Caught

Here Are 9 Treasures That Caught Our Eye at TEFAF Maastricht—From Antique Playing Cards to a Rediscovered Ambrosi Sculpture


One of the biggest art fairs in the world, TEFAF Maastricht, in its 2023 edition, brought together some 270 dealers from around the world, collectively offering 7,000 years of art history in nearly every conceivable medium, from grand Old Master paintings to African tribal art to fine jewelry. Sifting through the countless gems is an overwhelming proposition, with treasures everywhere you turn your head.

Here are nine of our favorites.

 

Dummy Board (17th century)
Jaime Eguiguren Art and Antiques, Montevideo, Uruguay
€65,000 ($70,000)

Dummy Board (17th century) from Jaime Eguiguren Art and Antiques, Montevideo, Uruguay, at TEFAF Maastricht, 2023. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

Dummy Board (17th century) from Jaime Eguiguren Art and Antiques, Montevideo, Uruguay, at TEFAF Maastricht, 2023. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

At first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Jaime Eguiguren Art and Antiques has a cardboard cut out at its booth as some kind of Instagram-friendly photo-op.

But instead of a cheap celebrity photo-op, it’s a charming Old Master painting of a young woman clad in an elaborate dress and head garb, carrying a basket full of flowers. If you walk around the figure, you can see the wooden support for the antique work, which is actually a 17th-century French dummy board.

“They were popular in Poland and France,” the gallery’s Vivian Velar told Midnight Publishing Group News. “They were used as decorative motifs in the home, often in front of the fireplace.”

 

Emma Schlangenhausen and Hilde von Exner, Two Secessionist Panels/Adolescence (1904)
Bel Etage, Vienna
€280,000 ($300,000)

Emma Schlangenhausen and Hilde von Exner, <em>Two Secessionist Panels/Adolesence</em> (1904). Photo courtesy of Bel Etage, Vienna.

Emma Schlangenhausen and Hilde von Exner, Two Secessionist Panels/Adolescence (1904). Photo courtesy of Bel Etage, Vienna.

A pair of striking copper panels in wrought iron frames represent an intriguing turn-of-the-century collaboration by a pair of women artists, Emma Schlangenhausen and Hilde von Exner.

“They were students of Kolomon Moser,” Christiane Gastl of Bel Etage in Vienna told Midnight Publishing Group News. The two created the pair of artworks at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, for the institution’s room at the Austrian pavilion at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri.

Both panels depict a young woman, featuring gilding and silver plating adorned with opalescent glass and enameled cabochons.

Tantalizingly, little is known about either artist. Schlangenhausen went on to work as a graphic artist, but Von Exner died fairly young, at just 42, leaving behind few known works.

 

Gustinus Ambrosi, Promethindenlos or The Eternal Longing (1928)
Bowman Sculpture, London
€395,000 ($420,000)

Gustinus Ambrosi, Promethindenlos or The Eternal Longing (1928). Photo courtesy of Bowman Sculpture, London.

Gustinus Ambrosi, Promethindenlos or The Eternal Longing (1928). Photo courtesy of Bowman Sculpture, London.

TEFAF is full of showstoppers, but one of the servers actually paused in her tracks and asked me if I could read her the label for this large-scale marble work, as she wasn’t able to step inside the booth with her tray of empty wine glasses. Instead, I offered to hold it for her, so she could experience the piece in the round—Prometheus arching backwards to give a naked woman a passionate kiss, both bodies partially embedded in the Carrara marble as if struggling to break free.

“I love Prometheus with his chains, and I love the fact that here, she is the chain. It’s just the most romantic piece,” Michele Bowman of London’s Bowman Sculpture told Midnight Publishing Group News.

The gallery recently restored the awesome work, which was discovered hidden in a cellar for safekeeping from the Nazis. It’s a smaller version of a sculpture Ambrosi carved from 31-ton block of marble that is in the collection of the Belvedere in Vienna. It’s on public view at the fair for only the second time, following a recent exhibition at Bowman.

The artist, known as the Austrian Rodin, was a former child prodigy in music who turned to sculpture after a bout of measles left him deaf. “Being an artistic soul, he started to sketch and draw and moved on from there,” Bowman added. “So little of his work comes on the market, so when it does, normally we buy it.”

 

Boris Aldridge, The Green Forest Panel No. 1 (2022)
Amir Mohtashemi, London
£50,000 ($60,000)

Boris Aldridge, <em>The Green Forest Panel No. 1</em> (2022). Photo courtesy of Amir Mohtashemi, London.

Boris Aldridge, The Green Forest Panel No. 1 (2022). Photo courtesy of Amir Mohtashemi, London.

The juxtaposition of contemporary works with TEFAF’s legendary antiques can yield some of the fair’s brightest moments, such as a large ceramic wall panel by Boris Aldridge amid the historic Indian and Islamic art at the booth of London’s Amir Mohtashemi.

“Boris is a British potter influenced by Persian art,” the dealer told Midnight Publishing Group News, pointing to the artist’s own poetry lining the glistening green and gold tiles, which are painted with intricate animal designs.

Alridge is the only contemporary artist that the gallery works with, but Mohtashemi sees plenty of overlap with their other holdings.

“We really look at him as the continuation of the arts and craft movement in the U.K.,” he added.

 

Giuseppe Viner, Divisionist Triptych (1902)
Oscar Grant, Paris and London
Around €250,000 ($265,000)

Giuseppe Viner, Divisionist Triptych (1902). Photo courtesy of Oscar Grant, Paris and London.

Giuseppe Viner, Divisionist Triptych (1902). Photo courtesy of Oscar Grant, Paris and London.

An especially stunning and unique work at the fair is the wooden room divider by Giuseppe Viner, painted with a gorgeous sunset view of the Tuscan countryside and the Mediterranean coast as seen from the artist’s villa outside Sienna.

Dealer Oscar Grant doesn’t sell paintings, but this work neatly bridges the divide between furniture and the canvas, with the two outer panels of the triptych folding in to reveal painted doors on the back side.

“This is what we call artist furniture—what painters and sculptors would make for themselves, not as part of their regular practice,” he told Midnight Publishing Group News. “And this is 10 or 15 years ahead of its time—we’re on the way to Futurist and Divisionist Italian painting.”

 

Playing Card Collection (1680–1975)
Daniel Crouch Rare Books, London
€600,000 ($638,000)

Selections from Frank van den Bergh's playing card collection. Photo courtesy of Daniel Crouch Rare Books, London.

Selections from Frank van den Bergh’s playing card collection. Photo courtesy of Daniel Crouch Rare Books, London.

A substantial portion of Daniel Crouch Rare Books’ booth was dedicated to 157 decks of cards owned by Frank van den Bergh. He has been perhaps the world’s leading collector of playing cards since 1990.

“It’s 30 years of work, but my children don’t want to continue the collection so what do you do?” Van den Bergh told Midnight Publishing Group News.

The asking price for the collection, which Crouch has packaged in attractive matching boxes for the occasion, comes out to about $75 a card—but that average includes much more valuable decks, like an embroidered one from 1680 that alone would cost €75,000. (The gallery has released a catalogue, titled The Art of the Deal, detailing the collection.)

There are also a few single cards, such as a 1795 “foundling card” that Van den Berge dubbed the “most emotional” of the collection.

“If a mother abandoned a child, she left a playing card and she cut off a corner of the card. She would keep the other part so she could prove that it was her child,” he said. “Here, she writes on the back ‘my burden is heavy. Goodbye my dear Famke,’ which is a Dutch name meaning ‘little girl.’ It’s just a single card, it’s dirty, but it has a very emotional background.”

 

Joachim Tielke, Collectors cabinet (ca. 1700)
Kollenburg Antiquairs, Oirschot, the Netherlands
€2.5 million ($2.65 million)

Joachim Tielke, Collectors cabinet (ca. 1700). Photo courtesy of Kollenburg Antiquairs, Oirschot, the Netherlands.

Joachim Tielke, Collectors cabinet (ca. 1700). Photo courtesy of Kollenburg Antiquairs, Oirschot, the Netherlands.

This is the only known cabinet by Joachim Tielke, who is recognized as one of the 17th and 18th century’s greatest instrument makers. Assembling the intricate piece, carved from solid ivory and inlaid with ornate designs in tortoiseshell and mother of pearl, would have served as an advertisement of the artist’s skill as a craftsman—and a showpiece in his Hamburg shop.

The work was identified thanks to the diary of a book collector, in which he described visiting Tielke and being impressed by the cabinet, with its many drawers and hidden compartments.

Finding the right collector to take home this unique piece, Renee Louwers of Kollenburg Antiquairs told Midnight Publishing Group News, could be a challenge: “The people who collect Tielke’s guitars, they are not usually looking for an expensive piece of furniture!”

 

Kazari Zame (19th century)
Galerie Jean-Christophe Charbonnier, Paris
€40,000 ($42,000)

Kazari Zame (19th century) from Galerie Jean-Christophe Charbonnier, Paris, at TEFAF Maastricht 2023. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

Kazari Zame (19th century) from Galerie Jean-Christophe Charbonnier, Paris, at TEFAF Maastricht 2023. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

In a fair full of rarities, a 19th-century Japanese Kazari Zame, a decoratively bound roll shagreen, or ray skin, stood out. Traditionally given as gifts among the daimyô, or Japanese feudal lords, these luxurious packages could have been displayed—or opened so the skin could be applied to a sword hilt.

“When you are packing something like this, it’s really, really precious,” gallery owner Jean-Christophe Charbonnier told Midnight Publishing Group News. “This one, we are very lucky that it hasn’t been unpacked.”

Only two other intact versions are known to survive, one of which is in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The other has been in private hands since being auctioned at Christie’s in 1992. The ray skin is mounted in high quality brocade, with several openings to show off the grain of the skin within.

 

Maddalena Corvina, Portrait of a Lady of High Standing (ca. 1635–1645)
Miriam di Penta Fine Art, Rome
€100,000–150,000 ($106,000–160,000)

Maddalena Corvina, <em>Portrait of a Lady of High Standing</em> (ca. 1635–1645). Photo courtesy of Miriam di Penta Fine Art, Rome.

Maddalena Corvina, Portrait of a Lady of High Standing (ca. 1635–1645). Photo courtesy of Miriam di Penta Fine Art, Rome.

This is a newly discovered painting by the obscure 17th-century Italian miniaturist Maddalena Corvina.

“She was well-known in her time. We have portraits of her, and 17th-century historians talk about her work,” dealer Miriam di Penta told Midnight Publishing Group News. “She never married, in order to continue her profession.”

Corvina was successful, too—her mother’s will lists jewelry and other valuables purchases as being made thanks to her daughter’s career as an artist.

The gouache on paper work on view at TEFEF, which hails from a private collection in France, joins only two or three known works by the artist. Likely painted for a betrothal, it is also in the best condition of any extant Corvina.

“The others are more faded; they’ve suffered from light,” Di Penta said.

The only previous auction results from the artist, according to the Midnight Publishing Group Price Database, were in 2019, for €12,260 ($13,596) and in 1998, for £2,760 ($4,519)—but an eagle-eyed buyer still snapped up this much more expensive example day one of the fair.

TEFAF Maastricht is on view at the Maastricht Exhibition and Conference Centre (MECC), Forum 100, 6229 GV Maastricht, Netherlands, from March 9–19, 2023.

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Texas Cop Caught Inside Capitol Riot Says He Was Just There to Admire the ‘Historical Art’ + Other Stories


Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most consequential developments coming out of the art world and art market. Here’s what you need to know on this Friday, January 22.

NEED-TO-READ

Antwaun Sargent Joins Gagosian as Director – The 32-year-old New York-based curator and writer will join the mega-gallery as a director. The first exhibition organized by the author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion (and former Art Angle guest) will look at “notions of Black space.” It is planned for later this year at Gagosian’s West 24th Street location. Of the mega-gallery, Sargent says, “It’s a place where you come and view art, but it’s also a place where discussion happens.” (New York Times)

Fraudster Cheated Gallery Out of Millions, Per Court – Gerald Smith is in the midst of a 10-week commercial court hearing in which claimants are looking to obtain tens of millions of pounds’ worth of assets they say were derived from the profits of his scams. Among those looking for restitution: London’s Halcyon Gallery, which sold Smith a portfolio of art by Renoir, Rodin, Degas, Matisse, and Dali worth $10.1 million in 2014. Smith was first convicted in 1993 over the theft of £2 million from a pension fund and again in 2006 for stealing £34 million from an IT company. (The Standard)

Houston Officer Arrested at Capitol Just Wanted to See the Art – We read Playboy for the articles, we patronize strip clubs for the food, and we apparently storm the US Capitol in order to take in the old pictures of important American figures. At least, that’s what Houston police officer Tam Dinh Pham suggested to authorities after he was captured in Facebook photos inside the building on January 6. Pham, who said he was in DC for his wife’s business trip, told the FBI that he spent about 15 minutes inside the Capitol during the riot, where “he looked at the historical art on the walls and took photographs and videos inside.” (Raw Story)

The German Stock Market Teams Up With the Städel Museum – The Deutsche Börse, which owns and operates the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, is teaming up with the city’s Städel Museum. The four-year partnership will contain a “high annual sponsorship sum” and will allow the museum to provide special education, events, and access to “employees, customers, and business partners of the stock exchange.” (Monopol) 

ART MARKET

Unseen Dog Painting by Manet to Hit the Auction Block – It’s a good painting of a very good dog. A composition that Édouard Manet dashed off in 1879 as a present for Marguerite Lathuille, the daughter of a Paris innkeeper whose portrait he painted around the same time, will go on sale at Drouot in Paris next month. The small work, which has not been seen publicly until now, is expected to (ahem) fetch €280,000 ($340,551). (Guardian)

Midnight Publishing Group Auctions’ Contemporary Art Sale Reaches New Heights – Midnight Publishing Group Auctions’ recent sale saw an average transaction value up 324 percent compared to the equivalent auction last year, and competitive bidding from continental Europe and Asia. The top lot was Imi Knoebel’s Chateau Lagrezette, which fetched $180,000 against a $150,000 low estimate. Armando Mariño’s Not All Who Wander Are Lost achieved $21,600, the second highest price for a work by the artist at auction. Midnight Publishing Group Auctions holds two of the three top records. (Midnight Publishing Group Auctions)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Gertrud Parker, Founder of Museum of Craft and Folk Art, Dies – The fiber artist who opened the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum in her home back in 1982 has died at 96 from complications from a stroke. The museum grew into a downtown institution, which closed in 2012 after a 30-year run. (SF Chronicle) 

JD Malat Joins Jury of “The Next Big Thing” – Art dealer Jean-David Malat of the JD Malat Gallery in Mayfair, London, has joined the panel of judges for the TV series “The Next Big Thing,” which premieres in February 2021. The show—think “American Idol” for young artists—aims to spot talented emerging artists who have suffered due to a lack of opportunities during lockdown. (Press release)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Midnight Publishing Group’s Own Sarah Cascone Was on Jeopardy! – Our very own senior writer Sarah Cascone was on Wednesday night’s episode of Jeopardy, winning a daily double and revealing her extremely specific knowledge of state capitals. Watch this clip to hear her recount the time she met the legend himself, the late Alex Trebek, on the subway. (Facebook)

See the Public Murals of Walls for a Cause – The gallery We Buy Gold and Orange Barrel Media have teamed up to organize a multi-site public mural project and art sale to benefit Project EATS. “Walls for a Cause NYC” will be on view from the street and online. Nine artists, including Felipe Baeza, Naudline Pierre, and Theresa Chromati, will take over Brooklyn and Manhattan walls from now until March 24. (Press release)

Christopher Myers, My Body is a Burning House (2020). Courtesy of the artist. Install photo credit: Orange Barrel Media

Christopher Myers, My Body is a Burning House (2020). Courtesy of the artist. Install photo credit: Orange Barrel Media

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Archaeologists Are Caught Up in an Intense Fight Over Just How Important the Mysterious Nebra Sky Disk Really Is


It’s an enchanting object, made of copper and bronze, an ancient view of the cosmos—but how ancient, exactly, is what’s fueling an increasingly contentious debate.

Is the Nebra Sky Disk an unprecedented Bronze Age treasure forged some 3,600 years ago? Or a less-remarkable Iron Age object made 1,000 years later?

In September, Rupert Gebhard, director of the Munich’s Bavarian State Archaeological Collection, and Rüdiger Krause, an early European history professor at Goethe University in Frankfurt, published a paper in the German journal Archäologische Informationen arguing that the artifact—which features images of the sun, the moon, and the Pleiades star cluster—is not the remarkable earliest-known depiction of astronomical phenomena that it had been heralded as.

“It’s a very emotional object,” Gebhard told the New York Times. He believes that the looters who discovered the disk before it was recovered in 2002 moved it from its original site and reburied it with real Bronze Age artifacts to make it appear older and more valuable.

Now, a competing paper put forth by experts including Harald Meller, director of the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Germany, which owns the disk, has fired back.

A replica of the Nebra Sky Disk being examined with a microscope in the workshop of the State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt. Photo by Sebastian Willnow/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images.

A replica of the Nebra Sky Disk being examined with a microscope in the workshop of the State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt. Photo by Sebastian Willnow/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images.

The article, published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, challenges Gebhard’s and Krause’s claims, arguing that the authors are “extremely selective in their argumentation, sometimes make false claims, and ignore a large part of the extensive research results of the last 20 years on the Nebra Sky Disk and its context.”

Authorities captured the smuggled disk in a 2002 sting operation. As part of a plea bargain, the looters revealed that it came from Mittelberg, a hillside near the German town of Nebra, and that they had damaged the artifact with pickaxe during their illicit dig.

Gebhard and Krause believe this is a convenient lie designed to protect the original find, in the hopes it might yield additional treasures they can sell illegally.

But their opponents argue that due to its elevation, Mittelberg would have been a good site for astronomical observations, and a logical place to ceremonially bury an object such as the Nebra Sky Disk, which was likely used to track lunar and solar calendars.

They argue that the evidence supports the looters’ story, and that the object—never mind how unusual it is—must be an authentic Bronze Age artifact.

“As a unique find, the Nebra Sky Disk is and remains an absolutely singular specimen. It goes without saying that it therefore is not easy to fit into the motif stock of its time,” admits the new study, which was written by a team of experts led by Ernst Pernicka, a senior professor at Tübingen University and a director of the Curt-Engelhorn Center for Archaeometry in Mannheim.

The Nebra Sky Disk on viewe at the State Museum for Prehistory in Halle, Germany. Photo by Schellhorn/ullstein bild via Getty Images.

The Nebra Sky Disk on view at the State Museum for Prehistory in Halle, Germany. Photo by Schellhorn/ullstein bild via Getty Images.

This isn’t the first time experts have questioned whether the Nebra Sky Disk was too good to be true. Initially, the work was suspected to be a modern fake.

“When I first heard about the Nebra Disk, I thought it was a joke, indeed I thought it was a forgery,” Richard Harrison, professor of European prehistory at the University of Bristol told the BBC in 2004. “It’s such an extraordinary piece that it wouldn’t surprise any of us that a clever forger had cooked this up in a backroom and sold it for a lot of money.”

Part of the cause for skepticism is the disk’s unusual iconography, which includes what has been interpreted as a solar barge added to the artifact some time after its initial creation.

The controversial Nebra Sky Disk and some of the Bronze Age artifacts with which it was found. Photo courtesy of the State Museum for Prehistory in Halle, Germany. Photo by J. Lipták, Munich.

The controversial Nebra Sky Disk and some of the Bronze Age artifacts with which it was found. Photo courtesy of the State Museum for Prehistory in Halle, Germany. Photo by J. Lipták, Munich.

Yet among the supporting evidence suggesting the disk dates to the Bronze Age is a sword with a handle made partly of wood that is believed to have been buried with the disk. According to carbon dating, the sword is from around 1,600 BC.

In addition, archaeologists found marks on the site that appeared to have been made by a pickax, matching the looters’ story of how the disk was damaged.

Soil samples from the disk and other artifacts from the Nebra hoard are all consistent with samples taken from Mittelberg. And the soil where the disk was allegedly uncovered contains traces of gold and copper, which could be residue from the disk after having been buried for thousands of years.

No matter what, the mystery of the Nebra Sky Disk and its view of the heavens is far from solved, another ancient artifact that may never reveal all of its secrets.

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