49
ART TRADE
London. Analysts are often quick to label
Old Masters a dying branch of the art
market, blaming generational changes
in taste, a shrinking pool of dedicated
collectors and the rarity of top-quality
works for this perceived decline.
However, recent dealer activity in
London’s traditional Old Master strong-
holds of Mayfair and St James’s seems to
suggest that the narrative is one of adap-
tation and change, rather than decline.
Johnny Van Haeften, the stalwart
Dutch Old Masters specialist, is closing
his gallery on Duke Street in Decem-
ber, after almost 30 years of trading,
to continue his work from his west
London home with a particular focus
on burgeoning Chinese appetite for
the genre. “When the gallery closes I’ll
be free to travel more and I’ll focus on
brokerage, advisory and consultancy.”
His departure will send ripples through-
out London’s traditionally slow-paced
and close-knit Old Masters community,
but then so will the new and energetic
younger dealers who are either setting
up shop in the area or expanding exist-
ing operations.
Symbolising this changing of the
guard, the young Italian dealer Fabrizio
Moretti—who is just over 40 but has
been trading since he was only 22—
has bought Van Haeften’s space and
the building next to it, formerly Derek
Johns’s Old Master gallery, to form a
large, single space.
The merger of the younger Spanish
dealers Jorge Coll and Nicolás Cortés
with Colnaghi, one of the world’s
oldest surviving commercial art galler-
ies, has resulted in a large new gallery
on Bury Street; meanwhile, Lullo Pam-
poulides gallery opened in Mayfair’s
Cork Street before the summer. It is
run by Andreas Pampoulides, a former
director of Coll & Cortés (prior to the
Colnaghi merger), and the Old Masters
specialist Andrea Lullo.
By modernising their presenta-
tion and rethinking their business
approach, these dealers are adapting
in ways that some of their elders have
been reluctant to do. “There’s a lot
to learn from the contemporary art
world’s organisation and attitude,” says
Jorge Coll. “The older generation of [Old
Master] dealers had it easy because the
trade was less transparent and export
laws were less stringent. When you
operate under those conditions for so
long, you start to get comfortable.”
The good old days, in which dealers
could buy works at auction and sell them
straight to clients—with a substantial
mark-up—are long gone. Well-informed
private collectors are now a dominant
force in the auction room, and the
market is more transparent than ever.
And unlike in the contemporary world,
new clients do not grow on trees.“When we’re not participating in a
major fair, we will aim to organise an
event of our own each month, such as
pop-up exhibitions in the United States,”
Coll says. “We realise that collectors
need memorable and educational expe-
riences—museum trips, dinners and
tours with curators. It’s expensive but
we want clients to realise that we’re not
just sitting and waiting for them in the
gallery,” he says.
The slick décor and modern lighting
at Lullo Pampoulides and Colnaghi’s
new spaces aren’t just for show: theyTHE ART NEWSPAPER Number 284, November 2016
Art Market United Kingdom
Young blood
for Old
Masters
Enterprising dealers are updating their businesses
to cope with a changing market
Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup I: Green Pea, color screenprint, 1968.
Estimate $15,000 to $20,000.Contemporary Art
November 15
JeZZM[ocWdjm[ocWd6imWdd]Wbb[h_[i$Yec'&*;Wij(+j^Ijh[[jD[mOeha"DO'&&'&('((+**-'&SWANNGALLERIES.COM© The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual ArtsAhead of the curve: Johnny Van Haeften (centre) caused a stir when he commissioned
music to accompany this work by Marten van Cleve at his Frieze Masters stand in 2015
Young and well-heeled, but will they buy? The next generation of potential collectors at Colnaghi’s new gallery in St James’sserve to create a familiar environment
for the new generation of collectors.
“We want the gallery to feel more like
a beautiful contemporary apartment,”
Andrea Lullo says. This is only a recent
development for many Old Master
dealers. “People imagine our galleries as
still being decorated with austere, green
velvet curtains,” says Van Haeften,
known for his experimental approach
to presentation.
Incomplete data
Van Haeften and Coll estimate that
gallery sales account for roughly half of
the market, but because analyses must
rely on auction results, public records
tell only part of the story. And in a cate-
gory where the top lots are as rare as they
are expensive, the presence, or absence,
of even one major painting is enough to
skew figures for an entire year.
The latest Tefaf market report points
to a 33% drop in the value of Old Masters
sold at auction in 2015, but figures do
not take into account the “extraordi-
nary year” that was 2014, according to
Alexander Bell, the co-chairman of Old
Master paintings at Sotheby’s. “We had
works from the estates of the Duke
of Northumberland and the Earl of
Warwick [and a record-breaking Turner,
Rome from Mount Aventine, which sold
for £30.3m with fees]. Comparing 2015 to
that year will always look bad. It’s frus-
trating that what comes to auction in a
single year is treated as a barometer for
the whole market—it’s not.”
Next year’s report might read dif-
ferently simply because it will factor in
Christie’s sale of Rubens’s Lot and his
Daughters, which sold in July, at Chris-
tie’s first-ever Classic Week, for £40m
with fees, the highest auction price ever
paid for an Old Master painting.
As Colnaghi demonstrated at Tefaf
in March by selling €12m worth of Old
Masters on opening day, the category
isn’t history just yet, despite the neg-
ativity that often surrounds it (both
from commentators and from the more
old-fashioned dealers themselves). “It’s
like this for every generation,” says Lullo,
of Lullo Pampoulides. “Even when my
father started dealing in Old Masters, in
the 1970s, the older dealers were already
telling him the market was dead.”
Still, the fact remains that the collec-
tor base is not nearly as broad as that
for modern and contemporary art. Says
Van Haeften, “We have just over 3,000
collectors on our books who are mostly,
but not exclusively, interested in Dutch
and Flemish masters, and that’s taken
40 years to accumulate.” And, unfortu-
nately for holders of second- and third-
rate stock, they are only interested in
top-quality works. “If you buy the right
thing you can’t go wrong,” Coll says.
Ermanno Rivetti“We want the
gallery to feel more
like a beautiful
contemporary
apartment”