The third instalment of London Art Week is continuing the event’s mission to bring the Old Masters into the 21st century. The lovechild of Master Drawings and Sculpture Week (founded in 2001) and Master Paintings Week (founded in 2009), the rebranded event, which starts today, 3 July, brings together around 40 leading galleries based in Mayfair and St James’s, London’s oldest and most prestigious art districts. Dealers will open their doors with exhibitions that have been timed to coincide with the Old Master sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams.
In a market landscape that is increasingly dominated by fairs, London Art Week proposes a similar event-based experience but the galleries stay put. Visitors wander around a relatively small part of town to visit the shows they choose, interspersed with the nearby auctions. The idea is that the decline of the traditional gallery model can be mitigated by a strength-in-numbers approach—the galleries will all get more visitors if they co-ordinate their plans.
“It’s very simple: people are encouraged when they see a gallery that’s already full of visitors,” says the dealer Johnny Van Haeften, a senior committee member for the event. “The point is to make this type of art more accessible to more people, and not just the usual collectors and experts,” he says. “There is a general misconception that galleries are unfriendly and unwelcoming places, but we [Old Master dealers] actually love talking about our works.”
The advantage of this model compared with the traditional fair, according to the dealer Stephen Ongpin, is that “it enables visitors to really look at a work of art without being distracted by something else across the corridor”.
Galleries are keen to entice new buyers as well as to impress experts, so this year’s highlights include a number of newly discovered works, such as a £2.8m painting by Johan Zoffany, The Sayer Family of Richmond (1781), at Colnaghi. A previously unknown landscape by Claude Joseph Vernet, Noon—Return from Fishing (1750-51), was reattributed after a year-long restoration stripped away layers of 19th-century paint. It is now at Ben Elwes Fine Art (priced at around £600,000).
Among the exhibitions on view are On Copper, featuring a dozen Dutch Old Master paintings on copper panels, at Johnny Van Haeften, and From the Salon, a selection of works previously shown at the Salon de Paris, London’s Royal Academy of Arts and the Venice Biennale, at Daniel Katz. Ongpin is showing Italian drawings from the Renaissance to Futurism, which will remain on view after London Art Week ends (until 31 July). Agnew’s is participating for the first time with Portraiture through the Ages, which inaugurates its new space in St James’s.
The event is also starting to attract foreign dealers, with seven taking part this year. Trinity Fine Art, on Bruton Street, is hosting Carlo Orsi and Walter Padovani from Milan and C.G. Boerner from New York; others, including Martin Hirschboeck (Berlin) and Maison d’Art (Monaco), have rented their own spaces. “London is, without question, the centre of the world for this kind of art, and competition is welcome—the more the merrier,” Van Haeften says.
• London Art Week, various locations, 3-10 July; some exhibitions run until later in July