The Art-World is Your Oyster

Strolling through the picture-perfect streets of Maastricht these days, you can’t help noticing the slogan “Maastricht embraces TEFAF,” roaring across storefronts. The banner has a point. The 37-year old art, design, jewelry, and antique fair is the quaint Dutch city’s prized possession for all the right reasons. Every March, starting this week, thousands of crème de la crème collectors from Europe march the aisles of the fair at the MECC Maastricht convention center to browse the offerings in some 270 booths—best enjoyed with a flute of champagne and freshly shucked oysters. 

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Unexpected vignettes of the old and the new are juxtaposed in dramatic booth designs. “We have to stay relevant,” TEFAF’s director Manon van den Beuken tells Family Style. She calls the endeavor a “completely different animal than other art fairs” that mostly focus on a certain period or a discipline. TEFAF, which prides itself for featuring 7,000-years of art and objects, also comes to New York every May for its annual turn at the Park Avenue Armory. Its success lies in its ability to sustain a timelessly classical veneer that keeps fairgoers returning every year while also continuing to adapt and surprise. The two-day VIP preview indeed sits high up on most collectors’ annual calendars not only for its feast of the rarest art but also for its promise as a social extravaganza. 

Right before noon, the doors open to a floral explosion of 60,000 colorful tulips at the fair’s entrance. The dome-like globular of petals, each stem in an individual glass tube, echoes across the venue’s ceiling. Each year, TEFAF’s long-term design agency Tom Postma Design works with the local florist Ten Kate to decorate the entrance with a showstopper display of local blossoms. Last year, flowers were arranged in an animatronic structure that allowed them to move. 

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Down in the fairgrounds, local oysters are shucked at high speed. Maastricht-based purveyor Matijn Wijn, whose Red Oyster company has been curbing the fairgoers’ aphrodisiac needs for 25 years, calls the presentation “osytertainment.” The shellfish monger’s officially registered term nods to servers donning belts that hold buckets full of oysters ready to be shucked and sprayed with local gin. “I instruct my team to speed up to a specific part of the venue because even if they stop for a second, a line will form immediately and they will never be able to move,” he says. It is “happy fast food,” as Wijn puts it, but “it doesn’t take your energy—in fact it gives you more of it.” This year, he has picked six kinds of the delicacy, including one from Brittany, two different regions from the Netherlands, and even an Irish variety. 

What pairs well with mouth-tingling brininess? The Stendhal Syndrome-like encounters with most unexpected embodiments of human imagination. Take, for example, the Parisian Galerie Kugel’s booth, which presents the earliest-known full-size replica of an anatomical study. The polychrome wood-and-wax pregnant female figure operates like a chest full of drawers that store the innards of a body, including the fetus. The object traces back to the mid-17th century, when universities of Salamanca and Bologna began experimenting with human anatomy after the sweeping curiosities of Renaissance loosened the church-controlled perceptions on dissection. “This is not a work of art per se, but her posture definitely references the Renaissance-era contrapposto,” says founder Laura Kugel, who notes the elegantly carved key that locks the drawers. 

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At London’s Peter Harrington Books, the first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, 1859, is clad in a light green cover. Inside, the bible of human rationale features a rare gem: the scientist’s secretarial letter to his editor. “Darwin never signed his copies but instead wrote letters to his editor with names of specific people to send one of 1,250 copies,” explains director Pom Harrington. At a $780,000 price tag, the tome was meant for a botanist and medical doctor named Hugh Algermon Weddell. Another antiquarian bookseller with a playful take between the known and the mysterious is New York’s Les Enluminures, whose booth features not only Medieval manuscripts but also a work from Sophie Calle’s 2018-dated “Because” series. Each of Calle’s photographs come with a fabric cover into which the enigmatic Parisian artist embroidered the reason why she took the image. Wedding Day, 2018, reads, “Because I was told she died the day of her wedding,” written in French, shrouding a photograph of a statue of an angel in a cemetery. 

The female figure stretches across New Yorker Marianne Boesky Gallery’s debut booth with a presentation dedicated to eight new oil-on-linens by painter Danielle Mckinney, paired with four less-known architectural Edward Hopper drawings one of which sold for $2.85 million. Veiled with a righteous devotion to leisure, Mckinney’s subjects are immersed in a detachment reminiscent of various historical paintings of women; however, in her autonomous handling, the Black, female posers are in full command of their bearings. “Beauty is timeless as is the innate human desire to connect with other people, and this ripples throughout the best of art, whether antiquities, old masters, or contemporary painting,” says Kelly Woods. “Danielle’s paintings express the pathos of human connection through a deep engagement with art history and a unique tenderness singularly her own.”

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For most dealers, the party in fact starts once they pass the fair’s notorious vetting process which asks each exhibitor to hand in their booth a few days before the vernissage. Then over 200 art professionals’ step in for an arduous examination of each work for originality. TEFAF invites the connoisseurs from all over the world, and while they do the job pro bono, the authenticators who are mostly museum curators enjoy the very first look opportunity to what collectors will compete for in days to follow.   

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TEFAF Maastricht is on view through March 20, 25 at MECC at Forum 100, 6229 GV Maastricht, Netherlands.