In a regular week, the usually homely Maastricht Exhibition & Conference Centre, in the Dutch city of Maastricht, hosts run-of-the-mill functions such as a pub quiz and a flea market. Then, every March, for a few days it gets dressed up with banks of flowers to welcome an altogether different crowd.
That’s when museum directors, art advisors, and billionaires from around the world descend on this provincial backwater straddling the Meuse River, many of them swooping in via private plane, to attend TEFAF, arguably the world’s most discerning art fair.
“It’s truly the best,” says Aerin Lauder, the New York designer, collector, and member of TEFAF’s global advisory board. “The heritage of it, what it represents, and the people who come.”
Co-founded nearly 40 years ago by the Dutch art dealer and gangster Robert Noortman, TEFAF, or The European Fine Art Foundation, has grown with the stratospheric rise of the international art market, which before the Covid pandemic reached heights estimated at more than $67.4 billion. Recently there has been grumbling from more clout-chasing rival fairs about a slump in this once booming sector. But do big buyers at Maastricht even understand the meaning of the word slowdown? Seven days in March may deliver an answer and set the tone for the year.
When the fair opens on the 15th, visitors may get their only glimpse of a Matisse that hung for a century in some European château and is on show for the briefest moment before disappearing again inside a Gramercy Park mansion.
A 1910 Kandinsky was up for sale in 2024 for at least $50 million, the price set by dealer Robert Landau.
At last year’s TEFAF the Canadian dealer Robert Landau showed up with a Kandinsky that he had bought at auction for $45 million, and a first-time exhibitor, the New Orleans gallery M.S. Rau, sold an early Van Gogh, the name of which translates to “Head of a peasant woman in a white cap,” to a museum for 4.5 million euros. Workers setting up before opening hours would come over and stare at it.
Wandering the thick carpets of the convention center, the highest category of visitors often look as expensive as the works on view. Some galleries spend months preparing their displays, and collectors go from stall to magnificent stall, sniffing out treasures. At a fair that’s a cross between world class museum and pricey shopping mall, buyers let the free champagne and canapés relax them into an acquisitive mood, or camp out at the pop-up Michelin-starred restaurant.
“It’s like walking into a luxury brothel,” says the Amsterdam art dealer Willem Baars, who sat for decades on one of the fair’s famed vetting committees.
NOTORIOUS RNC
TEFAF’s uniqueness stems from its origins in the small-time art world of the late-20th-century Netherlands. Back then the norm in art was “universal fairs,” where you could buy anything from ancient Peloponnesian ceramics to Warhols.
Noortman, a burly policeman’s son who began dealing art from his carpet store, co-founded an art and antiques fair called Pictura in 1975. Thirteen years later it merged with another fair and became TEFAF. What international custom it drew in those early years came mostly from Belgium (three miles away) and Germany (15 miles).
The painting “Venus and Cupid with Mercury and Psyche” at the fair on March 6, 2020.
Noortman was TEFAF’s chairman for a decade. He occupied the prestigious front corner booth, and if you couldn’t find him you just followed the cigar smoke. He threw famed parties during the fair, and his catholic tastes—everything from folk art to Chinese pottery to his beloved Old Masters—helped forge TEFAF’s tone. When he died, just across the border in his Belgian castle, at age 60 in 2007, the New York Times ran an obituary that celebrated “a gregarious, risk-taking dealer,” who once paid $28.6 million for a Rembrandt. Shortly before his death Noortman had sold his company to Sotheby’s for $56.5 million worth of Sotheby’s stock.
All this was true, but Noortman was even more “risk-taking” than the obituarist knew. As a young man, “Robbie” had twice been convicted for violent attacks. He later worked as a bouncer in a café frequented by the criminal underworld of an even smaller town near Maastricht. In 2009, after his death, Dutch police officers told a TV program that he had been a scout for a gang of safecrackers but had escaped another sentence by becoming a police informant.
In his youth Robbie had been in a gang that stole paintings. In 1987, once he had become the grand Robert Noortman, he received an insurance payout from Lloyd’s of London after nine paintings were supposedly stolen from his Maastricht gallery, where the alarm had not gone off. The Dutch courts took on the matter only after Noortman’s death, when people were caught trying to sell the missing paintings.
He was never tried for the case, but a Rotterdam court in 2010 and the Dutch Supreme Court in 2012 stated that he had orchestrated the theft so as to get the payout, had told his accomplices to destroy the paintings (which they didn’t), and had personally fed a 17th-century panel by the Dutch master Meindert Hobbema into a fire, as the journalist Ron Couwenhoven recounts in his book De Affaire Noortman.
The painting “Three Dancers in Yellow Skirts” by Edgar Degas at the fair in 2020.
No matter. By this time TEFAF had grown from a small fair for local collectors, one where some days were so quiet that British dealers played golf in the aisles, into a phenomenon that succeeded because it was unlike its competitors. Frieze London, Art Basel (and its Miami franchise), and Art Russia in Moscow (since dropped from the respectable collector’s rotation) majored in contemporary art. TEFAF, by contrast, boasts that it covers “7,000 years of art history.”
Its backbone is Old Masters, but you can find anything here, from ancient Egyptian vases to something finished last month in Red Hook. TEFAF Maastricht remains higher-status than its annual New York offshoot, even if the latter can attract Scarlett Johansson and Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn.
Counterintuitively, TEFAF also benefits from its setting in a pretty but relatively inaccessible provincial town that is short on distractions. “The fact that it’s geographically not the most convenient means that everyone who’s there has made a concerted effort to get themselves there,” says Paul Arnhold, a New York glassblowing artist and collector. “There’s really nothing else to do, and you immerse yourself in their offerings. And then you meet everyone else, who also don’t have anywhere else to go.”
Members of the TEFAF Global Advisory Board and Board of Trustees (from left): Heidi McWilliams, Marina Kellen French, Ugo Pierucci, Aerin Lauder and her father, Ronald S. Lauder.
BLING NON GRATA
The art world is a traveling circus, like the tennis tour: a core group of a few thousand people—dealers, collectors, museum types, and hangers-on—who crisscross the globe together, from fair to auction to fair. Because TEFAF is a universal fair, every serious museum has to go. Last year an estimated 25 American museum delegations showed up. Aerin Lauder says, “People say it’s where museums go to shop, and it’s so true.”
But it’s not just museum directors and curators who shop. A major European art dealer who’s a regular exhibitor at TEFAF says, “The museums make it like a school trip for the board of trustees. They take their best donors, have a tour.”
The museums annoy some collectors, because they drive up prices for the best stuff. But they also raise TEFAF’s snob value. A dealer at the fair might get a bigger kick out of a visit from a museum director than from Brad Pitt. Whereas Art Basel Miami Beach has been called “Costco for billionaires,” with people dropping in for an hour to buy a piece while party hopping the rest of the day, TEFAF appeals to connoisseurs. Bling is frowned upon here; the fair’s lead sponsoring partner is French insurance conglomerate AXA.
“It’s culture with a very big C—the highest hub of the highest culture in art,” says the European dealer.
TEFAF maintains its standards partly through its unusually strict vetting committees. Two days before the fair starts, dozens of the world’s leading experts in different domains go from stall to stall, checking that every piece is authentic, of sufficient quality, and not excessively restored.
Any item that is “vetted off” is physically removed and locked up until TEFAF ends, so the dealer can’t hide it in a drawer and sell it during the fair. Baars, who served for more than 20 years on the vetting committee for 19th-century paintings, says that soon artificial intelligence may beat humans at hunting out fakes.
Some dealers fear and loathe the vetting committees, but Alessandra Di Castro, a Roman dealer in antiques and a TEFAF executive committee board member, says the experts sometimes help dealers understand their own artworks, or suggest the right attribution. “It happened to me,” she says. “It’s a very interesting dialogue.”
A micromosaic of the Roman Forum the dealer Alessandra Di Castro expects to offer at the 2025 fair. Estimated price: $190,000.
Creating dialogue within the art world is one of TEFAF’s strengths, she adds. “There is competition between dealers. I was born into this, because I am the daughter of a dealer, the granddaughter of a dealer. But at TEFAF there is a community of dealers. When you sit with your dealer friends, you share your expertise.”
Di Castro always learns at TEFAF. While selling a piece to a museum last year, she witnessed the normally hidden conversations between director, curators, restorers, and trustees unfolding in front of her.
TINDER FOR CONNOISSEURS
Collectors too make their own journeys of discovery. In daily life they might buy works in their preferred genre from one or two trusted dealers in the city where they live. Suddenly, at TEFAF, they’re confronted with a wide range of artistic styles and periods they have never even thought of.
Many dealers invite their clients to TEFAF, but they also come here to chase new ones, so the fair can feel like Tinder for the art market. Dealers (the men among them in dark suits with overlong sleeves) will watch a client being drawn to a particular item and try to sniff out the person’s budget, psychology, job, and life status (married to their companion here? A freshly minted heir beneath that unfortunate jacket?).
Meanwhile, clients are trying to work out whether the unfamiliar piece they’re gazing at actually speaks to them. (The European art dealer quotes Schopenhauer: “Treat a work of art like a prince—let it speak to you first.”) Millions of dollars can hinge on a customer’s impulse, though the price paid usually stays private—TEFAF isn’t an auction house. In fact, many dealers here regard auction houses as the enemy.
A view of opening day at TEFAF Maastricht 2024.
The thrill of this mating game crescendos when the dealer spots that rare animal at TEFAF: a young person. Because TEFAF has relatively little contemporary art, the crowds are even grayer than at other fairs. The few under-forties who show up are often chaperoned by an older relative. Lauder first came to Maastricht with her father Ronald. Arnhold was first told about TEFAF by his grandfather Henry Arnhold, the banker and renowned collector of Meissen porcelain.
“He would go every year and make a pilgrimage,” Arnhold says. When Henry turned 93 he finally asked Paul along. Their conversation went as follows:
Henry: “I want to invite you to come with me, but there is a catch.”
Paul: “Okay?”
Henry: “Maastricht hotels are very difficult to book, and you will have to share a room with me.”
Paul politely declined; he began going only after Henry’s death. Now he cites Laura Kugel, deputy director at Galerie Kugel, and the thirtysomething London gallerist Milo Dickinson as examples of a new generation of dealers at TEFAF who are engaging younger buyers.
“In my conversations with him I felt I was looking at modern art, at art that was beautifully relevant to my life,” Arnhold says—even when the piece was from the mid-19th century.
TEFAF is no longer quite as unguarded as it used to be. In 2022, when the fair was operating at a low keel late in the pandemic, a criminal gang carried off a major heist in broad daylight. On the security footage you can see thieves wearing newsboy hats smash vitrines containing jewels, while wealthy visitors sit around watching them. It looks like a piece of performance art. The crooks made off with a 114-carat yellow diamond valued at €27 million. There’s a theory that they may belong to the Balkan “Pink Panther” gang (the Dutch police say they’re from Serbia), but they haven’t been caught yet. Since then, security has been tightened up.
The fair has also been shortened from its earlier 10-day run, and only the happy few will get into the invitation-only days on March 13 and 14. Still, 266 dealers and galleries from five continents are expected. TEFAF’s chief founding father, Noortman, would have been proud—maybe even of the heist.
This story appears in the February 2025 issue of Town & Country, with the headline “Where the Wildly Expensive Things Are.” SUBSCRIBE NOW
