Netherlands

Visitors to ‘TEFAF Maastricht’ 2015 will be greeted by a revamped entrance to the fair alongside a new ‘curated space’ of work by post-Modern and contemporary artists to tie in with the ‘TEFAF Modern section’.

Bright spring sunshine greeted the opening of this year’s TEFAF Maastricht in sharp contrast to last year when freak snowfall disrupted many visitors’ travel plans to the southern Netherlands.

Christie’s has announced a major consignment of Old Master drawings which will be offered over the next two years in a series of sales in London, Amsterdam and Paris.

Christie’s are scaling down their Dutch operation with substantially fewer staff and a pared-down sales schedule designed to reflect the international auction calendar.

Showing up at TEFAF Maastricht in the southern Netherlands with a stand cobbled together from stale, lacklustre stock is tantamount to professional suicide, the sort of nightmare that has dealers waking up in a cold sweat.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has acquired an important collection of letters, photos and documents relating to Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank.

ATG Media, parent company of Antiques Trade Gazette has been named as one of the Top 100 companies in Europe in the Red Herring Awards, which celebrate innovation and technology in business.

IT may sound a little gimmicky, but one of the most captivating TEFAF exhibits this year was an animated version of Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder’s Vase With Flowers in a Window by the contemporary artists Rob and Nick Carter on the stand of London’s Fine Art Society.

THE incomparable TEFAF Maastricht opened to the usual streams of visitors at the Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre but, unusually for the Dutch fair, an early big ticket sale came for a British picture.

PICTURED here is one of more than 100 polychrome Delft tiles, valued at hundreds of thousands of pounds, stolen from a leading collector in the Netherlands.

IF the mood at the opening of the TEFAF Maastricht fair on March 11 was tempered with a note of caution, this was dramatically heightened after a power cut plunged the halls into complete darkness just as the vernissage was getting underway.

SOTHEBY’S staged the most lucrative art sale ever in the Netherlands on March 8 when they offered a 161-lot selection of contemporary art from the corporate collection of British American Tobacco.

DUTCH police have recovered eight paintings stolen from Robert Noortman’s gallery in Maastricht in 1987. The works, which included valuable works by Renoir and Pissarro, were traced to two small towns in the south of Holland after an alleged middleman in Dubai made an attempt to sell the paintings back to the insurers for a reported €5m (£4.5m).

NEXT year's 22nd TEFAF Maastricht will see a record 240 exhibitors from 15 countries (this year there were 227) and for the first time there will be a dedicated section for 20th century and contemporary design.

A pair of Dutch library globes by the man regarded as father of western globe making, Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571-1638), now rank the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction in Holland.

Everyone knows about the legendary TEFAF waiting list. The pre-eminence of Maastricht among international art fairs means spaces at the town’s congress and exhibition centre in March are as rare as hens’ teeth.

WITH their much-publicised US$30m Van Gogh, London and New York art dealers Dickinson had one of the most talked-about works at TEFAF Maastricht which closed on Sunday, March 16.

HOTELS, restaurants, insurance, security, shippers and packers, design and print, marketing and promotion. These are just some of the ancillary industries that benefit when the show comes to town.

Christie’s are to increase the number of European salerooms offering the Christie’s Live online bidding feature.