Prompted by its Zurich office, Christie’s have decided to lend their support to the Tefaf antiques fair in Basel, coming up for it third edition at the Messe Basel from 8 to 16 November. Together with the Tefaf organisers, the auction house has published, at its own cost, a sixty-page brochure with highlights from more than fifty exhibitors at the fair. The auction house is sending 10,000 copies to its top clients in Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland, while Tefaf exhibitors will have a further 5,000 copies to give to their clients. Christie’s Zurich vice-president, Maria Reinshagen, together with company experts, is hosting two days of visits with clients to the fair.
According to Irmgard Pickering who is responsible for touring exhibitions at Christie’s, this is not a one-off initiative: “Tefaf and ourselves have taken a mutual decision to build a longterm relationship. This will show that an auction house can live with a trade fair in harmony.”
According to French antique dealer, Philippe Heim, even if the auction house is hoping to attract prospective clients, “the publication of the magazine indicates a development in the right direction.”
Tefaf Basel is no longer a new, untested product, but 1997 could certainly prove to make or break the fair. It is significant that there are thirty-five newcomers, which means that while the fair has managed to fill the spaces, 28% of last year’s contingent chose not to return.
Capturing the Italian market was a main target but, as other fairs have found, it is proving elusive because the Italian economy has been in recession since 1993. The first Basel fair did attract a reasonable contingent of eleven Italian exhibitors but this year it has dropped to three.
In a bid to strengthen and broaden the fair’s appeal, there has been a special drive to recruit dealers in twentieth-century decorative and Russian art. This has brought in two famous names, New York’s A la vieille Russie and London’s Wartski.
Meanwhile the organising team is being reshuffled. Leo Lemmens, Tefaf’s secretary general, left earlier this year and Cees van Gelder, a management consultant, is holding the fort.
In November, as usual, three floors of the Messe Basel will be given over to paintings, drawings and prints, twentieth-century art, sculpture, antique and contemporary jewellery, clocks and watches, books and illuminated manuscripts, Oriental and Islamic works of art, objets d’art, ethnographic and pre-Columbian art, antiquities and Egyptian works of art.
Antiquities, for which Switzerland is one of the main trading points, are an important component of this fair, and dealers have usually done well here. For example, Royal Athena Galleries of New York sold more than thirty pieces last time round. Johnny Eskenazi, who deals in Indian, Himalayan, and South East Asian art, is among the major new exhibitors and will be showing one of only three known twelfth-/early thirteenth-century sandstone sculptures of Vajradhara, the historic guide of Buddha. He says he has chosen to come, “because unlike other general fairs, this one concentrates all those who deal in antiquities and Oriental art in one area, therefore making it particularly attractive to collectors.” He adds that, “in the last two years the fair has gained a reputation for excellence in these fields. Traditionally there have been good collectors for works of art of this kind in Central Europe, so Basel is ideally placed geographically.” The ethnographic section is also substantial because it has a strong Swiss collecting base.