TEFAF ’S RUSSIAN RESET AVANT-GARDE BUTTERWICK ENHANCES WORLD’S TOP FAIR

The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF), held annually in the ancient Dutch town of Maastricht, is acknowledged as the finest – and most eclectic – art and antiques fair in the world. One field, however, has long been absent: Russian Art. Until now. This year’s TEFAF (March 13-22) sees the groundbreaking début of specialist dealer James Butterwick. Our International Editor SIMON HEWITT flew to The Netherlands to investigate.

I FIRST HEARD OF MAASTRICHT in 1986, ahead of interviewing Pierre Vermeulen, the Dutch winger busy helping Paris St-Germain to the French League title. The twinkled- toed chain-smoker – a generous host with a taste for expensive claret – had just joined PSG from MVV Maastricht.

This was six years before the EU Treaty made Maastricht a household name, and a decade before TEFAF established itself as indisputably the world’s leading art fair.

TEFAF covers everything from tribal art to jewellery, and from giltwood furniture to contemporary glass. Old Master paintings were the fair’s original focus and remain its strongest suit.

Yet Maastricht – wedged in between Belgium and Germany in Holland’s deep south, just north of Luxembourg – is one of the least accessible venues in western Europe. Megarich collectors jet into the town’s tiny airport (which offers direct flights to… Katowice and Tenerife), but for most mortals the nearest relevant runway is 80 miles off, in Brussels. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is even further afield but makes more sense:

the train journey from Brussels involves two changes and takes 3 hours 20; trains from Schiphol to Maastricht run every 30 minutes and cover the 135 miles in 2½ hours, with just one change.

So I flew to Schiphol early on March 11, and spent the morning at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which reopened in 2013 after a decade of restoration. You could probably build two or three new museums in that time, from scratch, but the Revamped Rijks, airy and stylish, is worth the wait. The glass-roofed entry court (above left) is one of the most spectacular covered spaces in Europe – while the museum’s star attraction, Rembrandt’s 1642 Night Watch , is now first glimpsed from 50 yards away, like a giant altarpiece at the far end of a cathedral-like hall.

After lunch in the museum’s innovative restaurant with go-ahead Romanian curator Liliana Popescu, currently based in Haarlem, I took the train from Amsterdam to Eindhoven, halfway to Mastricht and home to the Vanabbemuseum (above right) – a 1936 Art Deco brick building granted a quirky grey neo-Gehry extension in the late 1990s.

Unlike the Rijksmuseum, the Vanabbe has much to interest Russian art-lovers: works by Kandinsky, Chagall, Zadkine, Poliakoff and the Kabakovs, along with a stash of documentation about the Avant-Garde and 128 works by El Lissitzky (see below left) . Few of these are on permanent display, but the Lissitzky ensemble – along with works by Ilya & Emilya Kabakov – underpinned the Utopia & Reality show that ran at the Vanabbe two years ago before moving to Olga Sviblova’s Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow.

I reached Maastricht in time for the UK press dinner organized by Diana Cawdell at Mes Amis . Refined cuisine was complemented by unexpectedly serious Dutch wine.

The effects of which I decided to walk off next morning by going to TEFAF on foot.

The Fair venue is a modern exhibition centre (MECC) on the outskirts of Maastricht, a 30- minute walk from the historic town centre. The walk starts picturesquely enough alongside the River Maas (which flows from eastern France to Rotterdam, and is better known in English as the Meuse ) before confronting a snarling dual-carriageway.

The MECC can only be accessed by a hard-to-find underpass, and signage for pedestrians gets no better as you approach the MECC, which is surrounded by car parks and taxi ranks and bereft of pavements. Woe betide anyone with the impecunious audacity not to arrive on four wheels!

And, although the MECC has its own mainline train station just 500 yards away (Maastricht Randwyck), there is no clue as to its existence at MECC, and no street signs to help you find it.

TEFAF organizers do their best to spice up the featureless MECC building (left) with wilting tulips and spotted grey carpeting (often, alas, shoddily fitted), but most of the effort comes from the exhibitors.

While stands do not scale the sophisticated heights of those at Baselworld – Europe’s most glamorous fair (devoted to watches and jewellery) – they are often dubbed ‘museum-like’ for the quality and plethora of objects on display, with most exhibitors cramming in as much caboodle as they can fit.

Catering is another TEFAF strongpoint. The eight-hour Opening Preview on March 12 – attended by no fewer than 10,000 ‘VIPs’ – was awash with free snacks and champagne. Visitors throughout the fair can choose between three restaurants, two tapas bars, two cafés, a sushi bar, lobster bar, sandwich bar and oyster bar.

The VIP Preview was followed by an ‘After-Party’ in the Bonnefanten Museum, enlivened by free beer and Mo’s Big Band – a strutting ‘20-piece groove unit’ from nearby Sittard.

The 1990s riverside museum has two landmark features: a tower with a pointed cupola that looks like a fat lipstick; and a monumental flight of stairs rising three storeys between stark brick walls. The contents veer schizophrenically from genteel Flemish/Italian religious scenes and still lifes to in-yer-face Contemporary Art. The inside of the lipstick cupola is painted Gothic black, and adorned by Sol Lewitt with a thin white Spiral that weaves its way from the top to the floor using 3½ miles of white tape.

There is the same understated elegance to the James Butterwick stand at TEFAF. It felt ‘bloody marvellous’ to have been admitted, he admitted, calling it ‘a goal ever since I first started in this business’ – one he modestly supposed ‘unattainable.’

Butterwick has been selling Russian art since 1985, latterly in Hammersmith. He lived in Moscow – where he met his wife and gallery co-director Natasha – from 1994-96 and 2002-05, and is the only foreign member of the Russian branch of the International Confederation of Antique & Art Dealers. His relentless pursuit of the crooks and fakers who besmirch the Russian Avant-Garde market – making it a field TEFAF was long reluctant to embrace – has earned him many admirers and some enemies.

Butterwick’s TEFAF début features 30 works priced from €15,000 up to €2.5 million, united under the grand title Russian & Ukrainian Art 1890-1930 and accompanied by a stylish catalogue. His historic overview begins with Symbolism, and the mould-breaking Mikhail Vrubel, before charting Primitivism, Cubo-Futurism, Constructivism and Suprematism and ending with a cute Kustodiev that smooches with Socialist Realism.

The highlight: an ensemble of 12 works by Alexander Bogomazov (1880-1930), seven of them attractively paraded along the back wall. Bogomazov pioneered a new aesthetic – based partly on French Cubism and Italian Futurism, and anticipating British Vorticism – imbued with powerful rhythm and angular tension.

This approach, outlined in his 1914 treatise Paintings & Elements , is superbly embodied here in magnificent views of transport and daily life in Kiev, then a major city of Tsarist Russia . With most Bogomazovs in museums and private collections in Moscow and Ukraine, the artist remains scandalously little-known in the West.

Alongside seven early drawings by Dave ‘The Yak’ Yakerson, Butterwick (once chums at Eton with Dave ‘Candid’ Cameron) is also showing star names like Natalya Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Liubov Popova and Aristarkh Lentulov. His stand – misleadingly numbered 708 (out of a total of 260) – is the principal attraction of TEFAF’s Works On Paper section.

‘Fewer and fewer great paintings are appearing on the market’ observes Butterwick, ‘but for £200,000-300,000 you can buy a sensational work on paper! Many Russian and Ukrainian collectors are prepared to sell for cheaper prices than a year or two ago. That spells fantastic investment opportunities for new buyers!’

The Works On Paper section is tucked away upstairs in a corner of the Fair. To entice visitors, organizers have laid on a display of drawings from the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, by artists ranging from Michelangelo to one of Russia’s finest living draughtsmen: Pavel Pepperstein (right) .

Other Russian-born artists represented at TEFAF include Kandinsky at Alon Zakaim (London), Jawlensky (left) at Thomas Sallis (Salzburg), De Staël at Applicat-Prazan (Paris), and Paul Nasouroff at Karsten Grève (Cologne).

But I was disappointed not to see any works by Grisha Bruskin on the stand of the multinational Marlborough gallery (right) after his stunning recent exhibition at their Monaco venue. I suspect this absence reflects the parochial belief that Russian contemporary art is still too much of a niche market to sell well at an international fair. Nothing, however, that Marlborough have brought to TEFAF matches the quality or importance of Bruskin’s work.

A lavish inkwell made by Jean-Michel Labonté for Count Nikolai Demidov, using malachite from the Demidov mines in the Urals, adds 19th century Russian lustre to the Kugel (Paris) stand. Intricately woven rugs and carpets from the Caucasus (detail left) can be admired at Franz Bausback (Mannheim). Russian icons, some dating back to the early 17 th century (as with the portrayal of King David below left ), dominate the walls at Jan Morsink Ikonen (Amsterdam) – who staged an enterprising show at Trinity House during the last Russian Art Week – and Tóth Ikonen (Huizen), who also have some splendid brass and enamel travelling altars and an unusually wide, late 17 th century deisis incorporating two saints holding a model of the Solovetsky Monastery (notorious for its use as a Soviet prison) in the White Sea.

Wartski (London), this year celebrating their 150 th anniversary, offer several unusual Fabergé items, including a multi-hued agate kovch (or caviar scoop) with a reeded gold handle; a turquoise guilloché enamel medical thermometer; and a subdued silver box embossed with a Tsarist double- eagle and the inscription ВОЙНА 1914-1915 .

The cheerful welcome at Wartski was less forthcoming at their American rivals A La Vieille Russie (New York), where my request to take photographs was greeted with looks suggesting I might be a KGB spy. The stand’s achingly old-fashioned display cabinets (see left) are equally unprepossessing – although their fascinating Fabergé contents range from a Nobel Brothers company brooch and trio of silver Monkey table- lighters, to knives and forks reworked in St Petersburg from Japanese kozuka , and a diamond-ringed miniature of Nicholas II on a fluted half-column. And it ain’t all Fabergé: porcelain from the imperial yacht Derzhava , whose Monigetti design incorporates the monogram of Alexander II and rope-patterned double-headed eagles, also startles.

Still, for a global fair to have barely half-a-dozen stands from 260 specializing in Russian material seems absurdly low.

And, although I encountered a sprinkling of Russian connoisseurs on Sotheby’s VIP trip to Kasteel Eijsden (left) , a 17 th century stately home just south of Maastricht, few Russian voices were to be heard in the alleyways of TEFAF – at least on the first two days.

There is a significantly higher Russian presence at continental Europe’s second-most important fair: BRAFA in Brussels.

But then, BRAFA have their own Moscow-based agent, who organizes (and accompanies) group visits to the fair for journalists and major collectors. TEFAF have agents for China, USA, Latin America… but not Russia. Maybe, for once, the world’s top fair should take a leaf out of a competitor’s book. 

THOSE WERE THE DAYS: Alighiero Boetti’s embroidered Mappa , on show at Tornabuoni (Paris), dates from 1980 – when Russia held sway over the Baltics, the Caucasus and Central Asia