In the art world, getting younger people to look at very old paintings and sculptures has proved challenging. How can a delicate Renaissance sculpture compete with the immediacy of artists posting on Instagram about work they’re doing right now?
The art fair put on by the European Fine Art Foundation in Maastricht, the Netherlands, has taken some concrete steps to attract younger collectors. The latest edition of the fair will run March 15-20 at the Maastricht Exhibition and Conference Center with 273 dealers on hand.
Although the fair is always chockablock with old masters and other artworks made before the 20th century, it has increased the presence of modern and contemporary work over the years — if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em — which now comprises around 30 percent of the offerings.
“Because of our participation, and a few other contemporary art dealers, we see more younger collectors at TEFAF every year,” said Nathalie Obadia, a Paris dealer who is showing at the fair for the fourth time.
She added that the younger cohort is especially noticeable on the weekend, since those collectors are more likely to have full-time jobs.
The booth of her namesake gallery, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, which also has a branch in Brussels, will feature “Le Dernier Dimanche” (“Last Sunday”) (2024), an oil by the French-born painter Johanna Mirabel, and “The Red, the White and the Blue” (1964), an oil by the American abstract artist Shirley Jaffe, among around 30 works by eight artists.
Obadia said that it was precisely the eclectic, centuries-spanning art offered in Maastricht that worked for her, and for younger clients.
“Collectors are really curious to know contemporary art better, and in a way, Art Basel is too specialized,” she said. “The mix at TEFAF is a great introduction.”
It is also a reassuring context for buyers of any age to branch out, Obadia said. A couple of years ago at Maastricht, she noted, an old master collector who does not frequent contemporary art fairs stopped by her booth and ended up buying a sculpture by Wang Keping, a Chinese-born artist who now works in Paris.
Other contemporary specialists at this year’s fair include Marianne Boesky Gallery of New York and Galerie Lelong & Co., which has headquarters in Paris and a branch in New York. Both are among the 37 first-time exhibitors.
As part of the push toward involving younger patrons, fair organizers are emphasizing the pleasures of multigenerational collecting in families with a panel discussion on March 14 featuring Ilone and George Kremer, collectors of Dutch and Flemish old masters, and their son Joël Kremer, who has helped them create a virtual reality museum that allows others to experience their trove of treasures.
“Recently, we launched a web version of the museum on our website, allowing visitors without a VR headset to explore the collection,” Joël Kremer said in an email. “In addition, we’ve opened a new virtual gallery space, where we are currently showcasing the 24 works acquired since the museum’s launch in 2017.”
Another digital innovation had a test run at last year’s Maastricht fair and at last year’s New York edition of TEFAF, which takes place in May. A select few collectors were offered a special guide to the fair, the Insider’s Guide to Collecting — a “secret map,” said Hidde van Seggelen, chairman of TEFAF’s executive committee.
Getting access to the digital map — part of TEFAF’s Emerging Collector Program, its effort to develop younger buyers — is by invitation only, and galleries decide who can have one.
“The dealers can invite their young clients,” said van Seggelen, who is a contemporary art dealer in Hamburg, Germany. “They can explore the fair with something that has been curated with them in mind.”
The highlights for the new map were curated by the American decorator Remy Renzullo. Van Seggelen added that the selected works were “at a slightly lower price point” than the most blue-chip pieces, to get across the point of accessibility.
Asked what some of the highlights were, van Seggelen kept mum — the first rule of the secret map is, apparently: Don’t talk too much about the secret map.
One dealer of old master paintings, Patrick Williams of Adam Williams Fine Art in New York, said that he was seeing lots of interest from younger collectors even without a special map.
“TEFAF absolutely has more young and interested people attending, especially New Yorkers,” said Williams, 36, the son of the gallery’s founder.
“We’re seeing more action from people under 45 since the pandemic,” he added. The gallery has shown in Maastricht for the better part of 30 years, and this year will show around 20 works.
In his experience, the subject of an old master painting makes a difference for younger buyers. He said that religious scenes did not sell as well. “Part of the job is to find more secular imagery,” Williams said. “Blood, sex and mythology are the themes that are working.”
A measure of sex, or at least of flesh, is found in one of the works Williams is bringing, “Diana and Actaeon” (circa 1615) by the Flemish painter Jacob Jordaens, which depicts a scene of Roman mythology from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”
In the story, Diana, goddess of the hunt, and her nymphs are caught bathing in the forest by the mortal hunter Actaeon. Flustered, she splashes water on him and he is turned into a stag. Later, he is preyed upon by his own hounds and killed.
Williams is also bringing “Portrait of Johan Claesz Loo” (1650) by Frans Hals, among the best-known painters of the Dutch Golden Age, and “Portrait of a Young Man” (1775) by Élisabeth Vigée le Brun, one of the handful women painters from her era to have made it into the historical art canon.
Adam Williams Fine Art has been showing at TEFAF for decades, but a gallery of even longer standing is Vanderven Oriental Art, a specialist in Chinese works of art in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands. Vanderven was among the founding galleries of the fair, which held its first edition in 1988.
Floris van der Ven, the gallery’s director, emphasized how far ahead he worked on fair presentation — he said that he already had some material lined up for the 2026 edition of TEFAF Maastricht.
This time, his booth includes a roughly four-foot-tall bodhisattva figure in limestone made during the Northern Qi dynasty some 1,500 years ago.
“It’s especially rare in this size,” van der Ven said in a phone call during a visit to New York; he was about to look at some similar works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Van der Ven noted that last year, he sold a comparable piece, also from the Northern Qi dynasty. “It went to a Chinese collector for roughly $800,000,” he said. “There are not that many Chinese buyers who come to Maastricht, but those who come are highly serious.”
The London gallery Rolleston, which specializes in English furniture and Asian works of art, particularly from China and Japan, may offer traditional art, but at least one of its works may strike a chord with young newlyweds: an elaborately decorated gilt-copper and lacquer norimono made around 1857 in Japan’s Edo period.
A norimono, sometimes known as a palanquin, is a boxlike enclosed chair in which a bride would be carried to the groom’s family home after a wedding. Lifting this norimono, with its 15-foot-long carrying beam, requires several attendants. And its interior has its original wallpaper, according to James Rolleston, the gallery’s director.
Rolleston said that the gallery found the piece at a London auction. “It wasn’t well cared for,” he said. “This is where one’s skills as a dealer come in. We cleaned it up and conserved it.”
Rolleston was founded in 1955 but this is the first year it has participated in TEFAF Maastricht. Among its other offerings are a pair of George I needlework-covered armchairs (circa 1720) known as the Wanstead House Chairs.
Rolleston said that the chairs were from an original set of 12 and that they had an “unbroken provenance,” meaning that there was complete documentation of previous ownership — always a major plus, and sometimes difficult to find with older works.
But the norimono may get a large share of visitor attention just for its size. “It literally doesn’t fit in our gallery,” Rolleston said, adding that before the fair, it was sitting in storage.
It seemed to be an unlikely candidate for a spontaneous purchase for a private collector. “I can’t imagine whose house it would fit into,” Rolleston said. “It’s the size of my first flat.”
Its dimensions may restrict possible buyers, but you never know. “We’re earmarking this for a museum,” he said. “But we don’t rule out a collector buying it.”
