

Connoisseurship aimed at establishing authorship and authenticity is not endangered (the market sustains those efforts in pursuit of profits). Rather, the threat is to that which aims to identify aesthetic quality in the belief that it can be ascertained and articulated and that greatness is rare and worth privileging. We produce more art than ever. In the words of philosopher Jean Baudrillard: “Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” Connoisseurship helps, as Voltaire put it, “to perceive a flaw next to an embellishment” and thus disgorge.

In a recent interview, artist Jeff Koons captured the prevailing permissive attitude when he remarked, “Art requires you to bring nothing with it. Your own past history is perfect.” Yet we must surpass raw experiences of art (though legitimate) if we are to fully appreciate it (in the sense of understanding, versus enjoying) and heed Friedländer’s caveat that “a universal receptiveness carried to an extreme, leads to aesthetic Nihilism.” If we no longer receive classical educations or study iconography, we cannot grasp the rich symbolism, for example, of an Italian altarpiece, Dutch still life, or French conversation piece. We will think like a collector who recently quipped: “If there is a bunch of flowers on the wall, you walk by them and say, ‘That’s pretty,’ but that’s the end of it.” We will miss the profound aesthetic experience that Proust relished: “We have learned from [Jean-Baptiste] Chardin that a pear is as living as a woman, that an ordinary piece of pottery is as beautiful as a precious stone. The painter had proclaimed the divine equality of all the things before the mind that contemplates them, before the light that beautifies them.” It’s true that no one must be a connoisseur to enjoy art, but the more one learns, the more one experiences new dimensions of appreciation.

To those seeking to banish connoisseurship from nontraditional idea-based art, or any art, let’s throw down the gauntlet. Connoisseurship is concerned with physical qualities, but equally concerned with ideas and Voltaire’s “different shades of feeling.” Form and content are conjoined. “We use colors,” Chardin said, “but we paint with our feelings.” These days, people are enamored with novelty, as if traditional techniques have run their course. With notable exceptions (e.g., John Currin, Will Cotton, Ellen Altfest, Eric Fischl), technical mastery of a medium like painting is irrelevant to critically acclaimed art-making. In literature, words must form intelligible sentences, or the message is incoherent. The best writers deviate from rules of usage for aesthetic effect, yet master them to break them impactfully. The same is true for virtuoso musicians and five-star chefs: Their discordant notes and idiosyncratic ingredients flow from fundamentals. But painters no longer need to know how to mix pigments, layer glazes, or achieve chiaroscuro, sfumato, sprezzatura, and the like to gain recognition. Nor do sculptors need to master modeling, carving, constructing, or casting. Fewer artists “strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting…to the perfect blending of form and substance” once extolled by novelist Joseph Conrad. Connoisseurship thus outlasts the very elements of style it was originally designed to promulgate and critique, since it continues to perform an evaluative function, whatever the object of its gaze. It can bring us full circle, however, to age-old art forms in assessing the relative merits of new modes of expression.

Though conventional stylistic connoisseurship may founder in the face of new art forms, we must still judge form and substance if we care to differentiate among all that inundates our senses in this age of art proliferation. Adapting French critic Ferdinand Brunetière’s commentary on criticism, if connoisseurship “forgets” that an object is an object, and refrains from judgment, it is no longer connoisseurship, but “history and psychology.” With her groundbreaking Extreme Connoisseurship exhibition of conceptual art at the Harvard Art Museum in 2002, curator Linda Norden reminded us that, if we expect new objects to look familiar, we cannot fully appreciate them.

Connoisseurship, which is open to all who invest the time, must evolve. Without sacrificing close scrutiny of objects, it must be reconceived to admit new criteria by which to judge new visual evidence and adapt to the works it seeks to judge. Still, it must strive to identify that which rises above legendary connoisseur-dealer Bernard Berenson’s dreaded “fads, stampedes and hysterias of the moment.” Although Friedländer reminds us that “the boundary line between genius and talent has never been done quite successfully,” we must nevertheless try. Connoisseurship teaches us that fame does not equal greatness; artists rise as much by luck as talent. Quality lies equally in anonymity; the greatest feat for a connoisseur is to identify quality that bears no name.

Just as writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe conceived of destructive and productive criticism, the same is true of connoisseurship (ultimately a form of criticism): Connoisseurs can make perfunctory pronouncements of “good, better, best” as gospel, or they can answer meaningful questions about what an artist intended and how well he or she succeeded. The answers (right or wrong) will inspire new artistic dialogue and creation — ultimate proof that the language and art of connoisseurship are alive and well, poised to awaken the senses.

Carol Strone is an attorney and founder of Carol Strone Art Advisory, 29 East 64^th Street, 4C, New York, NY 10065, 212.879.2748, cstrone@csartadvisory.com

The recent record price of £29.2m for a Raphael drawing confirms demand for important Old Master drawings.

On Tuesday 8th December at Christie’s London a Raphael drawing entitled Head of a Muse was sold for £29.2m, doubling its estimate of £12m–16m and setting a world record price for a work on paper at auction. The price exceeded a 1911 Henri Matisse still life painting from the Yves Saint Laurent collection that Christie’s sold last spring for US$46.5m and an Andy Warhol screen print that Sotheby’s sold in November for US$43.7m. The high price achieved by the Raphael was covered by the press from Delhi to Doha and from Moscow to Beijing, focusing attention on this area of the art market loved by specialist collectors and museum curators and yet little known to the general public.

The Raphael exceeded the previous record for his work held by a painting of Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino, an awkward portrait that was sold in July 2007 for £18.5m. Raphael’s black chalk preparatory drawing on paper of the Head of a Muse, only 12 × 8¼ ins, depicts a young woman looking dreamily to her left, hair tied up in a scarf, eyes half-focused on something in the distance. The outlines are drawn in sure confident strokes and light and shadow are differentiated with subtle shading and cross hatching. A soft light falls left to right, putting the right-hand side of her face into shadow. The drawing is particularly important because it was made as a preparatory work for one of the heads of the background crowd in the Parnassus, the third of four frescoes painted by Raphael in 1510 for the Vatican library, the Stanza della Segnatura. This was the artist’s first commission from Pope Julius II and remains the last study in private hands from this series, the others being in the Louvre in Paris.

The drawing shows small dots along the main outlines, indicating it was an auxiliary cartoon. This means that there was another drawing from which the head of the muse in the fresco was constructed. That drawing would have had holes punched along its outlines and dust scattered over the holes whilst placed above the present drawing and later also onto the fresco. Then the artist would have joined up the dots on the present drawing, creating an identical secondary drawing on which he could experiment. This explains the slight differences in the features of the girl in the fresco and the present drawing which some journalists such as Souren Melikian in the New York Times have worried about unduly.

The drawing has a distinguished provenance which adds to its value, having belonged to important dealers like Samuel Woodburn and Colnaghi, leading artists including Sir Thomas Lawrence and royalty such as King William IV of Holland. Most recently it had belonged to the late Colonel Norman Colville, who was badly wounded and left for dead on the battlefields of the First World War. Recovering against the odds, Colonel Colville later built a good art collection incorporating the finest oak and Queen Anne furniture and Old Master paintings and drawings. The collection was split between his townhouse in Kensington Square, which had formerly belonged to Talleyrand whilst ambassador to England, and his Jacobean manor at Penheale in Cornwall. With a family that could be traced back to 1066, he was a connoisseur, only buying objects that appealed to him for their beauty. His drawings collection included other works by Raphael and sheets by Leonardo da Vinci, Marco Zoppo, Dürer and Fra Angelico.

The existing record for a work on paper was for Danseuse au repos by Edgar Degas sold by Sotheby’s New York for US$37m in November 2008. Christie’s put an estimate of £12m–£16m on the Raphael, which many dealers thought was optimistic but, as James Faber of leading London drawings dealers Day and Faber observed, “It was a high estimate but with a drawing like this you can never tell what will happen because it is a trophy that appeals to art collectors of all types and not just collectors of Old Master drawings. It doesn’t really bear any relationship to the price of normal Old Master drawings more than say a unique house in Millionaires’ Row does to a Chelsea town house.”

The bidding on the Raphael involved a variety of bidders up to around £20m, at which point it was contested by two bidders who have consistently battled for most of the outstanding drawings that have come up over the last five years. The London drawings dealer Luca Baroni, the eventual under-bidder, was present in the room representing a private collector and Jennifer Wright from Christie’s New York was taking bids on the telephone from a client who was the successful buyer and widely reported by the press to be Leon Black.

Leon Black will be better known to the Spears readership as the Chairman of Apollo Management which he founded in 1990 and today manages in excess of US$20 billion. An alumni of Dartmouth College with an MBA from Harvard, Black was formerly head of Corporate Finance at Drexel Burnham Lambert . A keen art collector with his wife Debra and advised by the leading American museum curators, his collection ranges from Old Master drawings to Impressionist paintings and the post-war American artists.

The market for Old Master drawings is steady and attracts a passionate group of collectors, dealers and museum curators. It is only when a high price attracts attention that the mainstream notices the drawings market but, for its enthusiasts, the market has continued without interruption during this recession, along with Old Master paintings, whereas, according to Artprice’s Art Market Price Charts, Impressionist paintings have dropped in value by 40 percent and contemporary art by at least 70 percent. Contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have disappeared completely from auction catalogues because the auction houses dare not put them on the block.

Drawings attract collectors because of their immediacy and their insight into the artist’s thinking. Drawings may be finished items intended for sale but are often studies as the artist tries to work on his ideas or what he sees before starting to put paint onto canvas. Drawings have an informality and spontaneity that is attractive. They are timeless and look good in traditional and modern interiors. Often on a small scale and with uniformity from mainly being on paper, they mix style and date better than paintings. For example, some collectors of contemporary art also collect Old Master drawings and mix them up whereas this doesn’t work with Old Master paintings. There are many collectors today still forming fine collections of drawings such as Jean Bonna in Geneva and George Pebereau in Paris.

Drawings also have a less expensive pricing structure than paintings. A great trophy like the previously described Raphael rarely appears on the market because such works by the leading Renaissance and Baroque artists have been sought after from the day they were created and now tend to be in the world’s great museum collections of drawings, including: the Albertina in Vienna, the Louvre in Paris, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Uffizi in Florence, the British Museum in London, the Metropolitan and the Morgan Library in New York, the National Gallery in Washington and the Getty in Los Angeles. The leading trophy artists include Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt and Goya. In the 18th century Fragonard and Boucher are sought after, in the 19th century Cézanne and van Gogh were both excellent draughtsmen and in the 20th century there are Picasso, Matisse and many others.

Decorative drawings can be bought for prices starting at around £5,000, and for £250,000 a major work by an important artist can be found. Specialist dealers in London and New York hold larger stocks than paintings dealers mainly because of the more affordable pricing, and many are happy to share their knowledge and expertise with anyone who shows an interest. Christie’s and Sotheby’s now often combine their drawings and paintings sales which are held several times a year. For better drawings, there are many issues that a dealer can advise on, such as condition, which has a major influence on a drawing’s value.

People often complain in the paintings market that it is difficult to find good paintings and, when they do, they are very expensive, whereas drawings are still affordable and provide a fascinating, decorative and enjoyable field in which to collect. Three excellent places to establish a feel for drawings and the market are the annual London Master Drawings Week held in early July and the New York Drawings Week held in late January when the dealers club together and all open their doors with interesting exhibitions. There is also the Salon du Dessin, the annual drawings fair in Paris, which in 2010 will be held from Wednesday 24th to Monday 29th March.

Modern Cataloguing

The Auction Catalogue

Since Auctioneers changed their role from simple broker to art experts and advisors the catalogue has changed out of all recognition, as it has become the instrument that establishes the written authority of the auction house. Many criticisms have been levelled at these lengthening volumes, mainly because they give an appearance of sound scholarship when in fact they are so variable that no generalisation is valid. Another weakness is that the auction house frequently relies on information supplied by the vendor whose reliability is equally variable.

Nevertheless, a vast amount of information is published in these sale catalogues, some of it taking advantage of the more recent advances in specialist scholarship, but a considerable proportion still relying on old references which are not always checked. It is unlikely that the role of the sale catalogue will change in the foreseeable future.

The Museum Catalogue

Outside the National Gallery seriously researched museum catalogues have virtually disappeared from UK Public Collections. Instead there are now an increasing number of illustrated inventories of major collections, some more detailed than others (e.g. the Wallace Collection supported by Lindsay Fine Art Ltd, and the Southampton City Art Gallery Collection published by Lindsay Fine Art Ltd).

The reverse is true in Continental Europe where an increasing number of collections, great and small, issue detailed catalogues of their complete holdings, almost always with comprehensive reference material. These are the basis on which scholarship is founded.

Quite often an auction catalogue (see above) will refer to the existence of another version or variant in a museum. The prospective buyer should always check the relevant museum catalogue as often there will be more detailed information not quoted in the sale catalogue.

As a rough guide each of the main European countries adopt slightly different styles of presenting the information, which can be confusing.

Some standardisation is seen in the fully illustrated volumes covering the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the museums of Antwerp and Brussels, the Louvre, the Prado and the Uffizi to name a few examples.

The French tend to be as complete as possible with their bibliographical information, as do the Germans. The extensive work done on Italian public collections is more uneven.

The Exhibition Catalogue

Most exhibition catalogues are now written in the form of books that can mislead the unwary as key works by the artist or movement cannot always be lent. Where the exhibition is of a great artist, e.g. Titian at the National Gallery, there is an increasing tendency to omit details of provenance and early literature. This increases the popular appeal of the ‘Catalogue’ and makes it more portable in the exhibition itself.

Sometimes, however, where the figure exhibited is a more minor one the exhibition catalogue (with or without detailed entries) takes on the role of the only standard reference work.

The Cataloguing Process

This now requires a variety of skills in order to achieve the level of accuracy expected. The precise information recorded in a statement catalogue entry is as follows: -

• Dimensions, inscription, both the front and back. These have to be recorded accurately as they are often wrong in previous publications. Frequently the exact form of the signature/inscription requires revision.
• History (or Provenance as it is known). This is often contentious in Auction Catalogues (see above) as the exact history of a painting can affect its potential value e.g. the existence of a prestigious previous owner. Provenances are often painfully inaccurate or at best misleading.
• Literature/Bibliography. This should be complete as far as possible, but often it is not. Some auction houses gloss over opinion detrimental to the picture being offered for sale – they never claim the literature is complete. In museum catalogues the French tend to be the most assiduous in making their bibliographies complete.
• Exhibition History. This is often limited to recent exhibitions, when in fact the 19th century exhibition history of a painting may be of great interest especially to the historian of taste.
• Related works. The catalogue is not obliged to present information about related works – copies, other versions, similar compositions by other artists etc. However, good catalogues will present this information and a great deal of skill is required here as it presupposes a detailed knowledge of the field.
• Comments. Here the compiler of the catalogue entry usually employs his own method. Auction catalogues must impress the intended buyer and thus tend to bring in as much extraneous information as the entry will carry without descending into mindless waffle. The French tend to be laconic, the Italians on the verbose side but in these countries a high standard is usually achieved. Thus, in assessing a particular catalogue entry the prospective user must first assess its purpose (i.e. commercial, academic or populist) and judge accordingly.

The Catalogue Raisonne

This is in a category of its own, as anyone compiling a raisonne on an individual artist has to rely on the existing corpus of published information. When the artist is much written about this is now daunting indeed and it has become increasingly difficult for scholars to be thorough on great artists.

In many cases the real flaws in a raisonne are caused by the variability of information available to the compiler. A significant work in a great national gallery or prestigious private collection will accumulate a body of literature that is extensive. Works in less ‘accessible’ locations will have attracted much less attention, as fewer people will have seen them. This can be downright misleading where a picture in a remote provincial museum will have attracted a modicum of literary references written by people who have never seen the picture concerned. Like the other sections listed above the catalogue raisonne varies greatly in standards of accuracy.

Christopher Wright, September 2006, London.

Christopher Wright is an art historian who writes extensively on art and in particular on the Old Master painters. After graduating from the Courtauld Institute he was Deputy Librarian at the Witt Library before become an independent writer. He has published articles in most of the leading art journals and written over 30 books including numerous museum catalogues and catalogue raisonees on Vermeer, Rembrandt, Bonnington, Poussin and Georges de la Tour.

Family Jewels Faberge heirs buy back the name and relaunch the jeweller

by Ivan Lindsay

Fabergé, jeweller to the last tsars, the British royal family and the European aristocracy before WWI, has been re-launched this summer by Sarah and Tatiana Fabergé.  The two cousins, the last surviving great-granddaughters of Peter Carl Fabergé, have teamed up with the British private equity firm Pallinghurst Resources and the South African firm Investec to buy back the Fabergé name from Unilever, who have been using it to sell Brut aftershave and deodorant.  That the brand has survived is due to the enduring mystique of the Romanovs with their fabled riches and the tragedy of their brutal and bloody demise.

The name Fabergé derives from the Latin faber meaning “smith” or “maker”, and Carl Fabergé (1846–1920) was descended from a long line of Protestant Huguenot craftsmen who had fled from La Bouteille in Picardy after Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1645.  After spending time in Berlin and Dresden, the Fabergés arrived in St Petersburg where Carl was born in 1846.  In 1864 Carl embarked on a grand tour of Europe where he received tuition from the finest goldsmiths and studied objects and jewellery at Europe’s leading museums.  By 1866 he was back in St Petersburg working in the jewellery workshops of the family business which were also cataloguing and restoring objects from the Hermitage Museum.  By 1882 Carl had been awarded the title Master Goldsmith and the tsars began to take notice of him after he won a gold medal at the Pan-Russian Exhibition held in Moscow in 1882.

Fabergé struggled to obtain royal patronage and, even a decade after taking over his father’s business in 1872, royal accounts reveal he was paid only 6,400 roubles (today US$64,000) in 1883 by the Imperial family whilst four other St Petersburg jewellers received more.  A request for a royal warrant in 1884 was denied.  The breakthrough came in 1885 when the Tsar, Alexander III, was trying to decide what to give his wife for Easter, an important occasion for present giving in Russia.  For Alexander was the richest man in the world at the time, and his wife Marie Fedorovna already had everything a woman could dream of.

Marie Fedorovna, daughter of Christian IX of Denmark, was a small, dark and husky-voiced beauty.  On her arrival in Russia she became the leader of society and at Imperial balls she danced the mazurka spiritedly in front of several thousand guests.  At such balls she showed off her jewels; huge pigeon blood rubies from the Mogok mine in Burma, flawless diamonds the size of quail’s eggs from Golconda in India and assorted tiaras, brooches, necklaces, earrings and rings.  The stones were “so large”, according to the wife of the American envoy to St Petersburg, that “they would not be handsome worn by any other person; as in that case, they would not be supposed to be real.”  The Tsarina’s decorators came in from Paris and her tailors from Milan.

An egg is a traditional gift at Easter in Russia and the Tsar commissioned Fabergé to make a special egg, the Hen Egg, which cost him 4,151 roubles (today US$43,000). Three days before Easter the Tsar wrote to his brother, the Grand Duke, “I am grateful to you, dear Vladimir, for the trouble you have taken in placing the order and for the Execution of the order itself, which could have not been more successful.”  He adds, “I do hope the egg will have the desired effect on its future owner.” What that effect was we do not know, but the Tsarina must have been pleased because so started a tradition in which first Alexander, and then his successor, Nicholas II, gave their wives exotic eggs full of layers and surprises, leading to the creation of around 50 Imperial eggs.

The outer cover of the Hen Egg is enamelled white to simulate eggshell and is opened by three bayonet fittings to reveal a matted gold yolk which in turn opens to reveal a vari-coloured gold hen in a suede-lined nest on stippled gold strings to resemble straw.  The hen also opens and is meticulously chased with tiny cabochon ruby eyes.  Fabergé took the idea from an early 18th-century egg, of which there are three versions, currently located at Rosenberg Castle in Denmark, the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, and in a private collection (formerly in the Green Vaults in Dresden).  The egg was such a success that six weeks after Alexander presented the egg to Marie on 1st May 1885, the court gave Fabergé an Imperial warrant.

With the arrival of the Imperial warrant and further royal patronage, Carl Fabergé’s business took off and the increase in sales allowed him to elevate the artistry in his jewellery to a level that had not been seen before. The eggs continued on an annual basis with Fabergé allowed complete artistic licence, the only stipulation being that they had to contain a surprise.  After his succession, Tsar Nicholas II took to ordering two eggs annually, one for his wife and one for his mother.

Although Fabergé is best known for the Easter eggs, he made an extensive range of objects, from tableware to fine jewellery.  With 600 employees and a headquarters in St Petersburg, offices followed in London, Kiev, Moscow and Odessa.  From 1882 until 1917 Fabergé produced between 150,000 and 200,000 objects.  Items ranged from humble silverware for the middle classes to necklaces for millionaires and empresses, from little animals (so beloved of the English royal family) made of semi -precious stones to flowers set in rock-crystal vases, cigarette cases, cane handles, vases, picture frames, paper knives, clocks, vodka bowls and crucifixes.  They were chased, spun, blown, gilded, enamelled, turned and carved and decorated in styles ranging from prehistoric Scythian through classical and baroque to contemporary Russian.  Materials included the full range of metals, enamels, leather and precious stones.

The intricate workmanship was too fussy for some.  The English journalist Harold Nicolson wrote after  a visit to Fabergé’s St Petersburg shop, “Those society trinkets appeared to me as symbols of Czarist Russia.  Inside that warm and brilliant shop the silly enamelled eggs would be laid out upon a black velvet napkin; outside the rime gathered slowly on the coachman’s beard.”  Likewise, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov recalled his sleigh “drifting past the show windows of Fabergé whose mineral monstrosities, jewelled troikas poised on marble ostrich eggs, and the like, highly appreciated by the Imperial family, were emblems of grotesque garishness to ourselves.”

Sensing trouble in 1916, Carl Fabergé formed his business into a joint stock company with a capital of three million roubles.  By 1918 the House of Fabergé was nationalised by the Bolsheviks and shortly afterwards it was no more.  The royal family were executed at Yekaterinburg and the property of the deceased emperor was transferred by decree to the state.  With the change in the world order, Fabergé’s ornate style fell out of fashion and the value of his work collapsed.  Carl Fabergé never recovered from the tragedy of what had happened to his adopted country and the loss of his business, and he died in Switzerland in 1920.  Two of Carl’s sons, Eugene and Alexander set up a new company, Fabergé et Compagnie in Paris in 1921 but it was not successful.  The brothers eventually sold the name to Samuel Rubin in 1951 for US$25,000 (today US$250,000) and he used it for a cosmetics range.

Although Fabergé was out of fashion, certain enthusiasts realised the value of the eggs and Soviet Russia, which desperately needed hard currency, began selling off the Imperial jewels, including the eggs.  By the mid 1930s only 10 of the 50 eggs given by the tsars to the tsarinas remained in the Kremlin.  An early collector was the company A la Vieille Russie who managed to buy six eggs in 1920, which, although genuine, were not royal commissions. Emanuel Snowman of the British jewellers Wartski bought nine eggs.  Armand Hammer actually took Fabergé goods on consignment from the Soviets, including several eggs which he sold in the USA.  Early private collectors of the eggs included Henry Talbot de Vere Clifton, Lillian Pratt, Jack and Belle Linsky, Marjory Meriwether Post, King Farouk and Dr Maurice Sandoz. Later, Malcolm Forbes managed to acquire eleven, nine of which were recently bought by Victor Veckselberg, who pre-empted the 2004 Sotheby’s sale with a bid of around US$120m, taking his total to fifteen.  This collection is reputedly once again available for acquisition en bloc at the right price.

With the emergence of rich Russian businessmen in the last decade, interest in Fabergé has risen.   Christie’s and Sotheby’s include Fabergé in the Russian sales in London and New York and an ex-Rothschild Fabergé egg made a record £8.9m in 2007 selling to Alexander Ivanov.  The new owners of Fabergé reportedly paid Unilever US$40m for the name and have already started trying to protect their investment, taking exception to the so-called “Fabergé museum” in Baden Baden, Germany.  Unusually, they are planning only to sell their range online.  Prices range from US$40,000 for a ring to US$7m for a bracelet inspired by Monet’s Water Lilies.  With a design team that includes Mark Dunhill, former president of Alfred Dunhill, they aim to re-create the success of Carl Fabergé, who, a hundred years ago exactly, was the most famous and successful jeweller in the world.

A sleeping bear awakes

Anyone working in upmarket real estate, oil, gas, diamonds, timber, mining or metals will already be aware that the Russians have arrived. The marriage between Russia’s vast natural resources and Western markets is creating some huge fortunes. Oleg Deripaska in aluminium, Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Prokhorov in metals and Mikhail Fridman, Roman Abramovich, Leonid Blavatnik and Viktor Vekselberg in oil and gas are among the better known.

Although it is less than twenty years since the fall of Communism the rapid arrival of the Russians in the West and their appetite for the finer things in life, including art, comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with Russian history. Peter the Great (1672-1725) travelled widely and imported art and Western culture into Russia, and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg stands as Catherine the Great’s (1729-1796) legacy.

The Demidovs, Vorontsovs, Yussupovs and Sheremetevs filled their palaces with European art, while Pavel Tretyakov preferred Russian paintings and bequeathed his entire collection to the city of Moscow. In the early twentieth century Shchukin and Morozov were early champions of Picasso and Matisse. At the end of World War II, Stalin ‘rescued’ an estimated three million art objects from Germany which today live in Russian museums and other depositories. These artworks were valued at over US$65 billion by the German government in 1997 and have clouded European politics ever since.

Art always follows the money. In the eighteenth century the art market was dominated by the English aristocracy, who visited Italy on their ‘Grand Tour’ collecting Renaissance masterpieces; Chatsworth was filled by the Duke of Devonshire and Woburn Abbey by the Duke of Bedford. In the nineteenth century it was the turn of the American Robber Barons such as Frick, Morgan and Mellon. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the art market is evolving once again and the most rapidly developing markets are those of China, India and Russia.

The Russians are just beginning to buy Western art and are starting with the best-known names. In May 2006 an unidentified Russian walked into Sotheby’s New York and bought Picasso’s Dora Maar au Chat for a cool $95 million. Rumour has it that he outbid Steve Wynn, Leslie Wexner and Paul Allen in the process. The buyer has at different times been speculated to be Roustam Tariko, a Moscow-based banking and vodka billionaire or Alexander Abramov, a steel magnate worth US$2.8 billion, according to Forbes.

However, what the Russians really want is their own heritage. Until recently the Russian art market consisted of a few paintings inserted into the general nineteenth and twentieth century sales. The first all-Russian sale happened in London only two years ago and now Christie’s and Sotheby’s are selling over one thousand lots a year, spread over four sales in New York and London.

Christie’s most recent Russian sale, on April 24^th 2006, totalled over US$15 million with 136 of 193 lots finding buyers, a 70% success rate. Sotheby’s, the current market leader, at its sale on April 26^th 2006 sold to a value of US$54.4 million, the highest total to date for a Russian sale. The top lot was Roerich’s Lao-Tze, which sold for US$2.2 million, more than seven times the pre-sale estimate of US$300,000. Auction records were set for Yakovleff (a little over US$1.8m), Bogdanov-Belski (nearly US$1.4m) and Vereschagin (around US$1.5m).

Although developing fast, the Russian art market is less than twenty years old and prices are often a fraction of those for Western art. Good paintings can still be bought for US$100,000 and exceptional ones US$250,000. The quality of the painters is on a par with their Western counterparts, as even in Soviet times there was an excellent system of art schools. Russian collectors dominate the market and only recently have a few Westerners begun to take an interest.

In brief, Russian art can be roughly divided into a few areas: the nineteenth century realist school is dominated by artists such as Repin, Shishkin and Levitan, while the pre-revolution period saw the rise of the ‘Avant Garde’ painters like Malevich, Popova and Kandinsky. This period also produced the first generation of Russian Impressionists such as Gorbatov, Zhukovsky and Korovin.

After the revolution Lenin, and later Stalin, outlawed the ‘Avant Garde’ and closely controlled artistic output for use as political propaganda. The political kitsch of this period is an acquired taste. Less well known is that there are some superb artists from the Communist period.

Stalin’s death in 1953 ushered in a period known as the ‘Krushchev thaw’ that allowed the emergence of the Moscow school and includes such great artists as Korzhev, Plastov and the Tkachev brothers, sometimes referred to in Russia as the second generation of Russian Impressionists. This movement is almost unknown in the West but contains some terrific paintings for the more intrepid collector.

Other areas starting to attract interest are the so-called ‘Non Conformist’ works of the Soviet era and contemporary art. Sotheby’s had their first sale of this period on 15^th February 2007 and raised US$5.17 million, selling over 80% of the 113 lots. The top lots were Evgeny Chubarov’s Untitled of 1992 at £288,000 and Erik Bulatov’s Revolution – Perestroika of 1988 at £198,000.

The Russian collectors have until now mainly been collecting the more internationally established artists of pre-revolutionary times and are only just starting to look at the art of the Soviet period. Russia’s richest woman, Yelena Baturina, wife of Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, is reputed to be a major buyer of Russian art at the auctions with a particular interest in Imperial porcelain. Viktor Vekselberg, who controls the Renova group with his partner Leonid Blavatnik, buys through the US$100 million Aurora Fine Fund and has been acquiring artists such as Repin, Konchalovsky, Aivazovsky and Vereschagin. In April 2004 Sotheby’s planned an auction to sell the nine jewel-encrusted Fabergé eggs belonging to the Forbes Collection. Vekselberg pre-empted the sale and bought all of them for a reputed US$110 million, working closely with the Kremlin who agreed to waive all import duty and taxes.

The Russian art market is the Wild West of the art world. As with all young markets it is important to take the best independent advice, as not everything is what it is purported to be. Dealing with the Russians is not difficult once you understand they are only interested in today and have little belief in the future. For those who are prepared to invest some time and effort in their art buying there are some outstanding painters still available at modest prices.

The following is a transcript in article format of the lecture given by Ivan Lindsay.

“

Good evening – ladies and gentleman and auction house representatives.I have been asked to talk on:-

‘The influence of art dealers and collectors on the development of the art market. The traditions, and tendencies of the last few years.’

I would like to begin by introducing myself. My name is Ivan Lindsay and I am art dealer with over 20 years experience in buying and selling major paintings. I deal primarily in European master paintings and have set many world record prices for artists like Canaletto, Goya and Hobbema. I set up a division to deal in Russian paintings in 2004. I am based in London and Switzerland and come from a family who have been collecting art for over 200 years. My mother’s family in Russia was Vorontsov and we built Palaces in St Petersburg, and Alupka in the Crimea when Count Mikhail Vorontosv was Governor of the Crimea. Alupka lost 537 paintings during the German occupation in 1942 and the paintings from the Vorontsov palace (built by Bartlomeo Rastrelli in 1749) on Sadovaia St, St Petersburg were dispersed around the Russian museums after 1917. My father’s family, the Earls of Crawford of Balcarres in Scotland, are major collectors of European Old Masters.

I would also like to introduce Katia Kapushesky, the art historian from Cambridge who is director of our stand here at the Moscow World fine Art Fair and who is kindly going to translate for me today.

I would like to start by saying it’s a pleasure to visit Moscow as usual and an honour to be invited to speak to such a distinguished group. I have been asked to talk on an interesting subject but in the short time I have been allocated I can only scratch the surface.

To examine this subject I would like to divide it into 3 periods:-

• 19th century.
• 1st half of 20th century
• After WW11 up until today.

But first I want to answer the question ‘What is an art dealer?’ because there seems some confusion in Russia. Whereas an auction house takes in paintings for sale and acts as an agent an art dealer monitors sales all over the world, has pictures offered to him privately and buys the best paintings for his stock. So a dealer acts primarily as a principle as opposed to an agent. For example, at my business, Lindsay Fine Art Ltd, we monitor over 50 auction houses, countless private collections and often see over 1000 paintings a week. An auction house has to sell every single picture that they take in for a sale whereas a dealer chooses the pictures he sells from out of thousands.

19th century – This was a period of huge dislocation which brought many paintings on to the market. For example some of the famous and largest sales of those times were:-

1848 – Lord Buckingham’s sale at Stowe which went on for 2 weeks.

1852 – The king of France, Louis Philippe’s Spanish picture sale at Phillips.

1859 – Lord Northwick’s collection dispersed.

1887 – Duke of Marlborough’s sale at Blenheim Place.

This mass of paintings was controlled by the art dealers. The auction room’s catalogues were very brief and did not give estimates. An example would be:-

Rembrandt, portrait of a girl, 30 x 20 ins. Attributions were wildly optimistic and, for example, anything that looked remotely like a Rembrandt was listed as a real Rembrandt.

Each of the major cities was controlled by an art dealer or 2 whose business was handed down from father to son. For example:-

London had Agnews and Colnaghi

Munich had Bohler

Paris had Sedelmayer……..and so on

All the major collectors tended to take advice and buy from the art dealer in their local city. For example the great collection of Lord Iveagh, head of the Guinness Beer family, at Kenwood House in London (now a museum) was bought on the advice of Agnews.

First half of the 20th century – Saw the emergence of some character art dealers of which the most famous was Lord Duveen who advised all the leading collectors of his day such as Huntingdon/Mellon/Widener/Altman and Kress. Andrew Mellon later gave his paintings to the National Gallery in Washington.

Schukin and Morozov were advised by Ambrose Vollard.

Collectors tended to influence taste less than the dealers who often, like Vollard and the post impressionists, often had to support artist for years before they could persuade collectors to buy them. All the best collections were formed taking the advice of a dealer. Those collectors who fluttered around from dealer to dealer tended to acquire mediocre collections because the dealers, knowing they were not going to have a long term relationship with the collector, did not give them the best pictures.

After WW11 – The dealers were destroyed by the war and never recovered and this time saw the rise of the auction rooms to the powerful position they are in today. Huge price rises made it difficult for dealers to hold stock. Even 20 years ago Bond Street in London had Colnaghi/Heim/Jacobs/Alexander and Agnews and now, due to the rise of the auction rooms and the increase in property values they have all gone. Agnews was the last one remaining and they sold up last week. All that is left today are some private dealers like myself who deal quietly and privately for a small band of clients who want to buy the best pictures.

The clever PR machines of the Auction Rooms have persuaded collectors that buying art is easy; you just turn up on the day or night and stick your hand up. Or you flick through the catalogue choosing pictures like chocolates and send out your agent to buy them. Because the Russian market is so young collectors do not have much confidence yet and they feel reassured that there is an under bidder at auction so they think they must be paying a real price and getting true value. The irony is that often a man who has and pays for the best lawyers, accountants and advisers that money can find, will buy art from an auction catalogue without any advice, having never seen it and with very little idea of what he is he really buying. They say you only really found out what you have bought in the art world when you try and sell it and because the Russian art market is so young most of the current collectors have not yet tried to sell their art.

The truth is that art always was, and still is, a very difficult thing to buy. Or rather, it is easy to buy average paintings but very hard to buy great paintings. It take years to learn how the auctions really work, if a painting is real or fake, if it’s a good example, if it is in good condition or heavily restored. Most people in the art world today, in this electronic age, know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Knowing what a piece of art is really worth can only come from the experience gained from having studied art and having bought and sold thousands of paintings. Most starter collectors are very influenced by the estimate at auction thinking this must be roughly what the picture be worth. However, auction estimates are often way too high or low. When we buy at auction we pay little interest in the auction estimate and work out own valuation of the painting.

Because the Russian art market is so new most Russian collectors are just buying from the auctions and don’t know any dealers. The dealer is an endangered species but there are a few left with enormous experience.

In conclusion: – It is my hope that with fairs such as this one that the Russian collectors will learn how to benefit from the dealers experience. We have brought US$50,000,000 worth of paintings to our stand at the fair with some of the finest paintings available on the world market at the moment. We have 3 important Picassos including a rare Acrobat and Clown from his pink period. Russian museum curators have told us that our Madonna and Child by Andrea del Sarto is the most important Renaissance painting to have been brought into Russia since before 1918. We will gladly share our knowledge and experience with any collectors or curators who would like to come down to our stand and have a talk or look at some pictures. Or come and see us in Switzerland, London or Madrid. Thank you for this invitation to join your Round table discussion and it has been my pleasure to talk to you.

Most of Hiscox’s art claims actually arise from when art works are in transit. They also have to contend with what Read refers to as the more sophisticated art crimes, such as the use of inflated insurance valuations as collateral for dodgy loans, fakes and forged paintings, smuggling without correct documentation, defective title on looted or stolen art works, and the modern reproduction
of ‘old’ furniture. In April 2008 The Sunday Times reported that Dennis Buggins, restorer to the leading London-based furniture dealer John Hobbs for the past 21 years, had come forth with photographic evidence that he had either faked or reconstructed many of the 1,875 pieces of furniture he handled for Hobbs. According to The New York Times, Hobbs’s clients such as David H Koch, Leslie H Wexner, Oscar de la Renta and Valentino are highly concerned.
Read recommends insurance as a good start because this usually involves taking a photograph of each item and warrants a survey of the home by the insurer’s surveyor. Although 80 per cent of households insure their art in the US, the figure drops to 60 per cent in the UK and 50 per cent in mainland Europe, as people are often worried about revealing what they have. Prices of art insurance have dropped from 1 per cent per annum in the 1970s, when art was first separated out from household contents policies, to between 0.1 per cent and 0.2 per cent today. A large collection with a client described by Read as ‘rich, honest and careful’ can even attract a premium of less than 0.1 per cent.
Art theft is as old as recorded history. Sargon II ruled Syria between 722 and 705 BC from his palace at Dur- Sharrukin near modern-day Mosul in Iraq and conquered most of the eastern Mediterranean, removing all religious artefacts, works of art, archives, military banners, musical instruments, armour, gold and silver. From one temple complex in the city of Musasir he removed one ton of gold, five tons of silver and 334,000 objects.
Nebuchadnezzar II (630–562 BC), King of Babylon, defeated all his neighbours and sacked Jerusalem in 587 BC, enslaving the Jewish population and emptying the Temple and plants to remind his homesick wife Amytis of her native land.

In the early Greek period respectful behaviour was usually adopted towards the statues of defeated foes so as not to offend the gods, but by the Hellenistic period wide-scale looting became prevalent. Dionysius of Syracuse (c. 430–367 BC) drove the Carthaginians out of Sicily before removing the gold mantle of Zeus at Olympia, as well as statues, gold objects and the gold crowns from statues’ heads.
Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) financed his campaigns by looting, and emptied the Persian treasuries of Susa, Sardis and Persepolis of over 4,500 tons of gold. During the Roman Empire looting was acceptable and expected during times of war; when a general had killed over 5,000 of the enemy, captured the king or queen of the vanquished, and had a sizable enough quantity of loot, he was allowed to parade his spolia through the streets of Rome in an officially sanctioned ‘Triumph’. During the Fourth Crusade, Doge Enrico Dandolo sacked and looted Constantinople in 1196, filling the treasury of St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice with Byzantine treasure, where it remains today. In the Renaissance, princes regularly raided.

Henry VIII emptied the English monasteries in the 1530s and the Spanish adventurers Francisco Pizarro and Hernán Cortés subjugated the Incan and Aztec empires before removing their gold and shipping it to Spain, although some was intercepted by Sir Francis Drake. In the 17th century, Sweden, under King Gustavus Adolphus, pillaged Northern Europe in the Thirty Years War before his daughter, Queen Christina, stole the collections of the late Rudolf II from Prague in 1649, including more than 1,000 paintings. Napoleon financed his campaigns by looting, and stole artworks from Egypt, Italy, Spain and Germany, trying to legalise his actions by forcing the vanquished to sign treaties such as the Treaty of Tolentino with the Vatican in 1797.
Between 1939 and 1945, Germany removed 592.48 tons of gold from the occupied countries and looted an estimated 20 per cent of Europe’s artworks. The art went to Hitler’s henchmen, such as Hermann Göring, who had over 1,500 paintings at his country estate Karinhall, or was earmarked for Hitler’s intended Führer Museum at Linz in Austria, for which 6,000 paintings were reserved. When the Russians started finding German depositories of art in salt mines and monasteries on their advance in 1944, Stalin ordered for it to be removed and over three million objects were brought to Russia, where they have remained, except for some items returned to Dresden (then under Russian control) in 1956. In 2000 the Russians passed a law in the Duma that states that as Russia did not start the war, and they lost 25 million people, they view the art they ‘rescued’ as compensation.
Art theft has continued at a steady rate since the Second World War. Interpol has had a dedicated department for art theft since 1947 and circulates a list of stolen artworks which now contains over 30,000 items. The 50 most valuable paintings are an astonishing selection, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Rubens, Picasso, Renoir, Van Gogh and Monet. The Art Loss Register’s list of 180,000 missing items includes 182 Warhols and 569 Picassos. Radcliffe calculates that about 3 per cent of works circulating on the art market at any one time have been stolen.
The masterpieces still outstanding have been described as the ‘Museum of the Missing’ and, though it is tempting to think there may be a mastermind enjoying his collection in a bunker somewhere, Radcliffe quickly scotches this favourite fantasy of both film and literature, saying that in over 2,000 cases he has investigated, only two were not stolen for financial gain. It is odd, however, how many masterpieces simply disappear into thin air.
Only 15 per cent of stolen artworks are recovered, so look after your art because if something is stolen the chances are that you will never see it again. With petty crime on the rise, it is also worth reviewing security arrangements. Police say that when they need to break into a house they often find a key within five metres of a front door, so it might be a good time to find a better place for that key under the flowerpot.
For more columns by Ivan Lindsay, visit spearswms.com