Researching Art Markets: Past, Present and Tools for the Future 9780367708320, 9781003018674

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction
The Art Market as an Ecosystem
Learning from the Past
Different Languages, Different Approaches
Sources
Contents
The Art Collector
The Artist as Entrepreneur
The Formation and Development of New Markets
References
Part 1 The Art Collector
1 The Artist Collector—a Dual Actor in the Artistic Scene: The Example of Bernar Venet’s Collection
Introduction
The Collection, An Echo of An Artistic Course
Artist-specific Modes of Acquisition
The Development of Interdependent Networks
Conclusion
Notes
References
2 Walpole and the Creation of a Market in Britain for Ebony Furniture from the East
Introduction
Walpole’s Collecting in the Context of Eighteenth-Century Antiquarianism
Rebranding Ebony Furniture as Tudor
The Dissemination of the Style
The Role of the Dealers
Conclusion
References
3 African Art Acquisitions at Tate: A Case Study On the Influence of External Parties on the Collecting of African Contemporary Art
Introduction
Collection Aims and Funding
Acquisition Committees and the Partnership with the guarantee Trust Bank
Examples of Acquisitions
Committees and Networks
Conclusion
Note
References
4 Art Malls and Popular Collecting in Post-Socialist China
Introduction
Private Art Museum in China Today
Empirical Approach
Shanghai Himalaya Museum
K11 and Its Outreach
The Chinese Model of Museum Retail
Conclusion
Acknowledgement
Notes
References
5 Perspectives of Private Contemporary Art Collecting in Brazil
Introduction
Methodological Approach
The First Results
The Museum as a Temple
National and Hegemonic Distribution
Conclusions
References
Part 2 Artists as Entrepreneurs and Their Career Paths
6 Art Market Stakeholders’ Actions and Strategies for the Co-Creation of Artists’ Brands
Introduction
Artist Brand Co-Creation Mechanisms in the Contemporary Art Market
Artists and Peers
Galleries and Dealers
Museums and Curators
Experts, Critics and the Media
Auction Houses
Some Concluding Remarks
Notes
References
7 A Behavioural Approach to Understanding the Artist as entrepreneur
Introduction
The Behavioural Approach to Artistry and Entrepreneurship
The Behavioural Characteristics of Artists and Entrepreneurs
Tolerance of Risk, Uncertainty and Ambiguity
Personality and Creativity
Intrinsic Motivation
Conclusion
Notes
References
8 Artists’ Promotion and Internationalisation: A Fair’s Perspective
Introduction
Art Basel’s Leadership
Empirical Approach and Data
Artists’ Internationalisation at Art Basel Fairs
National Representation of Artists
Support of Artists By Domestic Galleries
Artists’ Exposure at Art Basel Fairs
Artists’ Visibility
Artists’ Career Level
Conclusions
Notes
References
9 Disregarded Or Adored? Remarks on Art Market Responses to Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain
Introduction
Features of Totalitarian Art, Culture and Market
Women Under Socialism
Careers of Married Women Artists Assessed By Ratios of (un)equality
A Typical Woman Artist’s Career?
Conclusions
Note
References
10 Mapping the Art Market in Denmark
Introduction
The Boundaries of the Danish Art Market
Data and Method
Demand
Supply
The Size of the Art Market and Artists’ Share
The Development of the Art Market
The Total Art Market in Denmark
Conclusions
Notes
References
Part 3 The Formation and Development of New Markets
11 Information Efficiency in Art Markets Past and Present
Introduction
The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH)—its Potential and Its Limitations for Understanding Art Markets
Early Efficiency Milestones of Art Markets (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries)
Later Efficiency Milestones of Art Markets (Turn of the twenty-First Century)
Conclusions
References
12 Bought-In at English Auction: Sellers Testing Their Estimates in a Maturing Market
Introduction
The Increasing Professionalisation of the Field
Building Evidence On Bought-In Lots, Estimates of Reserves and Information
Discussion and Conclusion
Note
References
13 From the Artist’s Studio to the Amateur’s Portfolio: The Modern Drawing Market and Collecting in Early Nineteenth-Century Paris
Introduction
The Turning Point of the Revolution and the Société Des Amis Des Arts
‘L’empreinte Du Mouvement De L’âme’
Simon Chenard and Antoine Valedau: Two Collectors of Contemporary Artists
From a Personal Object to a Fashionable One: Drawings, market and the Vogue of ‘albums’ (1790–1830)
References
14 The Strategy of a New Material: The Demidoff Family and Malachite
Introduction
The Rise of a Market in the First-Third of the 19th Century
Paul Demidoff and New Ways of Applying Malachite in the 1830s
Anatole Demidoff and the First Promotional Programmes
Paul Pavlovich Demidoff, and the American Market
Conclusions
Note
References
15 New Markets for Old Items: Selling Aristocratic Collections of Art and Antiquities in Interwar Slovenia
Introduction
New State, New Legislation and the Emerging Market
Buying for the Nation as a Strategy
Heritage Protection and Cross-Border Trade
Conclusion
References
archival Sources
Index

Citation preview

Researching Art Markets

Researching Art Markets brings together scholars from several, various disciplinary perspectives. In doing so, this collection offers a unique multidisciplinary contribution that disentangles some of the key aspects and trends in art market practices from the past to nowadays, namely art collectors, the artist as an entrepreneur and career paths, and the formation and development of new markets. In understanding the global art market as an ecosystem, the book also examines how research and perceptions have evolved over time. Within the frameworks of contemporary social, economic and political contexts, issues such as business practices, the roles of market participants and the importance of networks are analysed by scholars of different disciplines. With insights from across the humanities and social sciences, the book explores how different methods can coexist to create an interdisciplinary international community of knowledge and research on art markets. Moreover, by providing historical as well as contemporary examples, this book explores the continuum and diversity of the art market. Overall, this book provides a valuable tool for understanding art markets within their wider context. The volume is of interest to scholars researching into the cultural and creative industries from a wider perspective. Elisabetta Lazzaro is Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries Management at the Business School for the Creative Industries, University for the Creative Arts, UK, and Executive Board Member of the Association for Cultural Economics International (ACEI). Nathalie Moureau is Professor of Economics at University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France, where she is also Researcher at RiRRA21. Adriana Turpin teaches the history of collecting and art market studies at IESA, Paris. She is Chairman of the Society for the History of Collecting.

Routledge Research in the Creative and Cultural Industries Series Editor: Ruth Rentschler

This series brings together book-​length original research in cultural and creative industries from a range of perspectives. Charting developments in contemporary cultural and creative industries thinking around the world, the series aims to shape the research agenda to reflect the expanding significance of the creative sector in a globalised world. Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Performing Arts Workforce Tobie S. Stein Understanding Audience Engagement in the Contemporary Arts Stephanie E. Pitts and Sarah M. Price Access, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Cultural Organizations Insights from the Careers of Executive Opera Managers of Color in the US Antonio C. Cuyler Digital Transformation in the Cultural and Creative Industries Production, Consumption and Entrepreneurship in the Digital and Sharing Economy Edited by Marta Massi, Marilena Vecco and Yi Lin Researching Art Markets Past, Present and Tools for the Future Edited by Elisabetta Lazzaro, Nathalie Moureau and Adriana Turpin Strategic Cultural Centre Management Tomas Järvinen For more information about this series, please visit:  www.routledge.com/​ Routledge-​Research-​in-​the-​Creative-​and-​Cultural-​Industries/​book-​series/​ RRCCI

Researching Art Markets Past, Present and Tools for the Future Edited by Elisabetta Lazzaro, Nathalie Moureau and Adriana Turpin

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Elisabetta Lazzaro, Nathalie Moureau & Adriana Turpin; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Elisabetta Lazzaro, Nathalie Moureau & Adriana Turpin to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​89339-​2  (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-70832-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​01867-​4  (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of illustrations  Acknowledgements  List of contributors  Introduction 

viii xi xiii 1

E L I SAB E T TA LA ZZA RO, NATH A LI E MO U R EAU AN D AD RI ANA TU R PI N

PART 1

The art collector 

11

1 The artist collector—​a dual actor in the artistic scene: the example of Bernar Venet’s collection 

13

G WE N D OL I N E C O RTH I ER -​H A R D O I N

2 Walpole and the creation of a market in Britain for ebony furniture from the East 

24

AD RI ANA  T U RPI N

3 African art acquisitions at Tate: a case study on the influence of external parties on the collecting of African contemporary art 

37

S T E P H AN I E DI EC K VO SS

4 Art malls and popular collecting in post-​socialist China 

51

I -​YI  H S I E H

5 Perspectives of private contemporary art collecting in Brazil  N E I VARG AS DA  RO SA

63

vi Contents PART 2

Artists as entrepreneurs and their career paths 

73

6 Art market stakeholders’ actions and strategies for the co-​creation of artists’ brands 

75

F RAN C E S C O A N G ELI N I A N D MA SSI MI LI A NO CAS TE L L ANI

7 A behavioural approach to understanding the artist as entrepreneur 

86

B RON WYN C OATE, RO BERT H O FFMA N N, P IA ARE NIUS AND SWE E -​H OON  C H UA H

8 Artists’ promotion and internationalisation: a fair’s perspective 

99

E L I S AB E T TA LA ZZA RO A N D NATH A LI E MOURE AU

9 Disregarded or adored? Remarks on art market responses to women artists behind the Iron Curtain 

112

MARC E L A RU SI N KO

10 Mapping the art market in Denmark 

126

T RI N E   B I L L E

PART 3

The formation and development of new markets 

139

11 Information efficiency in art markets past and present 

141

DARI U S A. SPEI TH

12 Bought-​in at English auction: sellers testing their estimates in a maturing market 

152

E L I S AB E T TA LA ZZA RO A N D BÉN ÉD I C TE M IYAMOT O

13 From the artist’s studio to the Amateur’s portfolio: the modern drawing market and collecting in early nineteenth-​century Paris 

168

SARAH BAK K A LI

14 The strategy of a new material: the Demidoff family and malachite  LU D MI L A BU D R I NA

182

Contents  vii

15 New markets for old items: selling aristocratic collections of art and antiquities in interwar Slovenia 

194

RE NATA KOMI Ć MA R N A N D TI NA  KO ŠA K

Index 

208

List of illustrations

Figures 1.1 Bernar Venet, La droite D’ représente la fonction y = 2x+1. Collection of the Musée de Grenoble; Représentation 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.1 2.2

2.3

2 .4 4.1 4.2 4.3

− x2 graphique de la fonction      . Collection of the Musée y= 4 National d’Art Moderne de Paris.  Sol LeWitt, Asymmetrical pyramid drawing #428, 1985, wall painting made with coloured inks, 255,5 x 724 cm. Bernar Venet Collection  Carl André, Belgica Blue Cliff, 1989, Belgian blue limestone, 45 x 15 x 750 cm. Bernar Venet Collection  Dan Flavin, Untitled (to Ira), 1970, green and yellow fluorescent light, 245 x 61 x 19 cm. Bernar Venet Collection  Visualisation of the artists collected by Bernar Venet according to their artistic movements of filiation  The Holbein Chamber at Strawberry Hill. Watercolour on paper by John Carter, 1788. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library  One of a set of ebonised wood side chairs c. 1660–​8. 82.0 x 50.5 x 45.0 cm. Possibly identified with the six ‘Wolsey’ chairs given by the Duke of York to George IV and received at Carlton House on 18 February 1824. Royal Collections Trust RCIN 2160  Ebony side chair, carved and pierced with caned seat. (1660–​1680). 97 x 53.5 x 46.5 cm. Most probably from Eaton Hall, home of the Marquess of Westminster. Victoria and Albert Museum, London IS 6-​2000  Design by William Burn for a dressing table 1848  Façade of the Shanghai Himalaya museum  Cao Fei, the birth of RMB City  Urban farm in the Shanghai K11 

14 16 17 19 21 25

30

32 34 54 57 58

List of illustrations  ix 9.1 Number of artworks purchased to the couples by public art museums (1970–1989)  119 9.2 Prices paid by public art museums for paintings of Šimotová and John (1960–1989). (Czech korunas per square metres)  121 9.3 Artist Adriena Šimotová in her studio in Prague, 1982  121 12.1 E.T., ‘To be sold to the best bidder’, 1773. [773.03.15.01] Lewis Walpole Library  156 12.2 Hammer price of bought-in paintings at consecutive sales in London auction houses (1790–​1820)  158 12.3 Sale, bought-​in and unknown prices of Albani’s Family in Adoration (first and fifth auctions only)  162 12.4 Sale, bought-​in and unknown prices of Bourdon’s auctions Niobe with her Children (first and fifth auctions only)  163 13.1 Henri-​Nicolas Van Gorp. Portrait of Guillaume-​Jean Constantin. RMN-​Grand Palais (musée des châteaux de Malmaison et de Bois-​Préau)/​Gérard Blot  170 13.2 Jean-​Baptiste Isabey, Portrait of Simon Chenard, 1796, Black pencil and stump, 58 x 42 cm. Orléans, musée des Beaux-​Arts  173 13.3 Adèle Romany (1769–​1846). Portrait of Antoine Valedau, 1809. Oil on canvas, 7.5 x 60 cm. Montpellier, Musée Fabre  173 13.4 Artists by generation in Chenard’s auction’s sales  174 13.5 Artists by generation in Valedau’s collection  175 14.1 Russia. Illustration from Dickinson’s comprehensive pictures of the great exhibition of 1851 (London, 1852)  188 15.1 Items from the collection of Hans Kometer, Pukštajn (Puchenstein) Manor, 1932  198 15.2 Collection of Karl von Strahl, Stara Loka Castle, 1930  199 15.3 Mid-​16th century carved canopy bed from Hrastovec Castle, exported, and sold in 1929  201 15.4 Collection of Ludwig von Gutmannsthal-​Benvenuti, Novi Dvor near Radeče, 1926  202

Tables 3 .1 Annual expenditure GTBank for Tate partnership  3.2 Price information on the acquisition of Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art  3.3 Members of the Africa Acquisition Committee Tate 2017  7.1 Key stages and associated behavioural competencies of entrepreneurship and artistry  8.1 Most represented countries by gallery origin at the Art Basel fairs (2017)  8.2 Most represented artists’ nationalities at the Art Basel fairs (2017) 

41 42 46 89 103 104

x  List of illustrations 8.3 Distribution of artists’ nationalities by gallery origin (all Art Basel fairs, 2017)  104 8.4 Distribution of artists’ nationalities by gallery origin for each fair (2017)  106 8.5 Number of artists whose works are showcased at two or more booths at the three Art Basel fairs in 2017  107 8.6 Artists’ breakdown by age (all fairs average, 2017)  108 8.7 Artists’ breakdown by age (all fairs, 2017)  109 9.1 Comparative characteristics for neo-​avant-​garde couples in post-​war Czechoslovakia  117 9.2 Artistic couple’s career development: Šimotová vs. John  122 10.1 Demand: buyers of first-​time sale of artworks by Danish artists, 2016  131 10.2 Supply: sellers of first-​time sale of artworks by Danish artists, 2016  133 10.3 Market size (demand) for first-​time sale of artworks by Danish artists, 1996 and 2016  134 10.4 Market size (supply) for first-​time sale of artworks by Danish artists, 1996 and 2016  134 10.5 The size of markets other than first-​time sale of artworks by living Danish artists, 2016  135 11.1 Share of international (non-​French) catalogues known to Lugt and Duplessis in %  147 11.2 Share of international (non-​French) catalogues, differentiated by place of issue, known to Duplessis, as % of Lugt  147 11.3 Percentage of transactions missed by either Artprice.com or Artnet.com for a sample portfolio of 10 twentieth-century painters, tracked over the period 2016–2018  149 12.1 Repeated auctions of Albani’s Family in Adoration 1792–​1797 159 12.2 Repeated auctions of Bourdon’s Niobe with her Children 1791–​1800  160

Acknowledgements

A book such as this is the result of many discussions, formal and informal: the series of the three interdisciplinary workshops arose from the editors’ belief that there is a need to explore the different methodologies that underpin art market studies, and developed as a result of the enthusiastic response to the workshops, where historic and contemporary markets could be examined in open and collaborative discussions by international scholars from many different countries and institutions. As such, our first debt is to the participants to our first workshops in Montpellier, Utrecht and London: to the many researchers who presented their papers in the three workshops, to our keynote speakers and to the chairs and participants of the round table discussions, where ideas were exchanged and perceptions challenged. Their insights, range and depth of knowledge, as well as their different perspectives, raised many new ideas and set out ways of understanding the multifaceted world of the art market, thus nurturing our growing research community who regularly meets during our ongoing workshops. We are also most grateful to the editorial panel members Michael Hutter (WZB Berlin Social Science Center), Léa Saint-​Raymond (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris) and Philippe Van Cauteren (Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent  –​S.M.A.K.) for their precious contribution to the peer review of the proposals and the final selection of essays. Their comments and suggestions were invaluable to the authors and the editors. To the institutional hosts of the three workshops, we would also like to express our gratitude for their support:  Paul Valéry University Montpellier 3, HKU University of the Arts Utrecht and the Royal Academy of Arts and Kingston University, London, that so generously hosted the workshops in those cities. In particular, in Montpellier we would like to thank Nicolas Bourriaud, director of the MO-​CO (Contemporary Montpellier) and David Giband, director of the research laboratory ART-​Dev (UM5281), for their support to the first workshop; in Utrecht, Roel of Bleker, president of the HKU and Marjanne Paardekooper, director of the Expertise Centre for Research and Innovation, and the whole Department of Creative Economy, for their keen endorsement and assistance; in London, Anna Dempster,

xii Acknowledgements former head of Academic Programmes, and Anna Pojer, former manager of Academic Programmes at the RAA and Bruce Hayes at Kingston, for their great support in the setting up and running of the London workshop. In addition, we would like to thank the anonymous donor who contributed to travel costs for some of the speakers on behalf of the Society for the History of Collecting.

Contributors

Francesco Angelini is an Adjunct Professor of Advanced Industrial Organisation at the University of Bologna, Italy. His research is focused on pricing and value formation in the art market and in the digital market. Pia Arenius is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She is an expert on new venture creation and nascent entrepreneurs. Sarah Bakkali is an independent scholar specializing in the Parisian art market from the end of the eighteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles on this topic. Trine Bille is Professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Her main research interest is cultural economics, and she has published more than 70 books and scholarly articles. She is president elect of ACEI, Association for Cultural Economics International. Ludmila Budrina is Professor of Art History at the Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg, Russia. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles and book dedicated to the history of the Russian art of pietra dura. Massimiliano Castellani is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Statistical Sciences of the University of Bologna, Italy. He is author of several publications on cultural economics and industrial organization. Swee-​Hoon Chuah is Professor of Economics in the School of Business and Economics at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. Bronwyn Coate is a Senior Lecturer in Economics and member of both the Behavioural Business Lab and Cultural Value Impact Network at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She is a cultural economist with expertise in the economic analysis of the arts and creative industries. Gwendoline Corthier-​Hardoin is doing a PhD at the École Normale Supérieure of Paris on artists collectors in co-​direction with the University Paul Valéry

xiv  List of contributors Montpellier 3, France. She is also in charge of the Research Centre on Collections at MO.CO. Hôtel des Collections in Montpellier. Stephanie Dieckvoss is an art historian with a special interest in art markets. She is Senior Lecturer at Kingston University, School of Art and Course Director of MA Art Market & Appraisal in London, UK, where she also teaches at Sotheby’s Institute of Art and Central Saint Martins. Robert Hoffmann is a Professor of Economics in the School of Economics, Finance and Marketing and head of the Behavioural Business Lab at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. His research areas are in behavioural economics. I-​Yi Hsieh is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Taiwan Yangming-Chiaotung University. Having received her PhD in East Asian Studies from New York University (2016), currently she is working on a book entitled Emotional Objects: Private Collecting and Connoisseurship in Post-​socialist Beijing. Renata Komić Marn is Research Fellow at the France Stele Institute of Art History, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Tina Košak is Research Fellow at the France Stele Institute of Art History, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, and Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Maribor, Slovenia. Elisabetta Lazzaro is Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries Management at the Business School for the Creative Industries, University for the Creative Arts, UK and Executive Board Member of the Association for Cultural Economics International (ACEI). She has a track record of more than 70 publications in international peer-​ reviewed journals, books and policy reports, in particular on art markets, arts consumption and value, entrepreneurship, sustainable business models and financing (including crowdfunding) of arts professionals and organisations, and digitisation in the arts and culture. Bénédicte Miyamoto is an Associate Professor at Université Paris III, Sorbonne-​ Nouvelle, Institut du Monde Anglophone, specialising in British History and Art Market Studies, Paris, France. She has published on various aspects of the British art world of the eighteenth century, the organisation of its professional artistic fields, its practices and influences and the emerging art market in London and its practices. Nathalie Moureau is Professor of Economics at University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France, where she is also Researcher at RiRRA21. Specialised in cultural economics, she has carried out expert works for the Department of Studies, Forecasting and Statistics of the French Ministry of Culture and the French committee of Art Galleries on art galleries, art

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List of contributors  xv collectors, art fairs, etc. She has published several books and numerous articles on cultural economics, especially on the art market. Marcela Rusinko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic. Her focus is on modern and contemporary art in East-​Central Europe, art collecting, material cultures, provenance research and art market. Darius A. Spieth is San Diego Alumni Association Chapter Alumni Professor of Art History at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA. He is the author of Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art (Brill, 2018) and subject editor for Art Markets for the Grove Dictionary of Art. Adriana Turpin teaches the history of collecting and art market studies at IESA, Paris. She is the FHS Project Manager for the British and Irish Furniture Makers Online database. She is a founder member of the Seminar on Display and Collecting at the Institute of Historical Research, and the co-​editor of their publications and the Chairman of the Society for the History of Collecting. She has published on a wide variety of topics in the history of collecting and furniture. Nei Vargas da Rosa is Professor of the Postgraduate Course in Art and Market at Centro Universitário Belas Artes, São Paulo and PhD candidate of Visual Arts at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre. He has published various articles and book chapters and organises events on the development of the art system in Brazil.

Introduction Elisabetta Lazzaro, Nathalie Moureau and Adriana Turpin

The art market as an ecosystem Following sociologist Raymonde Moulin’s (1967, 1992) pioneering analysis of the contemporary art market, where values are created through the interaction of institutions, artists and intermediaries, the concept of the art market as an ecosystem of interactions between various players was taken further by Howard Becker (1982), who brought the term ‘art world’ into common usage and reinforced the diverse and complex nature of creating and acquiring works of art. We therefore set up the international workshop series—​after which this book is titled—​to start to reflect on these aspects of the art market ecosystem. At the same time, we aimed at considering how multidisciplinary research might analyse the roles and interactions of main agents of such an ecosystem, starting from the collector, the artist and the dealer, and the implied shifts. As an ecosystem, the art market is nowadays studied by scholars belonging to different disciplines, among others, art history, economics, sociology, management, anthropology, law, political science and cultural studies. It is, however, only recently that art historians have been willing to engage with the general aspects of the art market, preferring to concentrate on the individual aspects of artists’ practices and patronage. Overall, each discipline brings its own questions and methodologies. The purpose of the workshops series Tools for the Future, and hence of this book, is not interdisciplinarity per se, but rather the exploration of how different methodologies can be used together and create an interdisciplinary international community of knowledge and research on the art market.

Learning from the past A second strand of aims of this book is the study of the developments that have historically occurred within art markets, to find out possible recurrent factors across time. Historians tend to assume that certain practices that concern their period of interest originated at that time. For instance, contemporary art historians question the aesthetic value of artworks produced

2  E. Lazzaro, N. Moureau and A. Turpin by studio assistants of artists, such as Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst. Other art historians, instead, focus on the studio practices of previous European artists and the common acceptance by patrons that artists such as Rubens or Raphael extensively or entirely used studio assistants in the creation of their paintings, while also offering works by their own hand. Certainly, the social, economic and political context changes the meaning of the studio; nevertheless, working with assistants is not so new in the artworld, and comparing these practices in different periods is rich in lessons.

Different languages, different approaches Disciplines argue from various perspectives and use different methodologies. By bringing art market scholars from different disciplines together, they can confront and possibly share and combine their own theoretical backgrounds, approaches and methods. For instance, new studies in art history exploring different meanings of ownership and value creation of artworks draw on the influence of post-​structuralist writers, in particular Michel Foucault, as well as of anthropologists, such as Arjun Appadurai or Igor Kopytoff (Appadurai, 1986). During the workshop conversations, we experienced the wide range of scholars’ interests and approaches, the very different viewpoints of, e.g. historians and economists being a reflection of the richness of the subject. Although the questions and methodologies concerned may remain quite different, it is important to achieve awareness and acceptance of the broad issues and approaches involved in understanding the art market. Similarly, this book reflects a growing international dialogue between scholars from different continents across the globe, who regularly meet at our ongoing workshops on a variety of topics in art market research.

Sources As is clearly visible from the essays in this volume, their various approaches use different types of sources. For instance, historians rely on archival evidence, bills, inventories, sales records as well as contemporary critical writings. They are well used to treating their subjects in a political, economic or cultural framework. For contemporary historians, the same sources may be just as fragmentary and some, such as bills or inventories, may not be possible to access. However, the conditions for understanding these sources, and their partial nature, are the same for all scholars. Economists, sociologists and anthropologists study outward forms of behaviour in order to assess motives or practices which can be of key relevance for art historians. Equally, scholars employing larger-scale data can better objectify the individual concerns of case studies. Whatever the discipline, the common scientific aim is to provide dispassionate and careful reflections on a given research question, and offer a complementary context for other research questions.

Introduction  3

Contents The book offers 15 essays, each independently treating its subject and discussing the corresponding methods employed. Noticeably, more common methodologies could be expected for such a relatively specialist theme which is the art market. Instead, each author applies his/​her own approach and method, confirming a research ecosystem as well; nonetheless, some commonalities may appear. The essays are organised into three main subjects, namely art collectors, artists and new markets. Other, underlying topics emerge across the three sections, such as networks and the intersection of roles of market players through the layers of friendships, business partnerships or social peer groups. Overall, the essays in this book invite the reader to consider and reflect upon all these topics, which remain a fundamental tool for understanding art markets within their wider context.

The art collector While academics evoke the idea of an ecosystem when analysing the functioning of the art world, it is to a chess game that the writer Pablo Helguera (2005) refers when he describes the functioning of the American art scene. In this game, the collector takes the place of the queen, the most powerful piece on the chessboard. The entry of an artist’s work into a private collection, large or small, is never neutral (Moureau, Sagot-​Duvauroux & Vidal, 2016). If the collector’s choices are in line with those of the institution (the museum), the entry of the artwork in the collection helps to ensure the concordance between institutional legitimisation and the market, as it shows that there is a market demand and not only a museal one. When, instead, the eye of the collector differs from that of the institution, it opens up the possibility of a later rediscovery by art historians, as the work of the artist will exist in private collections. The existence of a dense network of collectors whose choices confirm or are complementary to institutional collections is thus essential for the diversity of the contemporary scene. Until the nineteenth century, private collections were mainly the concern of ‘curious’ individuals, ‘connoisseurs’ or even ‘amateurs’, rather than ‘collectors’. Ideally, the ‘curious’ individual was driven by exhaustivity, the connoisseur was characterised by his/​her competence and discernment, and the amateur by his/​her taste and cultural capital (Guichard, 2008; Lichtenstein, 1995). Apart from these differences, they all shared a semi-​public character and the accessibility of their collections to visitors. With the advent of museums, ‘amateur collectors’ no longer had to open their collections to the public, and ‘each individual collection could thus become, without reservation, an expression of the collector’s personality’ (Pety, 2003, p. 119). In general, collections devoted to living artists, as opposed to patronage, probably did not develop until the middle of the eighteenth century, the original viewpoint of collectors

4  E. Lazzaro, N. Moureau and A. Turpin and their role in the subsequent constitution of museums becoming decisive. For instance, the exhibition La jeunesse des musées at Orsay Museum in Paris showed that two out of every five museums in France existed because of private collections (Martin-​Fugier, 2012). Similarly, thanks to the attention paid by several private collectors to the avant-​garde, certain artists could be consecrated by the institution (Bonfait, 2013; Pomian, 2001). The increase in the number of museums devoted to contemporary art during the 1960s marked a new stage in the collector’s role, as competition among curators to first identify the ‘important artists of tomorrow’ contributed to the artists’ earlier entry into art history. While the collector remains central to the recognition of artists, his/​her actions are more than ever coordinated with those of other market players, and the temporal gap that existed between museum collections and private collections at the beginning of the twentieth century, tends nowadays to be blurred (Moulin, 1992; Moureau & Sagot-​Duvauroux, 2010). Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines—​notably management, psychology, art history, sociology and, more recently, economics (for a review, see Moureau, Sagot-​Duvauroux & Vidal, 2016)—​have contributed to research on collectors. Most of them have dealt with the subject on the basis of case studies, through portraits and monographs. Fewer works have attempted to take a more global approach and consider the whole population of collectors. Of course, this is partly related to the discipline and its methods. While the careful exploitation of collectors’ archives tends to be the natural raw material of the art historian, for economists and sociologists the canvas is larger as they seek to highlight more general features. However, this may just be a supposition, as shown by the richness of essays contained in this book. Most of these essays are contributed by art historians, who, although relying upon case studies, offer strong hypotheses that could be tested more generally in the entire population of collectors. When studying the collection of the artist Bernar Venet, Corthier Ardouin sheds light on particular modes of exchange that could characterise many other collections built by artists. Similarly, when Turpin shows the decisive role of the collector Walpole and the relationships he maintained with other collectors and dealers in fostering an ebony furniture market, she contributes more broadly to the reflection on the fundamentals favouring the emergence of a new market. Similarly, both essays by Dieckvoss and Hsieh, which are also based on case studies, deal with the issue of the coexistence of the private and the public, highlighting features that are likely to be found in a large number of other art institutions. In particular, Dieckvoss questions the recent decision-​making system of the Africa Acquisitions Committee at Tate, London, and shows how the maintenance of a public service mission was stained by bias and private vested interests; from another angle, Hsieh addresses the issue of private museums’ sustainability, i.e. their financing and capacity to endure over time, through two case studies, namely the K11 and the Himalaya Museum in Shanghai. Vargas da Rosa, instead, does not rely on a case study, but on a large survey conducted among Brazilian collectors. National surveys point to the

Introduction  5 importance of international comparisons in order to set different conclusions about art collectors’ behaviour and to highlight national specificities. Whether we use case studies or more general surveys, the study of art collectors is so fascinating because we approach the figure of the collector, we make assumptions and discover different behavioural traits, but at the same time part of his/​her personality, motivations and actions still continue to elude us. What about the artist, then?

The artist as entrepreneur The market for the visual arts has been traditionally characterised by a short and relatively simple value chain, where the figure of the artist particularly stands out among collectors, museums, art galleries, dealers, critics, auction houses and, more recently, fairs and online platforms (Lazzaro, 2020). Yet, the artists labour market is highly selective and uncertain, as most successful artists at the top of professional careers correspond to global celebrity brands; and, more at the bottom end, a multitude of emerging artists may require greater entrepreneurial skills, where risk-​taking, networking and business and financial capacity crucially complement talent. In such a context, artists have always striven to build their careers, to achieve artistic innovation and value recognition (Menger, 1999). The success equation points to considering the necessary artistic, business and relational skills for artists in order to compete, emerge and consolidate their positions on the art market, as well as to opportunities and challenges available to artists, affected by public as well as private policies at both national and international levels, and the favouring (or disfavouring) schemes being put in place in support of artists (see e.g. Lazzaro & Noonan, 2021). In this context, entrepreneurialism is not new in the history of art and has affected the career paths and life cycles of a number of famous and less famous artists, besides influencing their art itself. Entrepreneurialism also contributes to blur the separation of roles between the artists and their intermediaries (besides collectors) in, among others, the concept, production, organisation, promotion, distribution and pricing of new art, opening to new business models. For instance, the creation of the artist’s identity through the management of studio production, as evidenced by Hirst or Muarakami (Riot, Chamaret & Rigaud, 2013) is not new, as it was in the practices of artists such as Rembrandt, Rubens or the Bruegel family (Alpers, 1990). Finally, entrepreneurialism supports less successful artists to invent alternative successful careers with other roles on the art market, or in other sectors outside the art market, also through knowledge internalisation and network spillovers (Lazzaro, 2017, 2021). At the same time, we cannot face all these issues without considering the underlying aesthetic and ethical implications connected with the creation of the artistic value. For instance, this allows us to reflect on certain artists’ conformism to market strategies aimed at diminishing the uncertainty of value

6  E. Lazzaro, N. Moureau and A. Turpin creation in the market, favouring the star system and a homogeneity of taste, against the benefits of cultural diversity. Historic cases, where business as such might not be seen in the same way, highlight how critics and collectors created star artists, Michelangelo and Guido Reni being just two examples of how far artists consciously affirmed themselves on the market (Cavazzini, 2008). The perspective of the art market as an ecosystem characterised by the interplay of different agents is adopted in this book by Angelini & Castellani, in order to explain how the value of artists is built, where such a value is captured by human brand. Artist’s brand contributes to convey information on the artist and hence to lower uncertainty about his/​her value, before that of his/​her artworks. Coate, Hoffmann, Arenius & Chuah focus, instead, on artists themselves, whom they assume to be a particular type of entrepreneur, compared and examined through the lenses of behavioural approach. In particular, they define the ‘artepreneur’ through the three dimensions of risk tolerance, creative disposition and intrinsic motivation, which are key in offering behavioural insights for both artists (and entrepreneurs) and policymakers. The policy perspective –​both private and public –​interests also the essay by Lazzaro & Moureau about globalisation vs. national representativeness of artists in the emerged phenomenon of art fairs, for their strategic role in the selection, support and establishment of artists on the international art market. Their main findings confirm the dominant positioning of Western artists from the USA and Germany, but also disclose different regional patterns in strategies promoting contemporary artists, such as in Asia. Geographical representativeness calls for another type of representativeness, namely gender. Rusinko shows how the difficult careers of most prominent Czech female artists married to and unfairly competing with their husband colleagues during the Soviet era was not independent from conservative art institutions, and especially from a lagging society. Eventually, the careers of these women artists could at least benefit from the support by individual private and rather young and progressive collectors. More generally, different facets of institutional contexts throughout the history and geographical areas of the art market, such as culture, society and political and economic systems and orientations have shown to more or less play a relevant role in artists’ opportunities and challenges. Bille further contributes to this perspective by focusing on the primary market of living Danish artists, and to what extent their income has depended on an increasing private demand, against a stagnating public demand during the last 20 years. Brille’s mapping of the Danish art market is possible by compartmentalising the supply-​side and the demand-​side of the market. Methodologically, the theoretical essays of this section demonstrate an effort in offering a comprehensive and multidisciplinary synthesis of relevant concepts and theories from a literature spanning economics, marketing, management, psychology, neuroscience and sociology. Empirical contributions, ranging from art history to economics, stress how they would not be possible without disposing of and/​or gathering substantial datasets. Overall, all

Introduction  7 essays are keen to provide insights about artists and other market agents and stakeholders.

The formation and development of new markets It is of considerable interest in studying the art market to explain why some artists are highly successful and others not, or why a particular type of artwork becomes fashionable at a particular moment in time. The rise of new markets, the decline of others, the transitory appeal of some artists in contrast to the constant interest in others are part of the history and the possible evolution of the art market or, indeed, art markets. In the primary market, the trajectory of the artist’s career forms an important element of the study of new markets and is considered separately in the previous section of the book. This section therefore concentrates on the secondary market and brings together five studies that take different views on understanding the creation, formation and development of new markets within the history of the art market. In The Economics of Taste, Gerald Reitlinger (1961–​70) presented his research in terms of the rise and fall of art prices from 1750 through to the 1960s, basing his analysis of the success of a particular market in terms of the prices realised at auction. His approach, although criticised in detail, remains to the interpretation that the success of an artwork and an artist are attributed in market terms in accordance to the price fetched and to the volume of works sold. Artworks, treated as commodities, can be classified by size, medium and subject matter. More difficult, is the question of authenticity (e.g. Lazzaro, 2006), which has different historical interpretations. In the contemporary art market, data are gathered by companies such as Artprice, ArtTactic, Artsy, Artfacts, Artory, etc., underpinning the sense that art can be seen as a form of investment. Art as investment is not new but has been part of the art market since at least the seventeenth century and the development of public auction sales. As always, access to information is a critical tool for the collector and buyer: as Spieth demonstrates in his essay, this is not new but is also dependent on very variable factors, even when in the contemporary market there is much more availability of information. Market prices are based on auction sales, usually from the principal, international auction houses and therefore are less likely to reflect smaller or less valuable markets; moreover, they generally do not reflect gallery sales. In the essay by Lazzaro & Miyamoto, auction records are examined to unearth possible strategies of dealers to manipulate prices. Historical records from dealers, although perhaps fragmentary, in addition, provide detailed and valuable information about their accounts and practices. Research into the strategies of dealers and agents has developed awareness of the roles that middlemen had in sourcing works of art, promoting them, advising clients as well as purchasing or negotiating the purchases of such works. (Pezzini, 2018). These strategies are explored in the essays by Lazzaro and Miyamoto, Spieth and Budrina, as also by Komiç & Kosak. The essays, particularly those

8  E. Lazzaro, N. Moureau and A. Turpin by Bakkali, Budrina and Komiç & Kosak emphasise the importance of some social features of different networks at play in creating new markets. The emergence of new markets equally reflects the social, political and cultural context in which collectors acquire. Taste, which was given prominence in the writings of Francis Haskell, remains a key concern of historians of the history of collecting. However, once taste enters the market, it is no longer only of interest as a cultural phenomenon but has also an impact on the art market. In particular, as the essays in this volume make clear, the taste that forms new markets is both subjective and objective. The emergence of a market for the paintings of Netherlandish Golden Age art, resulted from complex factors of shifts of artistic taste, new collectors and the availability of goods (Spieth, 2018). The French Revolution and Napoleonic conquests brought fundamental changes to the European societies and economies with equal shifts in collecting patterns (Avery-​Quash & Huemer, 2019). As Bakkali indicates, a new market for contemporary drawings developed during a period of upheaval and restoration, based not so much on the availability of works of art, but from profound changes in cultural attitudes. Koniç & Kosak in their turn analyse how markets were created and manipulated within another time of political and social turmoil after World War II. In examining methodologies for the creation of new markets, there is an assumption that such an approach can reveal certain patterns, the understanding of which can add to the methods employed in exploring individual markets. Although it must be recognised that such a structuralist interpretation must be balanced by reference to particular social and economic contexts, it also suggests that similar patterns of development can be found in the emergence of new markets at any date. The emergence of new artists or new art may follow a pattern: arising among a small group of collectors or dealers, developing into a significant trend and finally a new market, promoted and disseminated by networks of collectors, agents, dealers and supported by art critics, or, today, museum curators and art consultants. The essays in this section, although concentrating on historical markets, provide important and different examples and approaches of investigation by which the mechanisms behind the rise of new markets, including the contemporary market can be understood. They emphasise the complex interconnections existing among the players in the market and the range of strategies employed. They also demonstrate the various methods and sources which can be brought into play in order to better understand the rise and maturing of new markets.

References Alpers, S. (1990). Rembrandt’s Enterprise. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Appaduri, A. (Ed.) (1986). The Social Life of Things:  Commodities in Cultural Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Avery Quash, S. & Huemer, C. (Eds.) (2019). London and the Emergence of an International Art Market. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute Publications.

Introduction  9 Becker, H.S. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bonfait, O. (2013). Collectionnisme, Encyclopaedia Universalis. Retrieved from: www. universalis-​edu.com/​encyclopedie/​collectionnisme. Cavazzini, P. (2008). Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-​ Century Rome. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Guichard, C. (2008). Les amateurs d’art à Paris au XVIIIème siècle. Paris:  Champ Vallon. Haskell, F. (1976). Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and Collecting in England and France. London: Phaidon. Haskell, F. (1987). Past and Present in Art and Taste:  Selected Essays. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Helguera, P. (2005). The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style. Bethesda, MD: Jorge Pinto Books. Lazzaro, E. (2006). Assessing quality in cultural goods: The hedonic value of originality in Rembrandt’s prints. Journal of Cultural Economics, 30(1), 15–​40. Lazzaro, E. (2017). Cultural and creative entrepreneurs. In J.E. Doyle & B. Mickov (Eds.). Culture, Innovation and the Economy (pp. 33–​37). London: Routledge. Lazzaro, E. (2020). Art at the crossroads between creativity, innovation, digital technology and business, a case study. In T. Bille, A. Mignosa & R. Towse (Eds.). Teaching Cultural Economics (Teaching Economics series, pp. 238–​244). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Lazzaro, E.  (2021). Linking the creative economy with universities’ entrepreneurship: A spillover approach. Sustainability, 13(3), 1078. Lazzaro, E. & Noonan, D. (2021). Cultural entrepreneurship in a supportive ecosystem: The contribution of crowdfunding regulation. In P. Demartini, L. Marchegiani, M. Marchiori & G. Schiuma (Eds.). Cultural Initiatives for Sustainable Development:  Management, Participation and Entrepreneurship in the Cultural and Creative Sector (Book series: Contributions to Management Science) Berlin: Springer. Lichtenstein, J. (1995). Préliminaires à toute collection, Les Goncourt ou le portrait du collectionneur-​artiste. In S. Pagé, D.  Molinari, J.  Laffon, L.  Brisson & M.A. Chambost (Eds.). Passions privées, collections particulières d’art moderne et contemporain en France (pp. 23–​30). Paris: Paris Musées /​Editions des musées de la Ville de Paris. Martin-​Fugier, A. (2012). Collectionneurs. Arles: Actes Sud. Menger, P.M. (1999). Artistic labor markets and careers. Annual Review of Sociology, 25, 541–​574. Moulin, R. (1967). Le marché de la peinture en France. Paris: Minuit. Moulin, R. (1992). L’artiste l’institution et le marché. Paris: Flammarion. Moureau, N.  & Sagot-​ Duvauroux, D.  (2010). Le marché de l’art contemporain. Paris: La découverte. Moureau, N. Sagot-​ Duvauroux, D. & Vidal, M. (2016). Collectionneurs d’art contemporain:  Questions de culture Ministère de la Culture. DEPS. Retrieved from: https://​books.openedition.org/​deps/​935. Pety, D. (2001). Le personnage du collectionneur au XIXe siècle: de l’excentrique à l’amateur distingué. Romantisme, 112, 71–​81. Pety, D. (2003). Les Goncourt et la collection: de l’objet d’art à l’art d’écrire. Geneva: Droz.

10  E. Lazzaro, N. Moureau and A. Turpin Pezzini, B. (2018). Making a Market for Art:  Agnew’s and the National Gallery, 1850–​1944. PhD thesis. Manchester: Manchester University. Pomian, K. (2001). Collections: une typologie historique. Romantisme, 31 (112), 9–​22. Reitlinger, G. (1961–​1970). The Economics of Taste (Republished). London:  Barrie and Rockcliff. Riot, E., Chamaret, C. & Rigaud, E. (2013). Murakami on the bag: Louis Vuitton’s decommoditization strategy. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management, 41(11/​12), 919–​939. Spieth, D. (2018). Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art. Leiden: Brill.

Part 1

The art collector

1  The artist collector—​a dual actor in the artistic scene The example of Bernar Venet’s collection Gwendoline Corthier-​Hardoin

Introduction A double actor in the artistic scene, the artist collector is a figure too little known in academic studies (Collection Lambert en Avignon, 2001; Dexter, Barbican art gallery & Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 2015; Robbins, 2016). His dual position, between the production of works and the practice of collecting, gives him a singular status within the art world. The research carried out in recent years on contemporary art collectors (Thomas, 1997; Benhamou-​Huet, 2008; Guiot, 2008; Blom, 2010; Moureau, Sagot-​Duvauroux & Vidal, 2015) has helped to lift the veil on a field that is difficult to embrace in its entirety and in which artist collections play an important role (Schnapper, 1976). If the collector’s usual practices are now being identified, what about the artist who has collected works throughout his/​her career? How do we understand the formation of their collection in terms of motivations, acquisitions and networks, given their dual position as artist and collector? Our chapter proposes to analyse the collection of Bernar Venet as a case study, considering his intentions (artistic, social, economic), transactions (purchases, exchanges), as well as his networks, thus highlighting the relationships he maintained with his colleagues and trying to understand the specificity of an artist–​collector. Bernar Venet is a French sculptor born in 1941 and an emblematic figure of the Conceptual Art Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His collection of more than a hundred works by international artists is brought together in the Venet Foundation, created in 2014 in Le Muy in the south of France. Part of the collection has been shown in two main exhibitions: Vivre l’art: collection Venet, at the Espace de l’Art Concret in 2009; and Le Monde de Bernar Venet: Venet in context, at the Abattoirs de Toulouse in 2010.

The collection, an echo of an artistic course We have compiled an inventory of 121 works by 53 artists from the exhibition catalogues of his collection. Among them, six artists are particularly

14  Gwendoline Corthier-Hardoin represented: Sol LeWitt, Arman, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, César and Dan Flavin. These artists are characteristic of two fundamental stages in his career. The first took place in Nice at the end of the 1950s. Bernar Venet’s formal preoccupations then focused on black or monochrome and types of material. He created paintings coated with tar and continued his research around coal. During this period, he was very close to Arman, who also lived in Nice and through him he met New Realism artists such as François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Mimmo Rotella, Daniel Spoerri or Jacques Villeglé. Bernar Venet was not part of this group, but being around them allowed him to integrate a network of artists who encouraged the exchange of ideas and objects. The works presented in his collection and produce before he left for the United States represent this relational networking:  works by Arman, Ben, César, Gérard Deschamps, Hains, Yves Klein, Rotella and Villeglé. In 1966, his departure for the United States marked a turning point in his career. During this second stage, he discovered the works and artists of the American scene and created the first of his mathematical diagrams. He developed a conceptual language that originated in mathematical formulas painted on monochromes, or in spatial devices composed of bars placed

Figure 1.1 Bernar Venet, La droite D’ représente la fonction y = 2x+1. Collection of − x2 the Musée de Grenoble; Représentation graphique de la fonction y = . 4 Collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne de Paris. View of the exhibition ‘Bernar Venet, les années conceptuelles, 1966–​1976’, in Musée d’Art moderne et d'Art contemporain, Nice, 2018. © François Fernandez

The artist collector  15 on the ground. At this time the new artists, who appeared in his collection, were those such as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Dennis Oppenheim and Dan Flavin. Between 1971 and 1976, he ceased all artistic activity and pushed his investigations along three axes:  Lines, Angles and Arcs, which led him to increasingly monumental works. He presented his own work in many international institutions, including the Château de Versailles in 2011 and the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon for a retrospective in 2019. The works in his collection, produced and acquired from the late 1960s onwards now focused mainly on the American minimal and conceptual scene. Moreover, these artists belong to the generation prior to Bernar Venet’s. A generational analysis shows that the majority of them were born between 1920 and 1940, they represent 72% of the collection, while 17% (nine artists) belong to his generation (from 1940 onwards). Only two artists were born before 1900; among them was Marcel Duchamp. Bernar Venet met Duchamp in November 1967 through the collector Isi Fiszman at a dinner at the artist Christo’s home, and presented him with one of his works in February of the same year. It is at the end of this meeting that Duchamp wrote on a corner of a newspaper ‘The sale of wind is Venet’s event’, a pun with the letters of his name, referring to an artistic project by Bernar Venet.1 The trace of this meeting is still present in the artist’s collection and testifies of Venet’s admiration for Duchamp. ‘I was totally unknown and to have the privilege of making exchanges with artists who were changing the course of history in Europe was gratifying and reassuring’ says Venet (Avrilla, Marcadé & Espace de l’art concret, 2009, p. 27). The collection thus takes on multiple functions; it allowed the artist not only to be part of a contemporary art scene, in Nice before 1966, in the United States after that date but also within the history of art through his choice of guardian figures.

Artist-​specific modes of acquisition If Venet’s collection has a specific character through the motivations that animate it—​ admiration, artistic membership—​ the modes of acquisition employed are also particular. The usual collector sometimes practices exchange, but sales and purchases of works seem to be more common. Conversely, exchanges between artists are a familiar and recurrent practice (Collection Lambert en Avignon, 2001). The collection of Bernar Venet is a singular example. A gift from Arman occasioned the artist’s departure for the American continent. He knew that Venet dreamed of going there and offered him one of his works in 1966, advising him to sell it to finance his trip. After six months of hesitation, Venet sold the piece for $300 and left for New York. This story is symptomatic of artists’ collections in that a large number of works are obtained through exchanges. It is because Bernar Venet worked and was friends with the artists of New Realism that he acquired works. His first exchange took place with Ben (Benjamin Vautier), then with Arman, César, Deschamps, Paul-​Armand Gette and Villeglé. In the United States, he

16  Gwendoline Corthier-Hardoin exchanged work with Allan d’Arcangelo, John Chamberlain, Dan Flavin, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth. With Sol LeWitt, he also exchanged a wall drawing made for his apartment in 1970. These artists were the precursors of his own preoccupations, and together they shared a taste for collecting.2 Figuration never interested me… I knew Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist well, but it wasn’t my taste and that’s not what I ended up collecting… Since I  had a strong taste for abstraction, I  immediately found myself closer to minimal art. I became friends with Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Carl André… (Avrilla, Marcadé & Espace de l’art concret, 2009, p. 29) It thus appears that there was a correlation between his artistic practice and that of a collector. Bernar Venet was in contact with artists with whom he felt close both formally and personally. The choice of works in the collection was oriented to correspond with his own searches. In the 1980s, for example, he exchanged one of his works with art dealer Hans Mayer for a Campbell Soup by Andy Warhol. Venet then sold this work to Daniel Templon in exchange for a work by Ellsworth Kelly and a sculpture by Tony Smith. Although he was aware of Warhol’s importance on the art scene, the work he owned did not correspond to the spirit of his collection. While exchanges between colleagues were, therefore, a key element in this artist’s collecting practice, these exchanges also took place regularly with dealers. Exchanges with galleries appeared to be a normal mode of acquisition and seemed to take place mainly in two situations. On the one hand, when the gallery was unable to pay the artist, then it offered payment to the artist in the form of another artist; this is, for example, the case of the exchange with the art dealer Templon of Carl André’s Belgica Blue Cliff in return for the money that the gallerist owed to Venet—​around $70,000. On the other hand, when

Figure 1.2  Sol LeWitt, Asymmetrical pyramid drawing #428, 1985, wall painting made with coloured inks, 255,5 x 724  cm. Bernar Venet Collection. © Bernar Venet archives.

The artist collector  17 the gallery wished to acquire a work by Venet, they might offer a work from their stock; this was the case in the exchange of a bow by the artist for a work by Tony Cragg with a New Zealand gallery. In both circumstances, it was the fact of being an artist that made the transaction possible. Moreover, when the artist solicits a gallery for a purchase, he is often offered advantageous prices: I always get a bit of a special price, because I’m an artist, I  know the dealers very well, and the artists say you have to make a price. Robert Morris’ Labyrinth is a really major piece that was left to me for a small fee. Everybody does that. The Sol LeWitt that I bought at Pace, I told them it was for the Foundation. They understand that it’s not at all for speculation. (Interview with Bernar Venet on 21 November 2019 in Le Muy) The artist thus cultivates a dual position, allowing him to use his position within the art world as a key element in creating his art collection. This is coupled with an already established reputation as well as the links he has been able to forge with numerous actors (dealers, curators, collectors, …). This practice echoes Mark Granovetter’s work on the influence of social structure

Figure 1.3 Carl André, Belgica Blue Cliff, 1989, Belgian blue limestone, 45 x 15 x 750 cm. Bernar Venet Collection. © Bernar Venet archives.

18  Gwendoline Corthier-Hardoin on economic activities (Granovetter, 2006). Indeed, the networks developed by Venet with dealers determined his way of collecting. In the exchanges between artists, status also plays a determining role. Exchanging a work of art with another artist is, above all a way of showing mutual esteem. (…) To exchange is to feel that you belong to the same family, to the same category of artists, and conversely, the bonds of friendship facilitate exchanges. (Venet et al., 2010, p. 105) Belonging to a distinctive community thus appears as a facilitator of exchange. For all that, these transactions do not take place without taking into account notions of value, which may be artistic, but also economic: This type of exchange occurs when our works do not yet have a real commercial value and the galleries are not yet too quick to intervene in the selection of available pieces. And I would even say when no one but friends of artists are interested in what we do. The reality is that good artists, even if they are of a generous nature, do not exchange with average or mediocre artists… although things change with the years and fashions! (Venet et al., 2010, p. 105) The artist, therefore, not only exchanges works with artists whom he esteems, but also for a value that he considers comparable. In exchange for three large wall sculptures by Donald Judd, Bernar Venet offered him a small painting by Ad Reinhardt, a work on paper by Franz Kline and one of his works to which he added a little money. At that time Donald Judd was selling little, and this seems to have facilitated the transaction. It, therefore, seems that the exchanges carried out by Venet firstly took place between artists who considered themselves to be similarly recognised and were often at the beginning of their career, where dealers did not play a dominant role; and finally with the work being evaluated an equivalent price, even if it had not yet been put on the market. Thus, while the exchange can be a regular mode of acquisition for the artist, although more frequently practiced at the beginning of a career, major pieces are obtained through purchases in galleries or at auctions. Asked about this point, Venet stated that in his collection, the percentage of purchased works is much higher than those exchanged, but also that the purchase was made to achieve a museum quality level (Interview with Bernar Venet on 21 November 2019 in Le Muy). This characteristic is specific to the collection of the artist, who wished to live surrounded by major works; he said, ‘I would like to live in a museum, so I might as well make my own’. Shortly after his meeting with Marcel Duchamp, he acquired a work by the artist entitled In Advance to Broken Arms in auction at Parke-​Bernet Galleries, New York for $6000, which he exchanged five years later with Donald Judd. From Dan Flavin, he purchased a 1963 diagonal, a key

The artist collector  19

Figure 1.4 Dan Flavin, Untitled (to Ira), 1970, green and yellow fluorescent light, 245 x 61 x 19 cm. Bernar Venet Collection. © Bernar Venet archives.

piece representing one of the artist’s first and most important investigations into the formal possibilities of using fluorescent light fixtures. The artist’s involvement in the acquisition of artworks, whether outside the art market through mutual esteem with other artists, at the border, through exchanges with art dealers; or anchored in it, through the purchase of museum pieces, allowed him to build a collection of intimate pieces that reflected not only his friendships, admirations and concerns, but also contained major works, based on the impact these had on the career of an artist or in art history. It then appears necessary to demystify the disinterested and solitary artist. He would indeed, thanks to his collection, become more of a plural character, aware of the environment in which he evolves (Becker, 1982).

The development of interdependent networks We have seen that the artist uses a set of dynamics and relationships to mobilise what appears to be a network. According to the sociologist Walter W. Powell (1990), the network differs from a market, and an organisation, mainly insofar as exchanges are more social, more dependent on relationships, mutual interests and reputations, and not guided by a structure of authority. In this

20  Gwendoline Corthier-Hardoin sense, Bernar Venet as a collector, through his exchanges and purchases, was part of a network of interdependent actors whose means of communication were largely relational, and where the norm of reciprocity and reputational interest played a decisive role. On this last point, he mentions several times that the exchanges took place with artists he considered good and serious: ‘those who exchange with each other at the outset, it is because they have intuition that they are dealing with something serious’, or again: ‘nine times out of ten, it is a matter of friendship. You are friends with an artist because he’s good and you respect him, and then one day you think you’d like to have something from him’ (Interview with Bernar Venet on 21 November 2019 in Le Muy). In the same way, when asked about his first exchange, the artist stated that the first serious artist was Ben: ‘exchanging a work with him already meant a certain recognition…’ (Avrilla et al., 2009, p. 27) Moreover, reputational interest is coupled with a standard of reciprocity. Defined by Alvin W. Gouldner (1960) as a pattern of giving and receiving that encompasses all human contact, this norm of reciprocity underlies exchanges between artists as well as those with art dealers mentioned above. We know, for example, that in 1974, Venet graciously lent his New York apartment to Olivier Mosset for a year. To thank him, the latter offered him all his production made in situ. We could go further by suggesting that this standard, within the framework of the network of collecting artists, is coupled with an ethical significance. Indeed, ethical considerations seem to be exercised on artists instinctively. When Arman offered his work to Venet, so he could finance his departure, the artist hesitated. It was not appropriate for artists to resell works that have been exchanged. Venet eventually did sell this one but said that when he came back from New York, he owned two. Similarly, he had to resell—​for lack of financial means—​one of Villeglé’s artworks. Later, when his situation allowed him to do so, he acquired two new works by the artist from an art dealer. Finally, the links that are created between artists are intrinsically based on relational interactions. In this sense, it is not so much the collected object that establishes the relationship but rather the link that give rise to the exchange of the object; this aspect is particularly visible in the works from the collection that directly references Bernar Venet, such as the Portrait coupé de Bernar Venet by Arman in 1964, Boîte d’allumettes signed jointly by Rotella, Hains and Villeglé in 1965 after an evening in Montparnasse with the artist, the Portrait de Bernar Venet by Christo in 1967, or Relâche Venet by François Morellet in 1996. The visualisation of the networks created by the artist below makes it possible to distinguish more precisely the way in which his collection helps to identify the artistic movements in which Bernar Venet has been related. The relationships developed by the artist show that he fits into three main movements: New Realism, Conceptual art and Minimalism. Some artists are closer, and Venet’s ties to them are thicker. This depends on the number of artworks acquired by the artist. The more an artist is collected, the closer his name will be to the centre and the link will be thicker. Moreover, the spatialisation of the collection allows the artists who have been collected to stand out, but in isolation, so that they do not allow us to say that Venet was part

The artist collector  21

Figure 1.5 Visualisation of the artists collected by Bernar Venet according to their artistic movements of filiation. © Gwendoline Corthier-Hardoin.

of this specific trend. For example, this happens with Frank Stella, Gottfried Honegger, Jannis Kounellis or Marcel Duchamp.3 Globally, the collection is international, and more specifically American. It obviously echoes the career of the artist who, upon his arrival in the United States, met and exhibited with the proponents of Conceptual and Minimal art in the galleries of Paula Cooper, Virginia Dwan and Leo Castelli. All of these relationships thus highlight, not only the plurality of links woven by the art collector but also his place within the contemporary art scene from the second half of the twentieth century to the present day.

Conclusion Bernar Venet, through his position as an artist, is a privileged actor as a collector or in the collecting world. His evolution within several artistic scenes

22  Gwendoline Corthier-Hardoin (New Realism, Conceptual Art and Minimalism), his friendships with many artists and the resulting exchanges, as well as his links with dealers, placed him at the heart of an artistic network that facilitated the circulation of works. A double link in the same chain of circulation of works, his motivations were plural, between a source of intellectual and collective emulation and an instrument of legitimisation and recognition. His inclusion at the heart of a network encouraged exchanges between artists and dealers. By highlighting this practice, we can see how the artist collector holds an ambivalent position vis-​à-​vis the market, where relationships based on interdependence, reputational interests and reciprocity come into play. These elements are intrinsically linked to the artist’s career and highlight the life cycle of the collection. Indeed, the latter is made up of solidarity exchanges at the beginning of his career, mainly with artists who are friends, and then evolves towards confirmed exchanges, revealing a defined artistic orientation. Subsequently, exchanges and purchases are organised in such a way as to correspond to the spirit of the collection, conceptual and minimal art within the framework of Bernar Venet’s collection. Finally, the artist’s creation of a foundation marks the consecration of the collection’s autonomous existence, for which acquisitions are now made. As a result, Bernar Venet demonstrates a rare case among collectors, through his motivations, his modes of acquisition and his networks. The artist collector gathers artworks that he esteems, he feels close to and which resonate with his own productions, aesthetically and conceptually. Indeed, the mental path leading to the production of his own artworks is consistent with the friendships he develops and the acquisitions he makes. By determining the actors involved, the nature and characteristics of their relationships, as well as their foundations and how they take shape, it appears that artist collector constitutes a singular artistic and social phenomenon.

Notes 1 It was an artwork created in February 1967. Venet recorded a conference of the Annual meeting of the America Physics Society and decided to present this sound as an artwork. 2 Sol LeWitt has also collected many works. His collection was shown at the Centre Pompidou-​Metz during the exhibition ‘Sol LeWitt collectionneur. Un artiste et ses artistes’ in 2013. 3 The graphic also presents Frank Stella (Op art), Gottfried Honegger (Concrete art), Jannis Kounellis and Mario Merz (Arte povera), Marcel Duchamp (various), Lucio Fontana (Spatialism), Robert Indiana (Pop art), Ray Johnson and Robert Rauschenberg (Neo-dada), Robert Motherwell and Cy Twombly (Abstract Expressionism), Franz West and Jaume Plensa (other).

References Avrilla, J.-​M., Marcadé, B. and Espace de l’art concret (2009). Vivre l’art: collection Venet [exposition, Espace de l’art concret, Centre d’art contemporain, Mouans-​Sartoux,

The artist collector  23 25 janvier-​24 mai  2009]. Mouans-​Sartoux:  Espace de l’art concret, Centre d’art contemporain Somogy. Becker, H. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Benhamou-​Huet, J. (2008). Global Collectors/​Collectionneurs du monde. Paris: Éditions Phébus. Blom, P. (2010). Une histoire intime des collectionneurs. Paris: Payot. Collection Lambert en Avignon. (2001). Collections d’artistes [exposition, Avignon, Collection Lambert, 1er juillet-​30 octobre 2001]. Arles: Actes Sud. Dexter, L., Barbican Art Gallery and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (2015). Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist As Collector [exposition, Barbican Art Gallery, Londres, 12 février –​25 mai 2015]. Londres: Barbican Art Gallery. Gouldner, A. W. (1960). The norm of reciprocity: a preliminary statement. American Sociological Review, 25 (2), 161–​178. Granovetter, M. (2006). L’influence de la structure sociale sur les activités économiques. Sociologies pratiques, 13 (2), 9–36. Guiot, N. (2008). Collectionneurs. Les VIP de l’art contemporain. Paris: Anabet. Moureau, N., Sagot-​ Duvauroux, D. and Vidal, M. (2015). Contemporary Art Collectors: The Unsung Influences on the Art Scene. Paris: Département des études, de la prospective et des statistiques. Powell, W. W. (1990). Neither market nor hierarchy: networks forms of organization. Research in Organization Behavior, 12, 295–​336. Robbins, A. (2016). Painter’s number Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyck [Exposition, The National gallery, Londres, 23 juin  –​4 septembre  2016]. Londres:  National Gallery Company distributed by Yale University Press. Schnapper, A. (1976). Collections d’artistes en France au XVIIe siècle:  questions de méthode. Bologna: Biblioteca comunale di Bologna. Thomas, M. (1997). Un art du secret. Collectionneurs d’art contemporain en France. Nîmes: J. Chambon. Venet, B., Sans, J., Mousseigne, A., Davila, T. and Les Abattoirs (2010). Le monde de Bernar Venet, Venet in context:  Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, Arman… [exposition, Toulouse, Les Abattoirs, 17 novembre 2010–​13 mars  2011]. Montreuil-​sous-​Bois Toulouse: Lienart les Abattoirs.

2  Walpole and the creation of a market in Britain for ebony furniture from the East Adriana Turpin

Introduction Horace Walpole, one of the most famous figures of eighteenth-​ century London, purchased a set of carved ebony furniture for his villa in Twickenham, Strawberry Hill, which he placed in his principal bedchamber, known as the ‘Holbein room’ in 1759. This furniture, which has long been labelled Indo-​ Portuguese, is now known to have been made primarily on the Coromandel Coast of India (Jaffer, 2001, pp. 130–​135). At the time, it was thought to be sixteenth century and therefore appropriate for Strawberry Hill, the villa outside London, which Walpole bought in 1747 and began to rebuild, enlarge and extend over the next decades in a revival of the Gothic style. The six chairs and two tables in the Holbein Room, created by 1759, were accompanied by framed copies of Holbein’ drawings by George Vertue on the walls while memorabilia connected to the reign of Henry VIII also formed part of the display (Snodin, 2009). From then on, carved ebony furniture, decorated with floral motifs, and generally with turned legs, was always considered to be Tudor, a myth which continued into the twentieth century. It is generally stated that Walpole, in the role of tastemaker, instigated the taste and thus the collecting of this type of furniture. The purpose of this essay is to investigate his original purchase and his enthusiasm for black ebony furniture and to suggest that, while critical in his importance, Walpole was not unique in his appreciation. The fame of his ‘gothic’ interiors at Strawberry Hill and the associations created by his interior furnishings of the villa have been seen as the source of the long-​held tradition that this furniture was in fact English and ancient (Snodin, 2009; Wainwright, 1989). In order to examine the role of the individual collector and place it in the discussion of taste and markets, this essay will examine the collecting circle of Walpole/​ s day and trace the subsequent developments in the development of a fashion that continued within a specific group of British collectors. It focuses on the networks surrounding the collectors and the dissemination of information, before turning to the role of the dealers, arguing that their tactics encouraged and developed but did not create the collector’s enthusiasm. At the same time,

Walpole, ebony furniture from the East  25

Figure 2.1 The Holbein Chamber at Strawberry Hill. Watercolour on paper by John Carter, 1788. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, ©Yale University Library.

the changing perceptions of the identity of this furniture illustrate how knowledge and information form part of the development of new art markets. The approach to understanding the complexities of this trajectory is based on qualitative evidence, using the traditional tools of the art historian, contemporary accounts, sales records and dealer’s records. In view of the lack of evidence from early sales and the fact that many collections were never sold, the study provides an in-​depth analysis of a specific case study and demonstrates some of the issues that underlie the study of the art market. In particular, questions of interpretation and motive suffer from lack of documentary evidence, which is one reason why Walpole makes such a fascinating subject as the extensive correspondence between him and his friends provide an unusual insight into the passions of the collector (Lewis, 1937, vols. 1–​42).

26  Adriana Turpin

Walpole’s collecting in the context of eighteenth-​century antiquarianism Horace Walpole was not at first particularly interested in the Gothic but admired the classical architecture of his father’s house at Houghton Hall. He assisted in putting together a collection of Italian seventeenth-​century paintings for the house in Downing Street, London, which then was moved to Houghton Hall, Norfolk. Early on, however, he expressed an interest in ruins and responded to the romantic. In 1735 in a letter to his friend, the poet, Thomas Gray (1716–​1771) about his travels in Italy he recounts how, ‘In our way to Parvulun, we saw a great castle, belonging to the counts of Suffolcia: it is a vast pile of a building, but quite in the old taste’, and then details the story of the local saint (Lewis, vol. 13, p. 88). Gray was to be a key figure in the passion for ebony furniture and the Gothic. The building of Strawberry Hill is well known (Snodin, 2009). With his friends he explored medieval sources for the architecture, both English and French. His correspondence shows a passion for the detail of history and a fascination with its material evidence. In a letter to Walpole on 25 March 1754, Gray describes in extensive detail the costumes and appearance of the figures which related to a painting of the marriage of Henry VII to Elizabeth of York by Mabuse (Lewis, vol 14, pp. 69–​71). Walpole also described his painting in his Anecdote of Paintings, published 1762–​1780. He applied the same attention to architectural detail, basing the ceiling design of the Great Gallery on details from the chapel of Henry VII at Westminster Abbey. It is in this spirit that we see his discussion and search to acquire medieval furniture. In 1759, he wrote to his friend and architect John Chute (1701–​1776): I am deeper than ever in Gothic antiquities. I  have bought a monk of Glastonbury’s chair full of scraps of the psalms and some seals of the most reverend illegibility. I spend all my mornings in the thirteenth century and my evenings with the century that is coming on. (Lewis, vol. 35, p. 101, quoted in Wainwright, 1989, p. 97) This is the first instance of a shared interest with other antiquaries, however much he professed to distance himself from them. Sir William Stukeley (1687–​ 1765), published engravings of the Abbots kitchens and other buildings at Glastonbury in 1724 in Itinerarium Curiosum, Or, An Account of the Antiquitys and Remarkable Curiositys in Nature or Art, Obse’d in Travels thro’ Great Britain. Illustrated with Copper Prints (Lukis, 1882, pp. 367–​71). Walpole was clearly fascinated by ebony in general and the lavishly carved furniture in particular. The references in his correspondence show that both he and his friends were noting, commenting on and aiming to buy ebony furniture and old furniture of various types, generally from friends and privately (see Lewis 1937, vol. 1, p. 93 for a report by Cole on old furniture owned by

Walpole, ebony furniture from the East  27 Mr. Bateman). On 30 May 1763, he wrote to his friend, George Montagu from the Conyers sale at Stoughton House, Huntingdonshire, that he was ‘up to his chin in ebony; there is literally nothing but ebony in the house’ and that he planned to buy 2 tables and 18 chairs, ‘all made by the Hallett of two hundred years ago’ (Lewis, 1937, vol. 10, pp. 76–​77; Wainwright, 1989, p. 92). He was thus planning to decorate other rooms than the one dedicated to Holbein with ebony furniture and two years later, so there were probably at least 24 chairs in all, 22 of which were still at Strawberry Hill in 1842 when the contents were sold. The fact that sales were being held of collections of this type of furniture, suggests that there was a market for them. Walpole paid £45 for the set he bought at the Conyers’ sale (Lewis, 1937, vol. 10, pp. 76-​77), the equivalent of £110,500 in purchasing power in 2018, measured by income value (Measuringworth, 2020). What is more difficult to ascertain is the extent of this market and who else was actively collecting beyond Walpole’s circle. Ebony furniture was certainly on display in some of the great English country houses at this time although the evidence is fragmentary (Wainwright, 1985). The most notable was the set of chairs at Esher Place, which was much admired by Gray and was key in the connection made by Gray with Cardinal Wolsey, as will be discussed later. In 1755, Walpole noted an extensive set of chairs at Wanstead House, suggesting that he might have, but did not buy them (Lewis 1937, vol. 35, pp. 281–​283). As Wainwright observes, William Kent (1685–​1745) had been involved in the redecoration of both these houses, so might have been the instigator of the acquisition of these pieces (Wainwright, 1985). At Longleat in 1762, he described seeing a table, settee and 24 chairs in ebony (Toynbee, 1927, pp. 9, 45), while a further set at Cotehill in Devon was used for the visit of King George III and Queen Charlotte in 1789. Wainwright suggests that these might have been acquired recently by the owner, Baron Edgecumbe, who was a friend of Walpole. Other examples of ebony furniture in historic houses with long histories attached to them cannot, however, be proven to have been in English collections at an early date. One of the most interesting of these, the chair said to have been given by Elias Ashmole to the museum he founded in Oxford, as having belonged to Charles II’s Portuguese queen, only has records of its existence dating to the 1830s (Wainwright, 1985). This makes all the more important a suite of ebony chairs, bed and mirror surviving at Boughton House, Northamptonshire, previously discussed by Simon Jervis as having been acquired by the 1st Duke before 1709 (Jervis, 1992,  pp.  140–​141). Records show that the chairs and bed were repaired between 1746 and 1747 for John, 2nd Duke of Montagu (Buccleuch Archives, BM 1/​19). The bill from the London furniture maker William Hallett specifies polishing, repairing, re-​caning the chairs and altering the bed for a sum of £22, 14s, not an inconsiderable sum of money (£43, 2600 in wages expressed in 2018 terms). Such repairs suggest that the chairs were intended to be on display, which is confirmed by an inventory of 1747, where the furniture is listed in the inventory of Montagu House, London (Buccleuch Archives, BM

28  Adriana Turpin 1/​20). Recent research clarifies that, while the mirror and bed were described in the inventory taken at the death of Ralph Montagu, the 1st Duke of Montagu in 1709, the chairs are not mentioned (Buccleuch Archives, BM 16). This suggests that they were indeed acquired by the second Duke, who, as an important figure at the court of George II, would presumably have known of William Kent’s gothic furnishing by Pelham at Esher Place. He was also friend of Lord Edgecumbe, the likely purchaser of the ebony chairs at Cotehill as his correspondence shows. Although Montagu’s new house in Whitehall was in the classical, neo-​Palladian house, he had antiquarian interests, commissioning a gothic bridge for Boughton House and a set of portraits of his ancestors in medieval costume. There may have been a more personal interest in historic items that were associated with family history. Whether there were links with Walpole is more difficult to ascertain, although it is intriguing that William Hallett worked for both patrons and provided a set of Gothic chairs for the front parlour of Strawberry Hill in 1754, designed by Richard Bentley. Rather, it suggests that William Kent and his patrons may have formed the first network acquiring ebony chairs and at the very least, the set now at Boughton affirms that there were other, even earlier collectors of this style before Walpole.

Rebranding ebony furniture as Tudor Although ebony furniture was displayed in several interiors in Walpole’s time, its eastern and exotic connotations were of less importance than the fact that it was antique. More importantly, its association with the reign of Henry VIII and his chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, made it a fashionable taste among collectors of historicist interests. It has always been assumed that the legend was created by Walpole and his circle of friends (Wainwright, 1989; Jaffer, 2001). Writing about a sale at the Elizabethan Manor House of Stoke Poges in July 1752, Gray said that the original chairs had all been old and there was nothing left that could suit the ‘squareness of a Gothic dowager’s rump’, but went on to add that ‘there were certain low chairs that looked like Ebony, at Esher and were old and pretty. Why should not Bentley improve upon them?’ (Lewis, 1937, vol. 14, p. 60). However, although Walpole may have acquired his ebony chairs as antique, he did not make explicit the link with Esher, although his placing of them in the Holbein room at Strawberry Hill suggests such an assumption, certainly of their antiquity. The direct link that carved ebony chairs were Tudor, was made by an equally important figure in the development of the taste for the Gothic, William Beckford (1760–​1844) who was one of the most distinguished collectors of his day. His gothic creation, Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, was furnished with many types of antique furniture as well as new pieces in earl English styles, whether defined as Gothic or Tudor (Turpin, 2002). In Delineations of Fonthill published to coincide with the proposed sale at Christies in 1822, John Rutter stated that the six carved ebony chairs in the

Walpole, ebony furniture from the East  29 Crimson Drawing Room were from the Palace of Esher and had formerly belonged to Cardinal Wolsey (Rutter, 1823, p. 30). This is the first published statement that the set had belonged to Wolsey and it was to be taken up after this by collectors, dealers and auctioneers. When the set was acquired is uncertain as there are no records of the sales from Esher Place. They are not mentioned in the 1812 account of Fonthill by James Storer (Storer, 1812). Nonetheless, Wolsey’s name was certainly present at Fonthill, at that date as Storer described an ebony table used as a stand for an amber cabinet in the Gallery, ‘that had belonged to Cardinal Wolsey’ (Storer, 1812). By the sale of 1823, Beckford owned a considerable amount of ebony furniture, both in the St. Michael’s gallery, where they were illustrated and in the Lancaster bedroom, dedicated to his ancestors. Beckford collected many types of antique furniture, including Italian seventeenth-​century cabinets, Boulle furniture and important examples of pietra dura as well as modern pieces with older elements or completely modern (Turpin, 2002). In addition to the above, several items of carved, floral ebony furniture, many of them cabinets and a table were put up for sale and described as Persian or Oriental (Christies, October, 1822). Among them were: ‘a cabinet of ebony, with seven drawers, the surface of the whole carv’d with foliage of oriental design; twisted ebony mouldings’ (lot 55, day 3); ‘a Persian solid ebony table, with legs carved in scroll ornaments with crimson silk velvet top and drawer’ (lot 45, day 2); and ‘a curiously inlaid cabinet of Oriental work having nine drawers of ebony and ivory on a table to correspond, solid ebony legs and carved mouldings chased, the mountings very richly gilt’ (lot 55, day 2). One piece, a carved ebony coffer, was illustrated in a painting of Beckford on his deathbed, from which it is clear that it was carved Coromandel work. Thus, the descriptions of the collections at Fonthill reaffirmed the historic associations of ebony chairs as English while accepting the origins of other types of carved, floral ebony furniture as Persian.

The dissemination of the style It thus seems undeniable that the sale of Fonthill, which finally took place in 1823 created a flurry of interest and purchases for many collectors of the following generation. Some of this interest can be linked to Beckford himself while at other times, it was part of the general historicist interest in the medieval. It is also important to note that dark woods and ebony were also part of Regency taste in modern interiors. Many of the collectors of Beckford’s generation were owners of historicist country houses or even castles. Penrhyn Castle and St. Fagan’s Castle in Wales, St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, Warwick Castle, Warwickshire or Penshurst, Kent are among those with extensive ebony furnishings. Some of these were older houses being refurbished, others like Penrhyn Castle or Abbotsford in Scotland were newly built. Penrhyn Castle was bought by a sugar merchant from Jamaica, George Hay Dawkins-​Pennant (1764–​1840) and built between 1822 and 1837

30  Adriana Turpin by Thomas Hopper, when the ebony furniture was no doubt acquired. Apart from the fact that both Pennant and Beckford were Jamaica sugar merchants (as was also George Watson Taylor at whose sale in 1823 there was mention of an ebonised Wolsey chair in Mrs Taylor’s bedroom), George IV, another collector of ebony, was among Hopper’s clients. George IV furnished the corridor at Windsor Castle with a large suite of ebony chairs 1825, combining original models with ones made up for him by Baldock (Roberts, 2001, pp. 260, 266; Royal Collections Online). George IV had been a visitor to Fonthill in 1822 and his curiosity may have been aroused then. However, his collecting more probably originated with the gift of four chairs, possibly acquired at Fonthill, from his brother, the Duke of York (Roberts, 2001, pp.  260, 266; Royal Collections Online). Another brother, the Duke of Sussex, owned a set which he sold in 1843 (Christies, 1843). One of the leading purchasers at the sale of Fonthill was George Lucy (1789–​1845), who, on inheriting the Elizabethan house of Charlecote in 1823, determined to restore it to its original sixteenth-​century grandeur. With his newly acquired wealth, he immediately bought some 63 lots at the 1823 sale, including several items of ebony furniture. Among these were the bed, tables and chairs from the Lancaster bedroom as well as pietra-​dura and ebony coffer for the state bedroom. Years later, he succumbed to an offer of ivory

Figure 2.2 One of a set of ebonised wood side chairs c. 1660–​8. 82.0 x 50.5 x 45.0 cm. Possibly identified with the six ‘Wolsey’ chairs given by the Duke of York to George IV and received at Carlton House on 18 February 1824. Royal Collections Trust RCIN 2160, © Royal Collection Trust /​© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020.

Walpole, ebony furniture from the East  31 and ebony decorated chairs and couch, very different in style to the Beckford ones, but equally desirable to their purchaser, no doubt because of their presumed ancestry (Wainwright, 1989, p. 228): The set of 8 chairs, armchair couch and pair of cabinets which were made a present of by Queen Elizabeth to the Earl of Leicester, and were formerly at Kenilworth. They are massive solid ebony richly inlaid with the tooth of sea horses. The price demanded for the whole set 800£. (in 2018 terms £981,900.00) The 10th Duke of Hamilton, Beckford’s son-​in-​law, also acquired ebony furniture, some of which may have come through inheritance, others he bought from dealers (Jaffer, 2001, pp.  136, 142). Beckford’s reputation might have been the explanation behind the purchase by the Marquess of Buckingham of a set of ebony chairs and settees for his Gothic library at Stowe, an otherwise very classical interior. In the great sale of Stowe House in 1848, some of these were described as coming from the sale at Fonthill and as belonging to Wolsey, from which one assumes they were the chairs in the Crimson Drawing Room, while others were said to have been owned by Rubens (Forster, 1848 lots 2500–​2505, p.  246). That this ebony furniture was suitable for libraries may account for the two magnificent carved ebony cabinets belonging to Richard Heber (1783–​1833), a passionate bibliophile, which family tradition stated came from Fonthill (Coulborn, 2019). The cabinets cannot be identified with any in the Fonthill pieces, but if Heber bought books at the sales it might account for the family legends; his cabinets were placed in his library. Twenty years after Beckford’s sale, in 1842, the fascination with Walpole and his collections was revitalised by the famous sale of the contents of Strawberry Hill (Robins, 1842).  The table (lot 77)  and chairs (lots 54–​56) from the Holbein Room were sold to the Marquess of Westminster and two chairs to the Earl of Derby (lot 79). The sale must have rekindled enthusiasm for carved ebony furniture and the connections to Wolsey. When John Smyth Pigott (1792–​1853) sold the contents of Brockley Hall, Somerset in 1849 he had not only an arm chair said to have been owned by Wolsey from the library, but also a further set of Wolsey chairs and sofa in the drawing room (English & Son, 1849). Pigott was an important collector of manuscripts and rare books and like Richard Heber, saw carved ebony furniture as suitable for his library. The trend continued, as seen in the appearance of various items of carved ebony in the sales of Tong Castle at Christies in 1856, R. Wynn Williams sold at Christies in 1863, the Earl of Cadogan’s sale at Christies, 1865, Lord Willoughby de Eresby’s sale of the contents from his villa in Twickenham, sold at Christies in 1869 and the Earl of Lonsdale’s sale at Christies in 1879. Some of this furniture was being circulated through auction sales while some of it was being copied or imported to fulfil demand.

32  Adriana Turpin

Figure 2.3 Ebony side chair, carved and pierced with caned seat. (1660 –​1680). 97 x 53.5 x 46.5 cm. Most probably from Eaton Hall, home of the Marquess of Westminster. Victoria and Albert Museum, London IS 6-​2000. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The role of the dealers Examining the dealers’ tactics contributes to an understanding of how the collecting of such furniture might have spread from a small network of collectors to becoming part of a more overt market. In this transition, dealers played an important role as agents. At the Fonthill sale leading dealers made key purchases, no doubt in many instances buying on behalf of the next generation of collectors. Among the pieces of Coromandel furniture, the annotated sale catalogue lists that Robert Hume (active 1808–​1840) bought the Lancaster bed, which he then sold to George Lucy, for £63; a Mr. Broadway bought several of the ebony chairs from the bedroom at between 7 guineas and £21 per pair, in 2018 terms £9,282.00 to £25,770.00 (day 13, lots 341–​343). The chairs from the crimson drawing room were sold to Randall, Lawford and Hertford, who may have been dealers and to John Swaby (1782–​1859), who certainly was (day 29, lots 1171–​1174) for between £7,10s and £10 a pair, in 2108 terms between £9,205.00 and £12,270. (Phillips, 1823). The dealers Kensington Lewis (1790–​1854), Edward Holmes Baldock (1777–​1843), John Webb (1799–​1880) and John Swaby made a point of selling ebony furniture to aristocratic collectors, including George IV, the Duke of Buccleuch and

Walpole, ebony furniture from the East  33 Queensberry, who was descended from the Duke of Montagu, the Duke of Hamilton and others (Wainwright, 1985, pp. 44–​45; Westgarth, 2009, pp. 77–​ 68, 120, 121–​122, 169–​172, 181–​183). This was the period in which the emerging trade of the antique dealer was establishing itself (Westgarth, 2009, 2020; Wainwright, 1989, pp. 34–​50) and many of them used ‘Tudor’ and ‘Elizabethan’ furniture, including ebony pieces, to establish a market for what they called ‘curiosities and antiques’. Henry Shaw’s 1836 publication, Specimens of Ancient Furniture Drawn from Existing Authorities was a major step in this process; he illustrated Walpole’s Glastonbury chair as well two Coromandel chairs, the one belonging to Elias Ashmole and that from Strawberry Hill (Shaw, 1836,  pp.  52, 58, 60; Wainwright, 1989, pp. 43–​47). Both ebony chairs are described as ancient and were linked to medieval furniture in the introduction by the antiquary Samuel Rush Meyrick. It also appears that dealers used possession of authenticated works with established provenances to validate their authority. Thus, Walpole’s ebony chair was described as being in the possession of the dealer, John Webb of Bond St. As the sale records and accounts of the acquisition of such furniture in the nineteenth century make clear, the dealers exploited and marketed historic associations to build their markets, targeting those most likely to be excited by such historicist connections, as was the case with George Lucy and his Elizabethan cabinet, sold to him by the dealer John Coleman Isaac (1803–​ 1887) (Wainwright, 1989, p. 228). Dealers not only supplied ebony furniture to historicist collectors, they copied it as well. It has been suggested that such furniture was also being supplied from Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India (Jaffer, 2001). Between 1826 and 1828, the Duke of Hamilton bought a carved ebony bed from John Webb made for him by John Stuart (Jaffer, 2001, p.140). Similarly, in 1833 Charlotte Ann, wife of the 5th Duke of Buccleuch, wrote to her husband, ‘Mr. Burn has given me the drawing of the bed you admired at Webb and Craggs. It is very pretty indeed and Mr. B. thinks it very cheap’ (Buccleuch Archives, BS1/​ 28–​29). This refers to the architect, William Burn who worked extensively for the Buccleuchs, who made drawings for a set of bedroom furniture, intended for the Buccleuch villa in Richmond, London. Burn may have been the link to the commission from another dealer, noted for his antique furniture and excellent craftsmanship, Willcox of Warwick in 1841. Among the items delivered by Willcox to the Duchess were some ‘bird-​top chairs’ (Buccleuch Archives BS1/​28–​29) which could refer to a set of chairs in the Indo-​Portuguese style made for the villa at Richmond and now at Boughton House. Later in the century, one of the most notable collections of ancient furniture was put together for the 15th duke of Norfolk by the dealers, Frederick and Charles Davis of Bond Street for his rebuilt medieval castle at Arundel, Sussex, which included oak cabinets and ebony chairs, all seen as being in keeping with the historical nature of the castle. A large suite of ebony furniture was bought by Davis at the Beresford Hope sale at Christies in May, 1886, among which were couches and settees that were

34  Adriana Turpin

Figure 2.4 Design by William Burn for a dressing table 1848. Pen and ink. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Buccleuch Living Heritage Trust.

probably Coromandel, an expensive ebony cabinet (105 guineas or £92,130.00 in 2018 terms) and what was probably a carved Flemish seventeenth-​century cabinet (Jervis, 2005, p. 243).

Conclusion The study of the market for Coromandel furniture draws a picture as to how a market developed from a select taste among a small number of collectors to widespread acceptance. It also emphasises how markets can be created by linking them to famous collectors, although this may not be the entire story. It is important to acknowledge that Horace Walpole’s reputation as the creator and instigator of this style may partly be the historical accident of surviving records, in particular, the exceptional survival of his voluminous correspondence. In fact, it seems clear that Walpole may not have been the first to collect carved, ebony chairs nor was he the only collector to be aware of their association with Esher Palace. However, the fame of Strawberry Hill and the published accounts of its furnishings would have been significant in creating the link with Walpole. Collectors understood the resonance associated with owning these so-​called genuine antiques, which in turn was promoted by dealers. The evidence suggests that the development of this taste did not take place in a linear fashion but through interconnecting networks of wealthy collectors, who indeed been emulating each other. Here, the Fonthill sales of 1822 and 1823 were vitally important in opening opportunities while their

Walpole, ebony furniture from the East  35 fame helped to disseminate this taste among the next generation of rich, fashionable collectors. The difficulty of discovering how markets develop is highlighted by the lack of evidence. We do not know how Walpole or Beckford sourced their collections except through their letters as there are no surviving accounts of purchases, as is the case for many of the collectors. However, their surviving correspondence provides an unparalleled view of their thoughts and their purchasing, a rare and valuable asset in understanding the art market. Catalogues and inventories can inform us about the collections at the point of sale, prices and buyers. Such evidence combines to demonstrate the complexities of networks that underpin the development of a market. In their turn, dealers supplied demand, created provenance and disseminated the taste for historicist furnishing to a wider public. They used the emerging market to build their roles as facilitators and, through publications and catalogues, their reputations as experts and authorities. Although many questions remain and additional research will no doubt continue to nuance our understanding of the processes involved, the study of this small, elite area of art collecting offers an interesting exploration of the several factors that led to its importance in Britain during the nineteenth century.

Acknowledgements * I would like to thank Crispin Powell, Archivist of the Buccleuch Collections, for his invaluable and generous help with researching the Montagu and Buccleuch Coromandel furniture.

References Buccleuch Archives, Boughton House, Northamptonshire. BM 1/​19 Bill from William Hallet, 21 June 1750. BM16: 1709 Inventory of Ralph Montagu, Duke of Buccleuch. BS1/​28–​29, Letters of Duchess Charlotte Ann to the 5th Duke of Buccleuch, December 1833 Letter to Willcox, December 1841. Christies. (1822). Magnificent Effects at Fonthill Abbey, Wilts. To Be Sold by Auction, by Mr. Christie, on the Premises, on Tuesday, September 17, 1822, and Eight Following Days (Sunday Excepted) … Mr. Christie, Pall Mall, London, UK. Coulborn, T. & Sons. (2019). Available online: ​www.coulborn.com/​furniture-​categories/​ notable-​sales/​pair-​of-​carved-​ebony-​cabinet-​on-​stands/​. English, M.  & Son, B.  (1849). Comprising the Very Select and Valuable Library, of Several Thousand Volumes, Valuable Historical Manuscripts, Rare Autographs, the Magnificent and Celebrated Collection of Pictures Statuary, Antique Bronzes, Etruscan Vases, Splendid Furniture, the Live and Dead Stock, &c., &c. Brockley Hall, Somerset. Forster, H.R. (1848). The Stowe Catalogue, Priced and Annotated by Henry Rumsey Forster. London: David Bogue. Available online: https://​babel.hathitrust.org/​cgi/​pt? id=hvd.32044033790601&view1up&seq9.

36  Adriana Turpin Jaffer, A. (2001). Furniture from British India and Ceylon: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum. London: V & A Publications. Jervis, S. (1992). Other Furniture. In T. Murdoch (Ed.), Boughton House, the English Versailles (pp. 138–​141). London: Faber and Faber. Jervis, S. (2005). Charles Davis, the 15th Duke of Norfolk, and the Formation of the Collection of Furniture at Arundel Castle. Furniture History, 41, 231–​248. Lewis, W.S. (Ed.) (1937). The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence. 48 vols. Jervis. Available online: https://​walpole.library.yale.edu/​collections/​digital-​ resources/​horace-​walpole-​correspondence. Lukis, W.C. (1882). Family Memoirs of the Rev. W.  Stukeley. London: The Surtees Society, vol. 73. Measuringworth. (2020). Created by L. Officer and S. H. Williamson. Available online: www.measuringworth.com. Phillips (1823). The Unique and Splendid Effects of Fonthill Abbey…. 23–​30 Sept and 16–​20 October. London: Phillips. Robins, G. (1842). The Valuable Contents of Strawberry Hill, 23 April. London: Robins. Roberts, H. (2001). For the King’s Pleasure. London: Royal Collections Enterprises. Royal Collections. Available online: www.rct.uk/​collection/​search#/​page/​1. Collection numbers 21605, 21606, 21607, 21609, 21706, 21601. Rutter, J. (1823). Delineations of Fonthill, Shaftsbury. Available online: www.hathitrust. org. Shaw, H.  (1836). Specimens of Ancient Furniture Drawn from Exisitng Authorities, with an Introduction by Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick. London:  Pickering. Available online: archive.org/​details/​specimensofancie00meyr/​mode/​2up. Snodin, M. (2009). A Description of Strawberry Hill. In M. Snodin (Ed.), Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (pp.  15–​59). New Haven and London:  Yale University Press. Storer, J. (1812). A Description of Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire: illustrated by Views, Drawn and Engraved. London: W. Clarke, J. Carpenter, W. Miller, C. Chappel, White and Cochrane, Sherwood, Neely and Jones, Brodie and Co., and J. Storer. Toynbee. P. (Ed.) (1927–​1928). Horace Walpole’s journals of visits to Country Seats, &c. The Walpole Society, 16. Turpin, A. (2002). Filling the Void:  the Development of Beckford’s Taste and the Market in Furniture. In D. Ostegard (Ed.), William Beckford (1760–​1844): An Eye for the Magnificent (pp. 177–​202). New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Wainwright, C. (1985). Only the true black blood. Furniture History, 21, 250–​255. Wainwright, C. (1989). The Romantic Interior. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Walpole, H. (1772). Anecdotes of Painting. London: Dodsley, 1782. Westgarth, M. (2009). A Biographical Dictionary of 19th-​ Century Antique and Curiosity Dealers with Full Explanation and Plates. The Regional Furniture History Society, vol. 23. Westgarth, M.  (2020). The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer 1815–​ 1850: The Commodification of Historical Objects. London: Routledge.

3  African art acquisitions at Tate A case study on the influence of external parties on the collecting of African contemporary art Stephanie Dieckvoss

Introduction Tate Modern in London opened in 2000 and has since become the most visited museum for contemporary art in the world. The museum has attracted the interest of scholars as well as journalists and features heavily in discussions around curating and exhibiting of contemporary art, both in regards to the so called ‘new international art’ as well as of art from peripheries. While much discourse on the function of a contemporary art museum in postmodern and postcolonial societies exists (e.g. Altshuler, 2005; Bishop, 2013), little research has gone into funding processes of museum collections in general or Tate in particular. This is particularly relevant due to the establishment of mixed funding streams for museums, for example, the establishment of acquisitions committees consisting of private individuals. This is especially unexpected as the influence of private and corporate interests on institutions has been debated not only in academia (e.g. Zarobell, 2017), but also in the wider press (Harris & Forwood, 2016). John Zarobell (2017, p. 35) even goes so far as to state: ‘If you have ever wondered how museums are financed, you are not alone’. Hence, the aim of this essay is to gain further insights into the mechanism of acquisitions at Tate and, in particular, of the funding of acquisitions through the acquisition committees for African contemporary art at Tate Modern. The focus on Africa has been chosen because of Tate’s proclaimed wish to expand its collections within a global framework and because it can highlight the issues that arise with such a goal. As with any acquisition strategy, what to buy is not an easy task, especially in collecting areas which are extremely diverse (in the case of Africa, being a continent and a diaspora) and where the canonisation of what is ‘museums-​worthy’ has, as yet, not been clearly established. The difficulties around collecting African art in Western museums have been discussed by curators (Okeke-​Agulu, 2012; McClusky, 2005; Lamoni, 2017), and the insecurities around the position a museum might take within the discourse is reflected clearly in its acquisitions. Simon Njami speaks about an ‘absurd battlefield where all kinds of mercenaries and adventurers rage’ (McClausky, 2005, p. 121).

38  Stephanie Dieckvoss The author hopes to add to the conversations about the role of private (and corporate) collectors in shaping institutional collecting, shedding further light on the influence of the market onto the institution within the context of a  neoliberal society, whereby museum funding relies more and more on private funds. The period of investigation is 2011–​2017, which saw the directorate of Chris Dercon at the museum, who was influential for its expansion both in regards to collecting as well as space. Specific acquisitions of African contemporary art will be investigated within their funding context. This allows to  begin a debate about the acquisition strategies of the museum in regards to democratic accountability into what appear to be non-​transparent processes. The methodology for the research is based on a single case study, exemplifying interdependencies between agents in the art market and beyond. The case study is based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of the acquisitions through a review of publicly available financial statements and annual reports by the museum. It further uses published press materials by the museum and published interviews. Critical studies on the collecting of African art, the influence of private collectors onto institutions and the market for African art are used throughout. This paper is indebted to ideas expressed by the American art historian T. J. Demos and his analysis of Tate as a key tastemaker and value creator in the ‘narrative’ of contemporary art (Demos, 2009) as well as the ground-​breaking reflections on contemporary African art by the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor.

Collection aims and funding Before focusing on the relation of Tate Modern to African contemporary art, it is worthwhile being reminded of the purpose of the museum in regards to its collecting strategies as expressed in its acquisition and disposal policy: Tate’s mission, drawn from the 1992 Museums and Galleries Act, is to increase the public’s knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of British art from the sixteenth century to the present day and of international modern and contemporary art. Tate’s international collection is shaped by a truly global vision. In 2000, the Board of Trustees extended Tate’s collecting remit to include art from regions such as Africa, South Asia, Latin America, Australia, China, Eastern Europe, Russia and the Middle East. (Tate, 2017) This statement asserts the global vision of the museum, defined through a geographical lens on emerging art scenes. At this point, it is important to point out that Tate’s interest in African contemporary art does not rectify a desideratum in London; the British Museum has collected African contemporary art long before Tate’s engagement with art from this continent started (Heywood,

African art acquisitions at Tate  39 2013; Ardouin, 2009). How far Tate Modern has been successful in executing its global mission has been controversial. While Demos attests: ‘Tate Modern play(s) a key role in defining the narrative of contemporary art that potentially reaches the greatest number of people’ (2009, p. 260), other authors have viewed its discourse of international art in general and its collecting and display of art from the global South more critically (Enwezor, 1999; Bishop, 2013; Dixon, 2016). Any analysis of Tate Modern’s collecting endeavours must acknowledge how the museum has used its expanded mission in publicity campaigns to great effect. Press campaigns during the opening of Tate in 2000, the establishment of the African Acquisition Committee, its expansion in 2016 and the latest appointment of a new curatorial post for African art in 2019 have been noted in the arts press with headline articles in publications such as Artnews, Frieze, Artforum or the Art Newspaper. While the publicity campaigns position the museum at the forefront of a retelling of this ‘alternative history’ of modern and contemporary art, the question is how this is reflected in the museum’s acquisitions and if the reality of museum collecting aligns with its publicity.

Acquisition committees and the partnership with the Guarantee Trust Bank In times of austerity, but with a mandate on expansion, museums had to find alternative income sources to boost their ability to collect. With the rise of private museums, the ultimate goals of institutional curators to secure whole collections to enter the museums have also become more taxing (Brown, 2019). For some time now, museums have groomed collectors to support acquisitions by allowing them to buy themselves a place on so-​called acquisition committees. Robert Storr (2005) elucidates this system at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2005, pp. 38–​39; see also Okeke-​Agulu, 2012, pp. 80–​81; Zarobell, 2017, pp. 45–​46), which could have been the inspiration for Tate’s (and other museums’) similar structures. Storr explains how the role of suggesting works for purchases remains in the hand of curators, while the committees vote on the suggestions and accept or reject them. The situation in the UK has been similar. In Tate’s case, Demos points out how the various Tate museums, since an organisational restructuring under a Conservative Government in the 1980s, became ever more dependent on private funding (Demos, 2009, p. 256). The mix of diverse income streams through public–​ private funding has also effected acquisition practices. It comes as no surprise that Tate’s Acquisition and Disposal Policy states that ‘the Trustees seek to make best use of all other available funding sources’ (Tate, 2017), including the establishment of acquisition committees as pooled collectors’ funds. The policy leaves open however, when, if and how these committees come into play in the acquisition process and the detailed structure of operation is unclear:

40  Stephanie Dieckvoss Acquisitions to the Collection may be made by purchase, gift, bequest, fractional ownership, exchange, allocation or transfer. All works proposed for acquisition including works proposed as promised gifts for future acquisition, are researched by specialist teams of curators and discussed at the relevant monitoring groups […]. Recommendations are then taken forward to Collections Group, which includes the Director, the Directors of Tate Modern and Tate Britain and the Directors of Collection (British & International Art), Development, the Acquisition Coordinators and the management accountant. Works which the Collections Group agrees to take forward are presented to the Collection Committee for approval or recommendation, depending on the valuation limits set out above, and decisions are then ratified by the Board of Trustees. (Tate, 2017) Acquisition committees are strikingly absent from the explanation of the acquisition process above, despite being in place since 2001. The oldest and most powerful committee at Tate is the North American committee (Harris & Forwood, 2016). Purchases of African works of art are supported by two different committees: The Middle East and North Africa committee founded in 2009, which focuses on the mainly religious demarcations of the MENASA region, and the Africa Acquisitions Committee founded in 2011, which shall concern us here. The engagement with African art was not only stimulated through the establishment of the two acquisition committees but also especially through a partnership Tate established with the Nigerian Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB) in 2011 (Tate, 2011), which lasted until 2014. It financially supported the initial establishment of the African Acquisition Committee, the specific acquisition of Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002) with its subsequent exhibition, the Ibrahim Salahi painting acquisition and a large-​scale retrospective by the artist; and the employment of a dedicated curator for African Art, Elvira Dyangani Ose. It also included the project ‘Across the Board’ (2012–​2014) to support the development of the arts in Africa itself (Dixon, 2016, p.  193). The Tate/​GTBank partnership was a strategic move for both partners. Chris Dercon aimed to expand the remit of the museum, while the Nigerian GTBank was able to boost its brand recognition in a consolidated campaign to an international audience. The different initiatives listed above were meant to extend the collection of African art significantly: Over 100 works of art by African artists are currently held in Tate Collection, mainly from North and South Africa. It is anticipated that these holdings will be substantially added to in the coming years, with works from Sub-​Saharan countries in particular, providing an invaluable resource for future generations and firmly placing these artists from the whole continent at the heart of the contemporary art world. (Tate, 2011)

African art acquisitions at Tate  41 Table 3.1 Annual expenditure GTBank for Tate partnership Year of sponsorship

Nigerian Naira

Conversion to GBP

2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 Total 2012–​2017

28,422,450 29,436,494 22,733,851 18,339,831 15,409,000 6,388,000 120,729,626

113,690 117,746 86,389 66,023 53,932 16,608

Historical conversions from NGN to GBP used, January average exchange rates per each year. Results rounded to the nearest pound. www.exchangerates.org.uk. Source: https://​www.gtbank. com/​investor-​relations/​financial-​information

It is noteworthy that Tate has never made the financial details of the partnership public, a common undertaking by the museum, which has been heavily criticised (Memou, 2017). However, the Guarantee Trust Bank group’s financial statements (Guarantee Trust Bank 2012–​2018) clearly indicate the value of the sponsorship as per Table 3.1. The overall amount suggests quite a substantial deal, which however does not leave much room for acquisitions once a curator salary is considered. As with many sponsorship deals, it demonstrates the strategic relevance both for the bank and the museum, above direct financial benefits.

Examples of acquisitions In order to begin to understand the acquisition strategy of the museum in regard to African art, it is insightful to focus on the two most significant acquisitions by Tate in the area so far. Firstly, the physically most substantial acquisition was Beninese Meschac Gaba’s 12-​part installation Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002). The work was first displayed in its entirety in a solo exhibition of all 12 rooms in 2013 (Twitschin, 2019). For a while, only one room was still kept on display, but as artist and academic Mischa Twitschin states eloquently in 2019, the work has since been confined to the storage, demonstrating that the whole project is now the private property of the gallery rather than a public space of and for critical enquiry concerning the ‘Eurocentric’ (in the name of ‘African art’), except in its conceptual articulation still. (2019, p. 283)1 While Table 3.2 gives us some insight into the acquisition history of this complex piece, it does not clarify what the museums paid for it, or who facilitated its purchase. The work is listed on the Tate website as ‘Gift of the

newgenrtpdf

Title

Purchasing information

Reported price (£)

Source of information (also Inv. number indicating year of acquisition)

Draft Room, From Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002)

Gift of the artist and acquired with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank Plc and Tate Members 2013 Gift of the artist and acquired with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank Plc and Tate Members 2013/​partly purchased, partly presented

280,000

Tate Report 2013/​14 Appendix D

T14004

250,000

Tate Report 2013/​14 Appendix D

T14005

60,000

Tate Report 2013/​14 Appendix D

T14006

9,000

Tate Report 2013/​14 Appendix D

T13934

65,998

Tate Report 2014/​15 Appendix

T14219

65,998

Tate Report 2014/​15 Appendix

T14220

65,998

Tate Report 2015/​16

T14496

Architecture Room, From Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002) Museum Shop, From Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002) Museum of Contemporary African Art in London (2013) Game Room From Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002) Museum Restaurant From Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002) Summer Collection From Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002)

Purchased with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank plc 2013 Gift of the artist and acquired with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank Plc 2015/​partly purchased, partly presented Gift of the artist and acquired with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank Plc 2015 partly purchased, partly presented Gift of the artist and acquired with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank Plc 2016

42  Stephanie Dieckvoss

Table 3.2 Price information on the acquisition of Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art

newgenrtpdf

Music Room From Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002) Art and Religion Room From Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002) The Marriage Room From Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002) Salon From Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002)

Library From Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002)

65,998

Tate Report 2016/​17 Appendix A + D

T14812

100,000

Tate Report 2017/​18 Appendix A +D

T14969

100,000

Tate Report 2018/​2019 Appendix A + D

T15122

N/​A

Only on website, not accounted for in annual report

L03233

N/​A?

Not found in annual report

T14007

N/​A?

Not found in annual report

T15464

African art acquisitions at Tate  43

Humanist Space From Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997–​2002)

Presented by the artist and acquired with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank plc 2013/​partly presented, partly purchased Gift of the artist and acquired with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank Plc and Tate Members 2013/​presented Gift of the artist and acquired with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank Plc and Tate Members 2013/​presented Promised gift of the artist and acquired with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank plc 2013/​On long-​term loan Gift of the artist and acquired with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank Plc 2014 Gift of the artist and acquired with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank plc 2013

44  Stephanie Dieckvoss artist and acquired with funds provided by the Acquisitions Fund for African Art supported by Guaranty Trust Bank Plc 2015’ (Tate, no date). As with many Tate purchases, the museum relied on a mixed funding structure based around sponsorship and the collectors’ committee, as well as a ‘gifting’ by the artist. In fact, while from Table 3.2 it can be assumed that the spread of the purchase is in part indebted to Tate accounting mechanisms, there remain a number of questions unanswered. Not only does the purchase history go significantly beyond the period of the partnership with the GTBank, but it is also unclear what the individual sums refer to. Are they purchase prices, market prices or values for insurance purposes? How is the mentioned part-​gifting accounted for? Why are certain parts of the work not yet in the inventory, one room is missing from it and one is listed as a long-​term loan? It is also unclear what the split is between the part gift, part purchase and part support from the Bank and other Tate support groups. The public also can’t verify if the overall price of £1,063,992 presents value for money. As the largest and most important project of the artist, there are no comparable prices known, and the secondary market of this artist is negligible as a search on Artprice has shown. Secondly, Sudanese Ibrahim El-​ Salahi’s Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams 1, 1962–​1963, was acquired in 2012/​13 by a troika of acquisition committees, the African Acquisitions Committee, the Middle Eastern and North Africa Acquisitions Committee and the Tate International Council (Hynes, 2014, p. 108), for a price of £300,000 according to Tate records. This acquisition preceded a survey exhibition of the Sudanese artist in the institution. Again, we can’t establish a direct correlation in the market of El Salahi’s work since the Tate exhibition and acquisition, as too few secondary market prices are known, hence the market impact of the exhibition is unclear. However, his representation through Vigo gallery from London has further enhanced this artist’s market trajectory in recent years. Toby Clarke, gallery director, describes how at the upper end, artwork by the Sudanese Modernist painter can sell for between £3,000 and £1.5 million. When he started working with El-​Salahi, prices were set in relation to what museums had recently paid to acquire work, and have since risen, according to Clarke, by roughly 10–​ 20  percent per year. ‘At 85, El-​Salahi is now widely seen by many curators and museums around the world as one of the most important living African artists, the godfather of African and Arab Modernism’ (Sharp, 2016). For Dercon, this acquisition was about strengthening the existing collection: ‘He is now hanging where he belongs,’ says Dercon, ‘next to Karel Appel, but also Robert Motherwell, and in front of Dorothea Tanning.’ (Pawson, 2013). Dercon is clearly aware of the art market connotations of the artists he is supporting and collecting for Tate. In a Frieze Interview in 2013, he was asked if anything had happened between the 1989 Magician de la Terre exhibition in Paris, which is widely regarded as having put ‘global’ art on a map, and 2013. His answer reads peculiar: ‘When I started to be interested in El-​Salahi, there was no market for him’, he explains. ‘When I started to work with Gaba—​my

African art acquisitions at Tate  45 God, 25 years ago!—​there was not a market’ (Pawson, 2013). He also alludes to the market value of El Anatsui, and indeed the acquisition of his works as well as of modernist artist Ibrahim El-​Salahi demonstrates the closeness of the institution to the blossoming market of certain African artists. The two acquisition examples also evidence that the acquisition strategy of the museum was to purchase a few large-​scale contemporary works with great impact, while also inscribing earlier works by African artists into a (problematic) history of modernism. That this has become part of an ongoing strategy will be shown in the last section following.

Committees and networks The final part of this chapter analyses the acquisition of other works through the African acquisition committees and their members. The Tate report 2016/​ 17 lists the members on both committees at the time (Tate, 2018, p. 90). The Africa Acquisition Committee consisted of 31 members. Each member paid a fee of £10,000 a year to be on the committee, which added up to a fund of £310,000 plus, if we do not take the unknown number of anonymous members into account (Tate America Foundation, no date). The Middle East and North Africa committee attracted a larger constituency and comprised of 43 members. Table 3.3 provides background information on the members of the Africa Acquisition Committee for 2017. Members are a mixed group of collectors and art lovers, especially from the banking and finance industry in Africa, but also include art dealers. The majority are female and boost a number of members who act on different museum boards across Europe and the US. Most members have a professional connection to Africa, for example, through investment projects, but also through philanthropic endeavours; not all can be identified as collectors. Most remarkable is the lack of diversity in regards to the representation of African regions. The countries mainly represented through heritage affiliations and business interests are South Africa and Nigeria. The connection to Nigeria has been established with the GTBank. While it has been speculated that collectors join acquisition boards in order to influence the market value of works they are interested in (Harris & Forwood, 2016) through suggesting them for acquisition, we cannot establish a direct link between the support for African Art and individual collecting interests. It seems more likely that the committee members aim to profit from the ‘Tate Effect’ and the social status their role as givers provides them with, rather than specific short-​term financial goals. The support for this particular committee reflects their overall interest in the African continent, as collectors or business professionals. The committee membership is listed on the business biographies of a number of members. Zarobell (2017) is quite cynical about the influence of patrons who have unique access to institutions due to their engagements on boards. He states: ‘The result is that those who possess the greatest resources have the most power to direct the activities of

newgenrtpdf

Name

Gender Heritage

Professional context

Art related engagements

Kathy Ackerman Robins Anshu Bahanda Adnan Bashir Mrs Nwakaego Boyo Priti Chandaria Shah Mrs Kavita Chellaram Salim Currimjee Harry G David Mr and Mrs Michel David Weill Robert and Renee Drake Mrs Wendy Fisher Diane B. Frankel Aita Ighodaro Menet Andrea Kerzner Samallie Kiyingi Alexander Klimt Matthias and Gervanne Leridon Caro Macdonald Dale Mathias Professor Oba Nsugbe, QC Ms Ndidi Okpaluba Mr Hussam Otaibi Pascale Revert Wheeler Emile Stipp Mr Varnavas A Varnava Burkhard Varnholt Mercedes Vilardell (Chair) Alexa Waley Cohen Peter Warwick Ms Isabel Wilcox Marwan G Zakhem

F F M F F F M M M/​F M/​F F F F F F M M/​F F F M F M F M M M F F M F M

Artist Art Dealer Oil Trader Film Producer Industry Auctioneering Architect and Artist Economist Banking and Industry Import and Export Psychologist and Artist Management Consultant Author Tourism Law /​Banking Finance Communications Filmmaker Investment Law Management Wealth Management Art Dealer Insurance N/​A Finance Law N/​A N/​A Art Historian Art Dealer and Construction

Practicing artist and philanthropy (various) Art Dealing Collecting Collecting Philanthropy Art Dealing & Collecting Practicing artist and philanthropy (various) N/​A Collecting Collecting Collecting and philanthropy (various) Arts consultancy Collecting Arts and children charity N/​A Arts Patron Collecting and philanthropy (various) N/​A N/​A N/​A Collecting Collecting and philanthropy (various) Art Dealing Collecting N/​A N/​A Collecting and philanthropy (various) N/​A N/​A Collecting Collecting and art dealer

South Africa India UK and Nigeria Nigeria Kenya and India Nigeria and India Mauritius Nigeria France and USA USA /​Netherlands and South Africa USA and South Africa USA UK and Nigeria /​Sierra Leone South Africa and USA Australia and Uganda UK France Australia USA UK and Nigeria Nigeria UK and Jordan France South Africa and UK N/​A Switzerland Spain South Africa N/​A USA Lebanon and Ghana

Source: Tate Report 2016/​17, various Google searches 1 June 2020.

46  Stephanie Dieckvoss

Table 3.3 Members of the Africa Acquisition Committee Tate 2017

African art acquisitions at Tate 47 the institution, though this influence is wielded as ‘soft power’’ (Zarobell, 2017, p.  39). Dercon was aware of these tensions. In a 2012 interview, he acknowledged that the use of acquisition committees might lead to conflicts of interest, but argues that Tate had robust processes in place to monitor and mitigate those, without defining these (Higgie and Thorne, 2012). He is likely to refer to the acquisition policy of the museum as cited above. With funds of about £310,000 for African art being raised from the committee a year, we can expect quite a few acquisitions being made. An analysis of artists of African heritage listed in the annual reports by the author gave indeed a good first insight into the purchases from which a number of conclusions can be drawn: The majority of acquisitions were works created from the 1950s to 1970s, such as works by Samuel Fosso (Cameroon, born 1962), Malangatana Ngwenya (Mozambique 1936–​2011), Ernest Mancoba (South Africa1904–​2002) or Farid Belkahia (Morocco 1934–​2014), that can be ascribed to what has been termed ‘African Modernism’, following the initial El-​Salahi purchase. The bias towards earlier works by established artists is quite surprising for a museum that embraces the ‘new’ (Zarobell, 2017, p. 42; Bishop, 2013, p. 43). It means little risk for the museum, both reputationally and financially. This approach has been observed and critiqued by scholars such as Araeen (1989) or Enwezor (2017). The acquisitions for living artists like Meschac Gaba (born 1961), discussed above, carry on to consist of large-​ scale installation works, which are high priced. An additional example is the installation African Adventure (1999–​2002) by the South African artist Jane Alexander (born 1959), for the price of £400,000 (Tate Report, 2016/​17). Finally, an exemplary count of works being obtained by Tate in a year overall, compared with works by African artist, shows a huge difference in numbers. During 2012/​2013, Tate reports account for 500 works entering the collection, of which 42 were African. This marks the period of greatest activity following the establishment of the Africa acquisition committee and during the partnership with the GTBank. A spot check in 2016/​2017, however, shows that of about 1000 new works only 5 were by African artists. This might be connected to the fact that at this point in time Tate didn’t have a dedicated curator for African art anymore, a lack which was addressed in 2019.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to illuminate the relationship between public collecting and private influence. It showed how the acquisition of works by African artists at Tate Modern took off around 2012 with the establishment of a corporate partnership and the instigation of a dedicated acquisition committee consisting of supporters of African art, often with business interests in Africa and concentrated around West-​and South Africa. External funds enabled large-​scale acquisitions, but did not lead to a sustained increase in collecting activity. The holdings of African Art from about 100 works were added to through the acquisition of highly promotable key works by

48  Stephanie Dieckvoss established artists—​ both critically as well as in the market—​ rather than through a substantial ongoing investment in the whole continent and its diaspora. While one could argue that the visibility of any art beyond the American–​European dominance is to be applauded, the very singular and sporadic display of African Art, with Meschac Gaba’s acclaimed work sitting in storage, has not led to a shift in display strategies, and hence has not as yet enabled visitors to understand creativity from the Global South beyond token works which are still either marginalised in their display, incorporated into a Eurocentric modernist history of art, or hidden away. Furthermore, the acquisitions structures are not transparent. It is unclear where works are coming from, how they are financed and what they cost the museum and the tax payer. To understand the influence of not only the committees but also its members, further network analysis between different actors and agents in the market and the institutional realm together with further price analysis of artworks and artist careers will be needed to disentangle these complex relationships. Finally, it is also time to interrogate the acquisition strategies of museums and their global visions under a more critical lens. Natalia Majluf, Director of the Museum of Art in Lima, Peru interrogated the pitfalls of European collecting of global art in regards to Latin American works stating: Added to the modernist dream of a universal language of art, we now have a global dream of a new kind of contemporary survey museum that can claim to collect the world. […] The Lams at MoMA may no longer hang by the cloakroom, but they are certainly not hanging in many Latin American museums. (Lamoni, 2017) We wonder if the story of Tate is so different. Despite its outlook into Africa and other collecting regions, it retains its position of Western Power.

Note 1 For a cohesive theoretical analysis of the exposure of African artists in the West, see Enwezor (2017).

References Altshuler, B. (2005). Collecting the New Museums and Contemporary Art. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Anon. (2012, November 1). Tate announces new acquisitions of contemporary African art. Artlyst. Retrieved from http://www.artlyst.com/​news/​tate-​announces-​ new-​acquisitions-​of-​contemporary-​african-​art/​(Accessed 5 May 2018). Anon. (2019, September 13). Tate appoints curators specializing in African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Art. Frieze. Retrieved from https://​frieze.com/​article/​ tate-​appoints-​curators-​specializing-​african-​middle-​eastern-​and-​south-​asian-​art (Accessed 1 June 2020).

African art acquisitions at Tate  49 Araeen, R. (1989). Our Bauhaus others’ mudhouse. Third Text, 3(6), 3–​14. Ardouin, C. (2009). Museum politics in Africa. In Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Eds.). Contemporary Art and the Museum (pp. 42–​50). Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Bishop, C. (2013). Radical Museology or What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art? London, England: Koenig. Brown, K. (2019). Private influence, public goods, and the future of art history. Journal for Art Market Studies, 1, 1–​17. Buck, L. (2016, May 19). It’s a bigger story’: Frances Morris outlines her global vision for Tate Modern. The Art Newspaper. Retrieved from http://​theartnewspaper.com/​ news/​museums/​it-​s-​a-​bigger-​story-​frances-​morris-​outlines-​her-​global-​vision-​for-​ tate-​modern/​ (Accessed 10 May 2018). Chikukwa, R. (2011). Curating contemporary African art:  questions of mega-​ exhibitions and Western influences. African Identities, 9(2), 225–​229. Demos, T.J. (2009). The Tate effect. In H. Belting & A. Buddensieg (Eds.). The Global Art World:  Audiences, Markets, and Museums (pp. 256–​ 265). Berlin, Germany: Hatje Cantz. Dieckvoss, S.  (2020). The Musée d'Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden in Marrakech:  a case study in collecting and place-​making. Journal of Visual Art Practice, 19(3), 254–​268. Dixon, C. (2016). The ‘Othering’ of Africa and Its Diasporas in Western Museum Practices. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield. Enwezor, O. (1999). Between worlds: postmodernism and African artists in the Western Metropolis. In O. Oguibe & O. Enwezor (Eds.). Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (pp. 244–​275). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Enwezor, O. (2009). The postcolonial constellation:  contemporary art in a state of permanent transition. In T. Smith, O. Enwezor & N. Condee (Ed.). Antinomies of Art and Culture (pp. 207–​235). Durham and London: Duke University Press. Enwezor, O. (2017). The death of the African archive and the birth of the museum. In O. Grau (Ed.). Museum and Archive on the Move (pp. 132–​147). Berlin/​Boston: de Gruyter. Greenberger, A. (2019, September 11). At Tate modern, four curatorial appointments signal a more international direction. Artnews. Retrieved from www.artnews.com/​ art-​news/​news/​tate-​modern-​curators-​african-​middle-​eastern-​south-​asian-​13216/​ (Accessed 1 June 2020). GuarantyTrust Bank (2011, July 7). GTBank and Tate modern partnership. Retrieved from www.youtube.com/​watch?v=oFKTHVKBLwk (Accessed 10 January 2020). Guaranty Trust Bank. Financial statements 2012–​2017. Retrieved from www.gtbank. com/​investor-​relations/​financial-​information (Accessed 20 May 2018). Harris, G. & T. Forwood (2016, June 18). The networks that buy art. The Art Newspaper, 280. Hassan, S. (1999). The modernist experience in African art. In O. Oguibe & O. Enwezor (Eds.). Reading the Contemporary:  African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (pp. 214–​235). London: InIVA. Heywood, F. (2013). Collecting Africa. Museums Journal, 113 (6), 30–​33. Higgie, J. & S. Thorne (2012, January 1). Interview: Chris Dercon. Frieze. Retrieved from https://​frieze.com/​article/​interview-​chris-​dercon (Accessed 20 May 2018). Hynes, N.J. (2014). Being in now. Ibrahim Al Salahi at the Tate Modern. NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art, 34, Spring, 98–​108. Lamoni, G. (2017, May 29). Beyond the “global dream”. Transnational challenges in the modern and contemporary art museum. wrg magazine. Retrieved from

50  Stephanie Dieckvoss http://​wrongwrong.net/​article/​beyond-​the-​global-​dream-​transnational-​challenges-​ in-​the-​modern-​and-​contemporary-​art-​museum (Accessed 10 May 2018). McClusky, P. (2005). The unconscious museum:  collecting contemporary African art without knowing it. In B. Altshuler (Ed.). Collecting the New Museums and Contemporary Art (pp. 115–​130). Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Memou, A. (2017). Art, activism and the Tate. Third Text, 31(5–​6), 619–​631. Nhapata, G. (2012, November 30). African artists shine at the Tate. Brand South Africa. Retrieved from www.brandsouthafrica.com/​investments-​immigration/​ africanews/​tate-​301112, (Accessed 10 May 2018). Okeke-​Agulu, C. (2012). NKA roundtable III, contemporary African art and the museum. NKA, Journal of Contemporary African Art, 31, 46–​111. Pawson, L. (2013, March 13). Here & there:  Tate modern and African art. Frieze. Retrieved from https://​frieze.com/​article/​here-​there (Accessed 20 January 2020). Sharp, R. (2016, July 26). How London developed a bullish market for contemporary African art. Artsy. Retrieved from www.artsy.net/​article/​artsy-​editorial-​how-​ london-​developed-​a-​bullish-​market-​for-​contemporary-​african-​art (Accessed 20 January 2020). Sowole, T. (2011, September 9). African arts with Taj. Retrieved from https://​ africanartswithtaj.blogspot.com/​2011/​09/​gtb-​and-​tate-​modern.html (Accessed 10 January 2020). Storr, R. (2005). To have and to hold. In B. Altshuler (Ed.). Collecting the New Museums and Contemporary Art (pp. 29–40). Princeton and Oxford:  Princeton University Press. Tate, Tate Extends Its Focus to African Art Through New Partnership with Guaranty Trust Bank, Press Release 4 July 2011. Retrieved from www.tate.org.uk/​press/​press-​ releases/​tate-​extends-​its-​focus-​african-​art-​through-​new-​partnership-​guaranty-​ trust-​bank (Accessed 20 May 2018). Tate, Tate Acquisitions and Disposal Policy, 2017. Retrieved from www.tate.org.uk/​ about-​us/​collection/​acquisitions (Accessed 20 May 2018). Tate, Meschac Gaba. Retrieved from www.tate.org.uk/​art/​artworks/​gaba-​game-​room-​ from-​museum-​of-​contemporary-​african-​art-​t14219 (Accessed 20 January 2020). Tate, Tate Reports, 2011–​2017. Retrieved from www.tate.org.uk/​about-​us/​tate-​reports (Accessed: 10 May 2018). Tate, The Board of Trustees Annual Accounts 2009–2017. Retrieved from www.tate. org.uk/​about-​us/​governance (Accessed 10 May 2018). Tate, Tate Modern Appoints Curators Specialising in African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Art, Press Release Tate Modern, 11 September 2019. Retrieved from www.tate.org.uk/​press/​press-​releases/​tate-​modern-​appoints-​curators-​specialising-​ african-​middle-​eastern-​and-​south (Accessed 20 January 2020). Tate Americas Foundation, Support. Retrieved from http://​tateamericas.org/​support/​ (Accessed 20 February 2020). Twitschin, M. (2019). Concerning ‘the Eurocentric African Problem’ (Meschac Gaba). Open Cultural Studies, 3, 276–​285. Retrieved from www.degruyter.com/​ downloadpdf/​j/​culture.2019.3.issue-​1/​culture-​2019-​0025/​culture-​2019-​0025.pdf (Accessed 10 February 2020). Zarobell, J. (2017). Art and the Global Economy. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

4  Art malls and popular collecting in post-​socialist  China I-​Yi  Hsieh

Introduction As China progressively embraces a new identity of cheerleading for globalisation, Shanghai has been the vanguard in this rush toward internationalisation. Amongst Chinese global cities, Shanghai is nonetheless distinctive in drawing its commercial culture embedded in its past of semi-​colonialism (1843–​1947) as the period was also notable for the import of Art Deco aesthetics and cosmopolitanism which remains visible in the former concession neighbourhoods today (Pan, 2008; Erh & Johnston, 2006). This chapter addresses the contemporary art world in Shanghai that is once again enmeshed with the financial world, in which the city incubates new forms of art collecting against a backdrop of revived commercial culture. As an attempt to engage with the global wonder about the rise of Chinese collectors, I  present an ethnographically informed discussion of two private art establishments—​the Shanghai Himalaya Museum and the K11 Art Mall—​as they speak to the rising private collecting in Shanghai alongside the market reform. Having originated in Hong Kong, K11 has expanded into Shanghai by setting up its signature mall that combines art exhibitions, shopping experiences and public access to the celebrity–​artist culture. Now in partnership with MoMA PS1 in New York, and hosting an artist studio program in Wuhan, K11 has gradually developed itself into an international art institute that might have been inconceivable previously. Similar to K11, the Shanghai Himalaya Museum is situated within a shopping mall adjacent to a luxury hotel in suburban Shanghai. Together, the two unabashedly claim to integrate contemporary arts, from China and internationally, with fashion, blurring the boundary between art and consumerism. One can argue that such a new mode of artistic consumption is visible in other East Asian cities as well, such as the Mori Museum in Tokyo—​which is part of a luxury shopping centre in one of the upscale neighbourhoods in the Japanese capital. In the following section, I analyse the two above-​mentioned Shanghai art institutes as an example of the novel form of museum retail that resonates with a global trend of art institutes leaning toward the experience economy. In particular, I  discuss how these new private museums in China today are supported by individual

52  I-Yi Hsieh founders who are zealous collectors of international, Euro-​American art, who themselves have backgrounds as real-​estate tycoons active in the commercial world. Now equipped with digital art and new media-​oriented exhibitions, these novel art institutes cater to a new generation of the Asian urban middle class who readily embrace art as part of popular culture.

Private art museum in China today In The Rise of the Joyful Economy, Michael Hutter (2015) argues that the arts have increasingly been seen as a major booster for economic growth. The line between consumption and artistic reception is further blurred in the pursuit of joy in the delivery of the experience of art as goods. While Hutter mainly addresses the European and Japanese contexts, the two Shanghai art malls present an interesting Asian case regarding the intersected worlds of art and finance. Indeed, artistic production in China has a long history entangled with art markets in line with Chinese literati aesthetic tastes in imperial times (Clunas, 1991). Features of this art market have been since the fourteenth century, when custom-​made brush and ink paintings could be sold in the literati circles. In the early twentieth century, newspaper advertisements for pre-​ ordered artworks were also prevalent in Shanghai. These elements all point to an established relationship between art production and the commercial world beyond the realm of craftsmen or the decorative arts (Clunas, 1991; Hsieh, 2016). In the market reform era, in Shanghai, art mingles with joyful consumption by a web of privately funded contemporary art institutes.1 Whereas these museums collaborate via private funds, or receiving public funds in the occasions of the Shanghai Biennales or Art Fairs, none of the institutes so audaciously claim the abolition of the line between luxury consumption and the fine arts as it is built into the identity of the K11 and the Shanghai Himalaya. Chinese private art institutes vehemently emerge in response to the rapidly rising art market, aiming to attract middle-​class Chinese collectors from the bazaar setting of antique and counterfeit painting markets in Guangzhou and Beijing (Wong, 2014; Hsieh, 2016). Another factor is the private art museums’ lack of collections, as most have only just emerged in China in the past ten years. Many have thus turned their attention to video artworks, which can be produced and curated into exhibitions at a lower cost and in a shorter time frame. This widely perceivable trend of abundant video artworks also reflects shifts in China’s creative industry, which demands art to be incorporated into economic development in major metropolitan areas. Chinese cities coordinate the arts alongside commercial planning by orienting public funds to acknowledge the creative industry in efforts such as revitalising former industrial zones, e.g., old metal factories, shipyards, power stations into art museums. Replacing the workers and heavy machines are art shows, galleries and signs designed for annual art fairs. The sudden high demand of the creative industry is still taking shape, as China has focused much more on being the world’s

Popular collecting in post-socialist China  53 factory in the four decades of market reform. Art institutes in China nonetheless gain much more attention as soft power development since the 2000s.

Empirical approach The following analysis focuses on my onsite observation of the two institutes conducted in 2019, combined with personal communication with scholars in Shanghai and artists from Taipei (who had been involved in K11’s art residency program). The analysis is aided by an ethnographically informed observation accumulated when I resided in Shanghai in 2015–​2017.2 Anthropology’s recent turn to the so-​called ‘global art world’ has been urged by the proliferation of new art institutions, biennales, art fairs and galleries beyond Euro-​America. In particular, as Thomas Filllitz and Paul van der Grijp state, ‘[w]‌ithin contemporary art markets, the field of gallery investigation is of particular relevance to anthropologists, since it enables them to examine the dynamics of the interactions between artists, gallerists, and collectors’ (2018, p.2). Given my previous research of the rise of popular collecting in China centred on the collector’s markets in Beijing (Hsieh, 2016), my methodological focus has been bringing in fieldwork-​based, ethnographic thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973)  of the dynamics between art institutes and art markets. For contemporary Shanghai, this methodology means meticulous attention paid to addressing the reincarnation of the semi-​colonial legacy of the meshed commercial culture and cosmopolitan attitude toward arts. Such an embrace of commercial development and foreign investments is again revered in Shanghai in the post-​Mao period, if not further enhanced. Against this backdrop, the Shanghai Himalaya and the K11 Art Mall establish a foothold in the contemporary art world in which cosmopolitanism is deemed a tradition rather than a novelty.

Shanghai Himalaya museum Ever since its establishment in 2007, the Shanghai Himalaya has acquired a reputation for showcasing contemporary art compiled by both international and Chinese artists and curators. Most significantly, the museum is designed to be included in a luxury consumption compound that also houses a high-​end hotel, shopping mall and conference centre. Before convening such a conglomerate, Dai Zhikan, the founder of the Shanghai Himalaya Museum, had been the CEO of the largest real-estate corporation in Shanghai in the early 2000s, whose ambition was to combine art and luxury consumption. Dai’s story speaks to the heart of the fact that the contemporary art world in Shanghai is led by private museums, which can hardly be separated from the city’s rapid transformation to becoming the financial centre of China (Ortiz, 2017). On 29 August 2019, Dai turned himself in to the local police. Caught up in a series of peer-​to-​peer online lending platforms that collapsed one after another, a storm that had been seizing China since 2016, Dai was subsequently

54  I-Yi Hsieh

Figure 4.1 Façade of the Shanghai Himalaya museum. Photo credit: I-​Yi Hsieh.

arrested in September 2019 on the charge of illegal fundraising for Lao Caibao, an online microfinancing website that Dai heads. Dai’s business also included the largest real-​estate company in Shanghai, as well as shopping centres and a luxury hotel (Lu, 2019). As CEO of this mega-​sized corporation, Dai’s rise in the contemporary Chinese art world has been met with mixed opinions. He often touted a dream of bringing contemporary art to China—​one that physically materialised in the audacious façade of the Shanghai Himalaya Museum, designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, the 2019 Pulitzer winner. And since 2010, the museum has developed based on Dai’s dream of it becoming the city’s de facto MoMA, introducing the public to cutting-​ edge contemporary artists such as Kengo Kumo (2013 show) and Sean Scully (2015 show). Another example of this ambition manifested in Reset Modernity, the exhibition curated by Bruno Latour in 2017, which included figures such as Bill Viola and Yoko Ono in a show that reflects on the global climate and ecological crisis. Dai is also an enthusiastic collector in the international art market, representing a new generation of zealous Chinese collectors who also own private museums while still being aggressive bidders at auctions. Among Dai’s sensational collections are César Baldaccini’s Thumb, the prestigious Chinese literatus Wen Zhenmin’s landscape paintings (Ming dynasty), and

Popular collecting in post-socialist China  55 early modern master Xu Beihong’s brush paintings. Dai also set up a hedge fund tailored to art investments, followed by his involvement in the short-​lived auction centre for contemporary art in Shanghai. Upon his arrest in 2019, it is fair to argue that Dai’s rise and fall represents a cautionary tale emblematic of the enmeshed art world and financial world in China today. During my visit to the Shanghai Himalaya in December 2019, the whole compound representing Dai’s dream appeared to be in a dormant state, if not desolate. This was a drastic change from my previous visits to the museum in 2015–​2017. Ever since 2005, when the museum began to operate, it has attracted visitors with its audacious architectural design in the shape of a large man-​made cave, as well as its progressive curatorial themes. In winter 2019, however, what welcomed me was a scene of shattered construction materials scattered across the gated and empty museum spaces, which used to be filled with artworks and workshops. The whole museum space seemed to have fallen into negligence after Dai’s arrest in September 2019. The one and only exhibition in winter 2019, Shanghai Document: Uniform Motion, was an ongoing project composed of 5–​10 artists or art groups addressing contemporary issues in China. This year, it was a mix-​and-​match of video art and installations convened by local artists. Many of the selected works addressed the social and cultural conditions of China’s economic development, centring around the curatorial theme of the speed of social transformation. In a playful depiction infused by its satirical tone, artists brought forward reflections loosely pertaining to the theme of ‘uniform motion’, which can be viewed as a question directed toward the country’s rather synchronised and harmonised uniformity for developmentalism in the post-​socialist transition. This urgency of artistic response to contemporary China echoes what anthropologist Julie Chiu argues about chronopolitics, an idea pointing to the state’s control on ‘the orientation of flows’ of goods on the market by creating a dynamic ‘not just about speed so much as it was about honing the timeliness of response to the fluctuating rhythms of global supply chains’ (Chiu, 2017, p. 33). While critically engaging with this spectacle of speed-​and market-​oriented social rhythm, the artists selected in the Shanghai Document fall largely into the category of video art. For example, Lu Yang, the young female digital artist, participated in this show with her signature animation incorporating real human body captions rendered into cartoon figures in elaborate videogame works. Other installations also relied heavily on mixing video presentations with other mediums, such as stamps, used as an interactive method with which to solicit the audience’s participation. The sudden burst of video art in the Chinese art world can be better understood in the context of the rapidity of new museums being set up without substantial collections. Thus, it is difficult to disentangle the artists and curators’ own participation in a market obsessed with ‘the orientation of flows’. What we witness in these art malls, indeed, is the seamless collaboration of art and consumption goods subjugated to this new chronopolitics of circulation in the market-​oriented society, as in Julie Chu’s observation, which manifests in a spectacle of a superfluous and

56  I-Yi Hsieh excessive amount of video artwork shown side by side with luxury products. Both of these await being swirled into the rhythm of the market. If, indeed, one can consider the show of Shanghai Document as voicing social criticism—​however subtly—​about society’s overwhelming consensus toward rapid economic development, it is impossible to ignore the irony of a seemingly progressive curatorial theme hosted by an art institute facing a financial crisis largely due to its founder’s eager embrace of the subject of the critique—​financial acceleration with Chinese characteristics. Dai’s interest in situating an art institute in line with other forms of capital gain situates art directly beneath the large web of capital accumulation aligned with his previous real-​estate development corporation and online financing platform.

K11 and its outreach Operating in a similar mode, the K11 Art Mall is located in downtown Shanghai, next to Xingtiandi—​the pioneer in revitalising old neighbourhoods into refined shopping districts in the city. With a gallery in the basement level of the art mall, and artworks and installations scattering each floor, K11 also supports young artist fellows by offering residence and studio space at its outpost in Wuhan under the not-​for-​profit K11 Art Foundation, which focuses on curation and art education. Adrian Cheng, the founder of K11, has been taunted as among the ‘20 of the world’s most innovative art collectors’3 and ranked 73 in the ‘Power 100:  most influential people in 2019 in the contemporary art world.’4 The third generation of a real-​estate development empire, Cheng is heir to the $17.2 billion family fortune, with which he holds parallel positions as general manager of the New World Development5 and K11 Musea in Hong Kong—​ the prototype of his ‘art retail model’, which includes ‘hotel and property development on Hong Kong’s Tsim Shan Tsui waterfront’ (Ibid).6 Holding a bachelor of arts from Harvard University, Cheng is also a renown collector whose collection includes pieces by Tatiana Trouvé, Adrin Villar Rojas, Zhang Enli and Zhang Ding (Harris, 2014). During the 2018 Art Basel Hong Kong, Cheng reportedly purchased ‘works by Theaster Gates, Oscar Murillo, Anicka Yi, and Haegue Yang, among others’ (Pollack, 2018). Cheng also sits on a long list of boards and committees of art institutes including ‘London’s Tate and Royal Academy, the Pompidou in Paris, MOCA LA, and in New York, the Metropolitan Museum as well as MoMA PS1 and Public Art Fund’ (Ibid.). Separate from K11’s institutional collection, Cheng’s collection appears to fall in line with contemporary international conceptual and sculpture arts albeit his personal likings of several Chinese abstract painting artists. Most significantly, he represents the emerging trend of cosmopolitan Chinese collector who is no longer confined in a specific and localised aesthetic taste. The layout of the building of K11 itself resembles all other shopping malls that one expects to find in an East Asian city at large:  luxury department stores housed in high-​rise architecture with a modern façade that can be

Popular collecting in post-socialist China  57

Figure 4.2 Cao Fei, the birth of RMB City. Photo credit: I-​Yi Hsieh.

spotted in Tokyo, Osaka, Hong Kong, Taipei or Singapore. One would hardly be prepared to encounter works of contemporary art from the K11’s exterior look. Once inside the mall, interesting ideas and artworks interplay with products from international brands such as Gucci or Chanel. For example, in December 2019, the gallery placed the Chinese conceptual artist Cao Fei’s recent animated film, The Birth of RMB City, at the hallway leading up to the K11 gallery’s entrance level. Cao’s work was concurrent with the other video shows, the Nowness show and ‘Mesh’, convened by the Chi K11 gallery in the mall’s lower level. In line with these shows, which encompassed select contemporary Chinese experimental films, a special viewing area with a projector, a large screen and seats on the floor was temporarily created on the mall’s third floor, surrounded by products from fashion brands, such as clothing and bags. Other art on display is a permanent exhibition of Damien Hirst’s Wretched War, a cast copper statue, which is a part of the none-​for-​sale ‘K11 Kollection’ placed around the store isles (Harris, 2014).

The Chinese model of museum retail In a 2018 article commissioned by a Chinese fashion website, LADYMAX, K11 was described to be a rather successful case in terms of creating a new

58  I-Yi Hsieh

Figure 4.3 Urban farm in the Shanghai K11. Photo credit: I-​Yi Hsieh.

business model of so-​called ‘museum retail’, a phrase credited to the founder of K11, Zheng Zhigang (Wang, 2018). For 2023, Zheng plans to expand this new retail model into nine cities in China, i.e., Beijing, Shenzhen, Shenyang, Wuhan, Ningpo, Tianjing, Shanghai, Guanzhou and Hong Kong. If K11 brings forward a case about the rise of joyous consumption in China, the Shanghai Himalaya Museum presents a further advanced example of ‘museum retail’, which inserts itself into the tangled web of art and finance. Indeed, some might find the story of the Shanghai Himalaya Museum to be reminiscent of MoMA in New York as the latter formed a close relationship with the Rockefellers in the early twentieth century (Elderfield, 2018). The blurred boundary of the financial terrain and the art world in North America is hardly a New  York exceptionalism; in Boston, private art institutes gave birth to the framework of trusteeship in the late eighteenth through the mid-​ nineteenth centuries. This model of the wealthy patronage and trusteeship of art institutes allowed institutional collecting to develop into a major force sustaining the art world. And, this deep enmeshment carries out significant social and cultural percussions. From 1783 to 1860, with the mechanism of endowment, the Bostonian Brahmins, the self-​acclaimed ‘American aristocracy’, forged a collective sense for Bostonians who ‘viewed their city as the metaphorical hub of the world, under the guidance of its hereditary Brahmin

Popular collecting in post-socialist China  59 caste’ (Meyer & Brysac, 2015, pp. 41–​45). Another example is the founding of the Boston Athenaeum in 1807, a private library further equipped with an art gallery in 1827, which marked the arrival of the Bostonian Brahmins as patrons of fine arts institutes, such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (founded 1870). Interestingly, if one compares contemporary Chinese ‘museum retail’ and the early modern private museums in the East Coast of the U.S., one commonality of the two is the idea of art institutes being established in cities of global trade. What trade brings about, respectively, is not limited to the movement of goods, but also a union of art and business schemes that underlines the emergent urban identity. The synthesis of the art world and the finance world provides a pathway for interchanging symbolic capital with social capital. That being the case, the enhanced entanglement of the art world and the financial world also brings about structural changes in art production that mixes private fine art institutes with public funding—​a model deemed the norm in Euro-​America since the end of WWII (Beech, 2016). The historical moment of this model lies in 1946, when Maynard Keynes became the first Chairman of the Arts Council in the United Kingdom, followed by the birth of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 (Ibid., p. 131, 153). With these national funding structures of the arts in place, the post-​WWII era also paralleled the onset of the Rockefeller family’s extensive relationship with the New  York Museum of Modern Art. This combination of private trusteeship and public art funding allowed institutional acquisition at that time to develop from a particular vantage point (Barnhisel, 2015). In the case of contemporary Shanghai, the museum retail model brings about a mode of production differing from the post-​WWII Euro-​American norm—​particularly regarding the private art institute’s financial structure. In Dai Zhikan’s Chinese dream attached to the Shanghai Himalaya Museum, he appears to be partly trying to use the acquired art collections as collateral for his other business investments; hence, even the museum space itself was integrated into the real-​estate development endeavours. In his case, the museum itself is also a project to defy risk—​an ‘intentional entanglement’ of the commercial world and the art world (Hutter, 2015). While the financial market’s fluctuation is withheld in these business tycoons’ minds from the very beginning of an art investment, Dai’s ambition of aligning art and financial prospects has led to a disastrous outcome for the museum. Despite the initial idea to ‘overcome the market’ with art, Dai is rather ‘overcome by the market’—​and so is his art dream. The idea of ‘overcome by the market’ highlights the dynamic of popular collecting in the Shanghai art world. In the artistic attempts to criticise marketisation in China, as seen in the Himalaya Museum and the K11, the effort turns self-​referential when the artworks are convened within the same subject of attack. This contradiction appears to be most prominent in the story of Dai Zhikan, the founder of the Shanghai Himalaya Museum, whose rise and fall in the novel worlds of art and finance finally came crashing down in the

60  I-Yi Hsieh early 2000s. In the previously mentioned show, Shanghai Document: Uniform Motion, which insinuated criticism of the rapidity of developmentalism, the show’s host museum faced an existential crisis due to its founder’s extensive involvement in the exact area being criticised. Similar dynamics can be found at K11, where Cao Fei’s satirical work, ‘RMB City’, expresses discomfort about developmentalism in China, whereas the mall itself is one of the primary proprietors for urban development. Despite the best intentions of art curators and artists to reflect on problems induced by the Chinese market economy, most of these attempts ended up weaving them further into the web and rhythm of market-​oriented everyday life.

Conclusion In writer and curator Christian Viveros-​Fauné’s recent notes about the Pace Gallery’s new headquarters in New York,7 she depicts it as raising ‘an enter-​ through-​the-​gift-​shop rationale to partially describe their expanded-​business logic:  it’s about tapping into other commercial models […] including the experience economy, retail, Silicon Valley management and, yes, the real-​ estate industry’s obsession with, ahem, inseam measurements’ (Viveros-​Fauné, 2020, p. 34). Here, Viveros-​Fauné’s quibbling tone is intended for the gallery’s careful calculation of the income to be drawn from admission fees ($20 per person). Such expectations are apparently buttressed by the exhibitions of teamLab—​a Tokyo-​based digital art collective—​which brought in a record 500,000 visitors to the Pace Gallery’s Palo Alto, London and Beijing locations. Viveros-​Fauné’s quibble can be applied to the art malls in Shanghai as well, as a parallel trend of museum retail is now visible across oceans. The gift shop, which used to be placed at an inconspicuous corner of an art museum, is now moved to the front and centre of many art institutes. Moving toward the experience economy, this international trend is shared by private art institutes located in global cities across continents. When contemporary Chinese fine art institutes are drawn closer to popular culture alongside consumerism, it indeed points to the rise of the joyous economy as the art world veers toward the experience economy (Hutter, 2015). Nevertheless, the blurred boundaries of art and popular culture also brings out changes in the nature of art and art institutes. For popular culture is notorious in its ability to ‘contradicts itself’, so says sociologist John Fiske (Fiske, 1990, pp. 4–​5).8 A similar note regarding this contradiction can be sensed in Viveros-​Fauné’s implied criticism of the new Pace Gallery in New York, as the editor highlights her article with the statement:  ‘contemporary gibberish now goes from GAFA to PDZGHW’ (Viveros-​Fauné, ibid.). Such a contradiction is also visible in Shanghai, validated in the case of K11 and the Himalaya Museum. The contradiction notwithstanding, the unavoidable by-​product of art moving closer to popular culture is apparently a globally synchronised choreography.  ‘Art is  economically exceptional but it remains economic’, as Dave Beech reminds us (Beech, 2015, p. 27). We need to consider art’s place within

Popular collecting in post-socialist China  61 cultural economics based on careful, scholarly examination of the specific modes of art production embedded in respective historical context.

Acknowledgement The research presented in this article has been supported by the Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, National Taiwan University (MOST 107-​2420-​H-​002-​007-​MY3). The author thanks Jacob Dreyer and Chen-​Chen Yu, who shared their invaluable insights about the art world in Shanghai. Appreciations are also extended to the two anonymous reviewers for the critical comments.

Notes 1 Such as the Rockbund Museum (housed within the luxury Peninsula Hotel block), the Yuzi Museum, the Westbund Museum (currently in collaboration with the Pompidou), the Power Station Museum (venue for Shanghai Biennale) and the Long Museum (founded by famed Chinese collector Liu Yiqian), to name a few. 2 When I taught at New York University Shanghai. 3 See ‘Meet 20 of the World’s Most Innovative Art Collectors: see who’s rethinking collecting for the 21st century,’ by Artnet News, 29 October 2014. Retrieved from https://​news.artnet.com/​art-​world/​meet-​20-​of-​the-​worlds-​most-​innovative-​art-​ collectors-​117315. Latest accessed 7 July 2020. 4 See ArtReview’s ‘Power 100’ project website:  https://​artreview.com/​power-​ 100?year=2019. Latest accessed 15 December 2020. 5 Founded in 1970, by Adrian Cheng’s grandfather. 6 Cheng has continuously been featured in ArtReview’s ‘Power 100’ since 2014. Retrieved from https://​artreview.com/​artist/​adrian-​cheng/​. Latest accessed 7 July 2020. 7 Opened since September 2019. 8 Fiske’s original paragraph goes as the following: ‘Popular culture is deeply contradictory in societies where power is unequally distributed along axes of class, gender, race and the other categories that we use to make sense of our social differences. Popular culture is the culture of the subordinated and disempowered and thus always bears within it signs of power relations, traces of the forces of domination and subordination that are central to our social system and therefore to our social experience. Equally, it shows signs of resisting or evading these forces: popular culture contradicts itself’ (pp. 4–​5).

References Barnhisel, G. (2015). Cold War Modernists:  Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Beech, D. (2015). Art and Value:  Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Chiu, J. (2017). Risk, Fate, Fortune: The Lives and Times of Customs Inspectors in Southern China. In Osella, Filippo and Rudnyckyi, Daromir (Eds.). Religion and the Morality of the Market (pp. 29–​49). Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

62  I-Yi Hsieh Clunas, C. (1991). Superfluous Things:  Material Culture and Social Status in Early China. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Elderfield, J. (2018). The Rockefellers and the Road to Modern Art. Christies (8 February 2018). Retrieved from www.christies.com/​features/​The-​Rockefellers-​and-​ the-​road-​to-​Modern-​Art-​8847-​1.aspx (Latest accessed 2 January 2020). Erh, D. & Johnston, T. (2006). Shanghai Art Deco. Hong Kong: Old China Hand Press. Fillitz, T. & Grijp, P. (Eds.) (2018). An Anthropology of Contemporary Art: Practice, Markets, and Collectors. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic. Fiske, J. (1990). Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Geertz, C. (1973). Thick Description:  Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (pp. 3–​30). New York: Basic Books. Harris, G. (2014). Arts interview:  Adrian Cheng. Financial Times, London (24 October 2014). Hsieh, I. (2016). Nuts: Beijing folk art connoisseurship in the age of marketization. Asian Anthropology, 15(1), 52–​67. Hutter, M. (2015). The Rise of the Joyous Economy: Artistic Invention and Economic Growth from Brunelleschi to Murakami. London:  Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Lu, S. (2019). After turning himself in, what will happen to Daizhikan’s art museum and art collection? (Daizhikan zishouhou tademeishuguan yu yishushoucang jianghequhecong). The Paper (Pengpai Xinwen), 2019-​9-​3. Meyer, K. & Brysac, B. (2015). The China Collectors: America’s Century-​Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Ortiz, H. (2017). A political anthropology of finance: Profits, states, and cultures in cross-​border investment in Shanghai. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(3), 325–​345. Pan, L. (2008). Shanghai Style: Art and Design Between the Wars. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing. Pollack, B.  (2018). ‘It’s Time for Us to Build’:  Collecto and Business Magnate Adrian Cheng on his ambitious art and real-​estate plans. ArtNews (24 May 2018). Retrieved from www.artnews.com/​art-​news/​news/​time-​us-​build-​collector-​business-​ magnate-​adrian-​cheng-​ambitious-​art-​real-​estate-​plans-​10379/​(Latest accessed 15 December 2020). Viveros-​Fauné, C. (2020, March). Meanwhile, in Chelsea. ArtReview, 34. Wang, Y. (2018). What is the commercial logic behind the success of K11 in creating a miracle in the field? LADYMAX.CN. 2018-​ 3-​ 29 (Latest accessed 26 December 2019). Wong, W. (2014). Van Gogh on Demand:  China and the Readymade. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

5  Perspectives of private contemporary art collecting in Brazil Nei Vargas da Rosa

Introduction A systemic approach to art is based on a pragmatic research exercise, when a particularity is taken as an axis of analysis in order to have a wider understanding of the field in which its object is inserted. This assumption is anchored in the concept of the art system (Bulhões, 2014), a formulation that examines the vast environment, increasingly diffuse and twisted, in which the production, circulation, legitimation and consumption of what is defined as art by agents and institutions in the course of historical processes. Recently, they incorporated the idea of network (Cauquelin, 2005; Rosa, 2008; Fetter, 2014; Bulhões, 2018), as a tool to understand both how these articulations connect and the tensions in local and global worlds, which are increasingly multiple and complex. In a country of continental dimension and characterised by rich and unequal cultural realities, the art system presents a notion of a very segmented and discordant composition network in all its areas. One must escape from a simplistic definition of centre and periphery, notably in the neoliberal era in which these notions have blurred borders, and an alternative is to question which periphery and which centre is being spoken of, as well as who is peripheral of whom. There are hegemonic centres that are in the status of peripheries of others that are yet more hegemonic, and all produce central and peripheral zones in themselves. The Brazilian example points to a strong reliance on legitimation and endorsement linked to the capital city, São Paulo. The city with the largest number of galleries in the primary market, museums, exhibition spaces and events, São Paulo plays a ruling role in defining what is understood and is inscribed as contemporary art. However, there are many collectors and agents outside this central axis who are busy building local art stories, producing tensions on the centrality occupied by São Paulo. This phenomenon can be approached through Even-​Zohar’s polysystem theory (1990), helping to understand the dynamics in which artistic processes are conceived and under what conditions the disputes that define categories, such as centre (s) and periphery (s), take place. The polysystemic logic considers the study of the different factors that constitute the system, observing what

64  Nei Vargas da Rosa is at stake in the processes of valuation, visibility and legitimation of art at different scales of magnitude and scope. The polysystemic concept was devised to understand literary production, but when adopted to the visual arts, it aids in the understanding of various systems that intersect with each other and with others, which overlap partially or totally, and which simultaneously use equal mechanisms in different circumstances, functioning in a whole structured by interdependent members that operate in a local way, aiming to achieve, to a greater or lesser extent, multiple national or international legitimising contexts. The present essay is part of the research line ‘Systemic Relations of Art’, instituted by Maria Amélia Bulhões in the History, Theory and Art Criticism specialisation area of the Visual Arts Post-​Graduate Program of the Art Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (PPGAV/​UFRGS). Integrating scholars, advisors and researchers from different regions of the country, the group has organised a set of discussion platforms about the art system. The result of these actions regulates and strengthens the systemic approach as a way of understanding the visual arts universe, showing itself as a set of analytical and practical-​reflective tools conceived in research from different areas of knowledge. In this context, two researches were conducted on private collecting. The first, in 2016, was a thesis project for the Doctoral Course at PPGAV/​UFRGS, entitled ‘Institutionalisation of Contemporary Art Private Collections in Brazil:  Social Challenges and Contributions to the Art System’. The second, developed in 2017 alongside a private institution, ‘Perspectives of Contemporary Art Collecting in Brazil’, aimed to produce a data survey to understand contemporary art collecting procedures. It is extremely important to mention that this research would not have been possible without funding from the Institute of Contemporary Culture, in São Paulo, an institution chaired by collector, Regina Pinho de Almeida, a supporter of proposals that seek to fill gaps in the analysis of the art system in Brazil. Both research projects serve as a basis to discuss, in this text, the institutionalisation, motivations and strategies, the relations with the State and the role they play in the functioning and configuration of the national art system.

Methodological approach The history of art institutions in Brazil is linked to private collections, a phenomenon that took place in the creation of most museums of modern art and is repeated with the new models housing contemporary production. By definition, collectors are agents who purchase or have purchased works of art for a period; a collection is a set of objects under permanent development. Contemporary art comprises a certain production in visual arts, legitimised as such by agents and institutions, which took effect between 1945 and 1960 (Heinich, 1998), indicating a definitive break with reducible criteria used until then to categorise production in visual arts.

Contemporary art collecting in Brazil  65 The only ongoing Brazilian research in which contemporary art collections appear is Latitude –​Platform for Brazilian Art Galleries Abroad, a partnership project between the Brazilian Association of Contemporary Art (ABACT), and the Brazilian Agency for the Promotion of Exports and Investments (APEX-​BRASIL), which has been operating since 2011. In the six reports provided by ABACT, the Brazilian private collector accounts for an average of 75% of the purchases in the 50 galleries represented by the Association. These are important data to understand a little of the relationship with the primary market, but it is only an element of the collecting procedure. Aiming to add more content, we devised a survey following Moureau et al. (2016), which investigated the collection of contemporary art in France. We opted for a questionnaire of 45 questions, some by multiple choice, composing thematic grids that cover profile, scale, operability forms, applied values, habits and experiences beyond the acquisition of works. The questions reveal age, location, education and training and work areas, gender, marital status, collection age, collection size, who it belongs to, where the works are purchased, how much is invested per year in purchasing and maintenance, how often they attend galleries and fairs in Brazil and abroad (and which fairs), what influences the purchase, if they catalogue and document the collection, if they follow artists on social networks and who they are, how they help artists and cultural institutions (loans and project financing), the future of the collection, among other issues. As a strategy for forwarding the form to the target audience, artists, gallery owners, art advisors, directors of fairs and museums were asked to send the survey applied to Google Forms to collectors of their relationships. Access to it occurred on a website created especially for the project. The interviews were mediated almost entirely by gallerists, some of which were indicated by artists and other collectors. This measure was taken in order to build trust, bypassing the lack of research culture of this nature and due to collecting be linked to a market with few activities regulated by law that, frequently, generate few tax declarations and mistrust of all kinds. All field research took place between September 2018 and November 2019, obtaining 201 responses through the form and 83 interviews in 16 states in the 5 regions of the country. In the interviews, the figure of the collector–​collector was prioritised, that is, collectors involved with the market were not included, such as gallery owners and auctioneers who also collect. To be sure of this link, when scheduling the interviews, it was asked whether the collector worked professionally in any commercial activity of artworks.

The first results In order to bring an overall analysis of the results, some data were selected from the interviews and responses to the questionnaire divided into four groups: general characteristics of collectors and collections, acquisition and management processes.

66  Nei Vargas da Rosa The collectors ranged from 23 to 82  years old, therefore born between 1937 and 1996. The predominance in terms of sex, was male at, 68.2% and women at 31.8% of which 60.6% were married and 27.3% were single, with a percentage of separated, 4%, and divorced, 7%. About 35.5% of them have a university degree, followed by those with specialisation and post-​graduate degrees, 26.5%. Those with Masters at 23% and 12% with Doctorates. 3% had a high school or technical education. Among the professions were lawyers, doctors, agents of the art market, agents of the financial market, professors, architects, administrators, artists and entrepreneurs. The socioeconomic realities were quite varied, ranging from civil servants to owners of large industries, showing that the practice of collecting manifests itself in very different classes. There is a timid growth in the notion that collecting is possible, that there are collections for different budgets. Regarding the characteristics of the collections, there was no rule regarding the relationship between longevity of the collection and the number of works in it. For example, the four that were approximately 60 years old, contained between 300 and 2500 works. At the other end, the youngest collections making up 13.2% of the total, including those from the millennial generation, did not exceed 50 works. Two groups, between 20.3%, 6–​10  years old, and 13.7%, 11–​15 years old, consisted of collections, which ranged from between 50 and 200 works and had begun during a period of important economic growth that saw an increase in the number of galleries and the acceleration of the internationalisation of Brazilian contemporary art. There were two groups of collections between 16 and 30 years old that in total reached 30% and varied between 200 and 1000 works, some reaching approximately 1500 works. Almost 60% of them had up to 15% modernist and 85% contemporary works. Regarding the nationality of the artists in the collection, 66.7% are made up of 80% Brazilians and 20% foreigners. The opposite appears in four collections with 90% foreign and 10% Brazilian. National collections are a characteristic of developing countries, and show problems that can arise when import taxes charge fees that can increase the value of the artwork by up to 50%, as in Brazil, or there is a risk of losing the artwork in the customs service, as reported by some collectors. One of the most striking features of the collections in several capitals is the fact that they are the ones that best register the local /​regional production of visual arts, making this production understood in the collectors’ houses, much more than in public museums. About the acquisitions, the multiple choice answer to where collectors buy the artworks presented 70.9% for directly from artists, 67.3% from galleries in the primary market, 36.7% in the secondary market, 46.7% in fairs and 43.7% in auctions; 18.1% appear on the Internet, an index close to the international average for online sales. In the interviews, at least 80% of the first acquisitions at auction were forged artworks resulting from a lack of knowledge. Of the 83 interviews, only one collector expressed dissatisfaction with the work done by gallery owners, stating that he acquired his more than 200 works almost entirely from artists. Most of the collectors admitted their appreciation and

Contemporary art collecting in Brazil  67 respect for the work developed by the gallery owners, which can also be seen in the answers to the questionnaire about advice on acquisitions, showing that gallerists lead as to their preference, followed by collector friends. 91.8% of Brazilian collectors prefer to buy at SP-​Arte (the biggest Latin American art fair) followed by 50.3% at Parte Contemporary Art Fair and 48.6% at ArtRio. Half of the collectors attend fairs abroad, 58.4% go to Art Basel Miami, 35.6 go to Art Basel with and 33.7% choose ARCO. The annual investment in art shows that 25.9% spend the equivalent of 2000 euros in reais; 29.5% between 2000 and 10,000 euros; 17.1% between 10,000 and 20,000; 6.7% between 20 and 40,000; 4.1% between 40 and 100,000 euros; 2.6% have between 100 and 200,000 euros a year; while only 1% spend over 200,000 euros. The acquisitions were mainly motivated by affinity with the artwork, even in collections made up of defined criteria. The data on the management of collections show that collecting in Brazil still needs to advance greatly to become more professional. Only 16% have already catalogued the collection, 20% are in the cataloguing phase and the others have not catalogued yet. However, 70% have a documented collection against 21.5% that do not. The preventive preservation and restoration of the artworks proved to be satisfactory for 70% of collectors, but was seen differently regarding temperature and humidity control, which showed the majority dissatisfied, which is a countercensus. About 27.3% of the collectors lend artworks for exhibitions in Brazilian institutions and 20% for exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. 18% have no interest in lending and 34% would like to see the artworks in exhibitions. In the interviews, more than half of the collectors stated that they had not declared the artworks for income tax, which has complex implications for the inheritance processes.

The museum as a temple The French art historian Maurice Rheims (2002) said that the museum is the collector’s temple; all the joys of a collection may be jeopardised if the survival of the collected artworks and objects is not decided. Thus, the museum and its permanent character solve the collection’s susceptibility to its natural destruction, preserving the collector’s memory. Walter Benjamin (1977), based on Fuchs’ caricatures collection, engaged in an analysis that operates on historical investigation, highlighting the historian’s role of those who collect. Marcello Dantas (2019), a Brazilian curator, thinks of the collection from the dimension of a work of art in itself, giving the collector the role of an artist and causing a disruption between the notions of work/​collection/​ collector/​museum. In the survey, when asked about the collection’s future, 39.4% want some family member to carry it on. About 11.4% prefer to donate it to a public museum and 3.1% to a private one. Of the 201 respondents, 10.4% want to open their own museum, even though this is a decision involving considerable effort, as well as great risks and challenges in a country that lacks national

68  Nei Vargas da Rosa legislation to encourage the creation of private institutions. This issue meddles in the policies of institutions and their longevity, affecting the present planning and their scale of operation, with implications for their future construction. Of the four private institutions examined in the thesis, the only one with the assurance of a permanent future is the Vera Chaves Barcellos Foundation (FVCB). The Brazilian government requires the juridical entity of the ‘foundation’ to be created with its own assets, which may be real estate or a sum of money, while for associations, whether profit-​making or non-​profit, individuals must join together to create a legal entity. In 2005, FVCB started operating at Galeria Chaves, a symbolic building in Porto Alegre’s Historic Centre, the state capital in the extreme south of Brazil. In the neighbouring city, Viamão, in 2008, the current headquarters were opened on a two-​hectare property, consisting of two buildings of approximately 400 m² each. The land and buildings are loaned (free of charge) for an indefinite period and, as a legal requirement, the Foundation has a cash fund, an endowment, which is invested in the financial market as an asset to secure its future. Interviewed for the thesis, Vera Chaves Barcellos stated that the land, buildings and collection will be inherited by the Foundation, and the operating cost has been fully provided for by her. Throughout her life, the collector, who is also a renowned visual artist, set up a collection of approximately 900 works of her own and 1200 of artists representing post-​1960s contemporary art, national and international, which have been gathered by exchanges with other artists and purchases made in recent years. These reveal an approach that favours emerging young artists at the beginning of their careers, and local recognition that has helped to stimulate the art system of the region where the Foundation is installed. Another attitude that has begun to gain momentum as a policy is related to the acquisition of artists’ collections, such as those of Claudio Goulart and Silvio Nunes who had individual exhibitions in 2018 and 2019. With eight employees, the Foundation maintains an average of three exhibitions per year, all with catalogues printed and available for downloading on its website. It also produces material for the Educational Programme and promotes parallel activities, such as lectures and seminars. This reaches around 4000 people per year, of which there are approximately 60 teachers and 2500 students. The smaller format allows building more solid and lasting relationships with the Foundation’s visitors, such as the contributions brought by partnerships with the education departments of neighbouring cities, Alvorada and Gravataí. Its scope of action is expanded by carrying out activities in other institutions, establishing connections with different elements of the art system. The other three institutions that were researched have legal formats as associations. Although this is a more fragile instrument due to ease with which they can be dissolved, this does not prevent such strategies being developed that establish strong relations in the art system. Inhotim is a ‘state of mind’; summarises its creator Bernardo Paz, a mining industry businessman who, influenced by the artists Tunga and Cildo

Contemporary art collecting in Brazil  69 Meirelles, dissolved his modernist collection to collect contemporary art. One of the most important contemporary art museums in the world, Inhotim was opened in 2006 and today has a superlative scale: 23 galleries (19 permanent and 4 temporary), more than 700 works on display, 23 of which are large and outdoor, more than 100 artists representing 30 countries in a collection with more than 1300 works, more than 600 employees and 3 million visitors since the opening. There are 5 ornamental lakes and 5000 species that represent 28% of the known botanical families in the world, all of this spread in a 250 hectare park that makes up a Natural Reserve of Natural Heritage. Bernardo Paz created a collection of rare international art in a country that has legal flaws for importing works of art. This was evidenced in the survey results from the collectors, who when questioned about the percentage between national and international artists in their collections, of the 201 responses, 6% had collections with 100% national artists, 28% have 90% national and 10% international; 55% had 80% national and 20% international artists and only 1% had ratio of 90% international artists to 10% national. This percentage came from the interviews which revealed only 3 out of 83 collectors with international collections. A greater presence of national artists prevails in the collection of João Carlos Figueiredo Ferraz, the owner of the Institute Figueiredo Ferraz (IFF). The institution is an association between the collector, his wife and a friend. For each exhibition a free time-​limited loan is made to the Institute and once the exhibition is over, the works return to João Figueiredo’s collection. He started his collection in 1983, acquiring works by artists from the 1980s, a generation that became very well known with established names like Beatriz Milhazes, Adriana Varejão, Tunga and Waltércio Caldas, among many others. This is a period that 21% of respondents including Vera Chaves and Bernardo Paz claimed to have collected for over 30 years. Many of these collections have a similar profile to the Figueiredo Ferraz collection; they consist mostly of contemporary art produced in Brazil, consisting of paintings, installations, sculptures, photographs and video art, among others. The IFF is located in a 2500 m² building in Ribeirão Preto, 400 km far from São Paulo, with two floors distributed between exhibition rooms covering 1800 m², library and auditorium that serves an intense program of courses and lectures. There is an annual exhibition from the collection, mostly curated by the Institute’s own team, including Ferraz himself, in addition to other smaller exhibitions lasting 2–​3 months. Since its opening in 2011, the Institute has had more than 44,000 visitors, of which 23,000 students and 2000 teachers are served by a permanent Educational Programme, reaching out to the region’s education networks. His performance as a collector was consolidated when he became president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. The most recent institution in the research was the Usina de Arte, which opened in 2015 in Água Preta, Pernambuco, in the northeast of Brazil. Installed in the old Santa Terezinha Plant by the couple Bruna and Ricardo Pessoa de Queiroz, it is associated with the artist José Rufino. Inspired by

70  Nei Vargas da Rosa Inhotim, in conceptual terms it is an open air art collection in dialogue with a botanical collection. The museum has 20 works installed and three new projects in progress, arranged in a territory of 30 hectares. Some local artists are nationally recognised, such as José Rufino, Paulo Bruscky and Marcelo Silveira, others are from São Paulo and nationally recognised, such as José Spaniol and Vanderlei Lopes. It started in 2019 including international artists with a work by the Spanish Carlos Garaicoa, and inaugurated the Usina Library, a space where they offer professional courses for young people from the Santa Teresinha community. The crucial moment of the year is the Art at Usina Festival, bringing together several artists together in musical concerts, residencies and workshops over the course of a week. The institutions were examined along two lines, defined by two principal characteristics, the handling of collections and their operating policies. Thus, FVCB and IFF are institutions with more conventional museological structures placed in urban areas, with buildings for collections, short-​and medium-​term exhibitions and diverse cultural programs; they seek to follow the career of artists by obtaining works from different stages of their production and encourage young artists purchasing their works; offer solid continuing education programmes for teachers and students; they fund their institutions without using incentive laws, among other aspects. On the other hand, Inhotim and Usina de Arte occupy large territorial areas and are located in rural districts far from large urban centres, they are parks engaged in developing environmental preservation projects; they opt for site specific works of art; they depend on diversified professionals according to the demands they present; and cause more economic impact by transforming social realities in the regions where they are installed, among other aspects.

National and hegemonic distribution Regarding the territorial distribution of the survey’s respondents, of the 201 responses 109 came from São Paulo and 9 from inside the country. This is another data to discuss São Paulo’s hegemony in the definition of what contemporary art is in Brazil. Through the research, it can be said that there is a contemporary art legitimised by São Paulo and another with local meanings for other regions that is not known and acknowledged in this city. São Paulo works as a signifier for understanding the inequalities in the visual arts field, in the access and acknowledgement of artists and even of collectors. While collectors from other regions showed their collections in the interviews, a sentence was used expressively and spontaneously:  ‘this artist has already exhibited in a certain museum in São Paulo’ or ‘this artist has already exhibited or is represented by such gallery in São Paulo’. This fact leads us to think that owning acknowledged artists in São Paulo becomes a way of legitimising the collection for the collector and, possibly, in your local art system. Obviously, investment in institutions of art collectors does not change this hegemony, but it can help to prevent the major differences in the art system

Contemporary art collecting in Brazil  71 somewhat by helping to create new legitimation instances for local artistic experiences.

Conclusions The practice of contemporary art collecting in Brazil presents a very irregular universe in the way collections are managed, with collectors in an advanced process of cataloguing and conservation, tax legalisation and defined loan system coexisting with collectors unaware of all these aspects. However, it can be said that the collector’s social role has advanced rapidly. In this sense, it is possible to think of a concept of art collecting that is less and less trapped by quantitative issues, which privileges the number of works and their market values. The collector is driven to act socially through his/​her collection, making it a trigger element of social agencies capable of contributing to the development of the visual arts system in a broader way. By opening their own institutions, collectors expand the legitimation instances by how their collections advocate distinction. Their purpose becomes for certain artists to be presented in these institutions, thus providing a means of reference for their works to be given value and developing their careers. Additional factors are: who is responsible for the curatorship of the exhibitions that are organised; the publications produced; the debates generated and publicity achieved. Certainly, the institutions can exercise a powerful influence; they have become a reference for other people not only to start collecting, but also to institutionalise their collections thus providing more circulation, legitimisation and qualification of the culture arena as a whole.

References Benjamin, W. (1977). Eduard Fuchs, der Sammler und der Historiker. In W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, II, 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Bulhões, M. A., Rosa, N.V., Fetter, B., Rupp, B. (2014). As Novas Regras do Jogo: o sistema da arte no Brasil. Porto Alegre: Editora Zouk, 15–​44. Bulhões, M. A., Rosa, N.V., Fetter, B. (2018). Anais 1o. International Symposium on Systemic Relations of Art –​Art Beyond Art. Porto Alegre: Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Cauquelin, A. (2005). Arte contemporânea: uma introdução. São Paulo: Martins. Dantas, M. (2019). What Is Contemporary in Contemporary Art Collecting? Cycle of Dynamic Debates of Contemporary Art Collecting. São Paulo: A Casa do Parque. Retrieved from http://​ccparque.com/.​ Even-​Zohar, I. (1990). Polysystem Studies. [= Poetics Today 11:1]. Durham:  Duke University Press. Fetter, B. (2014). Narrativas conflitantes e convergentes:  as feiras nos ecossistemas contemporâneos da arte. Tese de Doutorado, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil. Heinich, N. (1998). Le triple jeu de l´art contemporain. Paris: Les Éditions of Minuit.

72  Nei Vargas da Rosa Moureau N., Sagot-​Duvauroux D., Vidal M. (2016). Collectionneurs d’art contemporain. Des acteurs méconnus de la vie artistique. Ministère de la Culture –​DEPS, « Questions de culture ». ISBN: 9782111281608. Retrieved from www.cairn.info/​collectionneurs-​ d-​art-​contemporain–​9782111281608.htm Rheims, M. (2002). Les collectionneurs: de la curiosité, de la beauté, du goût, de la mode & de la spéculation. Paris: Ramsay. Rosa, N. V. (2008). Estruturas Emergentes do sistema da arte:  instituições culturais bancárias, produtores e curadores. Dissertação de Mestrado, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil.

Part 2

Artists as entrepreneurs and their career paths

6  Art market stakeholders’ actions and strategies for the co-​creation of artists’ brands Francesco Angelini and Massimiliano Castellani

Introduction The contemporary art market is a complex system involving various agents interacting with each other in the process of creation of artistic value. This system is a centre-​satellite system, where the artist is the central agent and the other agents are his/​her satellites. However, when studying the value of artworks, most studies in cultural economics place the focus of the analysis on artworks instead of agents, using an object-​oriented approach. Most of these studies use, for example, hedonic regressions (e.g. Chanel, Gérard-​Varet & Ginsburgh, 1996; Lazzaro, 2006; Candela, Castellani & Pattitoni, 2012), which focuses on the characteristics of the artworks in investigating their prices, and consider the artist’s characteristics, such as age or being alive or not (e.g. Galenson & Weinberg, 2000; Ekelund, Ressler & Watson, 2000) only as hedonic characteristics. The agent-​oriented approach in cultural economics is mostly limited to the study of artists’ labour choices (Frey, 1997; Towse, 2006). Few studies analyse the artist and his/​her product together, linking the two approaches in a unique framework (e.g. Throsby, 1994, 2006). Several scholars from other fields, including management and marketing of art (e.g. Meyer & Even, 1998; Harrison, 2009), study the value of art through an agent-​oriented approach. Can cultural economists borrow from this approach and use it to study the value of artworks? We think so, by contributing to the analysis on the artist’s name as a human brand, as a signal that conveys information about his/​her style, the message in his/​her artworks, and his/​her persona in the art market; in other words his/​her characteristics such as fame and talent (Codignola, 2003; Angelini & Castellani, 2019; Angelini, Castellani, & Pattitoni, 2019). We borrow the definition of human brand from Thomson (2006, p. 104), stating that the term human brand ‘refers to any well-​known persona who is the subject of marketing communication’. By extension, an artist brand is a particular type of brand which refers to a person/​artist and not to an object/​firm, as ‘standard’ brands do.1 Being associated with a signal such as the brand, which contains all the above information and is easily processed even by people with low art knowledge, is particularly important in a market where agents have asymmetric information.

76  Francesco Angelini and Massimiliano Castellani A brand can be used as a signal of artwork quality (Preece & Kerrigan, 2015), and the analysis of how it shapes agents’ strategies and preferences can be of interest not only to scholars but also to markets agents, besides public institutions that finance the art sector. Brand could then be considered as a key variable in the analysis of the art market, especially for artworks by contemporary artists, given that the quality of these items is less clear and less canonised than works by artists from earlier historical periods. A potential buyer with limited information could refer to an expert for advice about an artwork she wants to buy, but this information may be costly. In these situations, extrinsic cues, such as brand, may be good signals of quality that can be used by customers (Moulard, Rice, Garrity & Mangus, 2014). Moreover, obtaining information through brands and other extrinsic cues is particularly important in the contemporary art market, which is characterised by the decline of the traditional judgment criteria for artistic assessment based on the technical quality defined by the academics (Zorloni 2016). Recently, Preece and Kerrigan (2015) used a multiple-​stakeholders co-​ creation approach to study the branding mechanism in the art market, based on the theory by Freeman (1984), where the artist brand is seen as part of a system of co-​creation with a series of stakeholders, including the artist, who modifies the brand value. This is continuously built by agents who constitute the art market ecosystem, with the artist as the centre, since the whole system exists because the artists created the artworks first. Preece and Kerrigan’s approach is based on the Cultural Branding Theory that recognises a brand is socially constructed within a system of intermediaries with complex relationships. We will use this approach in this chapter, where we describe how each of the main stakeholders on the contemporary art market can influence the brand of a visual artist. This chapter offers a review of previous art market studies on how artists and other stakeholders can influence the artist brand to what we refer as ‘actions and strategies’, which can suggest a research agenda and a road map contributing to art market research, with a particular call to cultural economists to focus more on the agents, rather than on the objects when studying the value formation of artworks. The use of the concept of brand instead of those of promotion, distribution, evaluation, consumption etc., allows researchers and market players to sum up in a unique dimension all the effects of various qualitative measures. In fact, the brand dimension can summarise the results of all strategies carried through by the stakeholders aimed at influencing the artist value, as well as their actions that were not intended to affect his/​her value, allowing to dispose of a quantitative measure of the importance and the value of the artist on the market. In the light of the Cultural Branding Theory, we present and discuss the main art market stakeholders and their strategies and actions that can affect the artist brand and value. In particular, we consider the brand of modern and contemporary artists; however, our approach could be potentially extended to study the brand of artists from less recent periods, since some of

Art market stakeholders’ actions and strategies  77 the stakeholders’ strategies and actions we explain are not limited to contemporary and modern artists. Our analysis is designed to be applied to the visual arts, although some of the actions and strategies we propose can be of interest for the branding of artists in other fields.

Artist brand co-​creation mechanisms in the contemporary art market In the contemporary art market, the perception and evaluation of an artist may be influenced by the different kinds of actions and strategies of a variety of agents. We define ‘action’ a choice made by a stakeholder of the art market, which, although not directly aimed to affect the artist brand, it still does affect it—​hence it is a pure externality. We define ‘strategy’ a choice that is voluntarily made with the aim of influencing the brand of a certain artist (or of a group of them). This distinction allows us to build a framework where all agents who belong to and operate in the art market can, voluntarily or not, affect the brand. The analysis we present below focuses on the choices of each agent separately, and in particular on what are the effects of these choices on the artist brand that the literature has implicitly or explicitly found. Noticeably, all actions and strategies we describe must be looked at as part of an ecosystem in which all agents ‘co-​act’ and where some dependence exists between the choices of an agent and those of others. In other words, all agents who operate on the art market co-​create the brand value (and the artist value in general), and the overall effect of all actions and strategies is larger than the sum of each agent’s effect. That is to say, the effect of an action or strategy must be seen as a part of all actions and strategies that affect an artist brand, so two types of externalities are at work in this market: the pure externality generated by each action, and the externalities due to the coexistence of each action and strategy with all the other actions and strategies (see Candela, Castellani & Dieci, 2008). We will focus on the actions and strategies of main agents considering both theoretical and empirical studies from cultural economics, marketing, management and sociology of art. The agents we consider include artists and peers, galleries and other dealers, museums and curators, critics, experts and journalists, and auction houses. Clearly the list is not exhaustive, since other types of agents and actions are part of the art market ecosystem (such as collectors and art fairs, prizes, awards and sponsorship), but we focus our analysis on agents who have been mostly analysed in the literature.2 Artists and peers Artists are clearly the main agents responsible for forming their own human brand, as they are the ones who strive for an artistic career, building their brand through their artistic work, dividing their lives between the art studio, where they create their artistic identity, and the art scene, where they build their reputation (Sjöholm & Pasquinelli, 2014). In particular, the artist

78  Francesco Angelini and Massimiliano Castellani compromises between investing in his/​her artistic research—​that is, his/​her stylistic choices and how to share his/​her poetics—​and investing in relational capital—​that is, how he/​she connects to the art system. These two choices can also be reformulated as the choice of how to invest in, respectively, social capital, cultural capital, and symbolic capital and fame (Rodner & Kerrigan, 2014). Social capital can be defined as those relations with others that increase an agent’s ability to realise his/​her interests; cultural capital as a form of value linked to culturally authorised tastes and consumption patterns; and symbolic capital as prestige and reputation (Jenkins, 1992; Webb, Schirato & Danaher, 2012). For the scope of our analysis, we consider the concept of reputational capital as part of symbolic capital, and relational capital as a component of social capital. The artist’s career choices, such as the decision to learn by training or by doing (or both) and to work only in the art sector or in other sectors as well, are the ones that affect his/​her overall accumulation of cultural capital. These choices are typical in the art sector (Towse, 2006) and affect the way brand is formed, since each choice opens up different career paths. These choices may have effect also on social and symbolic capital, but the main effect remain on cultural capital. Concerning the investment in reputational capital, in general the artist acts as a manager of his/​her own brand, both in building the image of his/​herself she wants to convey to the broader audience, and in choosing the way he/​she interacts with every agent through the available market channels (Schroeder, 2005). This dual behaviour is amplified by the internet use among artists, who can now directly propose their artworks (Van Miegroet, Alexander & Leunissen, 2019), as, for example, Banksy does through his own website.3 An artist can carry out different possible self-​promotion strategies (Vettese, 1991), such as the occultation strategy, when the artist creates mystery around his/​her person, or the scandal strategy, when the artist tries to attract audience attention, as Maurizio Cattelan has done in his career, also exploiting the different media channels to spread the news (Desbordes, 2013). Other artists, such as Andy Warhol, strongly focused on creating a human brand, and some of his artistic production was directly aimed at this goal (Kerrigan, Brownlie, Hewer & Daza-​LeTouze, 2011). We can argue that the artist’s choice to produce art sits between two boundaries, ‘art for market’s sake’, with works that are market-​oriented, and ‘art for art’s sake’, with product-​ oriented artworks; each choice has different implications on reputation, and hence on the artist brand (Fillis, 2010). However, reputation is more likely to be linked to relational capital rather than to artistic research, since reputation is the necessary condition for building relationships, that in turn influence reputation itself and prices. Concerning the investment in social capital, since different agents on the market can support the artist’s creative process, choosing with whom to interact is one of the key factors in his/​her brand formation. In particular, he/​ she may get help in the conceptualisation, production and/​or distribution of

Art market stakeholders’ actions and strategies  79 his/​her art (Lehman, Wickham & Fillis, 2018), and the stronger his/​her brand becomes, the more he/​she will be able to control these interactions (Angelini & Castellani, 2018). Besides the artist his/​herself, his/​her peers can also influence his/​her brand. They are especially important in the cases where art schools are not able to efficiently support the formation of young artists (Komarova, 2018). A crucial way peers affect an artist brand is through his/​her involvement in certain artistic movements, which works as a network, where the importance of a certain peer is reflected in other artists of that network (Hodgson & Hellmanzik 2019; Marchenko, 2020). Galleries and dealers Galleries act as gatekeepers of the art market: they select which artists can enter the market and eventually achieve success (Ertug, Yogev, Lee & Hedström, 2016), and share information about the value of artworks through posted prices. The price mechanism commonly used by galleries consists in assigning a price to each artwork, which accounts for both the value of the artwork and the mark-​up of the gallery, and is usually communicated to buyers upon their request (Robertson, 2005). In fact, Velthuis (2003) claims that prices can be seen as a language that is shared among the art market agents. One of the main functions of galleries is to reduce the information asymmetry and the uncertainty, by labelling the artists and positioning them on the market (Marshall & Forrest, 2011), promoting and supporting them through exhibitions, and signing exclusive contracts that stimulate the galleries to invest even more in the artists. The goal of a gallery is to lead its artists to social positioning and recognition in the market, and, after that, even to the ‘veblenisation’ of their brand (Van Miegroet et al., 2019), namely making the goods associated to these brands attract a demand which is positively related to their prices. The way each gallery creates its artists portfolio has also an effect on artist brand, since each gallery works as a node in a network of artists and generates cross-​agent effects between the various artist brands (Giuffre, 1999; Angelini et  al., 2019). Clearly, a key factor in the effectiveness of a gallery’s actions and strategies resides in the gallery’s own brand, that is, its relevance with respect to the other galleries on the market. The gallery’s influence also depends on the country where it operates (Benhamou, Moureau & Sagot-​Duvauroux, 2002; Komarova, 2018). Besides the choice of the artists to support, the gallery also chooses the collectors who can access those artists and buy their artworks: the gatekeeping function is at work, then, also on the demand side. Coslor, Crawford and Leyshon (2019) found that galleries use information about the potential buyers to discriminate between those who can be trusted, such as patrons and traditional collectors, and those who cannot, such as speculators, ‘flippers’ (who buy an artwork and immediately try to resell it), ‘dumpers’ (who are expected to resell multiple pieces of the same artist, without caring about

80  Francesco Angelini and Massimiliano Castellani the effect this action would have on the artist prices), and in some cases art investors. Gatekeeping on this side of the market consists in blocking those buyers who may damage the artist reputation and prices, with negative effects on his/​her brand. Museums and curators Museums and curators play an important role in the creation and consecration of an artist brand, and their role is particularly relevant for emerging artists (Zorloni, 2013). The museums’ choice of which artist to exhibit is independent on the other forces that drive the market: this is in line with the idea that museum choices help create an audience-​specific reputation of artists, which may however be recognised by more than ‘one type’ of audience (Ertug et al., 2016). In addition to consecrating emerging artists, museums’ choices affect the artist human brand, because museums can create networks of artists and hence a potentially positive cross-​agent reputation effect, that is, a positive effect on artist brands when artists are associated with peers with a similar reputation by a museum, through what can be called a ‘confirmation effect’ (Braden & Teekens, 2019). Also museums act as market gatekeepers, especially in the past, by choosing what is worth being included in the artistic supply of a certain country, by providing exhibition space either to artists who are more consolidated in their importance, or to more avant-​garde artists not yet traded on the art market, or both (Cameron, 1995). Museums continue to act as gatekeepers today (Ertug et al., 2016; Pisani, 2019), even though the digitisation of the market is influencing the way they make their choices (see Widrich, 2018; Gannis & Giannini, 2019). Experts, critics and the media Experts and other information providers contribute to art appreciation through a series of actions and strategies that play a part in the artists’ validation process. The most important actions include information provision and reputation creation (Cameron, 1995). Various types of agents constitute this macrogroup, and each of them can influence the artist brand. Art experts and authenticators can declare an artwork to be authentic and, consequently, influence how its value is perceived by the market (Hutter & Frey, 2010). Artistic foundations usually have authenticator boards and their choices can influence the artist brands, since their perception in the market changes depending on how many authenticated artworks are circulating. Critics and journalists can also influence the public perception of an artist brand and reduce uncertainty. The publishing industry, for example, is important because it spreads information, in the form of opinions by journalists and critics (Debenedetti, 2006), and also because it fosters the ‘spectacularisation of art’, which is not only linked to prizes but also to

Art market stakeholders’ actions and strategies  81 scandals (Desbordes, 2013), and that may transform the artist into a VIP. Recent evidence of how the media (and internet users as well) spread information on what can be seen as a scandal in the art market is the performance/​artwork ‘Comedian’ presented by Maurizio Cattelan at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019. Reviews are aimed at the diffusion of information as well, but they can also have a promotional effect; the effect of the reviews on the artists’ reputation depends on the type of publication that publishes the reviews (Brandellero & Velthuis, 2018). Auction houses Compared to other market operators, auction houses are seen as more rent-​ seeking agents (Velthuis, 2002; Lazzaro & Moureau, 2013), and they can affect an artist brand with their catalogue choices (e.g. the ranking of the lots for sale and how much space to dedicate to the description of each artwork). Actions that are not related to the catalogue, such as the choice to host a pre-​ auction exhibition, can also have an effect on artist brands. Auction houses operate mainly in the secondary art market (Candela & Scorcu, 2004; Velthuis, 2011), except in the case a piece by a famous artist is found and sold at auction for the first time (Robertson, 2005). Hence, the artist–​auction house relationship on the primary market is rare in Western countries, and limited to event-​driven activities, such as the 2004 Hirst’s Pharmacy Restaurant auction or his ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever’ 2008 auction, both hosted by Sotheby’s (Carver, 2018). However, where galleries are not central dealers on the primary market, such as in the Middle East and South East Asia (Adams, 2014) and China (Kharchenkova & Velthuis, 2018), auction houses could have an important role in the formation process of artist brands. In more recent years, with the expansion of the internet, the effects of these actions and strategies can also be found in online auctions, which lead to an increase in the number of the bidders who can participate in auctions and in the auction houses’ sales (Sidorova, 2019).

Some concluding remarks In this chapter, we have reviewed how a series of art market agents—​through their actions and strategies—​can directly and indirectly affect an artist brand, which is a key factor to help convey information about the artist, his/​her style and relevance in the art system. Brand is particularly important in the art market, as this market is characterised by high information asymmetry, and this could potentially lead to problems of adverse selection that could not be solved with standard methods such as screening or signalling. The diffusion of information is then necessary, and this information is accumulated in the artist brand. In addition to looking at past analyses of agents’ actions and strategies that can affect an artist brand, this chapter has also inspired potential research

82  Francesco Angelini and Massimiliano Castellani directions in economics, management and other disciplines to further investigate the relationships between these actions and strategies and the artist brand, keeping in mind that all strategies and actions must be considered as parts of an ecosystem where all agents co-​act and co-​influence value. Furthermore, the agent-​oriented approach developed in our framework may help refine the way market dynamics are considered and studied and complement information on how value and price are formed on the art market.

Notes 1 For general definitions and a description of branding strategies, see Clifton & Simmons (2003). 2 For example, collectors can influence an artist brand through financial and non-​ financial support, such as material support. Art fairs contribute to setting trends and fashions in the market, and spread information about artists, with effects on their reputation, prestige, and, hence, brand. Also prizes and awards are tools that reduce information asymmetry in the art market, and their effect is mainly on the artist reputational capital. 3 Banksy’s website (https://​shop.grossdomesticproduct.com/​) sold both unique artworks (such as signed prints) and merchandising after his art.

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Art market stakeholders’ actions and strategies  85 Vettese, A. (1991). Investire in arte:  Produzione, promozione e mercato dell’arte contemporanea. Milan: Edizioni Il Sole 24 Ore. Webb, J., Schirato, T. & Danaher, G. (2012). Understanding Bourdieu. London: SAGE Publications. Widrich, V. (2018). Transforming education and labor in a museum as a model of the future: vacancies in the future museum. In G. Bast, E. G. Carayannis, & D. F. J. Campbell (Eds.), The Future of Museums (pp. 53–​64). Cham: Springer. Zorloni, A. (2013). The Economics of Contemporary Art. Berlin: Springer. Zorloni, A. (Ed.) (2016). Art Wealth Management. Managing Private Art Collections. Berlin: Springer.

7  A behavioural approach to understanding the artist as entrepreneur Bronwyn Coate, Robert Hoffmann, Pia Arenius and Swee-​Hoon Chuah

Introduction Art and business, the respective pursuits of beauty and money, may at first glance not go well together. But closer inspection reveals that they can have much in common. Art is a multibillion-​dollar industry where international superstars, like many of the world’s biggest commercial brands, concentrate markets. Beyond the rare and exceptional cases where artists become superstars and entrepreneurs launch ventures that become household names, the motivations and practical realities faced by more ‘typical’ artists and entrepreneurs share some important features that are explored in this chapter. Regardless of the scale of operation, both the professional artist and the entrepreneur needs to mix creating with selling, where risk and uncertainty can foster their creativity in pursuit of both intrinsic and extrinsic reward.1 Despite their differences, a growing literature supports the existence of a behavioural overlap between artists and entrepreneurs (Daum, 2005; Lindquist, 2011; Poorsoltan, 2012; Deresiewicz, 2015; Arenius et al., 2020). Understanding the similarities and differences between artists and entrepreneurs can benefit practitioners and policy makers as well as advance research. For instance, if there is a desire to make artists more entrepreneurial as a strategy to achieving creative industry development (Florida, 2003; Henry, 2007), then understanding how artists and entrepreneurs are similar or different is needed for designing effective policies. This is demonstrated by Fontainha and Lazzaro (2019), who find the responses of cultural entrepreneurs to policy interventions, such as the provision of subsidies during economic downturn, to be idiosyncratic and less easy to predict compared to what general entrepreneurship theory suggests. In this respect, appreciation of both the similarities as well as the differences between artists and entrepreneurs can aid the design of incentives to nudge behaviour in a direction consistent with policy objectives, irrespective of normative issues around the desirability of such manipulations. This is important given artists’ contribution to innovation with new types of creative product and new business models2 that result in spillovers for the wider economy (Potts et  al., 2008; Lazzaro, 2017). In a similar respect, the increasing emphasis placed on creativity as a way for businesses to differentiate themselves (and

Artist as entrepreneur: a behavioural approach  87 their products) from competitors requires entrepreneurs to embrace new ways of thinking and problem solving that can be learned from artists as natural practitioners predisposed to creativity. From understanding what makes both artists and entrepreneurs ‘tick’, scholarship and policy around these two areas can learn from each other. This chapter focuses on key behavioural similarities that exist between artists and entrepreneurs. Despite these similarities, we acknowledge some important differences that distinguish artist and entrepreneur. We draw on empirical evidence from disparate research across a range of disciplines including economics, psychology, neuroscience and sociology. In particular, comparing the empirical studies that identify behavioural characteristics of artists (Rank, 1932; Cross, Cattell & Butcher, 1967; Csikszentmihalyi & Getzels, 1973; Götz & Götz, 1979; Kemp, 1996; Feist, 1999) and entrepreneurs (McClelland, 1965; Rotter, 1966; Gartner, 1989; Shaver & Scott, 1991; Zhao & Seibert, 2006; Baum, Frese & Baron, 2014) highlights three key aspects of behavioural overlap. We argue these afford vital insights into the pursuits of both artistry and entrepreneurship with relevance for practitioners, policy makers and researchers. Specifically, the behavioural similarities we focus on are that: 1 artists and entrepreneurs share a high tolerance of risk; 2 artists and entrepreneurs both have creative and open personalities; and 3 artists and entrepreneurs are highly driven by intrinsic motivation. Behavioural approaches to understanding both artistry and entrepreneurship can assist researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders in identifying the underlying motivations, personalities and thinking styles of artists and entrepreneurs. This is useful on a number of levels, including most importantly assisting artists and entrepreneurs on a practical level through well-​informed policies that take account of their behavioural peculiarities and motivations. Beyond artists’ and entrepreneurs’ self-​actualisation that well-​designed policies within these arenas can harness, there are also wider social benefits associated with flourishing arts, culture and innovation that arise directly from the activities of artists and entrepreneurs. Both national innovation and targeted urban renewal policies that emphasise the arts and culture and the special role played by artists at a community level provide examples. The chapter proceeds as follows:  we first outline the behavioural social science approach and discusses the ways it has borne fruit in explaining productive processes related to artistry and entrepreneurship. We then examine three specific individual traits that are generally common to artistic and entrepreneurial individuals, and the evidence for each. These traits are:  attitude towards risk, creativity and intrinsic motivation. In the final section, we conclude with an assessment and outlook on future possible research in this area.

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The behavioural approach to artistry and entrepreneurship Behavioural approaches can enrich the understanding of business and the economy through the psychological features, motivations and cognitions that characterise decision makers, in our case artists and entrepreneurs. Prior to the ‘behavioural revolution’, the decision making of artists and entrepreneurs has been studied in their respective academic literatures in relative isolation. Within cultural economics, artists’ labour supply has been examined through work preference models (Throsby, 1994) emphasising the role of intrinsic motivation (see Klamer, 1996; Abbing, 2008). These models have been applied to explain phenomena such as artists multiple job holdings (Throsby & Zednik, 2011) and the oversupply of artists (Towse, 2006). Parallel to this, there exists a growing literature that focuses upon the cultural or creative entrepreneur (see Swedberg, 2006; Klamer, 2011; Bridgstock, 2013; Oakley, 2013). Within it, artists’ entrepreneurial acumen is seen as a resource to be drawn upon in order to navigate the precarity associated with pursuing a career in the arts (Coate et al., 2020). From a more behavioural perspective, the psychology of art has examined the antecedents and consequences of the artistic process as well as the attributes of artists (for an overview, see Winner, 2019). Within the entrepreneurship literature the psychological foundations of innovative entrepreneurial behaviour (Block, Fisch & Van Praag, 2017) as well as the entrepreneurial process and its consequences for the resulting organisations and the economy have been explored (see Westhead & Wright, 2013; Åstebro et al., 2014; Birley, 1985). As a further consideration, environmental and institutional factors that influence both artists’ (Jeong & Choi, 2017) and entrepreneurs’ (Wallace & Gruber, 1992) occupational decision-​ making have relevance to policy design. Behavioural science approaches examine human decision-​making from the perspective of psychology. This entails both psychological phenomena (like perception, memory and information processing) and methods developed to examine them (including experiments, psychometrics and psychophysiology). Within the psychological approach, two lenses can be identified. The traditional lens focuses on those common psychological processes and tendencies most humans share, and how they affect human behaviour. Examples of human psychological universals include social cognition, heuristics and biases and emotions. We are all predictable to the extent that we share certain psychological machinery and tendencies. An alternative lens focuses instead on what differentiates one human from another. It is motivated by the fact that individuals often behave differently in the same situation, but in consistent ways that suggest a source of individual-​level regularity. While this is partly the result of each individual’s unique social learning and personal experience, some of it is down to what psychologists call individual differences, which are psychological traits that shape behaviour in an individual-​specific way. Differential behavioural approaches examining sources of individual differences including personality, values and attitudes, learning and thinking

Artist as entrepreneur: a behavioural approach  89 styles and motivation have been applied to profile various groups of individuals including entrepreneurs (e.g. Åstebro et  al., 2014) as well as artists (e.g. Feist, 1999). In both cases, entrepreneurship and artistry evolve as a sequence of processes stemming from the discovery either of a new business opportunity in the case of the entrepreneur or from the conceptualisation of a creative output in the artist’s case. Beyond the initial discovery, artists and entrepreneurs alike must secure resources to turn their idea into an artwork to engage audiences or peers or as a marketable product or service. Table 7.1 presents a summary of the key stages and the associated behavioural competencies that characterise the pursuits of entrepreneurship and artistry. The table is adapted from Shane’s widely accepted model that theorises the entrepreneurial process (Shane, 2003). Every stage is necessary for successful entrepreneurship and for artistic visions to be realised within a market context. Every stage is accompanied by particular behavioural competencies that characterise both the entrepreneur and artist which support the successful completion of the stage.3 Together, the stages indicate what type of individuals are likely to succeed in entrepreneurship and artistry. Table 7.1 Key stages and associated behavioural competencies of entrepreneurship and artistry Stage Ideation

Entrepreneurship

Artistry

Required behavioural competencies

Discovery of business Inspiration to Creativity, intuition, idea; identifying a conceptualise ambiguity market gap, process a new artwork tolerance, or product innovation and/​or creative openness to intertwined with spark experience assessment of viability and feasibility Resourcing/​ Resource assembly and Selling the idea Risk taking, execution securing support from to others exploration, others to organise within the internal locus of product development, cultural value control, optimism, manufacturing and production confidence marketing of the chain to business opportunity. distribute, Launching a business market and/​or produce Management Successfully building a Managing the Intrinsic motivation, business. Managing resulting artistic competitiveness the resulting business output or brand and its stakeholders (including artist reputation) including further pushing creative boundaries

90  Bronwyn Coate et al.

The behavioural characteristics of artists and entrepreneurs The empirical behavioural approaches designed to uncover psychological and individual difference characteristics have generated initial insight into the minds of both artists and entrepreneurs (e.g. Arenius et al., 2020). Here, experiments can enable the researcher to identify causal drivers of observable behaviour while psychometric instruments enable measurement of the underlying mental predilections that often moderate these causal relationships. The entrepreneurship literature has identified a number of behavioural idiosyncrasies that describe those driven towards entrepreneurship, while a parallel literature exploring the behavioural characteristics of different types of artists also exists. While there are many areas of overlap between different types of artists in terms of shared behavioural characteristics, empirical examination finds that these are by no means evenly spread across different types of artists and creative practitioners. For instance, Feist (1999) reports that performing artists, including opera singers and actors, are typically more extroverted compared to visual artists. This serves to caution the generalisability of defining the behavioural characteristics of an artist loosely defined. In acknowledging this, we proceed by comparing entrepreneurs with a particular type of artist, namely visual artists. In particular, we compare visual artists and entrepreneurs in terms of tolerance of risk, creativity and the existence of intrinsic rewards driving behaviour. Tolerance of risk, uncertainty and ambiguity Decision makers are often unable to predict the outcome of an action with certainty. The technical literature classifies these situations according to the nature of the lack of certainty that exists. Risky situations are those where the likelihood of different possible outcomes can be objectively predicted, like, for example, using data from past experience. Uncertainty exists when these predictions are at best subjective because of data unreliability, and therefore cannot be handled or resolved (sometimes known as radical uncertainty, see Kay & King, 2020). Ambiguity arises when subjective predictions rely on multiple data sources that may disagree or conflict. All these abound in artistic and entrepreneurial pursuits particularly given the reliance of both on the generation of new ideas. For instance, both artist and entrepreneur need to invest in new ideas that are by definition untested, meaning that whether these ideas will be accepted as new works of art or products is uncertain. Even before new ideas are turned into tangible products, the process of translating ideas and vision into a final product may present further non-​certainty to be conquered. Furthermore, in many cases, the new ideas that artists and entrepreneurs create will fail to achieve commercial success, at least in the short term. For instance, while most artists will be forgotten with the passage of time, history reveals that for some exceptional artists ahead of their time, such as Van Gogh, success may

Artist as entrepreneur: a behavioural approach  91 only come after death. In this respect, true innovators face further risk in that they may be denied recognition and financial reward for achievements during their lifetime. Assessing the probability and consequences of failure requires intimate knowledge of the specific venture or creative project. Like entrepreneurs, artists face different risks associated with a lack of financial success. As Levine and Rubenstein (2017) describe in their study investigating the shared traits of entrepreneurs, it is easier to take risks when basic needs are being met and a safety net exists. This logic also extends to other professions characterised by risky financial returns including the arts where relatively few earn sufficient income from their creative practice alone to make ends meet. Supporting this view, Coate et al. (2020) find that as artists advance in their career, the level of support available from family sources increases rather than falls. This contributes to shaping the cohort of active artists whereby social capital manipulates risk faced by many artists. Within the entrepreneurial domain, individual attitudes to risk have been much studied as a behavioural antecedent of entrepreneurship. From a broad perspective, the concept of ‘entrepreneurial risk’ includes the general risk appetite of the entrepreneur, the perceived probability of failure for a specific venture and the perceived consequences of failure, including harm related to financial, career, family and well-​being objectives (Brockhaus, 1980). As discussed, these components can be extended to specific types of artist in order to distinguish the different types of risk. For instance, alongside their general risk appetite, visual artists may to varying degrees take creative risks and engage in what Sjöholm & Pasquinelli (2014) describe as ‘brand-​building strategies’ as a mechanism to elevate their reputation within the contemporary art market. Also, relevant is an artist’s career stage which can influence both how an artist perceives risk as well as their acceptance as fitting within the art world establishment. For instance, career-​boosting opportunities such as being awarded a prize may favour established artists or at least those emerging artists who are perceived by institutional gatekeepers to possess the desired pedigree and judged to be less risky (Van den Bosch, 2005). Personality and creativity Personality encompasses those relatively stable psychological traits that shape one’s thinking and behaviour. One aspect of personality that has particular significance for artists and entrepreneurs is creativity. Creativity is related to a number of standard personality inventory dimensions such as openness to experience and emotionality (e.g. ‘Big-​5’ from Costa & McCrae, 1992). Creativity is the ability to generate novel and original ideas that are useful in a specific context. It involves the act of turning the imagined into reality and may be characterised by finding patterns or different perceptions that aid the generation of new solutions.

92  Bronwyn Coate et al. In the arts, the creativity of the artist is prized to the extent that it signals uniqueness. Compared to other industries, the individual artist plays a much greater role in the production process such that creative output is often distinguished on the basis of who its creator is. Creativity is also important in business venturing because the discovery of opportunities is greatly aided by the ability to generate novel thoughts (Demmert & Klein, 2003). As such, previous literature supports that both artists and entrepreneurs are relatively creative (Whiting, 1988; Heunks, 1998; Daum, 2005). Beyond creativity, a number of studies have shown, using standard personality inventories, that artists and creative people generally have distinct personality traits (Cross et al., 1967; Götz & Götz, 1979; Kemp, 1996). Broadly, there is some evidence from the early psychological profiling of artists undertaken by Drevdahl & Cattell (1958) that artists tend to be more psychotic and introverted compared to the norm. In addition, Feist (1999) shows that personality varies between artists engaged in different fields of creative practice. For instance, visual artists have a tendency to be asocial and are more likely to be hostile, aloof, unfriendly and to lack warmth in their social interactions with others (Taylor, McKay & Kaufman, 2017). Even within a specific field of creative practice, such as the visual arts, variation in personality traits may exist between different cohorts of artists according to styles and also across historical periods. Elements related to the type and style of art practice give rise to not only distinct art movements or schools of art, but also can be linked to different artists’ characteristics. Through deep immersion in creative practice, art and life become irrevocably tied, creating a link between the character of the artist and their work. For instance, avant-​garde artists are by definition more predisposed to experimentation, radical artistic ideals as well as to non-​ conformity and self-​ expression reflected in both their art and bohemian lifestyles. Abuhamdeh & Csikszentmihalyi (2014, p. 247) have investigated behavioural variation within artists and assert that generalisations of an invariant artistic personality is ‘more myth than fact’. They argue that social and cultural phenomena vary across place and time to shape the constraints facing those engaged in the artistic process, meaning in turn that the nature of the artistic personality will vary accordingly. In addition to personality, the specific motivations as well as the affective and cognitive styles of creative people have also been found to differ from the norm (Wallace & Gruber, 1992; Feist, 2010). Creativity is also associated with personal involvement and connection to work which become motivations in themselves (see Collins & Amabile 1999), and hence linked to intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation Another individual difference characteristic associated with both artists and entrepreneurs is the performance of productive tasks for their own sake

Artist as entrepreneur: a behavioural approach  93 rather than in pursuit of some external, often material reward. As a result, researchers have hypothesised the existence of intrinsic motivations, where actions are performed for their own internal rewards. Whist non-​pecuniary rewards are extensively acknowledged with the pursuit of an artistic career (Abbing, 2008; Klamer, 1996), Åstebro et al. (2014) identify non-​pecuniary taste-​based factors as important in motivating both the decisions to enter and persist in entrepreneurial ventures. Both entrepreneurs and artists often pursue their ventures as a source of self-​fulfilment rather than purely on the calculus of expected monetary reward. For instance, while some entrepreneurs are viewed as being selfishly motivated by wealth (e.g. Baumol, 1996), the rise of social entrepreneurism to address various social and environmental needs attests to the importance of individual values and beliefs as motivating forces that can drive behaviour (Germak & Robinson, 2014). Also, intrinsic motivation has been linked to the act of creation and the concept of flow when a particular creative activity is accompanied with deep immersion, focus and satisfaction such that awareness of time, space and oneself is lost (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Intrinsic motivations are of particular interest to economists because they can undermine extrinsic, outcome-​related incentives, with important implications for policy (Frey & Jegen, 2001). While there is limited scope for intrinsic motivation in the production of standard goods and services (Thompson & Bono, 1992), this is not the case in art and cultural production (Abbing, 2008, p.  82). This view is reflected in the popular notion of suffering for one’s art because of certain ‘psychic benefits’ and ‘non-​pecuniary rewards’ of pursuing one’s passion (Throsby, 1994; Klamer, 1996) including the perceived nobility of art for art’s sake. History is replete with examples of artists driven by intrinsic motivation, taking stylistic risks and contributing to artistic innovation to distinguish their work, while eschewing critical praise and convention.4 Similarly, in today’s contemporary art market, artists forgo alternative opportunities that offer more secure and stable income in order to pursue an artistic career which can be immensely rewarding on a personal level.

Conclusion Anecdotally, similarities between artists and entrepreneurs give rise to the idea of the ‘artist as cultural entrepreneur’ and also to ‘entrepreneurs as the artists of the business world’ (e.g. Daum, 2005). While both artists and entrepreneurs have been the subject of empirical research focusing on various behavioural overlaps, there is little research bringing artists and entrepreneurs together within a single study to afford a controlled comparison. Research using behavioural methods offers much potential for further work in this vein to confirm the overlaps in motivational, cognitive and personality similarities between both groups. In addition to psychometric studies, experiments can be used to compare how artists and entrepreneurs respond to changes

94  Bronwyn Coate et al. in their decision environments. In experiments, variables thought to influence decisions are manipulated systematically while confounding factors are controlled (excluded or held constant). When artists and entrepreneurs are recruited as participants, direct comparison between the behavioural responses of both groups can be made. Behavioural approaches that account for group and individual differences may risk yielding unwarranted stereotypes of the object of the investigation, in our case artists and entrepreneurs. Clearly, many exceptions exist where artists and entrepreneurs fail to conform to the typical behavioural commonalities we have identified. Conversely, we also acknowledge that various studies have uncovered evidence of further behavioural similarities (and differences) between artists and entrepreneurs. For example, a high level of self-​efficacy is found to exist in both artists (e.g. Kenny, Davis & Oates, 2004) and entrepreneurs (e.g. Krueger & Dickson, 1994). Our aim here has not been to present a complete behavioural overview of artists and entrepreneurs per se, but rather to restrict our focus to key aspects that can assist in understanding economising actions that drive individuals in the pursuits of artistry and entrepreneurship. Understanding the psychological overlap between artists and entrepreneurs has relevance for practitioners as well as for policy makers, who look to encourage creative and entrepreneurial behaviour with a view to enabling the arts and culture to flourish, as well as creating an environment conducive to innovation more generally. Within the social sciences and across policy domains behavioural approaches have become increasingly popular as the basis for developing non-​regulatory interventions that attempt to motivate individual behavioural change through subtle alterations in the choice environments faced by artists and entrepreneurs. This chapter has discussed some of the commonalities between artists and entrepreneurs that we assert are worthy of deeper inspection.

Notes 1 In the case of artists, while it is true that they develop their own work, many artists will not be directly engaged in the marketing and selling of their works. For instance, visual artists will create art works but rely on commercial art galleries to sell them. 2 Prominent examples from the cultural and creative industries highlighting the cultural sectors contribution to broader innovation include advancements in online distribution for digitised cultural content like film, television content and music and virtual audience engagement. For further evidence, see Scott (2012) and Morris (2014). 3 It is worth noting that while many behavioural competencies are shared between artists and entrepreneurs, differences have been found (e.g. social value orientation) as well as evidence supporting difference in degree of shared psychological traits. 4 Artistic movements in the visual arts provide a good example. For instance, impressionist works were initially criticised and rejected from exhibition at the official Paris Salon.

Artist as entrepreneur: a behavioural approach  95

References Abbing, H. (2008). Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Abuhamdeh, S. & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). The artistic personality:  a systems perspective. In M. Csikszentmihalyi (Ed.), The Systems Model of Creativity (pp. 227–​237) Dordrecht: Springer. Åstebro, T., Herz, H., Nanda, R. & Weber, R.A. (2014). Seeking the roots of entrepreneurship: insights from behavioral economics. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(3),  49–​70. Arenius, P., Chuah, S.H., Coate, B. & Hoffmann, R. (2020). The economics psychology of creating and venturing: a comparative behavioural portrait of artists and entrepreneurs. Working Paper. Baum, J.R., Frese, M. & Baron, R.A. (2014). Born to be an entrepreneur? Revisiting the personality approach to entrepreneurship. In J.R. Baum, M. Frese, & R.A. Baron (Eds.), The Psychology of Entrepreneurship (pp. 73–​98). New York: Psychology Press. Baumol, W.J. (1996). Entrepreneurship:  productive, unproductive, and destructive. Journal of Business Venturing, 11(1), 3–​22. Birley, S. (1985). The role of networks in the entrepreneurial process. Journal of Business Venturing, 1(1), 107–​117. Block, J.H., Fisch, C.O. & Van Praag, M. (2017). The Schumpeterian entrepreneur: a review of the empirical evidence on the antecedents, behaviour and consequences of innovative entrepreneurship. Industry and Innovation, 24(1), 61–​95. Bridgstock, R. (2013). Not a dirty word: arts entrepreneurship and higher education. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 12(2–​3), 122–​137. Brockhaus, R.H. (1980). Risk taking propensity of entrepreneurs. Academy of Management Journal, 23(3), 509–​520. Coate, B., Elkins, M., De Silva, A. & Boymal, J. (2020). Getting ahead in the gig economy: Comparing artists experience of precarity over different career stages. Working Paper. Available at: SSRN:  https://​papers.ssrn.com/​sol3/​papers. cfm?abstract_​id=3749684. Collins, M.A. & Amabile, T.M. (1999). Motivation and creativity. In R. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of Creativity (pp. 1051–​1057). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Costa, P.T. & McCrae, R.R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-​PI-​ R) and NEO Five-​ Factor Inventory (NEO-​ FFI) Professional Manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources. Cross, P.G., Cattell, R.B. & Butcher, H.J. (1967). The personality pattern of creative artists. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 37, 292–​299. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996) Creativity:  The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Csikszentmihalyi, M. & Getzels, J.W. (1973). The personality of young artists:  an empirical and theoretical exploration. British Journal of Psychology, 64(1), 91–​104. Daum, K. (2005). Entrepreneurs: the artists of the business world. Journal of Business Strategy, 26(5), 53–​57. Demmert, H. & Klein, D.B. (2003). Experiment on entrepreneurial discovery:  an attempt to demonstrate the conjecture of Hayek and Kirzner. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 50(3), 295–​310. Deresiewicz, W. (2015). The death of the artist and the birth of the creative entrepreneur. The Atlantic, 315(1), 92–​105.

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8  Artists’ promotion and internationalisation A fair’s perspective Elisabetta Lazzaro and Nathalie Moureau

Introduction An increased internationalisation of the market for contemporary art is reflected in the growing number of fairs worldwide, besides the phenomenon of major galleries opening branches abroad. Fairs have expanded the value chain of the art market, raising their role as active intermediaries between the artists’ supply and the collectors’ demand, next to galleries and auction houses, affecting artists’ selection and success, and hence the formation of artistic taste. For a gallery, the choice to participate to a given fair depends not only on its portfolio of artists and yearly schedule, but also on the fame of the fair, and the explicit and tacit conditions imposed. According to the president of the national committee of French art galleries Georges-​Philippe Vallois, the major burden especially for young galleries is, rather than the booth renting costs, to set rewarding artists and projects that meet  also the fairs’ expectations: The confreres with whom I  have been able to converse feel that like a real coercion, fairs more and more openly manifest their will and impose curatorial rules for galleries’ booths, impose artists or projects on young galleries or, sometimes, even experienced galleries, which have no choice but to accept. Therefore, the concern is about the balance between the valorisation of a gallery and its artists, and the valorisation of the fair. Indeed, it seems that galleries, the original founders of first fairs, are more and more dispossessed of their first prerogative, namely the choice of artists and exhibitions. (Dahainaut, 2018, p. 15) While gallery owners have begun to criticise art fairs for limiting their freedom on artists choice and planning, some scholars (e.g. Quemin, 2013; Velthuis, 2013) have started to question the internationalisation operated by art fairs. They rather claim a globalisation, namely a process of geographical expansion without diversity, where key players would be concentrated in

100  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Nathalie Moureau few Western countries. This is in particular the conclusion of Quemin (2013), building on Wallerstein (1991, 2000) and Bourdieu & Wacquant (1999), who underline the existence of domination effects on international cultural exchanges. By studying the participation of galleries to 41 international art fairs, Quemin concludes that the centre of the contemporary market is composed by a duopoly formed by the United States and Germany, and that a small number of Western European countries (United Kingdom, France, Italy and occasionally Switzerland) forms a semi-​periphery. The artistic periphery is formed by especially, although not exclusively, less-​developed countries. Also developed countries like Japan, Canada and Spain belong to the periphery, following the low representation of their galleries at art fairs. Yet, if we look at the more recent art fair business, we can notice that it is expanding beyond industrialised or even emerging countries, to economically less-​developed countries, such as in Africa. That is, fairs’ expansion would correspond to an internationalisation, rather than a globalisation, of the art market. For instance, India is trying to adopt the Western art market model by importing events such as biennales or specialised auctions. Although the major fair there, India Art Fair (IAF), struggles to become international, its national and local brand remains quite strong. ‘IAF functions not so much as an engine of globalization, but rather as a catalyst for the rapidly expanding home market by offering an existing shopping arena for the growing cosmopolitan class’ (Vermeylen, 2015, p. 51). From the artists’ perspective, evidence about an internationalised market is though less obvious. Velthuis (2013) shows that artists’ portfolios of art galleries in Amsterdam and Berlin are rather national, with, in both cities, a relative preference for national artists by non-​established galleries, a dominance of American artists, and artists from Latin America and Africa being hardly represented. These outcomes have led Baia Curioni, Forti and Leone (2015) to consider the most famous art fair, Art Basel, in order to study the legitimisation and status of artists from emerging countries in the context of the global art system. They find that after an initial predominance of Western artists in 2005 (85.5% of artists were born either in Europe or North America), in 2012 artists from other geographical regions became slightly more represented, at the expenses of European and US artists (down to 78.5%). Further, they show that the number of different nationalities represented at the fair has increased, from 83 in 2005 to 99 in 2012. They conclude that the barriers to globalisation seem to be higher for galleries than for artists, as the introduction of Asian, Latin-​American and African artists is operated by European and American galleries. It is therefore essential to analyse more closely the fairs’ context, to find out to which extent the internationalisation of the art market is accompanied by a diversity of artists being showcased at fairs in terms of their national representation and exposure.1 Do galleries use art fairs to expand their market of domestic artists, or, instead, to propose artists of other nationalities? Do we

Artists’ promotion and internationalisation  101 observe a certain geographical or even a cultural ‘hegemony’ in terms of over-​ representation of some nationalities? Are there artists jointly supported by different galleries at a same fair, implying in that case a star system, and how? In order to address these questions, we focus on the internationally most acclaimed fair, namely Art Basel, together with its two younger sisters in Miami and Hong Kong. We study whether and to what extent differences in artists’ nationalities appear in the portfolios showed by western galleries at the different locations of Art Basel. In particular, we test the assumption of geographical and exposure diversity against the assumption of a cultural hegemony imposed by the fair that would reinforce the international hierarchy of values on the market. The next section overviews the evolution of the business model of art fairs and in particular of Art Basel. We further introduce the research hypotheses, the empirical approach and the data. We then present and discuss the main results for artists’ internationalisation and establishment. The last section draws the overall conclusions.

Art Basel’s leadership At its start, Art Basel, like other (art) fairs, was just a tool to support exhibitors (galleries) enlarging their market. With their increase in number, art fairs have seen a raising competition. However, Art Basel found its way quite early, thanks to the important infrastructures and the free port of the Swiss city. In particular, its taking place in spring, when the Venice Biennale opens, is an incentive for American collectors to travel to Europe for both art events. Moreover, the fair organisers invite VIP collectors to collateral events with exclusive programs. However, Art Basel’s competitive advantages did not prevent it from escaping to the general crisis of the art market toward the end of the 1980s. Lorenzo Rudolf, the fair’s director during 1991–​2000, contributed to the fair’s recovering by lowering the number of accepted galleries. He also introduced specialised sections:  photography (1989), prints (1993), videos (1995), sculptures (1998) and ‘Unlimited’ (1999), proposing installations and monumental artworks. Service differentiation was followed by internationalisation, with the opening of the two branches Art Basel Miami Beach in the United States in 2002, and Art Basel Hong Kong in 2012 (after having bought the local fair). Art Basel has branded itself as an innovator, after which other fairs follow. Because of this strategy, Art Basel has been able to attract leading galleries. Each year more than 800 galleries apply to Art Basel, but only about 240 are selected. Wolf (2014) distinguishes three main innovations that contributed building Art Basel brand in 2014: catalogue, booths organisation and the addition of ephemeral art practices. Before 2014, the fair catalogues included each gallery in alphabetic order with just a large photography, the list of the exhibited artists and no other comments. Since 2014, the fair has published one single

102  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Nathalie Moureau large catalogue for the three fairs, the first one being entitled ‘Year 44’ (followed by ‘Year 45’, etc.). Each gallery is introduced by a short interview with its owner, together with many other texts written by critics, curators, etc. Through this innovation, the fair has clearly acquired a legitimating curatorial role along its commercial role. The second innovation concerns the organisation of the gallery booths. Before 2014, booths were separated, arranged as distinct spaces and visually independent, so that each gallery could be valued just by its own exhibited artworks and artists. Since 2014, many picture rails have been removed, so that the visitor can have a comprehensive vision of various booths at the same time. She does no longer see a series of distinct galleries, but a composition of open booths. As such, the main role in representing artists and their works has been shifted from the gallery to the fair. The third innovation according to Wolf consists in the presentation at the fair of ephemeral art practices that transcend the traditional materialistic market frontiers. Since then, the fair regularly presents performances in its Rooms and Unlimited sections. In this way, the fair shows that it can represent all artistic media. More in general, the fair clearly signals that it is no longer a mere sum of independent galleries’ proposals, but that, instead, it is the fair to construct and provide a global view of its own aesthetic values, actively selecting all the involved actors, namely curators, galleries, and, more or less directly, artists.

Empirical approach and data In order to assess the diversity of geographical representation and exposure that artists enjoy at Art Basel, we measure and compare the main features of artists exhibited at the three different Art Basel fairs in their respective market places. Our main hypothesis is that the triple location in three main cities in three different continents ought to augur a diversity in terms of geographical provenance, visibility and career level of showcased artists, and hence of cultural representativeness, as opposed to a certain cultural ‘hegemony’. In particular, we study whether the galleries’ geographical dominance at the three fairs is reflected in the artists’ composition in terms of their nationality. We further examine how these artists possibly benefit from an even exposure compared to other artists. For our research purpose, we built an original data set of artists showcased by a selection of galleries at the three Art Basel fairs—​Basel, Miami ad Hong Kong—​in 2017, based on Art Basel’s official website.2 We focused on the most represented countries at the three fairs—​all sectors considered—​in terms of participating galleries (i.e. for each country, how many galleries were present at least at one fair). Table  8.1 shows that at all three fairs the dominant countries by gallery origin were the same and in the same order, namely: USA, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy and Switzerland. While at the two Western fairs, these

Artists’ promotion and internationalisation  103 Table 8.1 Most represented countries by gallery origin at the Art Basel fairs (2017) Country

Basel

Hong Kong

Miami

USA Germany United Kingdom France Italy Switzerland Total

23.9% 15.5% 11.1% 8.0% 6.2% 4.9% 69.6%

12.6% 9.0% 6.5% 6.5% 5.5% 3.0% 43.1%

37.4% 11.1% 7.4% 6.8% 4.7% 3.2% 70.6%

Note: Authors’ own calculations.

six countries accounted for about 70% of total galleries participation, at the Asian fair they accounted for just above 43%. Not surprisingly, Miami is the most participated by US galleries. For the galleries from the six most represented countries, we selected the artists showcased at the main and common sector of the three fairs, namely Galleries.3 For each observation, we included the artist’s name, nationality (birth), date of birth (and possibly of death), their showcased artworks and year of creation, their representing galleries and, for each gallery, the number of branches in other countries and their presence at which of the three fairs. Data sources combined Art Basel official website for information on showcased artists, artworks and participating galleries, plus the general Internet for artists’ biographical and galleries’ further data.

Artists’ internationalisation at Art Basel fairs National representation of artists At first sight, the triple location in three main cities in three different continents of the same fair would confirm a great diversity in terms of artists’ geographical provenance. Indeed, this triple location results from a geographical differentiation of the fair. If we focus on the artists showcased by the US, German, British, French, Italian and Swiss galleries participating to the three Art Basel fairs in 2017, no less than 70 different nationalities were represented in Basel, 54 in Hong Kong and 62 in Miami (Table 8.2). However, even if these numbers of artists’ nationalities are quite large, there are many countries that are represented by one artist only. Some nationalities are more frequent and, ultimately, only some countries really emerge. While in Basel and Miami these countries generally correspond to the galleries’ most represented countries, this is not the case of Hong Kong, denoting a regional peculiarity of the Asian fair. Overall, the galleries based in the six considered countries showcase mostly US artists, especially at the American fair (41%), followed by German artists, especially at the European fair (16.4%). By scrolling the list of nationalities

104  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Nathalie Moureau Table 8.2 Most represented artists’ nationalities at the Art Basel fairs (2017) Country

Basel

Miami

Country

Hong Kong

USA Germany United Kingdom France Italy Switzerland Japan

28.3% 16.4% 8.4% 5.0% 4.7% 4.5% 2.7%

41.1% 11.5% 6.5% 4.7% 3.4% 2.8% 2.6%

USA Germany China United Kingdom Italy France Japan South Korea Switzerland

23.2% 11.3% 9.7% 8.0% 6.9% 5.1% 4.0% 2.9% 2.2%

Note: Authors’ own calculations.

Table 8.3 Distribution of artists’ nationalities by gallery origin (all Art Basel fairs, 2017) Galleries by origin

US Germany Italy France UK Switzerland

Artists’ nationalities US

DE

IT

FR

UK

CH

6 nationalities

54% 17% 20% 18% 31% 27%

8% 33% 8% 8% 10% 10%

3% 2% 25% 3% 3% 4%

3% 5% 3% 21% 3% 3%

5% 6% 8% 4% 21% 4%

1% 4% 8% 4% 1% 14%

74% 67% 72% 58% 69% 62%

Note: Authors’ own calculations.

down, the order of British,4 French, Italian and Swiss artists also reflects that of galleries’ origin, but only for the two Western fairs, Basel and Miami. The picture of the Hong Kong fair is rather different. In fact, at the Asian fair, Chinese artists rank third, and also Japanese (4.0%) and South Korean (2.9%) artists are fairly represented above Swiss artists (2.2%). Furthermore, within the six Western countries, Italian artists (6.9%) rank now above French artists (5.1%). More in general, the Asian fair shows a less concentrated distribution of artists’ nationalities, reflecting a local cultural adaptation of Western galleries. Support of artists by domestic galleries Depending on their own origin, galleries do not equally support their home artists (all three fairs considered). US artists are the ones who benefit of the strongest support by their domestic galleries, as they represent the largest proportion in the portfolios of these galleries (54%), followed by German (33%), Italian (25%), French and British (21%) and Swiss (14%) artists (Table 8.3). The percentage of European artists exhibited outside domestic galleries is low whatever the fair concerned, with German artists being relatively better

Artists’ promotion and internationalisation  105 represented. Overall, although Western galleries tend to favour domestic artists, their portfolios are affected by a generalised dominance of US artists, especially among British (31%) and Swiss (27%) galleries. The supremacy of US artists presented by galleries at the Art Basel fairs is reflected in international auctions results. On average, at auctions US artists fetch higher prices than other artists. Indeed, US artists are the creators of the most expensive works (46 over 100 highest prices worldwide), represent the densest market with almost 17,000 lots put up on sale, and the most sold ones, with an unsold rate of 25%, against a global average of 39% (Artprice, 2019). In general, the domestic effect is reinforced by the fair location (Table 8.4). As expected, this is stronger for US artists represented by US galleries at the American fair and by European artists represented by European galleries at the European fair. British and especially Italian artists are exceptions, as their respective domestic galleries tend to represent them at the Asian fair relatively more than at the other fairs. The British exception can be explained by still existing cultural ties with the recent former colony. The Italian exception can be explained instead by a more aggressive penetration strategy of the Asian market by Italian galleries supporting national artists, coupled with their relatively better reception by the Asian market. Remarkably, many exhibited artists are represented by heavily internationalised galleries. Such internationalisation is chased through multiple branches also abroad to penetrate foreign markets, as well as through high rates of participation to the three fairs. More than two-​thirds of the highly internationalised galleries (i.e. being located in at least three different countries) attended the three fairs in 2017. Less internationalised galleries would theoretically have an advantage to participate to an international fair and reach out a new clientele, although in practice they are not necessarily favoured by the modes of selection and the costs of participation (Moureau, 2019).

Artists’ exposure at Art Basel fairs Artists’ visibility Next to the degree of internationalisation, the degree of artists’ exposure is also remarkable. In Basel, at the galleries from the six Western countries considered, visitors were confronted with some 966 different artists, against 817 in Miami and 352 in Hong Kong.5 Furthermore, at all three fairs, about one-​third of artists were represented by one artwork only. This is explained by the fact that a fair is above all a commercial place, and for a gallery, it is a question of making participation expenses more profitable by presenting the greatest number of artists, rather than ensuring a cultural diversity. Yet, despite this profusion of artists, an impression of déjà-​vu can sometimes dominate. In fact, only a small core of artists benefit from a high visibility. These artists are supported by several galleries, and within the same fair they are showcased at several booths (Table 8.5).

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Galleries by origin

US Germany UK France Italy Switzerland

Artists’ nationalities (%) US

DE

UK

FR

IT

CH

6 nationalities

Ba

HK

Mi

Ba

HK

Mi

Ba

HK

Mi

Ba

HK

Mi

Ba

HK

Mi

Ba

HK

Mi

Ba

HK

Mi

49 16 26 18 21 32

42 21 36 15 14 10

59 18 37 23 27 30

11 37 12 9 10 10

9 26 5 5 8 10

7 33 11 8 8 10

6 5 21 5 12 6

3 8 26 4 7 5

6 6 18 1 5 2

3 4 4 24 4 1

3 5 2 14 3 5

3 6 2 23 2 5

4 2 4 5 26 3

3 3 2 1 42 3

2 2 1 0 25 5

2 4 2 6 2 20

0 5 2 0 1 10

1 5 1 6 5 7

75 68 69 67 75 72

60 68 73 39 75 43

78 70 70 61 72 59

Legend: Ba: Basel; HK: Hong Kong; Mi: Miami. Note: Authors’ own calculations.

106  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Nathalie Moureau

Table 8.4 Distribution of artists’ nationalities by gallery origin for each fair (2017)

Artists’ promotion and internationalisation  107 Table 8.5 Number of artists whose works are showcased at two or more booths at the three Art Basel fairs in 2017 Number of booths

Basel

Hong Kong

2 3 4 5 6

128 31 8 4 –​

49 7 5 –​ –​

Miami 111 24 1 1 1

Note: Authors’ own calculations.

In Basel, there were more than 170 artists whose works were altogether presented in two, three, four or even five booths. In the latter case, the number of elected artists was quite reduced, with only four artists shared by five galleries or booths. These artists were the American Andy Warhol (1928–​1987) and Sol Lewitt (1928–​2007), and the German Josef Albers (1888–​1976) and Sigmar Polke (1941–​2010), all no longer living. Sol Lewitt was also the most shared in Miami, even though in Hong Kong and Miami the phenomenon is smaller in scale because of the smaller size of these two fairs. In the three fairs altogether, about 100 artists were shared by 2–​4 galleries, and especially 5–​10 artists were shared by highly internationalised galleries. Some galleries are champions in sharing artists, and many artists showcased in their booths are found in others. In Basel, we can count a dozen galleries that shared between five and ten artists with at least another, up to several other galleries. Most often these galleries are highly internationalised, that is with branches in several countries (such as the art galleries Thaddaeus Ropac, Lévy Gorvy, Pace, Karsten Greve, etc.). In Hong Kong and Miami, figures on shared artists are smaller, also due to the smaller sizes of these fairs. The impression of déjà-​vu also stems from the fact that this redundancy is present not only from booth to booth, but also from fair to fair. This is how almost 25% of artists are present at two fairs out of three, and almost 9% of artists are showcased in Basel, Hong Kong and Miami altogether. The majority the of artists who benefit of the highest international visibility come from some of those countries most active on the art market:  US (36 artists), Germany (19), UK (10), France (9), Italy, Switzerland and Japan (6) and China (5). In terms of turnover, about 20% of well-​represented artists are already dead, 22% are aged 70 or older, while about 13% only are 40 or younger. Noticeably, the representation of artists’ nationalities at Art Basel almost mirrors that of the worldwide turnover observed at the Top 500 contemporary-​ art auctions. Indeed, in the same year, 32% of artists were Chinese, 19% American, 8% British, while 9 German artists figured among the Top 100 by auction turnover (Artprice, 2017). Noticeably, the dominance of the United States and Europe is even stronger at the fair.

108  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Nathalie Moureau Table 8.6 Artists’ breakdown by age (all fairs average, 2017)

US artists German artists British artists French artists Italian artists Swiss artists

≤45

46–​60

61–​80

81+

24% 19% 24% 17% 9% 35%

21% 34% 35% 20% 17% 18%

28% 29% 31% 21% 25% 34%

27% 17% 10% 42% 50% 13%

Note: Authors’ own calculations.

Artists’ career level A fair for contemporary art is particularly meant to boost an artist’s career. We proxied this dimension by analysing the artists’ distribution by age at the three fairs (Tables 8.6 and 8.7). It emerges a diverse picture. American artists are those for whom the market is on average the best balanced, each generation being equally represented. German and British artists are relatively concentrated in central generations. Yet, the young British generation is well represented (24%), while only 10% are the eldest. Unfortunately, French (63%), and even more, Italian artists (75%) are rather aged, leaving a limited room for younger generations. Swiss artists show another pattern, as they are relatively concentrated in the extreme generations. General age patterns are similar across the three fairs, although at the youngest Hong Kong fair younger generations are more represented (with the exception of Italian artists, who are relatively younger in Basel) (Table 8.7).

Conclusions In the international market for contemporary art, fairs are increasingly playing a strategic role toward the selection, support and establishment of artists, conditioning the role of traditional intermediaries, namely art galleries. The Art Basel fairs of Basel, Miami and Hong Kong are universally acclaimed as the finest panorama of contemporary artistic creation. We addressed this context by studying artists’ internationalisation and exposure by their galleries at Art Basel fairs. At first sight, the triple location in three main cities in three different continents in different quarters of the year ought to augur a great diversity in terms of artists’ provenance, visibility and career, and hence of cultural representativeness. We questioned whether this internationalisation corresponds to artists’ internationalisation, and in particular whether there is correspondence between artists’ and their galleries’ origins, showing an uneven internationalisation of artists—​this just focusing on the geographically most represented galleries. We further questioned the degree of exposure of these artists, in terms of visibility and career level, showing an additional unbalance.

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Table 8.7 Artists’ breakdown by age (all fairs, 2017)

US artists German artists British artists French artists Italian artists Swiss artists

Hong Kong

Miami

≤45

46–​60

61–​80

80+

≤45

46–​60

61–​80

80+

≤45

46–​60

61–​80

80+

22% 16% 26% 15% 16% 29%

22% 33% 33% 18% 33% 18%

29% 29% 29% 21% 29% 33%

26% 21% 11% 46% 21% 20%

23% 24% 20% 20% 3% 50%

21% 29% 38% 16% 14% 12%

28% 29% 31% 24% 29% 31%

29% 18% 13% 41% 54% 12%

31% 22% 22% 15% 13% 33%

16% 43% 39% 37% 10% 25%

26% 30% 32% 15% 30% 42%

26% 4% 7% 33% 48% 0%

Artists’ promotion and internationalisation  109

Basel

110  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Nathalie Moureau Artists’ internationalisation is overall hindered by the dominance of US artists, which is only partially contrasted by national strategies of galleries from other countries supporting their own domestic artists (domestic effect). In that, German galleries seem the most effective ones. Artists’ internationalisation is also limited by the strong presence of heavily internationalised galleries sharing many of the exhibited artists. This geographical dominance is reinforced by a cultural hegemony of few artists shared by same galleries, coupled with locally concentrated career effects, as American and German artists show an intergenerational turnover higher than that of French and Italian artists. Even if a large number of nationalities are represented at Art Basel fairs—​70 just in the Swiss location—​the national diversity of artists is quite limited, as a small number of artists are of nationalities other than those of the dominant countries of the art market. On the other hand, internationalisation is, in particular, characterised by some regional effects. For instance, the Hong Kong fair shows a more balanced geographical distribution of artists by provenance and the domestic effect is in general reinforced by the fair location. Furthermore, the younger Asian fair shows a greater balance in terms of intergenerational turnover (with the exception of French artists). Our results question the ability of the dominant Western countries, and of their traditional art market intermediaries, namely art galleries, to renew their supply. In particular, it raises the question of the way art fairs can frame, or not, the kind of art that is proposed by art galleries. Is this a deliberate choice by galleries or, instead, the choice dictated by art fairs, which would exclude galleries from these countries that propose domestic, younger, alternative and possibly riskier artists? Such a question points to the primary role of art fairs in legitimating the art value and filtering the effective offer at consumers’ and collectors’ disposal.

Notes 1 We consider the official nationality of artists, independently of a possibly different country of origin. 2 www.artbasel.com. 3 The sector Galleries is common to all three fairs and includes by far the largest number of galleries, whereas other sectors concern only one or two fairs, and usually add much fewer galleries. 4 British artists are relatively more numerous especially in the two fairs based, respectively, in Europe (8.4%) and ex-​Commonwealth (8%). 5 We considered couples and collectives as units.

Artists’ promotion and internationalisation  111

References Artprice (2017). Contemporary Art Market Report. Fontaines-​sur-​Saône: Artprice. Artprice (2019). Contemporary Art Market Report. Fontaines-​sur-​Saône: Artprice. Azimi R. (2018). Comment Art Basel est passée de foire incontournable à marque mondiale. Numéro, June. Baia Curioni S., Forti, L. & Leone, L. (2015). Artists and galleries in the global art system. In O. Velthuis & S. Baia Curioni (Eds.), Cosmopolitan Canvases (pp. 31–​54). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, P. & Wacquant, L. (1999). On the cunning of imperialist reason. Theory, Culture and Society, 16(1), 41–​58. Dahainaut, A.  (2018). Interview Georges Philippe Vallois. Art insider Revue des professionnels de l’art, September (6), 8–​17. Moureau, N. (2019). Les foires, quelle(s) opportunité(s) pour les galeries ? Rapport d’étude pour le Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art. Paris: CPGA. Quemin, A. (2013). International contemporary art fairs in a globalized art market. European Societies, 15(2), 162–​177. Velthuis, O. (2013). Globalization of markets for contemporary art:  why local ties remain dominant in Amsterdam and Berlin. European Societies, 15(2), 290–​308. Vermeylen, F. (2015). The India art fair. In O. Velthuis & S. Baia Curioni (Eds.), Cosmopolitan Canvases (pp. 31–​54). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallerstein, I. (1991). Geopolitics and Geoculture. Essays on the Changing World System. Cambridge/​Paris: Cambridge University Press/​Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Wallerstein, I. (2000). The national and the universal:  can there be such a thing as world culture? In A.D. King (Ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System. Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (pp. 91–​105). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wolf, L. (2014). Art Basel, une marque mondiale prend les commandes. Etudes, September. Retrieved from www.revue-​etudes.com/​article/​art-​basel-​une-​marquemondiale-​prend-​les-​commandes-​16339.

9  Disregarded or adored? Remarks on art market responses to women artists behind the Iron Curtain Marcela Rusinko

Introduction Research issues of the quickly developing art market have become increasingly topical and hopefully also beneficial during the recent decades, concerning not only different economic and political structures or historical periods but also the feminine and gender-​based discourse. About half a century after Linda Nochlin’s ground-​breaking study Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971), and 30 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it seems relevant to analyse the situation of women artists in the former European Eastern Bloc with greater clarity. This chapter contributes to the research in the field of art and artistic careers in Central European countries, by addressing the current issue of the changing role, market and social position of women artists, through a sociological and feminist perspective. It focuses on the careers of four selected, significant female art figures who grew up in Czechoslovakia and who took an active part in its cultural scene during the period of Communist oppression, i.e. between the 1950s and 1980s. Noticeably, the four considered female artists have in common lifelong marriages with very successful male artists. This turns out to be one of the critical variables that affected the time when they were active, their material possibilities and often also the support and recognition from their closest circles of family and friends. Therefore, the level of career development and the overall response to women’s artwork is related to the level of response by their male partners (husbands), as the phenomenon of artistic marriages became widely common during these years. Their career paths as professional artists were thus parallel in so far the time periods were concerned, but they were different as it relates to the general response to their art or their professional recognition by critics, curators and the market. To explain this in a case study, I focus on the career development and market response to one of the most individual Czech woman artist of last century, Adriena Šimotová (1926–​ 2014). From today’s point of view, she represents the most distinctive figure of all four artists, with a body of work representing remarkable references to the contemporary international art scene. I also discuss her deeply changing position in the Czechoslovak and later in the international (especially French)

Women artists behind the Iron Curtain  113 cultural scene from the late 1960s to the 1990s. To provide a complete picture of her development, the study is extended to a period after her career ended, which corresponded with the situation of the contemporary free art market. For the purposes of comparison and wider support of my thesis, I also consider the careers and responses to three other innovative neoavant-​garde women artists: the conceptually oriented Běla Kolářová (1923–​2010) and two sculptors, Eva Kmentová (1928–​1980) and Věra Janoušková (1922–​2010), as well as their respective husbands’ careers. During the two decades of normalisation, i.e. the years of restoration of firm totalitarian rules and adherence to the Soviet Union’s policy objectives in the 1970s and 1980s, following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, these women artists were politically suppressed, with somewhat limited possibilities to present their work publicly. Thus, my research objective is to reveal that, and to what extent, they were suppressed not only as neoavant-​garde conceptual artists, but also as women artists, besides as wives of famous male artists. This chapter builds on my previous extensive archival research on art collecting in the early and late totalitarian period and on the topics of the historical art market and material cultures (Rusinko, 2018, 2019). Conceptwise, it interconnects these fields with gender research findings, so as to open new ways of contextualising women artists’ career paths. Methodwise, it applies inductive, both quantitative and qualitative approaches of cultural history, based on analysis, comparison and consequent interpretation of the data. So far, little systematic or in-​depth research has been carried out on the Czechoslovakian art market during this period, similarly to other Central European countries. Furthermore, the available historical market data are rather limited and therefore have to be combined with that from oral research. The consistent primary data set concerns the history of the institutional market, corresponding to public art museum acquisitions. Based on this data, which is still in part inaccessible, I  then examine the representation of the women artists, offering and discussing a measurement of gender-​equality between female artists and their partners.

Features of totalitarian art, culture and market When Czechoslovakia was part of the Soviet satellites, the cultural developments of the officially controlled media, art market and culture brought with them quite unique features, which included: a practical absence of an auction market, at least until the late 1990s; a limited network of official sales within an authoritative political system of decision-​making committees; and a lack of structure of private galleries, contrary even to a nearby countries, such as Poland. However, there was a relatively strong primary market with a significant role played by both state art museums and private buyers. In the country, predominant governance practices and structures were authoritative and patriarchal, derived from the traditions of the Habsburg

114  Marcela Rusinko empire. They manifested themselves under the conditions of a totalitarian society, which also implied an anomalous influence and power exercised by several individuals in their respective fields of expertise. This was also the case of art historians employed in art museums, who could hold powerful positions, as they partly made decisions about not only state museum acquisitions, but they often acted also as curators, critics, as well as private collectors. Their power can also be related to a common custom of ‘voluntary’ gifts by artists to these experts in order for their works to be exhibited at or acquired by the museums (Kujelová, 2020, p. 123). This certainly had an effect on the rather limited market of progressive neoavant-​garde art, as the number of potential buyers was very low, but logically this subsumed marginalised women artists only slightly. In general, the relations between artists and art historians were rather personal, based on closed communities and built on trust, similarly to the relations between artists and their private collectors. The majority of private collectors emerging in the early 1970s came from the ranks of the young cultural intelligentsia, and they often organised unofficial regional exhibitions for the artists they collected. These ‘silent’, hidden-​to-​ the-​official-​regime, yet most passionate collectors focused on contemporary art, operating exclusively on the primary market, and often supported also women artists (Rusinko, 2017, 2019).

Women under socialism Many feminist studies have drawn attention to the fact that the condition of women in the socialist society was different from that in the West, and possibly one of greater equality. In particular, most feminist scholars tend to consider the set of legal provisions enacted by the communist Czechoslovak government between 1948 and 1989 as a tool for further promotion of women’s emancipation (Jusová & Šiklová, 2016, p. 15). These provisions included the de jure equality of the sexes, the early legalisation of abortion (1956) and equal opportunities of men and women in education and employment. In this context, the number of women studying at the Prague’s two art academies could grow significantly since the late 1940s. In order to enable the full employment of women, the state coped with the problem of their dual roles as mothers and workers by efforts to socialise domestic labour and childcare (Wágnerová, 2017). However, as Jusová and Šiklová (2016, p. 17) remark, despite such measures, everyday’s reality ‘lagged far behind the legislation. The traditional gender roles were very strongly rooted in the family, which continued to be viewed as natural’. Therefore, it is rather questionable to what extent these measures could be viewed as really ‘women-​friendly’, as they aimed primarily at solving problems of the socialist economy, rather than affecting the traditional family roles. Already in the late 1970s, the Czech émigré to Canada Heitlinger (1979, pp. 3–​4) noted that the position of women in Eastern Europe was ‘far from satisfactory, despite a commitment to their liberation at the policy level’,

Women artists behind the Iron Curtain  115 and attributed this not only to economic reasons but also to the traditional structures of family arrangements and the ‘prevalence of sexist cultural norms, supported by “male chauvinism” and advice from experts’. Contemporary studies suggest that these official equalisation measures could have brought tension into private lives and, consequently, conflicted with women’s private position as wives. Moreover, Wagnerová (2017, pp.  214–​231) connects the strong wave of post-​1948 communist nationalisation of private property with the sudden weakening of the traditionally strong economic role of men as property holders and breadwinners. In general, most Czechoslovak women did not consider their position as unequal. They often did not even perceive their real inequality, as they had no alternative experience. In their adult lives, they first experienced the catastrophe of WWII, and then the ambience of the ubiquitous Eastern Bloc’s propaganda and authoritative official structures. Not even the few liberal years at the end of the 1960s could substantially change the deeply rooted convictions and habits. In general, as Czech researchers highlight, it seems obvious that women artists perceived the totalitarian system itself as an enemy as men did, therefore much more distinctly than in the case of patriarchal structures and family habits. A  similar attitude persisted in the Czech society in the 1990s, as the democratic revolution of 1989 did not distinctly change the deeply patriarchal structure of the society. Štefková (2016, pp. 250–​251) refers to a gender-​themed survey among Czech women artists under the symptomatic title Women’s Art Doesn’t Exist (see also Jirousová, 1993). Noticeably, most women artists, including Šimotová and Janoušková among others, expressed a clearly distrustful or negative attitude towards the term ‘women art’; moreover, ‘only a minority of artists perceived any influence of established gender roles on their work, but even then this impact was not perceived as an automatic disadvantage’ (Štefková, 2016, pp. 250–​251). The lack of active feminist movements and thinking in the Eastern Bloc was notable also on a theoretical level. Jindřich Chalupecký (1910–​1990), an influential Czech art theoretician, curator and thinker, was probably the only one who occasionally dealt with women’s art during the normalisation period in Czechoslovakia. However, Chalupecký himself treated the term ‘women art’ in a very limited way, incomparable to the contemporary Western feminist context of its reading. Pachmanová (2013, p.  13) notes that, even if Chalupecký denied the existence of gender inequality (which seems to be the typical attitude persisting long into the 1990s) and resolutely opposed ‘Western’ feminism, he also noticed the difficulty of achieving concentrated work for women artists, implicitly admitting the different situation of men and women.

Careers of married women artists assessed by ratios of (un)equality Exploring the role of women artists is particularly interesting if we consider them in the context of lifelong artistic marriages. The socialist marriage was

116  Marcela Rusinko held to be a space of normative societal pressures, with a good number of contemporary writers actually persuading the youth that they should continue in the traditional family model, aimed primarily at the childbearing role, keeping its patriarchal structure and strongly unequal role distribution alive under any circumstances (Vodochodský & Klvačová, 2014). These relationships were usually formed during the years of study at the art academy. Chalupecký, the author of the distinctive chapter ‘Sowjetunion, Tschechoslowakei und Polen’ [‘The Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Poland’] on contemporary Eastern-​ European art in Volume XIII of Propyläen Kunstgeschichte [Propylaea Art History], one of the most prominent 1970s publications on the art of the Eastern Block, mentions 43 artists altogether, 7 women and 36 men, corresponding to a ratio of 1:5. Concerning Czechoslovakia, he mentions altogether 29 artists, 5 women and 24 men (again, a ratio of 1:5). He mentions representatives of what he calls ‘strong women art’: Šimotová, Janoušková, Kmentová—​considered in this chapter—​ besides two other female artists, whose careers appear less appellative today. Obviously, Kolářová was not referenced at all, since she worked only occasionally during the first decades and was primarily helping the career of her husband. It can be deducted more on gender inequality from the 23 illustrations in the appendix, where Chalupecký selects 4 female and 19 male artists, again with a ratio of 1:5 This implies that he could consciously and coherently apply a gender proportion. Relating to Czechoslovakia, he instead selects 2 female and 7 male artists, with a ratio slightly close to 1:3. Therefore, just Šimotová and Kmentová, together with Polish Jewish Alina Szapocznikow (1926–​1973) and Bulgarian Ljiljana Ganchewa (*1937) visually represent the contemporary art of ‘the Second Sex’ in the Eastern Bloc in this significant synthetic volume (Chalupecký, 1978). Following Chalupecký’s work, I  synthesise the major career profiles for four selected couples in Table 9.1. Born around the 1920s, both partners of these couples grew up with similar generational experiences and often studied under the same university professor (Couples A, B, C), or even knew each other since their high-school years (C). The ‘husband and wife’ artists were often also members of the same art group—​the ‘UB 12’ group was the creative background for couples A, B, C during the 1960s (Slavická, 2006). We can notice very similar starting career positions of both partners from those couples in the early 1950s. Couple D is somehow different, as both partners did not complete their university studies, and the most internationally recognised of all male artists, the poet, collector and creator of innovative collages, Jiří Kolář, started his career before WWII and held the first solo exhibition abroad in 1963 (Klimešová, 2019). On the other hand, the four couples differed substantially in terms of further career development and the opportunity of solo exhibitions, as not all the artists could have solo exhibitions abroad. This fact was related to their respective mediums of expression and the extent to which the political establishment could censor them as well. In fact, whereas graphic art and

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Table 9.1 Comparative characteristics for neo-​avant-​garde couples in post-​war Czechoslovakia Art Principal Academy medium of graduation expression year

First solo First solo exhibition abroad exhibition

Couple A F: Adriena Šimotová (1926 –​ 2014)

1950

1965

M: Jiří John (1923 –​1972)

1951

Painting, textile, paper objects Painting

1951 1952

Sculpture Sculpture

1948

Couple B F: Eva Kmentová (1928 –​1980) M: Olbram Zoubek (1926 –​ 2017) Couple C F: Věra Janoušková (1922 –​ 2010) M: Vladimír Janoušek (1922 –​ 1986) Couple D F: Běla Kolářová (1923 –​2010) M: Jiří Kolář (1914 –​2002) *hardcover/​more than 100pgs.

Solo Solo First State exhibitions exhibitions comprehensive museums till 1969 1970–​1990 monograph* acquisitions 1970–​1989

1978 2 Uppsala, 1982 (Paris) 1966 14 (Ljubljana)

21

2001

13

22

1988

25

1963 1963

-​ 1992

1 2

15 22

2003 1989

9 13

Sculpture

1965

-​

1

8

2001

6

1950

Sculpture

1967

-​

1

6

1995

14

-​

Photography, 1966 assemblage Collages 1937

1990 (Paris)

2

1

2006

3

1963 (London)

32

128

1968

39

-​

1960

Note: Data from AbART. The Fine Art Archive, Archive of National Gallery in Prague, elaborated by the Author.

Women artists behind the Iron Curtain  117

Couples

118  Marcela Rusinko paper collages could be sent abroad without being noticed by the authorities, larger spatial objects could be more easily excluded from contact with the Western world. This was obviously problematic for sculptors (Couples B, C). Nevertheless, as we can see, such factors as limited options of manipulation with the artworks and often also the slowness and difficulty of sculptural work, had a significant effect also on the number of sculptors’ inland exhibitions. It also seems that the artistic medium played a more substantial role than the level of education. For the two couples working with paintings, collages, paper reliefs or graphic art (A, D), male partners were professionally recognised by the inner artistic circles significantly earlier than their wives. In the first four decades of their careers, husbands’ works were generally considered more original and valuable. An improvement at market and social-​recognition levels for female counterparts came no sooner than at the beginning of the 21st century, when a gradual acceptance by both the wide public and the market took place. Figure  9.1 displays the main gender differences of acquisitions from the 14 state-​owned art museums during the 1970s and 1980s (Archive NGP; Sloupová, 2016).1 Noticeably, for all couples, gender discrepancies are evident, both in terms of the number of acquired pieces and in terms of the number of purchasing museums. Overall, the ratio of women’s to men’s acquisitions was of 31:91, approximately 1:3. For Couple B, the premature death of Kmentová mitigated the impact of an unfavourable gender perspective and boosted her market. Couple A presents an acquisition ratio of 1:2, hence relatively more in favour of the female artist. Similarly, only for this couple, both artists’ artworks were purchased by more than half of 14 museums, still with the male counterpart being relatively better-​off. Is the proposed theoretical and empirical evidence for gender inequality in art a valid measure of equivalence assessment that was indeed used by the patriarchal society of East-​Central Europe during the decades of the Cold War? And is it comparable to that of similarly married women artists from the former ‘Western’ part of the world and their similarly suppressed roles? Among the most valid and known examples, we could name the female abstract expressionists: Elaine de Kooning (1918–​1989), Lee Krasner (1908–​ 1984), Helen Frankenthaler (1928–​2011) and others (Marter, 2016). We could certainly also mention Louise Bourgeois (1911–​2010), about whose career Nochlin (2015, p. 313) noted: ‘It is important to realize that although Bourgeois has been working since the 1940s, she did not really come into prominence and recognition until the 70s, in the wake of the women's movement’. Thus, is not the fate of her career even more striking, having she partnered not with an artist, but actually with a professor of modern art history (Storr, 2016)?

A typical woman artist’s career? To clarify the general phenomenon of a persistently socially preferred male/​ husband artist’s career, I have focused on Šimotová’s (Couple A) early years

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M: Jiří John (1923 - 1972) F: Adriena Šimotová (1926 - 2014) Couple A

Number of artworks acquired

M: Olbram Zoubek (1926 - 2017) F: Eva Kmentová (1928 - 1980) Couple B

By how many museums

M: Jiří Kolář (1914 - 2002) F: Běla Kolářová (1923 - 2010) Couple D 0 5 10 15 20 25 Note: Data from Regional art museums' acquision register, Archive of Naonal Gallery in Prague, elaborated by the Author.

30

Figure 9.1 Number of artworks purchased to the couples by public art museums (1970–1989).

35

40

45

Women artists behind the Iron Curtain  119

M: Vladimír Janoušek (1922 - 1986) F: Věra Janoušková (1922 - 2010) Couple C

120  Marcela Rusinko by studying memoirs and oral history. During the first decade of her career, she was significantly overlooked and underestimated by male-​critics, -​friends and -​companions. In a late interview, she recalled one of the regular meetings, when a group of friends, along with Chalupecký, visited her husband Jiří John and her at home. Always discussing John’s paintings and achievements, they never took a single look at the paintings of Adriana, even when she already graduated from the art academy (Slavická, 2006, p. 248, 249). The recognition of Šimotová’s art improved slowly as she pursued her own original artwork. Meanwhile, during the 1960s, John achieved his career peak very quickly as a figurative painter, probably fitting the ordinary and unassuming middle-​class taste much better than her. His body of work was considered non-​avant-​garde and officially acceptable. Thus, he quickly became one of the most exhibited, published and sought-​after artists. It was not by chance that Šimotová sold one or two paintings to a regional art museum, when that museum also bought several paintings by John. We can just speculate that he was the one who could suggest such a deal. Even under these ‘helpful’ circumstances, the ratio of art pieces bought from Šimotová and from John (deceased in 1972) by 14 state art museums until 1989 was approximately of 1:2, as we already know. However, if we take into account only the first two decades, until 1972, i.e. when they were both alive, the ratio nears the more ‘common’ 1:3. When comparing the respective prices paid for these paintings until 1972, her average price corresponds to 65% of his. This price proportion takes into account significantly different sizes of their artworks, as she generally produced large spatial canvases, contrary to his often small-​sized works. Noticeably, it is very close to today’s average (see Brown, 2019). After her husband’s death, the average price differences grew considerably (28% of her husband’s average), as the scarce supply and growing demand for John’s work pushed his prices up. On the contrary, her gradually ascending price curve just matched the level of inflation, whereas John’s blew up (Figure 9.2). After the tragedy of the death of her husband, Šimotová’s art turned into a qualitatively new conceptual and material direction. She created textile collages based on themes of interpersonal communication and sensitive paper reliefs (Figure 9.3). During this new conceptual period of the late 1970s and the 1980s, many private collectors acknowledged her artwork (Rusinko, 2017). Famous Czech-​US female gallerist and art collector Meda Mládková noted that during those uneasy and desperate years Šimotová, while taking care of her slowly fading partner, ‘gained a kind of noble intimacy or a sort of strongly female artistic sensibility that shifted her work to a highly spiritual philosophical and conceptual level’ (Kundra, 2016, App. 5). Today, the Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation unites what is probably the most extensive and most balanced collection of her works worldwide, confirming the uniqueness of Šimotová’s legacy also from the institutional perspective. Indeed, only the aforementioned influential Kolář, who is largely represented in the same Foundation, could compete with her in this aspect.

Women artists behind the Iron Curtain  121 80000

Price in Czechoslovak korunas

70000 Jiří John

60000

Adriena Šimotová

50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0 1955

1960

1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

1990

1995

Year of acquision Note: Data from Regional art museums' acquision register, Archive of Naonal Gallery in Prague, elaborated by the Author. In normal prices. Average monthly salary varied in Czechoslovakia circa from 2000 korunas (1970) to 3000 korunas (1989).

Figure 9.2 Prices paid by public art museums for paintings of Šimotová and John (1960–1989) (Czech korunas per square metres. Photo credit: Marcela Rusinko).

Figure 9.3 Artist Adriena Šimotová in her studio in Prague, 1982. (Photo credit: Moravian Gallery Brno, Jiří Valoch’s archive).

122  Marcela Rusinko Thanks to individual private initiatives, significant paintings and graphic works of her were purchased by the state museums either directly from her studio or through the monopolist official trading network. State museums acknowledged her work a few years before the above-​mentioned young private collectors, who appeared on the scene in the early 1970s. Whereas the state institutions generally focused on the more conventionally acceptable early paintings, independent collectors were more in favour of her experimental, non-​conformant body of work that underwent a fundamental transformation, which was fully appreciated in the exhibition at Galerie de France in Paris in autumn 1982. The second shift in Šimotová’s career development came after the democratic revolution of 1989, when she could present her work in public cultural centres. Many, in particular contemporary, pieces were sold in the 1990s on the free primary market, whereas her post-​war art production started to be traded on the secondary art market (re-​established in the 1990s) only a decade ago. First auctioned pieces by Šimotová were those from the former art historians’ collections mentioned above, most likely offered for purely financial reasons. Precisely, those artworks prompted the market response. A further light increase in demand occurred in the years after the artist’s death in 2014 (Artplus Archive, 2000). Although European, the international recognition of her work continued to grow during the late period, and her market evolved—​due to the more accessible supply—​particularly at the national level. When Šimotová won the creative internship at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1995, it definitely corresponded to her career peak of the late period. She also sold art pieces both to this institution and to Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Then, came the second Paris exhibition at Galerie de France in 1996. All this happened long before two essential retrospectives that were held in 2001 and 2006 in her home country. At that time, she enjoyed the position of an established, internationally recognised conceptual artist who had been fighting for gradual acceptance and establishment of her original creative genius during the previous decades. As years passed by, the former husband and wife swapped not only their markets but also their social positions in terms of recognition, as is shown in Table  9.2. Today, after a Table 9.2 Artistic couple’s career development: Šimotová vs. John Launch

Growth

Maturity

Post-​maturity

Adriena Šimotová STAGNACY GROWTH GROWTH PEAK CAREER Jiří John PEAK CAREER STAGNACY DECLINE BOTTOM Time period 1960–​1975 1975–​1990 1990–​2005 2005–​2015 Note: For the purpose of this comparison, we consider the career developments in response to the demand from both the art market and public institutions. Data from AbART-The Fine Art Archive, the Archive of the National Gallery in Prague and Artplus Archive, elaborated by the Author.

Women artists behind the Iron Curtain  123 long, even painful journey, it is Šimotová who is considered to be among first-​ league post-​war visual artists in Central Europe. Šimotová is definitely not the sole example, either in Central Europe or elsewhere in the world. Other women artists faced similar prejudices and maybe bore even more suppressed roles. As for our considered couples, we should emphasise the fate of Kolařová (Couple D). Living her whole life in the shadow of her authoritative husband, she was recognised as a real artistic personality and became one of the key original Czech artists recognised internationally only a few years ago thanks to the large retrospective held in ‘Raven Row’ (London, 2013) (Klimešová et al., 2013; Placáková, 2019). Even though Kmentová (B) passed away almost 40 years before her famous, influential artist partner, she undoubtedly surpassed him in terms of quality, depth and timelessness of artistic expression during the recent decades (Klimešová, 2003). On the other hand, there seems to be more equality in the professional and private life of Couple C, Janoušková–​Janoušek (Zemina, 1995, 2002), even though state institutions preferred to purchase the male artist’s artworks for a long time. Recently, Janoušková’s unique enamelled objects and paper collages are attracting much more attention and are, together with the sculptural work of Kmentová, in the collection of the Prague’s Mládek Foundation mentioned above.

Conclusions Looking back to the art scene behind the Iron Curtain, this chapter revealed the long and challenging career paths of four influential East-​ Central European women artists and wives of successful male artists. As a possible indicator of gender art equality, I also offered a ratio based on the state market and theoretical reception. Such ratio regularly fluctuated between 1:5 and 1:3, and in exceptional cases down to 1:2. Furthermore, as an example of a fruitful case of a female artist’s gradual career emancipation, I presented the awakening response to Adriena Šimotová’s work during her six-​decade-​long journey, contrary to her husband’s career. In these cases, not only the totalitarian conditions but also the gender stereotypes, the family patterns and the patriarchal structures constituted substantially decisive factors. Therefore, keeping in mind the potentially comparable female artists’ fates in the Western world, aren’t the destinies of Eastern European and Western women artists and wives closer to each other than we thought? Could future research reveal that a political system, whether totalitarian or capitalist, is not the principal and decisive agent? And, that traditional patriarchal societal patterns and prejudices of the whole Euro-Atlantic humanity may play a much more substantial role?

Note 1 Data from the 1960s was not accessible for all couples.

124  Marcela Rusinko

References AbART. The Fine Art Archive Czech Republic. Retrieved from www.artarchive.cz. Archive of the National Gallery in Prague. Regional Art Museums’ Acquisition Register, 1950–​1990. Artplus Archive. Contemporary Czech Auction Results Database, since 2000. Retrieved from www.artplus.cz. Brown, T. W. (2019). Why is work by female artists still valued less than work by male artists? Artsy.net, March 9.  Retrieved from www.artsy.net/​article/​ artsy-​editorial-​work-​female-​artists-​valued-​work-​male-​artists. Brunclík, P. (Ed.) (2006). Adriena Šimotová, Olomouc: Muzeum umění. Chalupecký, J. (1978). Sowjetunion, Tschechoslowakei und Polen. In E. Lucie-​Smith, S. Hunter & A. M. Vogt (Eds.), Propyläen Kunstgeschichte, Band 13:  Kunst der Gegenwart (pp. 165–​175). Frankfurt a. M. –​Berlin –​Wien: Propyläen. Heitlinger, A. (1979). Women and State Socialism: Sex Inequality in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press. Jirousová, V. (1993). Žádné ženské umění neexistuje. Výtvarné umění, 3(1),  42–​52. Jusová, I. & Šiklová, J. (Eds.) (2016). Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Klimešová, M. (2019). Jiří Kolář:  The Grimase of the Century. Prague:  National Gallery. Klimešová, M. (Ed.)  (2003). Eva Kmentová. Litoměřice:  Severočeská galerie výtvarného umění. Klimešová, M., Motard, A., Císař, K. & Witkovsky, M. S. (2013). Běla Kolářová. London: Raven Row. Kujelová, D. (2020). (Ne)možnost prezentace a distribuce umění konceptuálních tendencí v Československu 70. let. Unpublished master thesis, Faculty of Arts. Brno: Masaryk University. Kundra, O. (2016). Meda Mládková. Můj úžasný život. Prague: Academia. Marter, J. (Ed.) (2016). Women of Abstract Expressionism. Yale: University Press. Nochlin, L. (1971). Why have there been no great woman artists? In V. Gornick & B. Moran (Eds.), Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (pp. 344–366). New York: Basic Books. Nochlin, L. & Reilly, M. (Eds.) (2015). Women Artists:  The Linda Nochlin Reader. New York: Thames & Hudson. Pachmanová, M. (2013). Mlčení o feminismu jako a ženskost jako výtvarná hodnota: České umělkyně očima Jindřicha Chalupeckého. Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny, 14, 34–​42. Placáková, M. (2019). Státní socialismus a umělkyně: Případ Běla Kolářová. Artalk. Retrieved from https://​artalk.cz/​2019/​07/​15/​statni-​socialismus-​a-​umelkyne-​pripad-​ bela-​kolarova/​. Rusinko, M. (2017). Živý květ jara”, či nový koncept? Sběratelská reflexe tvorby Adrieny Šimotové v socialistickém Československu v letech 1965–​1980. Opuscula historiae atrium, 66 (2) 168–​183. Rusinko, M. (2018). Snad nesbíráte obrazy? Cesty soukromého sběratelství moderního umění v českých zemích v letech 1948–​1965. Brno: B&P Publishing. Rusinko, M. (2019). Sbírka jako prostor vnitřní svobody:  Nová vlna soukromého sběratelství v Československu po roce 1970. In Petráš, J., Svoboda, L. (Eds.), Bezčasí. Československo v letech 1972–​1977 (pp. 95–​111). Praha –​České Budějovice: ÚSTR ČR, Jihočeské muzeum.

Women artists behind the Iron Curtain  125 Shepherd, R. H. E. (2000). Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution and Beyond. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Slavická, M. (Ed.) (2006). UB 12 –​Studie, rozhovory, dokumenty. Praha: Gallery. Sloupová, A. (2016). Galerie umění a akviziční politika v době normalizace. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Faculty of Arts. Prague: Charles University. Storr, R. (2016). Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois. New York: Monacelli Press. Štefková, Z. (2016). The east side story of (Gendered) art. Framing gender in Czech and Slovak contemporary art. In Jusová, I., Šiklová, J. (Eds.), Czech Feminisms: Perspectives on Gender in East Central Europe (pp. 247–​269). Indiana:  Indiana University Press. Vodochodský, I. & Klvačová, P. (2014). Normativní podoby manželství v předlistopadové populárně-​naučné literatuře. In Havelková, H., Oates-​Indruchová, L. (Eds.), Vyvlastněný hlas: Proměny genderové kultury české společnosti 1948–​1989 (pp. 207–​241). Prague: Sociologické nakladatelství. Wagnerová, A. (2017). Žena za socialismu. Československo 1945–​1974 a reflexe vývoje před rokem 1989 a po něm. Prague: Sociologické nakladatelství. Zemina, J. (1995). Vladimír Janoušek: Proč to dělám právě takto. Prague: Portál. Zemina, J. (2002). Věra Janoušková: Já to dělám takhle. Prague: Torst.

10  Mapping the art market in Denmark Trine Bille

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to study the size and development of the market for visual arts in Denmark during the past 20 years, and how it is composed of private and public demand. The focus is on the market for first-​time sale of works of arts of living Danish artists. The reason for this focus is that only this part of the market is crucial for living Danish artists’ income possibilities as artists. The size of this market along with the number of artists supplying that market is crucial to artists’ prospects of making a living from their art. While artists’ income and labour market conditions is a much-​researched topic (Abbing, 2002; Alper & Wassall, 2006; Throsby & Petetskaya, 2017; Menger, 2006; Throsby, 1994), the size of the art market (the ‘cake’ the artists must share) is a relatively unresearched area. An extended part of the research on art markets has focused on art prices, especially drawing on data from art auctions (e.g. Ashenfelter & Graddy, 2006, 2020). The few studies dealing with the size of the art market are related to the literature on the cultural and creative industries and their contribution to the general economy: to growth and employment (see e.g. Higgs, Cunningham & Bakhshi, 2008; Amez et al., 2017). In these studies, the classification of creative workers (artists) is based on ISCO (occupation) and NACE (industry) codes. There exists an ISCO code for ‘Visual Artists’ and a NACE code for ‘Galleries and Art Dealers’. One of the problems using these codes from the national accounts to study the art market, is that the ISCO codes are based on ‘primary occupation’. Even though it is possible to track ‘secondary occupation’ in these data, we know from former research that many artists have multiple jobs and earn very little from their arts (Casacuberta & Gandelman, 2012; Bille, Løyland & Holm, 2017). Therefore, many artists will be excluded in the official registrations of occupations, and the income data cannot be used to study the total size of income from arts. Likewise, it is not possible to study the size of the art market with the NACE-​code ‘Galleries and Art Dealers’. Lots of artworks are sold directly from the artists to the customers. But we do not know how much. Furthermore, studies of the composition of the art market in terms of the public and private parts of the market need other data and methods to be studied.

Mapping the art market in Denmark  127 To fill this gab, a novel method to map the market is proposed in this chapter to address the following research questions: • • •

What is the total size of the market for first-​time sale of artworks by living Danish artists? How is the market composed in terms of private and public buyers? How has the market developed over the past 20 years?

The results of this mapping will be compared with the Danish art market of 20 years ago, based on a similar study (Bille Hansen, Ibsen & Nielsen 1998). This will allow to study the market development during the past 20  years, including the different parts of the market (public and private). The chapter is organised like this. First, the boundaries of the art market are defined, then the data and method are explained. The size and composition of the art market are further mapped from respectively the supply and the demand sides, followed by the artists share of the art market and the comparison of the size of the art market with its size 20 years ago. Finally, an estimate of the total art market including resale and works of art by foreign artists is shown.

The boundaries of the Danish art market The focus of this chapter is on the economic market conditions for living Danish visual artists (namely residents with Danish civil registration number, i.e. who have resided in Denmark within the past three months, and/​or Danish citizens). This has several implications for the design of the study. Firstly, the market is delimited to first-​time sale of works of arts made by living Danish artists. Of course, this only constitutes a limited portion of the total market for the visual arts in Denmark. The study will disregard the following sections of the market, as they do not directly affect the income of living Danish artists: (a) resale of works of arts made by living Danish artists,1 (b) sale of works of arts made by deceased Danish artists and (c) sale of works of arts made by foreign living and deceased artists. However, in Section 8, an estimation of the total size of the art market in Denmark, including all the above parts, will be presented to get the full picture. Secondly, a distinction needs to be made between the total turnover on the market and the artists’ share of the turnover. The difference comprises the income received by various intermediaries and gatekeepers, e.g. galleries, from the sale of art. When a buyer pays for a work of art, only a portion of that revenue goes to the artist. The artist only receives the entire sale price when selling directly to a buyer. This study elucidates both the total turnover and the share of the turnover that goes to the artists; in a later section, it further elaborates on the artists’ share of the market.

Data and method This section accounts for the data collected and the empirical approach. It draws on data collected in Bille and Olsen (2018) and Bille et al. (2018). All

128  Trine Bille the data was collected in 2017–​18 and covers the year 2016. An overview of all the surveys and data collection is provided in Appendix 10.1. The size of the art market in Denmark is mapped by studying, respectively, both the supply-​side and the demand-​side of the market. The results should in theory be the same in both cases, as what is sold is also bought. But, in order to validate the data, the size of the art market will be measured from both sides. On the demand-​ side, there are many different buyers of art, such as museums, the public sector (the state, the regions and the municipalities) and the private sector (private persons, including private collectors, private companies and customers from abroad (export)). On the demand-​side, the following data was collected from respective sources: •

The State: data from official accounts regarding purchase of art and decoration of public buildings. Some of the main projects are decoration of a new university building and the new metro line in Copenhagen. • The municipalities: a questionnaire to all the 98 municipalities in Denmark concerning their purchase of art and decoration of public buildings and spaces. • The regions: interviews conducted by phone to the five regions in Denmark concerning their purchase of art. Their expenses mainly concerned decoration of eight new super-​hospitals. • Art museums:  a questionnaire to all the 70 art museums in Denmark, both publicly supported and private. • The private sector (individuals and businesses):  as it is not possible to get valid data for the private sector’s purchases of art, the only way was through a survey to artists. This will be explained in further details below. • Export: an overview of export data of visual art is likewise not possible to get without a survey to artists. • Art clubs:  art clubs are privately organised clubs in private and public organisations. They exhibit art in the organisations for the benefit of the employees, and they buy arts which is typically distributed among the employees based on a lottery once a year. There exist 513 art clubs throughout Denmark. They have all received a questionnaire concerning their purchase of art works. • Private foundations:  independent private foundations or corporate foundations with a public purpose. They buy art primarily to donate it to museums and public spaces. There are many private foundations in Denmark, but eight foundations are the primary art foundations. Data was collected through the foundations’ webpages and through interviews with managers of the foundations. In total, the collected data account for all the public and private customers. As the study is focused on first-​time sales, an effort has been made to differentiate this from the rest of the market for visual arts (works of art by deceased and/​or foreign artists). This has been done systematically in all the surveys by

Mapping the art market in Denmark  129 asking the different groups of buyers of art how big a share of their purchase of art was related to first-​time sale of living Danish visual artists.2 Likewise, an effort was made to avoid double counting. For example, concerning art museums, their purchase of new Danish visual arts depends partly on the level of public funding and partly on funding from private foundations. In order to avoid double counting, data on the museums finance were collected through the questionnaire to museums. In the results, these funds was excluded in the museums’ purchase figures, as they are already accounted for under private foundations and the state. A fully comprehensive mapping will reveal the total market for first-​time sale of works of art by living Danish artists. The data are, however, not perfect, and therefore the size of the market has also been measured from the supply-​side to validate the results. On the supply-​side, different suppliers of art can be localised. Firstly, the artists themselves can sell directly to the customers from their studios. Secondly, there are intermediators like art galleries, and there are auction houses selling art. Furthermore, art can be sold directly from sales–​exhibitions where groups of artists exhibit and sell their works of art. On the supply-​side, the following data was collected from respective sources: •

•

• •

•

Galleries and art dealers:  official data for turnover at galleries and art dealers has been achieved through the National Bureau of Statistics Denmark, as Galleries and Art Dealers have their own industry (NACE) code. The data has been manually cleaned to make sure it only contains firms selling visual art. Artists’ associations, defined as groups of artists working as collectives, both artistic and commercial, and making sales–​exhibitions together. The 23 artists’ associations in Denmark received a questionnaire about their sale turnover. Exhibition halls:  there exist 16 exhibition halls in Denmark. Through telephone surveys with their managers, it was confirmed that they mainly exhibit without selling art. Auction houses: there are two major auction houses in Denmark dealing also with first-​time sale of works of art by living Danish artists, namely Bruun Rasmussen Auction House and Lauritz.com. However, they mainly deal with resale of art, while the rest of the auction houses in Denmark are only dealing with resales. After telephone interviews with the managers at the auction houses, it was revealed that their first sales of art by living Danish artists are extremely limited, as, for instance, at Bruun Rasmussen it represents only 1% of its total turnover. This finding was confirmed by the survey to artists. Direct sales from artists’ studios:  the only way to get data on this is through a survey to artists, as it is further explained below.

In total, the data collected accounts for all the available sale channels. As mentioned above, some information about the size of the art market is only

130  Trine Bille available through a survey to the artists themselves, and therefore, a survey to the total population of visual artists in Denmark was conducted. The population was selected based on the following not mutually ​exclusive criteria, and corresponding sources:3 1 Membership of one of or both main artists’ organisations in Denmark, namely the very elitist Danish Artists’ Society, and the less elitist and more numerous BKF (Danish Visual Artists):  from Danish Artists’ Society and BKF. 2 Graduation from an arts academy: from the official education registers of Statistics Denmark. 3 Artists who received grants from the Danish Arts Foundation (DAF) during the period 2006–​16: from DAF. The three criteria gave a total population of 3,028 artists covering both professional and semi-​professional artists (see Baldin & Bille, 2020). BKF is a broad membership association, including artists from more commercial circuits who may not live up to criteria 2 or 3. Although there may be artists who fall outside our definition if they do not meet any of the criteria, that number is expected to be small. The artists were identified through their civil registration number (‘cpr.-​ number’). Through Statistics Denmark, 3,028 artists received an online survey. 1,000 completed and returned the survey, giving a response rate of 35%. Via the artists’ civil registration numbers, it is possible to link the survey data with micro-​data from the public registers held by Statistics Denmark comprising a combination of employment, income, and education figures for the individual artist for the period 2010–​2015. This was done for both the respondents and the non-​respondents to the survey. The combination of official micro-​data (from the national tax, labour market and educational registers) and survey data offers several advantages. Firstly, micro-​ data from Statistics Denmark presents a wide range of variables, which provide accurate information for the individual artist concerning, e.g. their income and demographics. On the other hand, a questionnaire allows for a more detailed examination of the working conditions of visual artists, which are not available in the registers, including the share of their total income from sales of artworks and the customers to whom they sell (public and private). Secondly, merging the two data sets offers options for analyses of non-​respondents to the survey, since data from Statistics Denmark also provides information pertaining to those artists who did not answered the questionnaire, and in this way, the representativity of the sample can be assessed. No significant differences were found when comparing the total population with the respondents on several important variables (age, gender, total income, education, art grants and membership of artists’ associations). On this basis, the sample is deemed representative (see Appendix 10.2).

Mapping the art market in Denmark  131

Demand The estimate of the total market of living Danish artists is drawn by combining all the data collected. As mentioned above, the size of the art market in Denmark is mapped by studying respectively both the supply-​side and the demand-​side of the market. The result should in theory be the same in both cases, as what is sold is also bought. Table 10.1 displays the main figures concerning demand. Column (a) is based on the survey to artists and shows how their turnover is divided between different types of buyers. Column (b)  shows overall turnover levels where market data is collected. Column (c)  shows the corresponding artists’ turnover. Combining the information of Columns (a) and (b), we obtain that 33% of artists’ turnover is equal to 14 million EUR, and their total turnover equal to 42 million EUR. Similarly, the corresponding purchases from private companies, private individuals and export, are estimated in Column (c). The estimates of the overall turnover (Column d) are based on the survey information that part of the artworks sold to the private sector are sold directly from the artists’ studios and another part through galleries. It can be assumed from normal practice that these shares are both 50%. We can thus infer that the total turnover is roughly 1.5 times higher than the artists’ turnover for these private parts of the market. Figures in Table 10.1 indicate that the total purchase of new Danish visual art amounts

Table 10.1 Demand: buyers of first-​time sale of artworks by Danish artists, 2016 Buyer

Based on survey to artists

Based Estimates obtained from columns on other a&b collected information on art market

Share of artists’ turnover (%) (a)

Overall turnover (million EUR) (b)

Artists’ turnover (million EUR) (c)

3 4 1 1 4 4

3 3 1 1 3 2 14 6 14 9 42

The state Municipalities Regions 33% Art museums Art clubs Private foundations Subtotal 33% Private companies 13% Individuals 34% Export 20% Total 100%

Total turnover (million EUR) (d)

Share of overall turnover (%) (e)

3 4 1 1 4 4

5% 6% 1% 2% 7% 6%

8 21 13 59

14% 37% 22% 100%

132  Trine Bille to about 59 million EUR.4 Of this amount, the public sector (the state, municipalities and regions) accounts for 12 percent, art museums for 2 percent5 and the private sector (art clubs, private foundations, private companies, private individuals and export) for 86 percent.

Supply To validate demand estimates, a similar exercise was done on the supply-​side. If approximately the same size of the market is estimated, we can be more confident about the results. Table 10.2 displays the main figures. Column (a) is based on the survey to artists and shows how their turnover is divided between sale channels. Column (b)  shows overall turnover levels where market data is collected. Column (c) shows the artists’ share of turnover, where 50% of turnover to galleries is subtracted. Combining the information from Columns (a)  and (c), we can infer that 23  million EUR, i.e. 53% of artists’ turnover is produced through art market intermediaries, while artists’ total turnover fetches 43 million EUR. Figures in Table 10.2 indicate that private galleries account for two-​thirds of the overall turnover, while direct sales from the artists make up the rest, and other sales channels are of little significance. Artists’ total share of turnover is 43 million EUR, corresponding to 65 percent of the overall turnover on the market.

The size of the art market and artists’ share Having estimated the turnover both from the demand and from the supply sides of the art market, we can claim with some confidence that the value of the total market for first-​time sales of works by living Danish artists is in the order of 59–​65  million EUR. All figures are net of VAT. For comparison, Denmark´s GDP is 280 billion EUR, for a population of 5.7 million. Artists do not enjoy the entirety of this turnover because intermediaries, such as galleries, take a percentage of the proceeds (see e.g. Di Caro, Di Gaetano & Mazza 2020; Velthuis, 2020). Based on the information about where public and private buyers buy art (directly from artists or through galleries and art dealers), and the knowledge that galleries take on average 50% of the total turnover, the artists’ share of the total turnover was estimated to approximately 42–​43 million EUR (Tables 10.1 and 10.2), corresponding to about two-​thirds of the overall turnover, while the rest of the turnover goes to galleries and the like. Artists’ income opportunities will depend on the overall (demand) size of the market, as well as the number of artists, as the size of the market is equal to the total ‘cake’ to be distributed among the existing population of visual artists. As mentioned above, there is a total population of 3028 visual artists in Denmark. With a total market of about 42 million EUR (the artists’ share), this means an average annual income from the arts of about 14,000 EUR per

Mapping the art market in Denmark  133 Table 10.2 Supply: sellers of first-​time sale of artworks by Danish artists, 2016 Sale channel

Galleries and art dealers Artists’ associations Exhibition halls Auction houses Subtotal Direct sale from artists Private websites Total

Based on survey to artists

Based on Estimates obtained from columns collected a&b data on the art market

Share of artists’ turnover (a)

Overall turnover (million EUR) (b)

Artists’ turnover (million EUR) (c)

Overall turnover (million EUR) (d)

45% 5% 2% 1% 53% 45% 2% 100%

44 0.3 0.1 0.3

22 0.3 0.1 0.3 23 19 1 43

44 0.3 0.1 0.3 19 1 65

Share of overall turnover % (e) 68% 0% 0% 0% 30% 1% 100%

artist. However, this income is very unevenly distributed among artists (see Rosen, 1981 and, for Danish artists, Bille et al., 2018; Baldin and Bille, 2021).

The development of the art market A similar study of the Danish art market was conducted more than 20 years ago by Bille Hansen, Ibsen and Nielsen (1998). Table 10.3 shows that if we look at the demand-​side and compare the turnover in 2016 with similar estimates in 1996, we can see that the market have grown from 39–​44 million EUR to 59 million EUR, or by 15–​20 million EUR (in 2016 price levels). It is also evident that this the private market has particularly contributed to this growth. While the public sector covered 24 percent of the marked in 1996, the same share was reduced to 12 percent in 2016. In real numbers, the public part of the market remained basically unchanged. Looking at the supply-​side in Table 10.4, the estimations indicate that the market increased by 22 million EUR in 2016-​prices (which is approximately the same as the estimations from the demand-​side). In particular, sales from galleries and art dealers increased—​from 25 million EUR to 43 million EUR (2016-​prices). Compared to 1996, the market increased by approximately 100  percent in current prices (from 27–​33  million EUR in 1996 to 59–​65  million EUR in 2016). By comparison, the growth in GDP in Denmark during the same period was about 90 percent. It means that the art market increased by a little more than the increase in GDP (an income elasticity above 1).

134  Trine Bille Table 10.3 Market size (demand) for first-​time sale of artworks by Danish artists, 1996 and 2016 Turnover (million EUR) 1996 (1996-​prices) The state Municipalities Regions Art museums Art clubs Private foundations* Private companies* Individuals* Export* Total

1996 (2016-​prices)

4 2–​3 1 1 4–​5 3

5 3–​4 1 2 6–​7 4–​5

12–​16*

18–​20*

27–​33

39–​44

Turnover% 2016 3 4 1 1 4 4 8 21 13 59

1996

2016

13% 9% 2% 4% 15% 11%

5% 6% 1% 2% 7% 6% 14% 46%* 37% 22% 100% 100%

Note. (*) Private companies, individuals and export could not be separated in 1996 data.

Table 10.4 Market size (supply) for first-​time sale of artworks by Danish artists, 1996 and 2016 Turnover (million EUR) 1996 (1996-​prices) Galleries and art dealers 17 Direct sale from artists 11 Artists’ associations 1 Other channels 1 Total 30

Turnover%

1996 (2016-​prices)

2016

1996

2016

25 16 1 1 43

44 19 4 1 65

58% 37% 2% 2% 100%

68% 30% 0% 1% 100%

The total art market in Denmark The focus of this chapter has been on the market for first-​time sales of works of art by living Danish artists. Those parts that have been omitted can, however, be considered ‘substitute’ markets. In fact, besides first-​time sale of works of art by living Danish artists, there are resales of works of art made by living Danish artists, sales of works of art made by deceased Danish artists, and sales of works of art made by foreign living and deceased artists. Based on figures for resale rights (droit de suite), as well as the collected information from galleries and museums, it is possible to make a rough estimation of the size of the markets excluded in this chapter. Table 10.5 indicates that the size of these markets in 2016 was about 51 million EUR. Given that the size of the market for first-​time sale of artworks by Danish visual artists is

Mapping the art market in Denmark  135 Table 10.5 The size of markets other than first-​time sale of artworks by living Danish artists, 2016 Data source

Resale of artworks made by Danish living artists Heirs’ representatives

VISDA (the colleting society for visual rights in Denmark) VISDA (the colleting society for visual rights in Denmark) VISDA (the colleting society for visual rights in Denmark) Data from Statistics Denmark on Galleries and Art Dealers’ the turnover

Resale of artworks made by foreign artists First-​time sale of artworks made by foreign artists (Danish galleries and art dealers) Museums (purchase of Data collected in the artworks made by survey to the Danish living foreign artists, museums first-​time sale, bought directly from the artists) Total

Droit de suite Total value (million EUR) (turnover, million EUR) 0.3

5.3

0.4

8.5

0.2

3.5 33.6

0.3

51.2

estimated to be about 60–​65 million EUR, the total market for the visual arts in Denmark thus amounts to 111–​116 million EUR per year.

Conclusions The ability of visual artists to pursue their professions while maintaining a reasonable standard of living, i.e. their opportunities to live from their art, largely depends on the size of the market. This chapter has shown that the size of the market for first-​time sale of artworks made by living Danish artists is around 60–​65 million EUR, which is about 55 percent of the total market for the visual arts in Denmark. To my best knowledge, a similar mapping has never been conducted before. Compared to former mappings of the creative industries, this study has focused on the art market and its development. Main findings showed that Danish living artists get about two-​thirds of the total turnover generated from first-​time sales of artworks. Moreover, during the past 20 years, the private market increased, while the public market stagnated. Finally, the competition by deceased national artists and by foreign living and deceased artists is rather important, as the market of Danish living artists accounts for just

136  Trine Bille about 55 percent of the total market for the visual arts. While this chapter is based on the art market in Denmark, results may not be different in other countries. Mapping the art market can be quite costly, as it implies a heavy data collection. However, this chapter has shown to national art market scholars that it may be done in a rather viable way. By collecting information on the public purchase of visual art (demand-​side), the sales from galleries and art dealers (supply-​side), as well as surveying artists on the distribution of their income from artworks on sale channels and customers (public and private), an estimate of the market for first-​time sale of works of art by national artists can be managed. Obtained results can be of great interest to artists, other market players and policy makers, as it gives information on the composition and development of the art market, in particular on the artists’ share of this market, as well as on the importance of the public and private sectors of the market.

Notes 1 According to VISDA (the colleting society for visual rights in Denmark), living Danish artists received in total 0.3 million EUR in droit de suite in 2016. 2 A major issue about the art market is the black market (see e.g. Alacovska & Bille, 2020). In this chapter, information from the demand-​side was used to assess the size of the art market. Artists were not asked to state their income and turnover from art, but only how their turnover is divided between different buyers, and thereby the risk of artists not reporting their sales on the black market was minimised. 3 Notice that information from the VAT-registers is not useful in this case, as there are limited VAT levied on first-time sale of art, and the percentage varies according to different rules. 4 The original figures are in DKK; the following exchange rate has been used:  1 EUR = 7.5 DKK (base 2016). 5 In total, art museums purchased artworks for 10  million EUR. Of this amount, 3 million EUR was spent on works by living Danish visual artists. Works by living foreign visual artists were purchased for about 1.3 million EUR, and the remaining 5  million EUR were spent on works by deceased visual artists. To complicate matters further, the museums receive private and public funding to facilitate the purchase of new artworks. To avoid double counting, these funds were not included in the museums’ purchase figures, as they were already accounted for under private foundations and the state. Therefore, the amount spent by Danish art museums for the acquisition of artworks by living Danish artists might look rather minor.

References Abbing, H. (2002). Why Are Artists Poor. The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Alacovska, A. & Bille, T. (2020). A heterodox re-​reading of creative work: the diverse economies of Danish visual artists. Work, Employment and Society.

Mapping the art market in Denmark  137 Alper, N. & Wassall, G.H. (2006). Artists’ careers and their labor markets. In V.A. Ginsburgh & D. Throsby (Eds.), Handbook of the Economics of the Arts and Culture (pp. 813–​64). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. Amez, L., Lazzaro, E., Mauri, C.A., Vlegels, J., & Ysebaert, W. (2017). The Cultural & Creative Sectors in the Brussels-​Capital Region. Brussels:  Government of the Brussels-​Capital Region. Ashenfelter, O. & Graddy, K. (2006). Art auctions. In:  V.A. Ginsburgh & D. Throsby (Eds.), Handbook of the Economics of the Arts and Culture (pp. 909–​46). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, North Holland. Ashenfelter, O. & Graddy, K. (2021). Art auctions. In R. Towse & T.N. Hernández (Eds.), Handbook of Cultural Economics (3rd ed., pp. 19–​28). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Baldin, A. & Bille, T. (2020). Who is an artist? Heterogeneity and professionalism among visual artists. Journal of Cultural Economics. Bille, T. & Olsen, F. (2018). Billedkunstens økonomiske rum  –​Markedets samlede størrelse. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School. Bille, T., Løyland, K., & Holm, A. (2017). Work for passion? –​Labor supply of artists. KYKLOS, 70 (3), 347–​80. Bille, T., Alacovska, A., Baldin, A., Horndrup, S.N., & Mikuta, R.H. (2018). Billedkunstens økonomiske rum  –​Danske billedkunstneres økonomiske levevilkår. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School. Bille Hansen, T., Ibsen, C.P., & Nielsen, M.B. (1998). Billedkunstens økonomiske rum –​ Markedets samlede størrelse. Copenhagen: AKF Forlaget. Casacuberta, C. & Gandelman, N. (2012). Multiple job holding:  the artist’s labor supply approach. Applied Economics, 44 (3), 323–​37. Di Caro, P., Di Gaetano, L. & Mazza, I. (2020). Intermediaries. In R. Towse & T.N. Hernández (Eds.), Handbook of Cultural Economics (3rd ed., pp. 304–​310). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Higgs, P.L., Cunningham, S.D. & Bakshi, H. (2008). Beyond the Creative Industries: Mapping the Creative Economy in the United Kingdom. London: NESTA. Menger, P.M. (2006). Artistic labor markets: contingent work, excess supply and occupational risk management. In V.A. Ginsburgh & D. Throsby (Eds.), Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture (pp. 765–​811). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science. Rosen, S. (1981). The economics of superstars. American Economic Review, 71 (5), 845–​58. Throsby, D. (1994). A work-​preference model of artist behaviour. In A. Peacock & I. Rizzo (Eds.), Cultural Economics and Cultural Policies (pp. 69–​ 80). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Throsby, D. & Petetskaya, K. (2017). Making Art Work:  An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia. Strawberry Hills, NSW:  Australia Council for the Arts. Velthuis, O. (2020). Art dealers. In R. Towse & T.N. Hernández (Eds.), Handbook of Cultural Economics (3rd ed., pp. 29–​37). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

138  Trine Bille Appendix 10.1 Data sources Source/​s

Population/​Responses

Demand side. Purchases from: The state Municipalities Regions Art museums Art clubs Private foundations Private business Private consumers Foreign buyers (export)

Official state accounts Own survey Interviews with managers Own survey Own survey Homepages, interviews with managers + Statistics Denmark Survey of artists Survey of artists Survey of artists

Supply side. Sales from: Direct from artists themselves Galleries and art dealers Artists’ associations Exhibition halls Main auction houses Artists’ homepages

Survey of artists Statistics Denmark Own survey Interviews with managers Interviews with managers Survey of artists

98/​74 7/​7 38/​26 513/​284 8/​8 3028/​1000 3028/​1000 3028/​1000 3028/​1000 250/​250 23/​12 16/​16 2/​2 3028/​1000

Appendix 10.2 The representativeness of the research sample (survey to artists) Population Research (N = sample 3028) (n = 1000)

Test

Gender (Male) Average age Received grants Arts education Member of Artists’ Society Retired

46% 51 24% 38% 20% 27%

χ 2 = 5.63; d.f=1; p-value=0.017

Income groups

Population (N = 3028)

Research sample (n = 1,000)

500,000 DKK Total

20% 58% 17% 5% 100%

17% 59% 18% 6% 100%

d χ 2 test: = χ 2 6.21; d.f=3; p-​value=0.101.

42% 53 25% 36% 21% 28%

χ 2 = 0.48; d.f=1; p-value=0.48 χ 2 = 1.51; d.f=1; p-value=0.22 χ 2 = 0.56; d.f=1; p-value=0.45 χ 2 = 0.45; d.f=1; p-value=0.50

Part 3

The formation and development of new markets

11  Information efficiency in art markets past and present Darius A. Spieth

Introduction The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), a brainchild of Nobel laureate Eugene F.  Fama, is considered one of the cornerstones of modern financial theory. Although it was often criticised by behavioural economists, the EMH has received ‘significant support over decades of elaborate and rigorous testing’ (Keane, 1980). However, Fama did not invent the theory of efficient markets, which quickly rebalance as new information becomes available—​ credit for that goes to the nineteenth-​ century financial economist Jules Regnault (Goetzmann, 2016, pp. 277–​279)—​but he contributed the hypothesis that such efficiency exists in three forms: weak, semi-​strong and strong. These three ‘flavours’ depend on different assumptions on how quickly and comprehensively financial markets absorb information to recalibrate the prices for securities. But how about art markets? How good are art markets at integrating available information into their price structures? Are art markets efficient markets? How has their efficiency varied over time? In order to sort out these issues, we will study data sets from four centuries that permit comparisons between what was known and what could have been known about art auction results from geographically remote and foreign locations. For the period prior to the twentieth century, the focus will be on Paris and Parisian contacts with Holland, Flanders, England and Germany. For the eighteenth century, we will look at François Joullain’s Repertory of Painting (Joullain, 1783) and Variation of Prices Concerning Painting (Joullain, 1786), the first French attempt to compile historical auction price data to establish current benchmarks, and Jean-​Baptiste-​Pierre Lebrun’s Gallery of Flemish, Dutch, and German Painters (Lebrun, 1792–​1796, vol. 2, pp.  65, 74), which introduced the idea of art markets as international information networks; for the nineteenth century, Georges Duplessis’ repertory of art sales between 1611 and 1800 will be analysed in detail (Duplessis, 1874); for the twentieth century, we will refer to the volumes by Frits Lugt (Lugt, 1938–​1987) of auctions between 1600 and 1925, and the updated Brill online database (Lugt, 2006) derived from it. The different forms of the EMH allow one not only to develop a new perspective

142  Darius A. Spieth on the backward-​looking nature of data and information prevalent in art markets, but also to gain a better understanding of both the potential and the limitations inherent in applying financial concepts to art assets. In the conclusion, we will compare the older, ‘slow techniques’ of art markets for acquiring and integrating pricing knowledge with those of the digital age, in particular, the use of subscription-​only database services, such as Artprice. com or Artnet.com, the alert functions of which represent a major leap forward in art market information efficiency.

The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH)—​its potential and its limitations for understanding art markets In 1970, Eugene F. Fama published an article in the Journal of Finance entitled ‘Efficient capital markets:  a review of theory and empirical work’, which evolved into the EMH (Fama, 1970). In its weak form, the EMH affirms that markets and price development for securities are unpredictable and follow a ‘random walk’. Thus, it is not possible to predict future developments from observing and analysing the historical data, especially price fluctuations, of an asset. However, as events happen and new, economically relevant information becomes available, the ramifications of these events will be reflected in the formation of prices. The weak form of the EMH seems to be a stranger to art markets, where historical information on prices attained at auction is accepted as the only true benchmark for determining current market values of artworks. However, who could not imagine a scenario where, for instance, the announcement of a major retrospective of an artist by an important museum affects that artist’s price levels? Financial markets and their pricing models tick differently. The explicitly forward-​looking Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is a good example because it relies on assumptions about expected market returns, which are compared with the risk–​ return profile of the security to be evaluated. Auction houses, on the other hand, routinely consult databases with past auction results to establish their estimates for comparable objects (size, period in artist’s life, subject matter, etc.) in upcoming sales. Only at the very top end of the market do these businesses actively survey their client base and their clients’ financial abilities to adjust estimates for individual lots upward or downward. In doing so, they integrate, to some degree, expectations about the present and future into the price formation process. Most dealers, too, will look at the same historical results gleaned from the same art auction databases (or, previously, auction record yearbooks) as the auction houses themselves. Similarly, these prices are cited regularly in negotiations between buyers and sellers, who themselves are avid users of the same sources. In this information monoculture, historical auction house data have become a self-​fulfilling prophecy for more than three centuries in art markets. The semi-​strong form of the EMH looks at the problem from a slightly different perspective. It maintains that stock prices respond ‘instantaneously and in an unbiased manner’ to new public information, as it becomes available

Information efficiency in art markets  143 (Keane, 1980, pp. 6–​7, 12–​13). Because of the immediacy of the process, no gains can be made from trading strategies based on the release of new information; similarly, neither fundamental nor technical analyses hold the promise of above-​market gains. (Fundamental analysis looks at the value of the underlying assets, e.g. land, machinery, or brand name recognition of a company, to determine whether its stock is over-​or underrated in the market; technical analysis looks at charts—​and therefore at historical data—​for the same purpose.) This form of the EMH again seems to further underscore the deep-​ seated differences between financial and art markets. Unlike the algorithms that run high-​ frequency trading (HFT) programs, which execute buying and selling orders for financial securities in nanoseconds (one-​billionth, or 1 /​1,000,000,000, of a second), art markets, despite significant improvements in information efficiency since the beginning of the twenty-​first century, continue to move on a geological time scale. A sales order for an important artwork filed today will more likely than not take several weeks or months to be executed, as the buyer has to wait for inclusion of the lot, for instance, in a prestigious Spring or Fall auction of a major auction house. Art prices are far from ‘simultaneous’ or ‘instantaneous’ even in the best of all cases. The strong form of the EMH, finally, affirms that all information, public and private, is reflected in stock prices. The emphasis here is on the word private, since the definition now implicitly includes trading strategies that are based on illicit insider information. At least since the release of the 1987, movie Wall Street:  Money Never Sleeps, featuring Michael Douglas as the rogue stock dealer Gordon Gekko, the general public is aware that insider trading in financial markets is a criminal offense. The situation could not be more different in art markets. Not only is insider information in all art markets legal, but the buyer with the best ‘insider information’ is the unsung hero of the auction floor, whose connoisseurship skills are superior to everybody else’s. In fact, almost all art buyers (and some sellers, too) believe they have special information—​even if it consists only of a ‘great eye’—​that nobody else has. Everybody is an ‘inside trader’ to a lesser or smaller degree. Sometimes, though, this insider information is more explicit. When Pierre Rosenberg, a Louvre curator who would go on to become the museum’s director and a legendary global authority on seventeenth-​century painter Nicolas Poussin, was reported in the late 1980s to have deliberately refused an authentication of Poussin’s The Holy Family on the Steps to devalue the painting, the ensuing controversy created nothing more than a bemused raising of eyebrows in the press (Crex, 1998). The canvas ended up being sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art rather than going to the Louvre.

Early efficiency milestones of art markets (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) The EMH seems to hold at first little relevance for art markets, yet it provides a useful conceptual framework for discussing a crucial but consistently overlooked

144  Darius A. Spieth element of their mechanism, which is the dynamics between time and information. The speed of information transmission was of great importance to participants since the inception of modern art markets. Catherine the Great, one of greatest collectors of the eighteenth century, spent fortunes to retain the services of Enlightenment thinkers Denis Diderot and Friedrich Melchior Grimm to keep her informed, by mail, about the latest events in the remote Parisian art market and to act in a timely fashion whenever opportunities for outstanding acquisitions presented themselves (Seznec & Adhéma, 1957; Grimm, 1877–​1882; Massie, 2011, pp. 520–​523). William Buchanan, a British picture dealer from the turn of the nineteenth century, who bought art in bulk in Revolutionary Paris and wrote about it in his Memoirs of Painting, described himself as a person under perpetual time pressure for fear of missing out on the action. The acquisition of the collection of the Duke of Orléans turned out to be a particularly dramatic act in this respect. There was ‘not a moment to be lost’ to secure the Dutch and Flemish pictures from this collection for England. ‘I lost no time availing myself of this permission’ to take possession of the pictures. ‘I had them all privately in the night put on board a barge, which was in readiness, and sent by Seine to Le Havre; from whence they were immediately forwarded to England’ (Buchanan, 1824). In the early 1880s, the art critic Paul Eudel described in his vision of a fictional art auction of the future a telegraph Morse machine, used to broadcast sales results internationally and in real time, before such technology had even been invented (Eudel, 1885; Wendt, 1982, p. 57). Again, the speed at which price information was disseminated stood at the heart of Eudel’s art market science fiction. For better or worse, the lifeblood of art market information is past auction results. The first ever attempt to compile retrospective art auction data in a long-​range survey was undertaken by the Dutch art dealer Gerard Hoet the Younger in 1752. His Catalogue of the Lists of Names of Paintings consists of chronologically arranged reprints of Dutch auction catalogues published between 1684 and 1750 (Hoet, 1752). Hoet noted the prices attained for each lot and indexed the artists covered, which made the Catalogue, for all intents and purposes, a price guide. Still, it remained a local affair, since all of the sales documented took place in Holland, mostly in Amsterdam. In 1751, the painter Johan van Gool published a dictionary of Dutch painters and draftsmen, flavoured with some price information and sporadic mentions of sales results abroad, such as, for example in England (Gool, 1751–​1752, p. 70). Since the overwhelming majority of catalogued auctions, by this point, had taken place in The Netherlands, one cannot blame Hoet or van Gool for dismissing information from outside their own backyard. Although there is scattered archival evidence for uncatalogued sales taking place in Italy as early as 1495, no developed, regular art auction market existed outside Holland before the middle of the eighteenth century (Fusco & Corti, 2006, pp. 166–​167, 361–​362). With François-​Charles Joullain, an art dealer who had organised close to 200 auctions in pre-​Revolutionary France, the centre of updating and

Information efficiency in art markets  145 expanding auction record compilations moved to Paris. Joullain was much more explicit than his Dutch precursors in wanting to provide benchmarks for other dealers and collectors active in the market. His compendium of past auction records exists in two editions, the first, from 1783, is the Repertory of Paintings, Drawings and Prints; the second, from 1786, is entitled Variation of Prices Concerning Paintings and was published together with a theoretical treatise, The Reflections on the Commerce in Curiosities and on Art Sales in General (Joullain, 1783, 1786). Both handbooks selectively cover painting lots from the Parisian auction block of the preceding three decades, but the 1786 edition is a condensed version of that of 1783 and puts a greater emphasis on the higher end of the market. One of the shortcomings of Joullain’s books, again, was that his data remained limited to the Parisian market; one will search in vain in his publications for information about what happened elsewhere in Europe. Joullain’s contemporary, Jean-​Baptiste-​Pierre Lebrun, was the first chronicler with a truly international vision of art prices and art markets. Lebrun was a dealer, auction organiser, and an expert-​ advisor to the emerging Louvre museum, who travelled a lot outside of France, especially in Holland, Flanders and England (Spieth, 2018). At the peak of the most radical phase of the French Revolution, Robespierre’s Rule of Terror in 1792, he published the first two volumes of his Gallery of Flemish, Dutch, and German Painters; a shorter addendum was added as a third volume in 1796 (Lebrun, 1792–​ 1796). Based on research and data gathered over the preceding two decades, the Gallery was an illustrated dictionary of northern European painters and their works, written primarily for a French audience. Similar dictionaries had existed before; one can cite van Gool’s volumes or the first French dictionary of Dutch artists by Jean-​Baptiste Descamps from 1753 (Descamps, 1753). Lebrun’s Gallery, however, was a novelty on three accounts: its primary criteria for inclusion was the relevance of an artist in the market; each entry contained one or multiple engravings after paintings that had passed previously through the author’s business; most entries concluded with an analysis of the artist’s standing in the market, including the listing of sample prices from Paris and abroad. Of the roughly 170 artists thus covered and illustrated, 156 entries (about 93%) had typical prices or price ranges provided with their biographical essays. Out of this number, 54 entries (35%) mention international prices from outside France. Occasionally, these quotes are even expressed in foreign currencies, such as British guineas or Dutch guilders (florins). Given the taste for Dutch ‘Golden Age’ artists from the seventeenth century, not surprisingly, foreign benchmark prices from Holland, claiming 60% of the international quotes, were relatively common. Roughly, 30% of international prices came from the London market, while Flanders, Germany and Russia each appeared in 9% of the entries with international transactions. In general, the more expensive the art of a given painter and the more prestigious his or her name, the greater the frequency of international benchmarks. The global outlook of Lebrun’s undertaking was evident in statements such as

146  Darius A. Spieth pictures [by Jan van de Cappelle] sell for between seven and eight hundred florins in Holland; if they came up for sale in Paris, they would not make half the price, given that the artist is less well known [in the French market]. Elsewhere, Lebrun wrote that the benchmark of ‘200 guineas [5250 livres] attained in London’ for a Jan Lingelbach port scene, ‘proved right my estimate of 6,000 livres for a pair [of Lingelbach’s peasant subjects] from the de Boisset sale in Paris’ (Lebrun, 1792–​1796). The pair was nevertheless hammered down for a mere 2650 livres. Such affirmations demonstrate the intention to compare art market centres across geographical distances and to show variations in price, which may offer arbitrage opportunities (Spieth, 2018). Lebrun not only made the first attempt to provide an international, retrospective survey of art market prices, but also provided the astute reader—​mostly art collectors, dealers, artists and bibliophiles—​with a weighted geographical survey of art market centres in the late nineteenth century. Both Joullain and Lebrun contented themselves with subjective sampling techniques and neither made any claims for the comprehensiveness of their price surveys. This final step was left to Georges Duplessis, who in 1874 published The Sales of Pictures, Drawings, Prints and Art Objects in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century, 1611–​1800 (Duplessis, 1874). Duplessis was a curator in the department for graphic art at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where a large, historical collection of sales catalogues was kept, which put him in an ideal position to accomplish this job. In the preface of his book, he said to have also relied upon the works of Hoet, Hoet’s successor Terwesten, and Charles Blanc, in addition to unidentified private Parisian collections of past auction catalogues; however, he did not mention Joullain or Lebrun. One can compare Duplessis’ efforts with those undertaken by Frits Lugt in the twentieth century (Lugt 1938–​1987), whose four-​volume Repertory of Sales Catalogues, 1600–​1925, has been converted and maintained as a digital database by Brill since 2006. Lugt, too, was an art dealer. He had a Dutch background, but was operating from Paris. His Repertory is generally considered a complete survey of extant auction catalogues, one that is comprehensive and, unlike Joullain’s, free from local biases. If we can think of the international (non-​French) catalogues to which Duplessis had access as a proxy for the foreign catalogues circulating in eighteenth-​century Paris, and if we assume that Lugt described a ‘complete set’ (100%) of all extant catalogues, we can extrapolate interesting observations about the evolution of market efficiency and the internationalisation of art markets over the course of the eighteenth century. Table 11.1 shows the rate of international (non-​French) catalogues identified in either Duplessis’ or Lugt’s set. The circumstance that the share of non-​French catalogues in circulation during the first quarter of the eighteenth century was exceedingly high can be explained by the fact that an overwhelming number of identifiable auction catalogues known from this period were Dutch.

Information efficiency in art markets  147 Table 11.1 Share of international (non-​ French) catalogues known to Lugt and Duplessis in %

1st quarter 18th century 2nd quarter 18th century 3rd quarter 18th century 4th quarter 18th century

Share of internatl. (non-​French)

Share of internatl. (non-​French)

Catalogues in Lugt (1938–​1987, 2006)

Catalogues in Duplessis (1874)

99.20% 91.20% 79.50% 76.10%

98.50% 75.20% 53.80% 43.00%

Table 11.2 Share of international (non-​French) catalogues, differentiated by place of issue, known to Duplessis, as % of Lugt

1st quarter 18th century 2nd quarter 18th century 3rd quarter 18th century 4th quarter 18th century

% Paris catalogues known to Duplessis

% Dutch % Flemish catalogues catalogues known known to to Duplessis Duplessis

% London catalogues known to Duplessis

% German catalogues known to Duplessis

50%

40%

33.33%

0.62%

0%

75%

35.55%

25.53%

4.63%

3.70%

70.30%

41.25%

36.18%

1.39%

6.67%

73.50%

33.35%

21.58%

11.54%

11.64%

By the second half of the century, the importance of Dutch catalogues sharply decreased, while Paris and London rose to claim their places as international art market centres. The information efficiency of the Parisian art market is expressed by the differential between Duplessis and Lugt. What is apparent from Duplessis’ sample is that a relatively large part of internationally issued catalogues were ignored in the French capital. But which catalogues and auction results from abroad were likely to be known and which foreign information was more likely to go unnoticed? Table 11.2 breaks down the percentage of catalogues accessible to Duplessis as a percentage of Lugt’s ‘complete set’. Duplessis’ ‘knowledge rate’ was naturally higher for French catalogues, where it hovered, for most of the century, between 70% and 75% of all catalogues issued in Paris. Given the importance of Netherlandish Golden Age art in eighteenth-​ century art markets, information efficiency stood at a fairly high rate of about a third of all Dutch catalogues and between a quarter to a third of all Flemish catalogues. These two ‘knowledge rates’ about markets in the northern and southern Low Countries showed a remarkable consistency over

148  Darius A. Spieth time. The drop-​off in the last quarter of the century, reflecting a loss in information efficiency by about one-​third, can be explained by the political turmoil of the French Revolution and its toll on economic and transportation infrastructures. The true surprise is with catalogues issued in London and in Germany; these were hardly known in Paris during the first three quarters of the eighteenth century, but arrived in greater numbers by the 1780s, before their supply was dwindling again as a consequence of the French Revolution. With the exception of Lebrun, who was keenly aware of the importance of the London market by the 1780s, Parisian market makers seem to have generally scorned information about English auctions. Despite the language barrier, this is a surprising finding, since London was a bigger and better capitalized art market than Paris—​arguably, the foremost in the world by the end of the eighteenth century. By the last quarter of the century, more artworks were sold in London than in Paris, and they often fetched higher prices across the channel. Better information (more readily available British catalogues in Paris) would have alerted more French market makers to the arbitrage opportunities in the British market, which some more intrepid dealers, such as Lebrun and Buchanan, only began to explore by about the time of the French Revolution. But for the most part, the lack of information efficiency between the Paris and the London market—​compounded, no doubt, by the real challenges and dangers of shipping art or catalogues across the channel—​thus had a far-​reaching impact on how the genesis of historical art markets evolved at this crucial juncture. On another level, the above findings are quite intuitive for an analogue world: the closer markets are geographically, linguistically and culturally interlinked, the better the exchanges and hence the information efficiency.

Later efficiency milestones of art markets (turn of the twenty-​first century) The turn of the twenty-​first century and the concurrent digital revolution will be remembered as another milestone in the improvement of art market information efficiency, comparable in magnitude only to the 1780s. Phonebook-​size yearbooks of auction prices, such as Enrique Mayer’s publication (established in 1962), were replaced with pay-​per-​view or subscription-​based, proprietary databases, accessible via internet. Among the best-​known providers of such services are Artprice.com, Artnet.com, Mutualart.com and Invaluable.com. Subscribers to these databases were offered an added and hitherto unprecedented service: the ability to establish and edit ‘search portfolios’ of artists, which automatically trigger e-​mail alerts for lots by a given artist in upcoming auction. This capacity was revolutionary in terms of enhancing the information efficiency of art markets because the alerts freed art buyers from the (practically impossible) undertaking of subscribing to all auction catalogues issued in the world. It also drastically curtailed the volume of print media information to be digested in order to find one’s artworks of choice.

Information efficiency in art markets  149 Beginning in the early 2000s, the democratisation effect of timely access to future art sales information for a vastly enlarged group of global stakeholders took on truly epic dimensions, yet this information bonanza remained a largely underappreciated and undocumented event in the evolution of this field. Without diminishing the magnitude of this momentous change, one may rightly raise the question of the speed and quality of these ‘search portfolios’. To test their information efficiency, let us track a sample of ten artists and their price records over a three-​year period, between 2016 and 2018, and compare the completeness of the data provided by the two market leaders, Artprice.com and Artnet.com. Specifically, we will be looking at auction transactions that were recorded by both sites/​databases and calculate from these finds the ‘miss rate’ when a given transaction was listed by one site or the other, but not by both. The sample was drawn from a group of geographically diversified, twentieth-​century painters outside the media limelight of the markets, but who have regular (although not too many) transactions of clearly identifiable artworks and enjoy fairly established track records of market recognition. The results are somewhat sobering in that upwards of a quarter to a third of all listed transactions—​and in some cases a lot more—​were routinely missed by one of the two sites. Higher-​priced artists with regular transactions in globally active auctions houses, such as Sotheby’s or Christie’s, seem to fare generally better than artists with many smaller transactions, scattered across local businesses, as in the case of Luigi Veronesi. These statistics do not even account for the fact that notifications sometimes arrive only 24 hours before the sale. Such last-​minute notifications leave precious little time for Table 11.3 Percentage of transactions missed by either Artprice.com or Artnet.com for a sample portfolio of 10 twentieth-century painters, tracked over the period 2016–2018

Van Dongen, Kees (NL/​F) Montenegro, Roberto (MEX) Stella, Frank (USA) Berman, Eugene (RUS/​F/​USA) Kline, Franz (USA) Metzinger, Jean (F) Styka, Adam (PL/​F/​USA) Perahim, Jules (RO/​F) Delorme, Raphael (F) Veronesi, Luigi (I)

‘Miss rate’ (%) 2018, with number of observations

‘Miss rate’ (%) 2017, with number of observations

‘Miss rate’ Three-​ (%) 2016, year with average number of observations

24% (33) 50% (10) 29% (14) 13% (8) 50% (24) 21% (24) 38% (21) 50% (16) 0% (2) 71% (63)

26% (31) 13% (8) 18% (11) 38% (8) 15% (13) 57% (14) 41% (22) 36% (25) 50% (2) 61% (44)

22% (36) 13% (8) 35% (20) 33% (3) 19% (16) 26% (27) 40% (20) 38% (24) 100% (1) 69% (26) Average 10 artists:

24% 25% 27% 28% 28% 35% 40% 41% 50% 67% 36.50%

150  Darius A. Spieth potential buyers to make up their mind, register and bid for an object. Worse, some lots were recorded only after the sale had passed. A  major work by Raphael Delorme, for instance, was sold at an online auction of Sotheby’s in New York on 6 February 2018. It was bought by a Parisian dealer, who made it a centrepiece of the Biennale de Paris fair about a year and a half later, where it sold instantaneously. To the present day, the February 2018 transaction of Sotheby’s remains unlisted by either Artprice or Artnet, but was included by their competitor, Mutualart.com. One can assume that many more such examples exist.

Conclusions Applying the EMH provides us with tools to think about art markets and art price formation ‘outside the box’, in new and previously unexplored ways; it allows us to test our assumptions about the functioning of art markets and to revisit our presumed certainties. Art markets have been very international from the beginning of time, but, as shown above, the true onset of self-​ assertively globalised art markets was in the 1780s. While art markets cannot boast anywhere near the same degree of information efficiency as financial markets, they steadily gained in transparency since the eighteenth century—​ and at a vastly accelerated pace in the twenty-​first century in the aftermath of digitisation. Perhaps, the many remaining imperfections are a good thing for art markets and the people who bring them to life. Inefficiencies not only provide opportunities for profit and keep the gates open for making new discoveries, but also fuel the curiosity and envi, the pleasurable desire to own art, which are the psychological drivers for all luxury consumption, including art purchases. If art market information, even in the twenty-​first century, resembles in part a ‘random walk’, it is the element of chance encounters that continue to give art markets their vitality.

References Buchanan, W. (1824). Memoirs of Painting. 2 vols. London:  Ackermann, vol. 1. pp. 161–​163. Crex, A. (1998). L’Exemplaire histoire de l’attribution de La Madone à l’Escalier. Valeurs d’art, 52(2), 49–​56. Descamps, J. (1753). La Vie des Peintres Flamands, Allemands et Hollandois. 4 vols. Paris: Jambart. Duplessis, G. (1874). Les Ventes de tableaux, dessins, estampes et objets d’art au XVIIe et XVIIIe siecle, 1611–​1800. Paris: Rapilly. Eudel, P. (1885). L’Hôtel Drouot et la curiosité en 1883–​1884. Paris: Charpentier, p. 247. Fama, E. (1970). Efficient capital markets: a review of theory and empirical work. The Journal of Finance, 25(2), 383–​417. Fusco, L. & Corti, G. (2006). Lorenzo de’ Medici:  Collector and Antiquarian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Information efficiency in art markets  151 Goetzmann, W. (2016). Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gool, J. van (1751–​1752). De nieuwe schoubourg der Nederlantsche kunstschilders en schilderessen. 2 vols. The Hague: Van Gool. Grimm, F. (1877–​1882). Correspondance Littéraire. 16 vols. Paris: Garnier. Hoet the Younger, G. (1752). Catalogueus of Naamlyst van Schildreyn, met derzelves Pryzen. 2 vols. The Hague: Van Baalen. Joullain, F. (1783). Répertoire de Tableaux, Dessins et Estampes. Paris Demonville. Joullain, F. (1786). Variation de Prix Concernant les Tableaux. Metz and Paris: Demonville. Keane, S. (1980). The Efficient Market Hypothesis and the Implications for Financial Reporting. London: Gee & Co. Lebrun, J. (1792–​1796). Galerie des Peintres Flamands, Hollandois et Allemands. 3 vols. Paris and Amsterdam: Poignant. Lugt, F. (1938–​1987). Répertoire des Catalogueues de Ventes Publiques. 4 vols. The Hague: Nijhoff. Lugt, F. (2006). Art Sales Catalogues Online (ASCO). [Online] Available at: https://​ primarysources.brillonline.com/​browse/​art-​sales-​catalogueues-​online/.​ Massie, R. (2011). Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman. New York: Random  House. Seznec, J. & J. Adhéma (Eds). (1957). Diderot. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Spieth, D. (2018). Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Wendt, L. (1982). The Wall Street Journal:  The Story of Dow Jones & the Nation’s Business Newspaper. Chicago: Rand McNally.

12  Bought-​in at English auction Sellers testing their estimates in a maturing market Elisabetta Lazzaro and Bénédicte Miyamoto

Introduction The secondary art market of late eighteenth-​ century London was fast becoming a major European hub and functioned with limited transparency—​ expected prices were inferable from the order of sale, but failure to sell a lot and buying it in would often be masked by ‘chandelier bidding’. This strategy remained largely confidential on a secondary market which lacked informational efficiency. Collectors in the eighteenth-​century British picture market relied on a network of suppliers, agents, auctioneers and dealers to value on demand, to confirm attributions and give advice on restorations. In turn, these professionals gained insight into their consumers’ visual preferences (Lippincott, 1983, pp. 103–​118; Pears, 1991; Stourton, 2014). These extended and personal exchanges were essential in a market of unstandardised goods, and the early modern markets systems had long relied on prolonged negotiations and sustained contacts to build trust. The auctions that appeared in Britain in the eighteenth century, however, were built for speed and they thrived on information asymmetry. The audience of sellers and buyers would have had little occasion to consult and confer. The estimate of the lot before sale by prospective bidders remained largely undisclosed and unaffected by the other bidders’ preferences or valuation prior to the opening of the bids. The sellers had personal reserve prices, representing the lower limit to their final acceptance of any successful bid, and their assessment of a fair market value (Smith, 1989). These reserve prices similarly remained undisclosed to the public, and the perusal of auction catalogues of the period reveal an inordinate amount of bought-​in lots, undisclosed to the auction audience. In this context of information asymmetry, what is the value of prices that were reached in bought-​in lots, and should we not consider them as much more than the evidence of annulled transactions or of sellers having misjudged the market demand? They can yield information on the sellers’ practice of reserve, flexibly reassessed during the sales. This chapter looks at how the practice of buying-​in at auctions enabled sellers to test the market, often repetitively across multiple sales, and were an added security for sellers in an information-​asymmetric market. Such a

Bought-in at English auction  153 market was already skewed towards the sellers. Indeed, London sale catalogues mostly appeared under a collectors’ name but were often stocked with dealers’ goods. These dealers sold for themselves or were standing-​in and lending their expertise to private sellers or even foreign dealers (Armstrong-​Totten, 2019; Miyamoto, 2014). Nowadays, even the relatively loosely regulated Anglo-​ Saxon auction practices (Lazzaro & Moureau, 2013) legally (or at least ethically) prevent sellers from bidding in the auction and ‘no auction house that values its reputation—​and the long run profits its reputation secures—​would systematically engage’ in fictitious bidding. On the other hand, ‘auctioneers do not reveal the reserve price, and they make it as difficult as they can for bidders to infer it’, to deter rings formation and hence price depression. In particular, auctioneers do not reveal bought-​in lots—​that is knock-​down items whose bids have not passed the reserve price—​except where required by law (Ashelfelter, 1989, pp.  25–​26). In fact, especially recognisable items that fail to sell are often considered ‘burned’, which would increase their risk of illiquidity, and corresponding time and transaction costs need to be put up when reauctioned, ultimately thus, with lower returns (Beggs & Graddy, 2008). The reserve price implies the option for the seller to withdraw from the process, like buyers (Smith, 1989), and sell at a further auction or private sale, although this option is bound to a fee on unsold items applied by auctioneers often through ‘a percentage of the reserve price set by the seller, which obviously gives the seller an incentive to keep the reserve price low’ (Ashelfelter, 1989, p.  27). While current art auctions work with fixed reserve prices, this is not the norm in other auctions (e.g. livestock), where sellers can set this price during the auction, implying a stronger power of sellers with respect to bidders (Smith, 1989). In eighteenth-​century London, fictitious bidding was common practise, however. The Auction Duty Act of 1777, which levied a duty on all picture sales by auction, also provided the sellers with added securities. It upheld and enshrined as a fair practice the seller’s recourse to ‘becoming Purchaser by means of his own bidding’ of his own lots at auction, or by having someone bid on his behalf, provided that ‘notice be given to the Auctioneer before such bidding’ (17.Geo.3.c.50). This legal system of reserve lessened the chances of catastrophic sales results for the seller, and thereby increased the desirability of sale by auction for sellers. The possibility of bidding for your own lot during the auction meant that the seller could exercise flexibility. He could revise and adapt his private estimate of a reserve price according to the developing pattern of the bids. This meant that in effect, a reserve price did not need to be fixed in advance with the auctioneer, and that the seller could ensure that when a lot failed to reach this flexible reserve, a transaction would not occur since the seller would intervene in the process of the sale. This added security made legal a practice nowadays termed ‘phantom bidding’ or ‘flexible reserve price’ (Bag, Dinlersoz & Wang, 2000). This chapter sheds light on the mechanisms that saw lots being repetitively bought-​in by a set of established dealers in eighteenth-​century London. What

154  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Bénédicte Miyamoto is at stake is more than failed prices and information asymmetry. The study of a painting’s repeated failures to sell can arguably denote lower quality and highlight the audience’s consistent rejection of paintings unfit for the auction slots reserved for paintings of higher quality. And our analysis does indeed show that the audience could return bids that mark the pictures as ‘burned’. But, more crucially, the repetitive practice by experienced dealers hints at sellers’ practice of reserve to test the market in agreement with the auctioneer. By putting up lots in desirable segments of the sale and therefore staging high prices, dealers could hope to use the auction arena to market test consumers’ evaluation of attributed paintings sold in the same time slots. Our case study highlights these professionals’ strategic practices by tracing the circuit—​from stock to eventual transaction—​of a set of pictures repeatedly unsuccessful at sales and bought-​in by their dealer between 1780 and 1820. The majority of these paintings have a short waiting period between being bought-​in and being put up for sale again of between three months to two years. We especially focus our analysis on two paintings, for which we could record the highest number of repeated auctions within our data set, in order to track and compare particular patterns.

The increasing professionalisation of the field Since Michael North and David Ormrod’s Art Markets in Europe 1400–​ 1800 two decades ago, the study of the emergence of art markets has shifted the question from the binary dynamic of consumer demand and artistic offer to the question of the art market’s ‘potential for innovation’ (North & Ormrod, 1998, p. 2). In pursuing the question of the ‘emergence of art markets’, art market studies have raised capital questions about the chronology and propitiousness of art market stages. These questions were meant specifically to uncover the functioning of an anonymous art market and have in fact highlighted the role of the auctioneers, dealers and sellers themselves—​rather than external circumstances—​in redefining the professional field. Researchers of the art market now frame consumer demand and economic capacity as permissive, rather than effective factors (Goldthwaite, 1993). They construe legal changes mainly as records after the fact that authenticate or sanction a change rather than create it. The Act of 1777 saw auctioneers having to take a licence to practice and provide ‘ad valorem’ duties on goods sold (Ohashi, 2008). This was more of an endorsement of the profession than a rebuke since it legalised auctioneer–​dealer agreements over reserves and recognised that auctioneers were not simply ‘bid takers’, but held lucrative new position as ‘market makers’ (Lacetera et  al., 2016, p. 196). The London art market was hampered by the time-​consuming process of supplies in time of war blockades and the upsets of Napoleonic wars until 1815 (Bayer & Page, 2016). But its strong merchant ethos which protected

Bought-in at English auction  155 sellers, and its consumers’ appetite established it as a new hub within the crowded field of European art markets around the 1780s to become dominant in Europe by the 1850s (Avery-​Quash & Huemer, 2019; Fletcher & Helmreich, 2011). The auctioneers’ master copies of the sale catalogues hold clues to explain the attractiveness of the British market. Their annotations on prices, sellers and buyers, unveil a tightly knit social network, and a public event that had a decidedly well-​organised private agenda. Pictures were socially constructed to have ‘a deliberated quality’ but buyers and sellers lacked institutional quality control and the regulation process of other trades (Minard, 2011). The information garnered in the arena of the secondary market, which pitted the art world actors against one another in the course of public bidding, was therefore doubly precious. Auctions of the type that were occurring in England at that time were already complex environments. They were directed according to ascending bids, during which the bidders sequentially offered higher prices until one bidder remained, at which point the auctioneer attributed the property to that bidder with a fall of the hammer that sanctioned the final price as the picture’s public market value. In these English auctions, auctioneers and sellers relied on and expected a ‘morning effect’ in the bids, a profit-​maximising practice in the order of sales that triggered overbidding and fever bidding behaviours from placing lots in an ascending estimate value (Gandal, 1997; Scorcu & Picci, 2003). Assessing the level of market maturity and weighing up the information transparency was ultimately ‘the role of art dealers as commercial and cultural mediators’ (Lyna, 2016, p.  105). Agreeing upon which segment of the sale a picture would be sold was a crucial part of the auctioneer–​seller pre-​sale discussions, during which the sellers’ reserve price and private estimate was matched to the auctioneers’ expertise over the prices to expect during the course of the auction. Legalising agreed-​upon buying-​ in strategies reinforced the pre-​sale partnership between professional sellers and auctioneers. Sales were routinely fleshed out by dealers’ stock, as seen in the caricature published by the print-​seller Matthew Darly in 1773, listing the goods of a bankrupt mixed with, ‘likewise to be sold, a quantity of articles in Mr. Phillips (the auctioneer)’s way’. If this was not apparent in print in the catalogues, which created information asymmetry, the undisclosed insertions of dealers’ lots in the sales were often in customers’ interests, being frequently of higher overall quality than the collection of which the sale was named. By 1770, the second-​hand market of household furniture and luxury goods had actually become very popular with the wealthy classes, and London auction goers were also familiar with catalogue descriptions and with the fact that the value of paintings routinely increased through the sale (Miyamoto, 2016). Shopping for Londoners was an ‘application of skills as much as it was fraught with the hazards of manipulation’ (Walsh, 1995). They had gradually internalised the mental accounting scheme that was needed to unpack

156  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Bénédicte Miyamoto paintings into desirable characteristics as taught by auction catalogues, such as number of figures, provenance, genre, conservation and composition. The information asymmetry in auction also—​and more consequentially—​ encompassed the secrecy deployed around sellers. Recent research tends to show that the auction worked as the institution that would enable enough secrecy amongst all players for a fair public sale (Munck & Lyna, 2015). As thus, bought-​in prices can be analysed as something more than failed prices, or failed negotiations.

Figure 12.1 E.T., ‘To be sold to the best bidder’, 1773. [773.03.15.01] Lewis Walpole Library. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Bought-in at English auction  157

Building evidence on bought-​in lots, estimates of reserves and information The regular sales of around 80 lots per day rarely derived from a single proprietor. In a sample of seven sales per year at Christie’s from 1789 to 1800 that we selected from the Getty Provenance Index® Databases,1 the sales were on average made up of more than 70% by insertions from undeclared sellers: collectors, casual sellers and a long list of dealers whose names did not appear on the front page (Miyamoto, 2019). The transcribing teams of the Getty Provenance Index® Databases used for this case study were able to identify bought-​in lots in master catalogues from the differentiated records of such transactions, which saw the final bid prices being accounted for outside of the £.s d ledger columns—​which ultimately intimates that the transaction was null and void of duties. It is important to note that all of the Getty Provenance Index® database price entries for our period correspond to the transcription from the original pre-​decimal documents, such as ‘sold, 12.12 pounds’ or ‘bought-​in, 7 ½ Guineas’, with 21 shillings to the guinea and 20 shillings to the pound. All prices in our tables and figures are expressed in shillings only; all prices in our text are expressed in the original pre-​decimal £.s d. system followed by the equivalent shillings-​only sum. Our case study traces a circuit—​from dealer stock to clearance—​of a set of pictures unsuccessful at sales. Our data set is made up of 85 paintings traced being put up for sale again at auction after being bought-​in previously (sometimes up to 5 times), between 1780 and 1820. This database only includes definitely traceable pictures, which were sold at the established auction houses of Phillip’s, Coxe’s, Foster’s and Christie’s by the seasoned dealers Woodburn, Harris, Davies, Colnaghi and Birch. The majority of these paintings have a short waiting period between being bought-​in and being put up for sale again of between three months to two years. Each of the scales of grey lines on Figure 12.2 corresponds to a painting going through one to more buying-​in at auction. A smoothed black and bold trend line sums up the average pattern of decreasing bidding results reached at successive auctions. This shows that it was extremely rare for a painting to fare better at auction after having failed to reach its reserve price and having been bought-​in—​a conclusion that proved more dramatically true for higher quality pictures, such as a Nativity by Murillo, traceable to a Spanish Convent via a Paris auction sale, proposed for sale by Mr. Strubing via Colnaghi, which in 1794 was bought in as it failed to attract bids beyond £190, after being previously bought in at £399 at Christie’s in 1791. The paintings in Figure 12.2 were often presented first time round with a substantial praising description and glittering provenance. These sale boosters were often toned down at subsequent auctions (the length of description decreases by nearly 30% on average). This is evidence of a mature market in which bidders (dealers and collectors alike) seem to have had a good level of vigilance and connoisseurship, and to have been able to spot returning paintings. The second evidence is that

158  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Bénédicte Miyamoto

Figure 12.2 Hammer price of bought-​in paintings at consecutive sales in London auction houses (1790–​1820).

the results at auction of mediocre paintings proved remarkably coherent and consistent. The result is not an average of some hits but more misses, but an overwhelming and consistent string of misses that are visible in the accumulation of downwards trajectories of grey lines in Figure 12.2. Time and, again, buying in a picture because the seller’s private estimate of the picture had not been reached by the bids did not prove rewarding, and hammer prices rarely climbed further at the next attempts at transactions. We further focused our analysis on two paintings, which we could identify as the object of at least five repeated auctions within our data set, in order to track particular patterns. They were, respectively, ‘Family in adoration of the virgin and child’ by the Italian Francesco Albani (1578–​1660), and ‘Niobe with her Children, a very capital and noble picture’ by the French Sébastien Bourdon (1616–​1671), both offered by dealer Paul Colnaghi (1751–​1833) at Christie’s during 1792–​1797 and 1791–​1800, respectively. Tables  12.1 and 12.2 display the main results. For each auction, we first considered the price at which both paintings were bought-​in until their last appearance on the auction circuit during our period (the Albani being finally sold, while the Bourdon remaining the bought-​in property of the dealer). We also measured the general performance of the auction by the total number of lots offered; the rate of sold over total number of lots offered; the overall turnover generated by sold lots; and the mean, median, minimum and maximum prices of, respectively, sold and bought-​in lots (and unknown lots, i.e. lots for which it is not certain whether they were actually sold or bought-​in). As measurements of a possible control exerted by Colnaghi or, instead, other sellers, we also included the number of lots offered by Colnaghi, the number of different sellers, and the number (and name) of lots offered by the seller offering the highest number of lots other than Colnaghi.

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Table 12.1 Repeated auctions of Albani’s Family in Adoration 1792–​1797 8/​2/​1793 (4999)

14/​6/​1794 (5225)

10/​2/​1797 (5530)

9/​12/​1797 (5677)

147 72 66.7%

140 99 99.0%

168 100 33.0%

168 82 54.9%

100* 84 91.7%

53% 42,640

77% 9,507

69% 6,233

59% 6,002

46% 9,806

870 231 50 19,110

96 63 11 640

189 94 8 2,205

130 100 10 546

124 84 2 630

788 525 47 6,090

140 140 140 140

232 84 10 3,990

272 157 35 1,281

280 268 105 480

189 189 189 189 33 15 11 (Cawthorne)

–​ –​ –​ –​ 2 4 86 (Kirkman)

15,767 15,750 33 31,500 6 24 15 (Christie)

–​ –​ –​ –​ 2 12 17 (Beauvais)

267 367 26 409 4 21 15 (Bryan)

Notes: Lugt numbers in parentheses. All prices are in shillings. (*) Sale price (previous were bought-​ins).

Bought-in at English auction  159

Albani's price (sale or bought-​in) Total no. of lots offered Rate sold/​total lots offered Albani's lot relative position in sequence (Albani's lot no./​total no. of auctioned lots Sales turnover Sale price: Mean Median Minimum Maximum Bought-​in price: Mean Median Minimum Maximum Sale or bought-​in? (unknown) price: Mean Median Minimum Maximum No. of lots offered by Colnaghi No. of different sellers No. of lots (and name) offered by dominant seller other than Colnaghi

10/​3/​1792 (4871)

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Bourdon's price (bought-​in) Total no. of lots offered Rate sold/​total lots offered Bourdon's lot relative position in sequence (Bourdon's lot no./​total no. of auctioned lots Sales turnover Sale price: Mean Median Minimum Maximum Bought-​in price: Mean Median Minimum Maximum Sale or bought-​in? (unknown) price: Mean Median Minimum Maximum No. of lots offered by Colnaghi No. of different sellers No. of lots (and name) offered by dominant seller other than Colnaghi

5/​3/​1791 (4681)

10/​3/​1792 (4871)

7/​5/​1796 (5447, 5465)

28/​3/​1797 (5561)*

7/​5/​1800 (6074)

1,785 56 42.9%

777 72 66.7%

651 108 45.4%

1,029 103 47.6%

800 101 78.2%

80% 26,333

90% 42,640

94% 18,063

100% 6,145

92% 13,870

1,097 651 168 5,040

870 231 50 19,110

369 168 36 2,310

114 68 7 882

171 90 10 1,995

2,209 1,470 273 7,980

788 525 47 6,090

376 157 17 3,885

702 1,029 28 1,050

815 483 105 4,200

–​ –​ –​ –​ 56 1 0

189 189 189 189 33 15 11 (Cawthorne)

–​ –​ –​ –​ 2 18 19 (Bridgewater)

196 189 20 714 4 13 48 (Kirkman)

–​ –​ –​ –​ 2 7 8 ("T")**

Notes: Lugt numbers in parentheses. All prices are in shillings. (*) For 47 lots it is unknown whether they were sold or bought in. (**) Sellers not identified for 66 lots.

160  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Bénédicte Miyamoto

Table 12.2 Repeated auctions of Bourdon’s Niobe with her Children 1791–​1800

Bought-in at English auction  161 Each auction included between 56 and 108 lots, with the Bourdon’s auctions scoring a relatively higher variety in length. The rate of lots sold varied between 33% and 99%, with the Albani being offered at relatively more successful auctions than the Bourdon. Overall, median values were lower than mean values, confirming price distributions skewed to the left, due to the most expensive pictures usually being offered toward the end of the auction. Remarkably, at almost each auction, bought-​in price levels were higher than sale price levels; moreover, bought-​in distributions were usually (and less realistically) less skewed than sale distributions, denoting possible manipulation efforts. The Albani was offered five times in five and a half years, while the Bourdon was offered at almost half this frequency—​was this possibly correlated to a relatively higher quality of the Bourdon? The bought-​in prices of Albani’s ‘Family in adoration of the virgin and child’—​a painting by a well-​regarded painter of the Italian seventeenth century  –​oscillated between £7 (140 shillings) and 8 guineas (168 shillings), to finally sell for a lowest, and cheap, £5 (100 shillings) at a rather successful auction in terms of lots sold (91.7%) and (apart from the first auction of 1792) the turnover and price levels fetched. The Bourdon’s bought-​in prices oscillated more widely, between 31 guineas (651 shillings) and 85 guineas (1.785 shillings), to remain unsold at £40 (800) at a relatively successful auction in terms of lots sold (78.2%) but not of turnover and price levels fetched. The prices of the Albani fell within auction price ranges (especially within the higher bought-​in price levels), except at its first auction, where it fetched a rather low bought-​in price. Instead, the Bourdon’s bought-​in prices tended to be above mean bought-​in prices. This might reflect the fact that seller and auctioneer had been too ambitious when agreeing on the selling lot, and that the seller had overestimated the reserve price. It might also indicate the usage of this substitute for Poussin to lift bids of subsequent lots. Miyamoto (2016) shows how in London auctions, at that time, there was a systematic ordering of lots based on increasing quality of artworks, where the ordering was usually established by the auction houses, while the sellers’ margin of negotiation depended on their market power. As an indicator of the signalled quality of the two paintings, we included their lot’s relative position in the auction sequence (painting’s lot No./​Total No. of auctioned lots, expressed in %). Despite its well-​regarded attribution, the picture by Albani, a sought-​after painter in the eighteenth century, appears to have been a moderate to middling worth picture—​either because of size or aesthetic competency, or because people were aware that this particular painting was a studio or circle work, given the large school of Albani. It was placed repetitively in the middle segments of the sales it was presented at. The Bourdon was clearly deemed by seller and auctioneer alike of superior quality, or surer attribution, and was put up for sale each time in the last quarter of the sale, a practice reserved for the better works.

162  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Bénédicte Miyamoto

Figure 12.3 Sale, bought-​in and unknown prices of Albani’s Family in Adoration (first and fifth auctions only). Notes: horizontal axes indicate lot numbers (C stands for Colnaghi); vertical axes price levels in shillings (black:  sold; grey:  bought-​in; white:  unknown)  –​details only for sales of 10 March 1792 and 9 December 1797). The arrows indicate the Albani’s lots positioning in the sequences of lots (grey: bought-​in; black: sold).

Figures 12.3 and 12.4 further allow us to compare price fluctuations with the dealers’, or auction house’s expectations on paintings prices, that we proxied with the relative position in sequence of the two paintings’ lots. Note that in Figures 12.3 and 12.4, the horizontal axes indicate lot numbers (C stands for

Bought-in at English auction  163

Figure 12.4 Sale, bought-​in and unknown prices of Bourdon’s auctions Niobe with her Children (first and fifth auctions only). Notes: horizontal axes indicate lot numbers (C stands for Colnaghi); vertical axes price levels in shillings (black: sold; grey: bought-​in; white: unknown)–​details only for sales of 5 March 1791 and 7 May 1800. The arrows indicate the Bourdon’s lot positioning in the sequences of lots (grey: bought-​in).

Colnaghi), while the vertical axes indicate price levels in shillings (black: sold; grey: bought-​in; white: unknown; details only for auctions of, respectively, 10 March 1792 and 9 December 1797 in Figure 12.3, and 5 March 1791 and 7 May 1800 in Figure 12.4); the arrows indicate the Albani’s and Bourdon’s lots positioning in the sequence of lots (grey: bought-​in; black: sold).

164  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Bénédicte Miyamoto Overall, two facts stand out. First, the two paintings were always positioned in the second half of the lots sequence, especially in the case of the Bourdon—​was this to attract higher bids for the paintings themselves, or to ‘use’ the paintings to warm up the whole auction? This is not evident in these sales. In any case, both paintings positioning was consistent with an ordered distribution of generally increasing prices, both for sale and bought-​in prices. Second, the Albani’s only sale price more realistically matched not only the lowest price, but also the lot’s foremost position (46%). Furthermore, the fact that Colnaghi was the dominant or even the unique seller at an auction does not seem to have positively influenced the success of the painting’s sale. On the contrary, the sole sale of the Albani corresponded to the highest number of different sellers among all nine auctions (since the Albani and the Bourdon shared one auction, in 1792).

Discussion and conclusion Subsequent results for previously bought-​in pictures returning at auction (even for new market products such as Spanish or German pictures) proved consistent, were rarely rewarding and were not ‘frictionless’ or with negligible transaction costs (North, 2005). The dynamic market of the auction, where prices were decided in public and sales made up by numerous and active professionals, was not as profitable as it appeared, was predictable even for new products, and was less of a manipulation then rumoured. Why did dealers, whose careers could span over 20 years, then persist in seldom profitable buying-in? One reasonable explanation is that they were acting as agents or intermediaries (Montias, 1988). If the auctioned lot was highly valued privately by their clients—​misled for example by the glitter of the auction—​the dealers may have been commissioned to buy-​in at levels that precluded transactions (Levin & Smith, 1996, p. 1282n). They would intervene and enter bid at the auction when bidding floundered, thereby attempting to either further raise the standing price, or salvage the picture by annulling any transaction below their clients’ private reserve price. As it is, the practice of buying-​in did not benefit the seller through higher returns in the long run, but it did offer the seller the possibility to ‘select a different, and more importantly, better reserve price based on the information revealed in the bidding process’ (Bag et al., 2000, p. 704). This flexibility in setting the reserve price meant it could be optimised according to the appetite for the lot witnessed in the audience and enabled the seller to balance the expected cost of lost trade and the expected gain of reoffering an unsold item at a later sale. This ultimately benefitted the auctioneer himself, who kept the business of procuring pictures behind the scene and away from the unprofessional audience. Transaction costs hence remained out of the limelight, keeping only the bid results public. Thus, the art market appeared ‘frictionless’ to the audience, while the bidding seemed to have been reached without outside intervention.

Bought-in at English auction  165 This sustained the illusion that transaction costs amounted to 0, and that selling art came with a substantial gain. The attraction of lucrative sales was therefore not only sustained by dazzling prior bid results mentioned in lots’ description and by the frequent advertisement in the press of outstanding price results reached at private sales, but also by phantom prices during the sales. Although manipulation of bought-​in has not been proven in the literature, what has often been suspected is anonymous bidding to create an illusory high price and inflate the reputation and name recognition of a specific artist already in one’s collection or represented by one’s gallery (Marquis, 1991, p. 255; Velthius, 2002, pp. 143–​144). Could that be a form of market testing via the auction, but with the option of selling more knowledgably afterwards on the private circuit? The practice of contacting dealers in the days following the auction to sell the work privately is now well established. Was this already a reason why after garnering information on the auction stage and assessing an informed reserve price for pieces with the auctioneer’s agreement, the seller felt tempted to delay transaction? Maybe, this could be followed by attempts to sell on the private circuit which tended to yield higher prices (Armstrong-​Totten, 2019)? The interest of testing the market is that private sales cannot rely on increasing or decreasing prices, since bargaining one-​to-​one is awkward and harms the trustworthiness of the private dealer’s expertise, and the highly ritualised and symbolic moral meaning of prices on the private scene (Velthuis, 2005). The dynamic market of the auction, where prices were decided in public and sales made up by numerous and active professionals, was not as profitable as it appeared, and was less of a manipulation then rumoured. It did offer reliable public vetting, which both protected the customers from unworthy paintings (especially in the lower end of the market) and efficiently trained the bidders’ eyes.

Note 1 www.getty.edu/​research/​tools/​provenance

References Armstrong-​Totten, J. (2019). From Jack-of-all Trades to Professional: The Development of the Early Modern Picture Dealer in Eigheenth-century London. In S. Avery-​ Quash & C. Huemer (Eds.). London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–​1820 (pp. 194–​204). Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute. Ashenfelter, O. (1989). How Auctions Work for Wine and Art. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 3(3), 23–​36. Avery-​Quash, S. & Huemer, C. (Eds.). (2019). London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–​1820. Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute. Bag, P.K., Dinlersoz, E.M. & Wang, R. (2000). More on Phantom Bidding. Economic Theory, 15(3), 701–​707. Bayer, T.M. & Page, J.R. (2016). The Development of the Art Market in England: Money as Muse, 1730–​1900. London, UK: Pickering & Chatto.

166  Elisabetta Lazzaro and Bénédicte Miyamoto Beggs, A. & Graddy, K. (2008). Failure to Meet the Reserve Price:  The Impact on Returns to Art. Journal of Cultural Economics, 32, 301–​320. Fletcher, P.M. & Helmreich, A. (2011). The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–​1939. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Gandal, N. (1997). Sequential Auctions of Israeli Cable Television Licenses:  The Morning effect. Journal of Industrial Economics, 45(4), 227–​244. Goldthwaite, R.A. (1993). Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–​ 1600. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lacetera, N., Larsen, B., Pope, D. & Sydnor, J. (2016). Bid Takers or Market Makers? The Effect of Auctioneers on Auction Outcome. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 8(4), 195–​229. Lazzaro, E. & Moureau, N. (2013). Auctioneers vs. Commissaires-​ priseurs: The Carnival Mirror of Professional Regulation in the International Art Market. European Journal of Comparative Economics, 10(2), 159–​176. Levin, D. & Smith, J. (1996). Optimal Reservation Prices in Auctions. The Economic Journal, 106 (438), 1271–​1283. Lippincott, L. (1983). Selling Art in Georgian London:  The Rise of Arthur Pond. New Haven, CT and London, UK: Yale University Press. Lyna, D. (2016). In Search of a British Connection: Flemish Dealers on the London Art Market and the Taste for Continental Paintings, (1750–​1800). In C. Gould & S. Mesplède (Eds.). Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present (2nd ed., pp. 101–​118). London, UK: Routledge. Marquis, A.G. (1991). The Art Biz. The Covert World of Collectors, Dealers, Auction Houses, Museum and Critics. Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books. Minard, P. (2011). Micro-​ economics of Quality and Social Construction of the Market: Disputes Among the London Leather Trades in the Eighteenth Century. Historical Social Research/​Historische Sozialforschung, 36(4), 150–​168. Miyamoto, B. (2014). Bidding as a Guide to British Visual Preferences: A Late Eighteenth Century Case Study. In N. de Marchi & S. Raux (Eds.). Moving Pictures: Intra-​European Trade in Images, 16th and 18th Centuries (pp. 257–​276). Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. Miyamoto, B. (2016). ‘Making Pictures Marketable’: Expertise and the Georgian Art Market. In C. Gould & S. Mesplède (Eds.). Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present (2nd ed., pp. 119–​130). London, UK: Routledge. Miyamoto, B. (2019). British Buying Patterns at Auction Sales, 1780–​1800. In S. Avery-​Quash & C. Huemer (Eds.). London and the Emergence of a European Art Market, 1780–​1820 (pp. 35–​51). Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute. Montias, J.M. (1988). Art Dealers in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands. Simiolus, 18, 244–​256. Munck, B.D. & Lyna, D. (2015). Locating and Dislocating Value: A Pragmatic Approach Economic Practices. In B. D. Munck & D. Lyna (Eds.). Concepts of Value in European Material Culture, 1500–​1900 (pp. 2–​26). Farnham, UK: Ashgate. North, D. (1990). Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. North, D. (2005). Understanding the Process of Economic Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. North, M. & D. Ormrod. (1998). Art Markets in Europe, 1400–​1800. Farham, UK: Ashgate.

Bought-in at English auction  167 Ohashi, O. (2007). The Auction Duty Act of 1777: The Beginning of Institutionalisation of Auctions in Britain. In J. Warren & A. Turpin (Eds.). Auctions, Agents, and Dealers: The Mechanisms of the European Art Market ca. 1660–​1860 (pp. 21–​32). Oxford, UK: The Wallace Collection. Pears, I. (1991). The Discovery of Painting:  The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–​1768. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scorcu, A. & Picci, L. (2003). Bidders’ and Sellers’ Strategies in Sequential Auctions: New Evidence about the Afternoon Effect. Empirica, 30(2), 163–​178. Smith, C.W. (1989). Auctions: The Social Construction of Value. London, UK: Free Press. Stourton, J. (2014). The Revolving Door: Four Centuries of British Collecting. In I. Reist (Ed.). British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response: Reflections Across the Pond (pp. 27–​46). Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Velthius, O. (2002). Promoters and Parasites:  An Alternative Explanation of Price Dispersion on the Art Market. In G. Mossetto & M. Vecco (Eds.). Economics of Art Auctions (pp. 130–​149). Milan, Italy: FrancoAngeli. Velthuis, O. (2005). Talking Prices:  Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Walsh, C. (1995). Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London. Journal of Design History, 8(3), 157–​176.

13  From the artist’s studio to the Amateur’s portfolio The modern drawing market and collecting in early nineteenth-​century  Paris Sarah Bakkali

Introduction Most collecting and art market studies of the eighteenth-​century period in Paris do not separate modern artists from Old Masters and in spite of research into collecting before 1789 (Bailey, 2002) and Marie-​Claude Chaudonneret for the Restoration period (Chaudonneret, 1989, 2005, 2008) the emergence of a modern art-​oriented market and collecting in the very early nineteenth century in Paris has not been analysed in detail while much remains to be done regarding the markets during the revolutionary and imperial periods (Spieth, 2018).This essay addresses the emergence of a market for ‘modern’ drawings and the growing specialisation of this market. As this study will emphasise, this was the logical outcome of a quite remarkable boom in this market during the Revolution, as attested by archives and auction sale catalogues. In this paper, a comparative study of two collectors drawing on archival sources, contextualises their activities within the wider structures of an emerging market. As will be discussed, interest in modern art was already present long before the Revolution, but the circulation and market for modern drawings developed rapidly in its wake. Through the study of two of the better-​documented collectors, Valedau and Chenard, the social frameworks and networks at play during this period can be better understood. The third section will focus on the vogue for albums in the 1820s, arguing that Chenard and Valedau’s tastes and practices heralded a spectacular increase in this type of collecting.

The turning point of the revolution and the Société des Amis des Arts Although collecting drawings was not a new practice and had a long tradition in France (Michel, 2004; Szanto, 2013; Tillerot, 2014), nonetheless, the emergence of dealers, collections, shops and sales entirely dedicated to the drawings of living artists was something new in the early nineteenth century. To the best of our knowledge, one of the first dealers openly specialising in modern drawings was Claude Schroth who, since at least the 1820s, was

From artist’s studio to Amateur’s portfolio  169 mentioned as a ‘marchand de dessins modernes’ in the artistic press, such as in the Journal général de la littérature de France (1823). Since the 1770s, this new passion had been preceded by the development of several private initiatives to support modern artists, which challenged official institutions such as the Royal Academy and the Salon (Van de Sandt, 2006). The French Revolution amplified this phenomenon, as the art market was then confronted by an unprecedented crisis due to the departure of the émigrés, who were historically the core of painter’s patronage, and with the dissolution of the Royal Academy. The period, however, was also marked by new opportunities, such as the opening of the Salon to non-​academicians, and numerous private or official initiatives to support a modern national school, which was then regarded as, more than ever, in danger. One of the most remarkable was the ‘Société des Amis des Arts’, founded in 1789 by the architect Charles de Wailly (1730–​1798). It organised exhibitions of modern paintings and drawings acquired through subscriptions, which were then distributed as prizes to the subscribers through lotteries (Van de Sandt, 2005, 2006). The Société exclusively acquired relatively small easel paintings from the artists’ studios (e.g. from the open market) and not through traditional commissions. Its aim was therefore to stimulate and support the artists through the purchase of works that artists had planned to sell on the Parisian marketplace (Van de Sandt, 2005). In other words, the Société supported the open market, without officially dealing with intermediaries who, more than ever, did not have a good reputation (Bakkali, 2006). Nevertheless, it counted among its founders a well-​known art dealer, Guillaume-​Jean Constantin (1755–​1816), who can be assumed officially involved in the visits to artist studios and the selections of works, with which he was familiar. Moreover, he organised several sales of patriotic collections during those years and was an intimate of several prominent artists of the time such as Jean-​Baptiste Isabey (1767–​1855) (Bakkali, 2015). He also owned several drawings that clearly testify to his support of modern artists. Pierre-​Paul Prud’hon (1758–​1823), for example benefited from his familial network by working for the publishing house Didot (Laveissière, 1997, p. 75; Guffey, 2001).

‘L’empreinte du mouvement de l’âme’ Thanks to Constantin, Prud’hon was able to supply drawings as models for book illustrations. He also sold, as did many other artists in precarious situations, numerous drawings as ‘pensées’. The concept of pensées (thoughts) particularly appealed to theoreticians, almost overtaking the importance placed on ‘dessin/​dessein/​disegno’ by the previous century. Johann August Lehninger (1730–​1786), in his introduction to his Abrégé de la vie des peintres (Lehninger, 1782, p. XIII) described them as: The first thoughts that the painter puts down on paper, in order to carry out his work. They are also named sketches, as the hand only roughly

170  Sarah Bakkali

Figure 13.1 Henri-​Nicolas Van Gorp. Portrait of Guillaume-​Jean Constantin. RMN-​ Grand Palais (musée des châteaux de Malmaison et de Bois-​ Préau)/​ Gérard Blot.

forms the figures, groups, positions and the other parts of the composition. Most of those rough and quick drawings are not perfectly correct and can lack perspective and the other aspects of art, but they are not flaws in a sketch. their purpose is to represent a thought executed with spirit, or some single and imperfect figures which should be a part of a composition. Lehninger contrasted pensées with finished drawings which were, according to him, ‘the same thoughts but more digested and adopted. […] They give a right idea of the work and it is usually with those pieces, which are the final ones, that we can determine the execution.’ Further, he added, ‘Master drawings are the best education for an amateur:  it’s a fertile source, from which he can draw illumination and where their different techniques will be revealed.’ (Lehninger, 1782, p. XIII). Thus, before becoming fashionable or suitable as gifts as in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, drawings were considered as a tool for exercising the eye of the amateur. Watelet, in his article defining the ‘esquisse’ or sketch in L’Encyclopédie called them the ‘empreinte du mouvement de l’âme’ (Diderot and D’Alembert,

From artist’s studio to Amateur’s portfolio  171 1772, Vol. 38, p. 918). Anticipating the romantic conception of genius, he also praised them as the best examples of spontaneity and sincerity before being corrected by the commissioner’s control or market constraints: ‘We can sometimes see evidence of the inconvenience caused by the patron, who forced him to abandon his reasonable ideas for absurd ones’. Thus, drawings represented an efficient means of education as well as signalling proximity and even intimacy with artists, at a more affordable price than paintings. Like the ‘amateur’ in modern painting, the modern drawing collector was characterised by his proximity to the artists. But whereas the amateur’s connection was displayed in a public space and had a worldly aspect (Guichard, 2008), the modern drawing collector’s proximity was more personal and intimate: intellectual intimacy with the creative process for drawings as ‘thoughts’, social intimacy for more finished drawings. In fact, these more completed drawings were frequently gifts from the artists themselves, thus revealing the circles and networks where the border between private and public lives becomes blurred.

Simon Chenard and Antoine Valedau: two collectors of contemporary artists Collecting modern drawings during the Revolution is difficult due to a dramatic lack of sources. However, the comparative study of two unknown but interesting figures can help highlight the social networks that were at stake and to understand the roots of the emergence of a new market in the following years. Among the members of the Société des Amis des Arts, two collectors, Simon Chenard (1758–​ 1832) (Figure  13.2) and Antoine Valedau (1777–​ 1836) (Figure 13.3) are relatively well documented. They were not members of the Société in the same years:  Chenard joined it during the Revolution, Valedau after the Restoration (La Quotidienne, 3 March 1817). Nevertheless, they might have known each other, and they probably knew Constantin (Archives Nationales, MC/​ET/​LIII/​712, 1801). In spite of their common interest in modern drawings, they were quite opposite in terms of their social profiles:  the former was a comedian and actor at the Opéra Comique, a public and well-​known character through his profession, but also through the numerous representations of him, some of which were displayed at the Salon. Bruun Neergaard, the naturalist and also a drawing collector, described him as ‘the friend of all who cultivate[d]‌the Fine Arts’ (Bruun-​Neergaard, 1801, p.  31). This may not have been an exaggeration, as many sources testify to his close connections with artists. Indeed, he was on very close terms with Louis-​Léopold Boilly, who painted him and some of his relatives many times, and who offered him many drawings with personal dedications. For several years, he resided with many other artists at the Hôtel Bullion, where one of the main public auction rooms in Paris, was located, managed by the art dealer Alexandre-​Joseph Paillet (Edwards, 1996), where amateurs, collectors, painters, musicians and actors often went. The atmosphere of the place is revealed through the precious accounts of Paillet’s grandson, the violinist

172  Sarah Bakkali Eugène Sauzay (Wangermée, 2006). According to him, the place was occupied by artists such as Sablet, Valenciennes, Lethière, Sauvageot, Thévenin, Barthélemy, Vincent, Boilly and also the engravers Renard and Desmarest. Chenard also lived there, as well as, according to other sources, the famous actor Talma (Lefeuve, 1875, p.  161). Paillet organised several parties and receptions there, where art was a familiar topic. The assembly, which called itself the ‘Société des Amis des Arts’, was the prototype of the one founded by the architect Charles de Wailly in 1789 (Harisse, 1898, pp. 10–​11). In other words, Chenard was closely related to artists, he was living among them and probably formed his collection as a result of direct contacts with them. Valedau was a more discrete personality. A possible explanation may be his profession, as he was a stockbroker and also a purveyor to the army, which thus classified him among the much-​criticised ‘nouveaux riches’ of the time (Bruguière, 1986). It is therefore not by chance that he lived in a mansion (‘hôtel particulier’) at the rue Basse-​du-​Rempart (Lefeuve, 1875), next to Giovanni Battista Sommariva (Haskell, 1989, pp.  110–​111), one of the greatest modern art collectors of those years, for whom it was probably desirable to represent himself as a protector of the arts. The doubly precious advantage that amateurs will take from following his [Godefroy’s] example of supporting artists is to be useful and to acquire pure and genuine paintings. They cannot always do so by purchasing Old Masters, unless they have knowledge that can be only acquired by deep familiarity, a decided taste and assiduous study. (Constantin, 1794) This commercial argument is obviously reminiscent of the one that followed the spectacular emergence of Flemish and Dutch paintings in Paris eighteenth century (Pomian, 1987; Constantin, 1794, p.  3). Thus, one can surmise that, whereas collecting drawings had a strong personal dimension for Chenard, because of his social connections with artists, for Valedau the social stakes might have been higher. Nevertheless, both of them followed the current ‘anglomania’ by having themselves portrayed as dandies Such portraits responded to a new trend prized by rich ‘amateurs’ taking the Grand Tour (Korchane, 2006). This kind of portrait in which the figure is set against the French landscape might indicate that the protagonists belonged to the same social class, which however was not the case. Similarly, their support for modern works was not based on the same motives. Unlike Chenard, who was himself an artist, Valedau and Sommariva probably had to build their image as protectors of the arts to distract attention from the immoral origins of their fortunes (Montaiglon, 1879). The two collections, which were assembled by collectors from different generations and from completely opposite backgrounds, had two different destinies:  Valedau’s collection was bequeathed to the Musée Fabre, in Montpellier, his native city, whereas Chenard’s was disseminated in several sales:  three while he was still alive, and a posthumous one (sale catalogue,

From artist’s studio to Amateur’s portfolio  173

Figure 13.2 Jean-​Baptiste Isabey, Portrait of Simon Chenard, 1796, Black pencil and stump, 58 x 42 cm. Orléans, musée des Beaux-​Arts.

Figure 13.3 Adèle Romany (1769–​1846). Portrait of Antoine Valedau, 1809. Oil on canvas, 7.5 x 60 cm. Montpellier, Musée Fabre.

174  Sarah Bakkali 1822 and Paillet, 1832). Thus, rebuilding Valedau’s collection, or at least the part of it that remains in the museum, is not difficult, although one part was stored in the public library and disappeared in mysterious circumstances. However, the way it was gathered by Valedau is a much more difficult matter and remains unknown so far. Valedau’s social profile suggests that it may have been the fruit of the contemporary Parisian art market, as well as the social networks he built around the Société des Amis des Arts. On the other hand, although dispersed, Chenard’s collection can be reconstructed and a chronology of his purchases sketched out by cross-​referencing the sales’ records with various other archival documents such as his wife’s posthumous inventory (Paris, A.N., MC/​ET/​LIII/​796, 25 January 1813). Through the analysis of the sources and an attempt to reconstruct the collections, several circles of influence and taste can be identified. Importantly, the great majority of the artists collected belonged to their collector’s respective generation. As detailed in the charts, Figures 13.4 and 13.5) Chenard, who was older than Valedau, started collecting earlier, in the very last years of eighteenth century. Both continued to collect until the end of their lives and died a few years apart (Valedau in 1836, Chenard in 1832), which explains the presence of young and emerging artists in both their collections and demonstrates a real interest and support to promising but still aspiring figures like Théodore Gudin (1802–​ 1880), André Jolly (1799–​1863), Louis Boulanger (180–​1867), Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–​1828), Jacques-​Raymond Brascassat (1804–​1867), Jules-​ Louis-​Philippe Coignet (1798–​1860), Achille Dévéria (1800–​1857), Xavier Artists by generation in Valedau’s collection

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

ARTISTS BORN BEFORE 1750

ARTISTS BORN ARTISTS BORN ARTISTS BORN AFTER BETWEEN 1750 AND BETWEEN 1770 and 1790 1769 1789

Figure 13.4 Artists by generation in Chenard’s auction’s sales.

UNKNOWN

From artist’s studio to Amateur’s portfolio  175 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Sale 1822-1

Sale 1822-2

Sale 1832

Figure 13.5 Artists by generation in Valedau’s collection.

Leprince (1799–​1826) among others. This is the case even of Valedau and may nuance the idea of a pure impersonal taste. Indeed, in Valedau’s collection, there were not only established artists widely hailed by the critics but also artists in the making. Both collections were strongly marked by Jacques Louis David’s pupils, but one can also find many troubadour-​style works made by Fleury-​François Richard (1777–​1852), Charles-​Marie Bouton (1781–​1853), Charles-​Caïus Renoux (1795–​ 1846) or Pierre-​ Nolasques Bergeret (1782–​ 1863) among others. This testifies to the rising taste for national antiquities and the heritage of the Middle Ages, which can be linked to Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des Augustins (De Chancel-​Bardelot, 2014, 2016), as well as the fame and importance of Joséphine de Beauharnais’s collection (Pougetoux, 2003), which had been built with the support of Constantin. Another striking feature is the prominent place given to picturesque landscapes and ruins, which is not surprising, knowing the taste of the period for those subjects under the leadership of Alexandre Lenoir, who would publish picturesque views of his Musée des Monuments Français in 1816. It is also worth noting that many of the artists being collected participated in the editorial project of the Voyages Pittoresques by Charles Nodier and Baron Taylor (Nodier et al., 1820). This suggests a community of taste as Chenard, Valedau and Sommerard all supported the project as subscribers.

176  Sarah Bakkali Because of a lack of detailed sources, it is not easy to know precisely the way Chenard and Valedau stored their drawings, although there is evidence that both of them used ‘albums’. Chenard’s posthumous sale catalogue of 1832 (Paillet, 1832) described two ‘albums’ (lots 84 and 85)  with drawings by, among others, ‘MM. C. Vernet, Horace Vernet, Boilly père, Jules Boilly, Blondel, Finard, Muneret, Rouget, Gassies, Régnier, Le Prince, Roëhn, Truchot, Montfort, Thibaut, Percier, Nicole, Picot, Honel, L.  Leprince, Bouton, Hennequin, A  Dumoulin, Gérard, Granet, Bergeret, De Bez, Cherubini, Boieldieu, Ronmy, Atoche, de Laval, F.  Désorme, Watelet, Garneray, H. Lecomte, Chassela, Sweback, Norblin, Chatillon, Joly, Enfantin, Cicéri, Thienon, Maréchal, Mongin et Bessa’. With regard to Valedau, his posthumous inventory (Paris, A.N., M.C. /​ET/​LIX/​521), clearly separated framed drawings from those that were part of ‘albums’. These were located in the first antechamber and/​or in the dining room on the second floor and were described as: four brown, violet and red morocco leather albums, including two made of incised and gilded copper. Another had a stainless-​steel cover title. The albums contained 297 pen and gouache drawing sheets, coloured and Sepia modern painters. Research into other inventories and catalogues confirms the amateurs’ predilection for those albums, especially in the 1820s and 1830s, as will be discussed later.

From a personal object to a fashionable one: drawings, market and the vogue of ‘albums’ (1790–​1830) As previously noted, when Valedau and Chenard started gathering their friends’ drawings, there was no specific market for modern productions. Generally on the demand-​side, drawings, and especially modern ones, were part of monolithic collections, complementary to the Old Masters. More artists appeared as followers of Great Master’s or ‘in their manner’ than as original, modern works. On the supply-​side, in spite of dealers’ proximity with the artists of their time, none of their stocks contained a majority of modern works. The first real specialist seems to have been Claude Schroth (?–​ 1856), who Eugène Delacroix mentioned in a letter addressed to Théophile Thoré Burger: ‘Shortly afterwards I saw watercolours lovely in terms of colour and composition at Schroth’s place, who has just opened a drawing and small painting shop (the first one, I think)’ (Burty, 1878, p. 343). In 1823, he was mentioned as a ‘modern school drawing dealer’ in the literature review La Foudre. The opening of Schroth’s shop seemed to have been the keystone of a sustained development that did not slow down at the Restoration and the return to peace. On the contrary: the Musée du Luxembourg opened in 1818, as an official recognition of the modern national school (Alary, 1995). In parallel, the Salon presented an increasing number of exhibitors and drawings (Van de Sandt, 1986). On the private-​side, the émigrés returned back to France and gave a new dynamic to this aspect of collecting with figures such as the Duc and Duchesse

From artist’s studio to Amateur’s portfolio  177 de Berry, or the Duc d’Orléans (Chaudonneret, 2008). The latter was one of the members of the new Société des Amis des Arts, resumed in 1814, alongside figures such as du Sommerard (1779–​1842), who also collected modern art and would found the Musée de Cluny, and Valedau. Thus, it is no accident that Schroth called himself from 1825 as a ‘Modern Painting and Drawing Dealer. Patented by Her Royal Highness Duchesse de Berry’. The collection of the Duchesse de Berry, one of the most important in Paris at the time, probably contributed highly to Schroth’s reputation, particularly thanks to the publication of a portfolio of lithographs after her collection: Galerie de son Altesse Royale Madame la duchesse de Berry:  école française; peintres modernes (Bonnemaison, 1822). The consecration of the modern drawing was also followed by an increasing commercialisation of objects for their protection, especially ‘portfolios’ and primarily ‘albums’, from the most ordinary to the most luxurious albums were not only for drawings, but could contain famous authors’ autographs, popular musical scores, poems or mementos forming the highly prized ‘liber amicorum’ or friendship book. The increasing popularity of drawing albums was not uncontroversial and was criticised by the Miroir des Spectacles in 1821 as being ‘more determined by caprice than by good taste’. Furthermore, it argued: Connoisseurs have albums: they don’t care about the quality of the works with which they overload their pages; whereas they care about the quality of morocco leather cover that they had decorated with golden stickers; about the clasps that they want as finely carved as a precious and perfect finished vase, bracelet or necklace; about the spine where brilliant gold is enhanced with coloured arabesques and gothic ornaments. […] Genuine amateurs, on the opposite, have little regard for those elegant trinkets, all this useless luxury, which is more suitable to objects that adorn women; they care more about the quality of the works they gather. The list of artists that follow is striking in the number of names represented in Valedau’s and Chenard’s collections. The article continues (Mirroir de Spectacles, 1821): Regarding the sketches and drawings which should belong to their precious collections, [genuine amateurs] ask for them from the dealer Schroth, who is the best supplied with those pleasant ‘futilities’, those funny caricatures to which several of our first masters condescend put a little of their talent. Schroth provides them interiors by Bouton and Truchot, picturesque landscapes by Cicéri, Daguerre, Regnier, Regnoux and Joly; seascapes by Gudin and Isabey, gracious subjects by Rioult […]; compositions by Miss Lescot, Desmoulins, Lecomte, Lavigne; architecture by Destouches and Renoux, familiar scenes by Leprince and Bellangé, studies from Italy by Allaux […], patriotic memories by our

178  Sarah Bakkali famous Vernet and watercolours by Charlet […]. All those prized works enrich albums of men of the world, genuine friends of the arts, true portable museums which have nothing in common with fashionable women’s. Their real value consists in gathering the venerable production of our distinguished artists. The expression a ‘portable museum’ may be particularly relevant for a character such as Valedau as he used to commute from his ‘hôtel particulier’ in Paris to his ‘château’ in Bièvres for various years and needed a convenient way of carrying his drawings with him. His will suggests this nomadic nature: ‘If at the moment of my death my four albums should have been left in my country home in Bièvres, they will be included in the present donation’ (Paris. Archives Nationales. MC/​ET/​LIX/​519 à  521). In conclusion, in spite of their distinct social status and way of collecting, Chenard and Valedau present strong similarities in terms of taste. At the end of their lives, the names they had patiently gathered have clearly become recognised as references. The artistic press did not fail to mention their names in association with albums. Their influence in the emergence of these new standards of taste could be discussed, but they were undoubtably decisive levers. They also illustrate the limits of a romantic opposition between the world of artists, supposedly free and sincere, and the world of markets, a supposed cynical and standardised. Through his collection, we see that Chenard, despite his status as ‘artists’ friend’, was closely connected to the art market of his time. It was thus not by chance that he was depicted in the Atelier d’Isabey by Boilly, where most of the painters represented formed part of his collection and many of them were acquired by the Société des Amis des Arts. Similarly, a dealer such as Constantin was also a reliable and important support for various artists, especially in the tumultuous years of the Revolution (Guffey, 2001). Drawing albums were the cornerstone of all the sociability networks underpinning this market:  artists friends ‘coteries’ were the opportunities to fill the ‘liber amicorum’ with various drawings, poems or autographs: ‘Surrounded by a crowd of lovely women who beg for their albums, [skilled draughtmen] often give what they could sell expensively’ (Le Miroir des Spectacles, 1821). It reflected their owners’ social spheres, as well as their more personal links with artists. As this social phenomenon increased in the 1820s, some dealers such as Jean-​Louis Susse (1806–​1860) (Journal des artistes, 1834) or Alphonse Giroux (1776–​1848) offered ‘ready to use’ albums or portfolios for rent or for sale, even without having to build any specific connections! (Journal des Artistes, 1834). The most prominent artists of the time, most of whom appeared in Chenard and Valedau’s collections, cooperated with these preworked products that had probably become a significant source of income. Albums, which used to be very personal and intimate objects, had by this time become completely standardised and privileged material to support an uniformisation of a ‘good taste’ and also promoted the work of contemporary

From artist’s studio to Amateur’s portfolio  179 artists. In the 1820s, a commentator on Alphonse Giroux’s shop in 1821 noted that people looked especially through the albums composed by Isabey, Vernet, etc. […] Great artists have the good spirit of putting their talent in pocket change in a certain way:  it spreads quickly, under various forms, and plantsa good seed everywhere. (Annales de l’industrie nationale et étrangère, 1821)

References Archival Sources Archives nationales, MC/​ET/​LIII/​712. 8 messidor an 9 (27 June 1801). Etat des tableaux appartenant au Cen Chenard (…) par lui vendus au Cen Guillaume-​Jean Constantin. Paris, MC/​ET/​LIII/​796, 25th January 1813. The posthumous inventory of Gertrude Fillipe or Philippe, Chenard’s wife, Paris. M.C. /​ET/​LIX/​521. Posthumous inventory of Antoine Valedau: Paris.

Published Sources Åstebro, T., Herz, H., Nanda, R. & Weber, R.A. (2014). Seeking the roots of entrepreneurship:  Insights from behavioral economics. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(3),  49–​70. Alary, L. (1995). L’art vivant avant l’art moderne. Le musée du Luxembourg, premier essai de muséographie pour l’ “art vivant” en France. Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 42(2), 219–​239. Annales de l’industrie nationale et étrangère. (1821). Anon. Tableaux flamands hollandais et français anciens et modernes dont 25 Demarne. (4 September 1822). Paris. Bailey. C. (1999). The early appreciation and marketing of Watteau’s drawings, with an introduction to the collecting of modern French drawings during the reign of Louis XV. In A. Wintermute (Ed.), Watteau and his World, French Drawing from 1700 to 1750 (pp. 68–​92). London: Merell Holberton. Bailey, C. (2002). Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-​revolutionnary Paris. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bakkali, S. (2006). L’environnement domestique d’un collectionneur montpelliérain: Antoine Valedau (1777–​1836). Mémoire de Master 2. Montpellier, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3. Bakkali, S. (2015). Le Salon et le marché de la peinture moderne à Paris (1791–​ 1799). In J. Kearns & A. Mill (Eds.), The Paris fine art Salon/​le Salon, 1791–​1881 (pp. 31–45). Oxford: Peter Lang. Bergeron, L. (1978). Banquiers, négociants et manufacturiers parisiens du Directoire à l’Empire. Paris: Mouton. Bonnemaison, F. (1822). Galerie de son Altesse Royale Madame la duchesse de Berry. Paris: Imprimerie de J. Didot, l’Aîné.

180  Sarah Bakkali Bresc, G. & de Chancel-​Bardelot, B. (2016). Un musée révolutionnaire:  le musée des Monuments français d’Alexandre Lenoir. Paris:  Musée du Louvre and éditions Hazan. Bruguière, M. (1986). Gestionnaires et profiteurs de la Révolution: L’administration des finances françaises de Louis XVI à Bonaparte. Paris: Orban. Bruun-​Neergaard, T.C. (1801). Sur la situation des beaux-​arts en France ou Lettres d’un Danois à son ami. Paris: Dupont. Burty, P. (1878). Lettres d’Eugène Delacroix (1815 à 1863). Paris: A. Quantin. Chaudonneret, M.-​ C. (2005). Collectionner l’art contemporain (1820–​ 1840). L’exemple des banquiers. In M. Preti-​Hamard & P. Sénéchal (Eds.), Collections et marché de l’art en France. 1789–​1848 (pp. 273–​282). Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Chaudonneret, M.-​C. (2008). Collecting contemporary art in 19th century France. International Auctioneers Magazine,  13–​16. Chaudonneret, M.-​C. & Pougetoux, A. (1989). Les collections princières sous la Restauration. Revue de la Société d’Histoire de la Restauration et de la monarchie de Juillet, pp. 33–​49. De Chancel-​ Bardelot, B. (2014). Le musée des monuments français, une source d’inspiration pour les artistes troubadour’. In M. Briat-​Philippe, L’invention du passé. Gothique mon amour… 1802–​1830. Catalogue d’exposition, Vol. 1. Monastère royal de Brou, Bourg-​en-​Bresse: Hazan. Constantin, G.J. (1794). Catalogue d’une belle collection de tableaux de l’école française, formée par les soins du citoyen G***. Paris. Diderot, D. & D’Alembert, J. (1772). Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers par une société de gens de lettres, Paris. 3rd ed, Vol. 38. p. 918. Edwards, J. (1996). Alexandre-​Joseph Paillet, expert et marchand de tableaux à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Arthéna. Entre cour et jardin. Marie-​Caroline, duchesse de Berry. (2007). Catalogue d’exposition. Sceaux: Somogy. Guffey, E. (2001). Drawing an Elusive Line: The Art of Pierre-Paul Prud’hon. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press. p. 78. Guichard, C. (2008). Les Amateurs d’art à Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Champ Vallon. Harisse, H. (1898). Louis-​ Léopold Boilly, peintre, dessinateur et lithographe. Paris: Société de propagation des livres d’art. Haskell, F. (1989). De l’art et du goût, jadis et naguère. Paris. Gallimard. Journal des artiste (1834, December 21). Korchane, M. (2006). Entre Lumières & Romantismes, dessins du musée des Beaux-​Arts d’Orléans, catalogue d’exposition. Paris: Somogy. La quotidienne. 3 March 1817. Laveissière, S. (1997). Prud’hon ou le rêve de Bonheur. Paris:  Réunion des Musées Nationaux. Le Miroir des Spectacles. 14 December 1821. Paris. Le Miroir des spectacles, des lettres, des mœurs et des arts. 11 December 1821. Paris. Lefeuve, C. (1875). Les anciennes maisons de Paris: Histoire de Paris rue par rue maison par maison. Vol. 5. Lehninger, J.A. (1782). Abrégé de la vie des peintres, dont les tableaux composent la galerie electorale de Dresde. Avec le détail de tous les tableaux de cette collection & des éclaircissemens historiques sur les chefs-​d’oeuvres de la peinture. Dresden: Chez les frères Walther.

From artist’s studio to Amateur’s portfolio  181 Marlaud, P. (2003). Documents inédits relatifs à la succession d’Antoine-​ Louis-​ Joseph-​Pascal Valedau (1777–​1836). In L. Pellicer (Ed.). Testaments et inventaires après décès d’amateurs et de collectionneurs du midi de la France, Actes de la journée d’études du 17 octobre 2003, Liame, n°12. Michel, C. (2004). Le gout pour le dessin en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: de l’utilisation à l’étude désintéressée. Revue de l’Art,143 27. Montaiglon, A.  de. (1879). Lettres du Comte Sommariva (1814–​1825). Nouvelles archives de l’art Français, 1, 297–​320. Nodier, C., Taylor. J. & de Cailleux, A. (1820). Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France. Paris: Didot l’aîné. Paillet, C. (1822, November 19–​20). Catalogue des tableaux […] composant le cabinet de M. Chenard, artiste pensionnaire du Roi. Paris: Paillet & Coutellier. Paillet, C. (1832, December 17). Tableaux et dessins, anciens et modernes, […] par suite du décès de M. Chenard, artiste-​dramatique du Théatre royale de l’Opera-​Comique. Paris: Paillet & Coutellier. Pellicer, L. (2003). Des extraits aux originaux: nouveaux regards sur Antoine-​Valedau et François-​Xavier Fabre (1766–​1837). In L. Pellicer (Ed.). Testaments et inventaires après décès d’amateurs et de collectionneurs du midi de la France, Actes de la journée d’études du 17 octobre 2003. Liame, 12, 157–​231, V–​VI. Pomian, K. (1987). Collectionneurs, Amateurs et Curieux. Paris-​Venise, XVIe-​XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard. Pougetoux. A. (2003). La Collection de Peintures de l’impératrice Joséphine. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux. Schnapper, A. (1988). Curieux du grand siècle. Collections et collectionneurs dans la France du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Fammarion. Spieth, D.A. (2018). Revolutionary Paris and the Market for Netherlandish Art. Leiden: Brill. Szanto, M. (2013). La révolution des dessins en France autour de 1750. De l’ombre à la lumière, du portefeuille au cadre. In E. Brugerolles (Ed.). De Poussin à Fragonard: hommage à Mathias Polakovits (Ser. Carnet d’études 26) Paris: ENSBA Tillerot, I. (2014). L’usage et la réception du dessin chez Jean de Julienne. In P. Michel (Ed.). Connoisseurship:  L’œil, la raison et l’instrument. Paris:  École du Louvre (pp.  141–​ 153). Lisbon:  Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, & Institut national d’histoire de l’art. Van de Sandt. U. (1986). La fréquentation des Salons sous l’ancien Régime, la Révolution et l’Empire. Revue de l’Art, 73, 43–​47. Van de Sandt, U. (2005). Les “collections” de la Société des amis des arts. In M. Preti-​ Hamard, P. Sénéchal (Eds.). Collection et marché de l’art en France, 1789–​1848 (pp. 43–​48). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Van de Sandt, U. (2006). La Société des amis des arts (1789–​1798):  un mécénat patriotique sous la Révolution. Paris: ENSBA. Wangermée, R. (2006). François-​Joseph Fétis. Correspondance. Sprimont:  Mardaga. p. 512.

14  The strategy of a new material The Demidoff family and malachite Ludmila Budrina

Introduction From the end of the eighteenth century, the status of malachite—​the intensive green coloured carbonate of copper—​evolved from a mineral curiosity collected by the nobility to a highly prestigious and luxurious decorative material. Discovered in the copper mines of the Ural Mountains in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was firstly used as an ore. It was only with the interest of European mineralogists and the intervention of Catherine II that malachite started to be separated from metallurgy and became a form of decorative material. The key particularity of malachite was not only its very intensive and unusual colour, but also its fragility. It is impossible to create something from a block of malachite in the same way as with marble or jasper. The only possibility is to apply a veneer of pieces of malachite, or mosaic onto the surface of the support, whether bronze, cooper, marble or some other stone. One of the most important roles in the creation and development of a market for malachite was held by the members of the Demidoff family, who owned the monopoly of malachite (originally as one of the materials for copper production) in both the Russian and European markets. During the nineteenth century, the Demidoffs lived between Petersburg, Paris and Florence. Three generations of the family were involved in creating the fashion for this decoration of green stone. The Demidoff collection of malachite was divided among the succession of gifts and sales, both public and private that took place during the second half of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the study of this collection began with research into the history of the works of art themselves. The result of several years’ research is a reconstruction of some elements of this collection (Budrina, 2013a, Budrina, 2018), the artistic and stylistic context of the creation of the pieces (Budrina, 2016) and the cross-​cultural exchanges around their production and distribution (Budrina, 2013b). This research is based on different types of sources, such as the archival materials of the Demidoff family in the Russian State archive of the Old Papers (Moscow) and the Sverdlovsk Region State Archive (Ekaterinburg); museum collections and documentation, many papers and journal articles,

The strategy of a new material  183 catalogues and publications from the national and world exhibitions of the time. Curiously, these sources, which are absolutely traditional in art history, have opened up another side of the Demidoff’s malachite collection—​namely the promotional strategies and tools, used by the three generations of the illustrious family to create a new market for this new decorative material. Beginning as a sort of self-​demonstration and an expression of a personal taste, the use of malachite gained increasing approval and popularity. This was an opportunity that could not be ignored by the important businessmen who were the proprietors of the malachite mines and could thus take advantage of their monopoly of this rarest of materials. They were able to utilise the rise of a wealthy bourgeoisie searching for the visualisation of their wealth through luxury; as such the role of malachite as a distinctive symbol of the leisure class became increasingly important. The flashed green of this stone set against brilliant gilded bronze was a perfect mark of distinction for the nouveau riche residences. The history of the market for Demidoff malachite can be viewed as one interesting illustration of Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption (Veblen, 1899, Chapter IV). The appreciation by a new society—​ new monarchies and new elites of the 19th century—​was based on their considering malachite as a sign of new taste, something that was different from past traditions. However, as this essay demonstrates through its study of the century-​long history of the promotional tools used by the Demidoffs, the rise of malachite as a most desirable signal of such status was the result of specific strategies to gain visibility and exclusivity in a new market. The Demidoff family, the main actors in this history, was from the Russian industrial nobility, whose ascent started at the time of Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century. They developed a metallurgical empire in the Urals based on their copper and iron mines and factories. By the end of the century, the Demidoffs were one of the richest families in Russia. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, malachite was extracted from the copper mines of the Demidoffs and when an unusually big and solid block was discovered in one of the mines in Nijniy Tagil in 1835, it allowed for the development of the technique of veneering furniture. The main actors in developing a market for malachite were Nicolay Nikitich (1773–​1828), his sons Pavel (1798–​1840) and Anatole (1813–​1870) and his grandson Pavel Pavlovich (1839–​1885). Each of them represents an important stage in the history of the familial collection and the promotion of the malachite.

The rise of a market in the first-​third of the 19th century Nicolay Demidoff left Russia for Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Although the Demidoff mines were not yet known for their malachite at this point, Nicolay started to collaborate with Henri Auguste (1759–​1816) and, much more importantly, with Pierre-​Philippe Thomire (1751–​1843). Demidoff furnished these two important Parisian silversmiths and bronziers

184  Ludmila Budrina with copper for the bronze and malachite for the mosaic veneers. The first results were exhibited in the Exposition des produits de l’industries Françaises in 1806 in Paris. This exhibition was decisive for the discovery and recognition of malachite. All the exhibited pieces of malachite—​an important three stage table and garniture for the chimneypiece—​were given awards, and Auguste and Thomire received Gold Medals (Rapport du jury sur les produits de l’industrie française, 1806, p. 207). More importantly, this exhibition created a fascination for this new material. The following year, Napoleon I requested some works of art in malachite from Tsar Alexander of Russia for the celebration of the Treaty of Tilsit (Tosltoï, 1893, pp. 563). At the celebration of the second wedding of Napoleon malachite came to the attention of a wider public and formed one of the most attractive curiosities at the event when these pieces, mounted by Jacob Desmalter (Ledoux-​Lebard, 1944, p. 4), were placed in the Salon de l’Empereur of the Grand Trianon (Ledoux-​Lebard, 1975, p. 14). In 1816, Nicolay Demidoff tried to open a market in England for French bronzes with malachite, but without any great success. That year Carbonnel (the member of Thomire family responsible for relations with Demidoff) wrote to him from London, ‘I’ll propose the pieces with malachite to different clients but I’m afraid that my efforts will still be unfruitful. This material is still not known here, but I hope to arouse their curiosity’1 (Carbonelle, 1816, p.  2). For the next Exposition des produits de l’industries Françaises (1819), Demidoff authorised Thomire to exhibit three very large pieces. The large table setting, consisting of an impressive Medici vase and an important cup on a bronze base supported by three figures was reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition and Thomire again received the Gold medal (Description des Expositions des produits de l’industrie française, 1824 II, pp. 224–​225). In the early 1820s (after the death of his wife Elisabeth Alexandrovna in 1818), Demidoff left France for the more comfortable climate of Italy and created a new residence in Florence. However, his orders for Thomire became increasingly elaborate. Between 1822 and 1824, a very impressive surtout de table was created in Paris, with mosaics in malachite, which was executed in Rome. It included seven plateaux, one centre piece, two Medici vases, two tripods and two coups; the execution of the this ensemble was estimated at 13,100 francs or about £452,200 in current terms based on income value (Measuringworth, 2020), while the malachite and copper for the bronzes were supplied by Demidoff (Budrina, 2018). The exhibition of this ensemble in Thomire’s shop at the end of 1824 broadened interest from the members of French Royal family. On this occasion, Carbonel wrote to Demidoff (Carbonelle, 1825, p. 346) Dans ma dernière du 20 Décembre je vous annonçais que nous exposons dans nos magasins votre beau surtout. Je puis me servir de cette exposition. Nous avons reçu ce qu’il y a de mieux dans Paris et il n’y a qu’une vois là-​dessus, c’est que c’est vraiment beaux. Madame la duchesse de

The strategy of a new material  185 Berry nous a dit que l’on ne faisait ordinairement dans son pays que des bijoux avec cette pierre’. The words of the Duchess of Berry and her compliments about this surtout were reproduced in the Parisian Journal des débats of 1825. At the same time, King George IV bought his first malachite pieces from Thomire, probably attracted by the interest of the French court to this material. Thus, in May 1828, a suite by Thomire et Cie which included a clock, a thermometer and a pair of candelabras was purchased in Paris by George IV’s agent and pastry chef François Benois for George IV (Russia. Art, Royalty, and the Romanovs, 2018, p. 372). The suite cost £500 (about £419,500.00 in 2018 terms (Measuringworth, 2020). One of the last orders of Nicolas Demidoff was given to the Romain mosaicist and stone carver, Francesco Sibilio—two monumental columns with Corinthian capitals (1825)—which became the subject of an important number of newspaper articles, each of them contributing to the promotion of the material and the idea of its particular rarity (Budrina, 2020b). The time of Nicolas Nikitich can be considered as a pre-​promotional period for malachite. Certainly, the pieces were exhibited, and articles were published, but the main profit was not for Demidoff as malachite dealers, but for the artists like Thomire. On the other hand, by giving the stone to the ateliers, the Demidovs ensured the realisation of the order and—​at a very minor level—​gained a discount. Moreover, the publicity and artistic success of the works of art, the interest of royal figures branded these objects as objects of high status.

Paul Demidoff and new ways of applying malachite in the 1830s After the death of Nicolay, his heirs, Paul and the very young Anatole, decided to complete the last order of his father. This was a very sumptuous and extravagant Temple, a sort of rotunda in bronze with malachite columns. Once this piece was finished, it was shown in the next Exposition des produits des industries Françaises (1834) and reproduced in the description (Musée industriel, 1838, vol. 3, pp. 48–​49, fig. 3). A short time afterwards, the Temple was given to the Russian Emperor for the newly constructed St. Isaak Cathedral in St.  Petersburg. After the beginning of the 1830s, Demidoff became the monopolist in the malachite markets, other mines of this stone were exhausted, but the discovery of the enormous block on their property gave them control of this material. Not surprisingly, after this first experience with malachite and the immense use of pietra dura (jasper, lapis) in the decoration of the Petersburg palaces, Paul wished to develop the idea of malachite as an architectural material. In 1836, he ordered the construction of the Malachite Ballroom with columns and pilasters in malachite for his new Petersburg house (Budrina, 2011, pp. 32–​38). This idea was taken up by Emperor Nicolas I for the Empress’ drawing room in the Winter Palace, which was decorated after the fire of 1837 with columns and pilasters in malachite.

186  Ludmila Budrina At the beginning of the next decade, the malachite decoration of the altar of St. Isaak cathedral began, eight columns of more than 9 metres high were realised in malachite mosaic. Certainly, it is still the most impressive interior with malachite and, without any doubt, was the most successful operation for promotion of this green stone. This building, created by August de Montferrand, a French architect, who first arrived in Russia as one of Nicolas Demidoff’s protégés, the incorporated malachite into the decorative program of the most important cathedral of Russian Empire, thus ensuring its status as a noble and symbolic material. The wave of malachite interiors in the most prestigious buildings in Russia, ensured that this material became highly fashionable and sought after. Everyone who visited the imperial palace or St. Isaak Cathedral would have wanted to own a small piece of the green material. Although Paul Nickolaevich did not promote these interiors in any specific ways, nonetheless, the creation of these prestigious interiors and the extensive use of malachite within them, became a strategy in itself, assisting the transformation of the stone into an emblem of luxury. Greatly admired by the visitors and mentioned in all sorts of descriptions (letters, memoirs, diaries, articles in the press and guidebooks), the St. Isaak malachite columns themselves became part of the company’s publicity.

Anatole Demidoff and the first promotional programmes The younger son of Nicolas Demidoff, Anatole, lived mainly in Europe. His marriage and separation from Mathilde de Montfort, the niece of Emperor Napoleon I, resulted in annual alimony payments of considerable sums, obliging Anatole to exploit more and more sources of money. One of the initiatives was the extensive commercial promotion of malachite. To this end, from 1847 until 1854, Demidoff operated a private malachite factory. In the Demidoff archival documents, we can see the clear explanation of the creation of this enterprise, ‘the establishment of the manufactory has for its purpose, the enforcement of the sale of malachite, which otherwise will not have a satisfactory market’(Report on Incomes, 1850). A special collection from that workshop was created to be shown in 1851 at the First World Exhibition in London (Budrina, 2013a). Evidently, during the calm of the early stages of this new market, the London fair provided an important opportunity for its development. For this reason, the exhibited pieces were both unusually large and took on very unusual forms, vases were created in the form of rococo porcelain or Chinese bronzes, tables and chairs in the rococo style were completely covered by malachite from the top to the end of the legs, while enormous doors were also covered by malachite. Once the collection had arrived in London, Louis Joffreaud, who apparently was the manager of the stand, started to search for textiles for the walls. The same cramoisy velvet was supplied for the furniture—​the chairs and armchairs. Joffriaud explained this choice in his letters, he searched for what

The strategy of a new material  187 would create the most spectacular contrasts with the green malachite, intensive red-​cramoisy of the walls and gilded bronze details on the pieces. This ensured that the stand gained attention in the fair itself. At the same time, Anatole Demidoff paid for multiple reproductions of the pieces from his collection; 12 pieteces were engraved for the Official descriptive and illustrated catalogue (Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, 1851, Vol. V, figs. 180, 189, 192,193, 195 and 271, p. 1379), 7 were placed in the English and French edition of the exhibition’s review Crystal Palace (Le Palais de Cristal, Journal illustré de l’exposition de 1851, 1851, Nos. 15, 19, 20) and 5 in The Illustrated London News including the malachite doors and the vases from Russia (The Illustrated London News, 1851, p. 125). Each of these publications was followed by articles. The attention paid to the Demidoff malachite collection was especially important. The jury awarded the ‘Council’ Medal for the malachite pieces. Therefore, mention of the Demidoff’s stand appeared in most of the reports. Another strategy was the emphasis on the technical skill and rarity of the material. The first step in this promotional strategy was to give a chair in malachite to the charity fair in Saint-​Petersburg just before sending the main part of the collection to London. The ingenious application of the malachite created a huge stir and much excitement. The decision to give visitors small samples of malachite was another form of promotion. Its presence on the stand and its low price permitted the ordinary visitor to have access to this rare material. Furthermore, the French national commission dedicated large and detailed articles in the Travaux de la Commission française to the technology of the ‘Russian mosaic’ (Travaux de la Commission française sur l’industrie des nations, 1855, vol.7,  pp.  112–​116). This term is firstly used for the identification of the mosaic made from malachite in the Reports by the Juries (Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was Divided, 1852, Vol. II, p. 1248). Never before had Russia been mentioned as a centre of artistic production in hard stone. In this publication, the term was used alongside that of ‘Florentine mosaic’—​ associating it with the well-​known and most famous centre of artistic production of this type. Thus, being included in the same context as the highly regarded manufacture can itself be considered a major success in the promotion of the Demidoff company. With other distinguished exhibitors, the pieces of malachite were reproduced in Volume III of the Reports of the Juries of Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was Divided, III, 1851)  with photographic illustrations by Claude-​Marie Ferrier and Hugh Owen. After the Exhibition there was an expediential increase in the number of publications showing the exhibition stand and the malachite works, including Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851 (London and New York, 1851), Baxter’s Gems of the

188  Ludmila Budrina

Figure 14.1 Russia. Illustration from Dickinson’s comprehensive pictures of the great exhibition of 1851 (London, 1852).

Great Exhibition (London, 1854), Dickinson’s comprehensive pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1852; Figure 14.1). This last offered its readers coloured images of the Russian stand. Some watercolour views were realised by Henry Clarke Pidgeon (‘Russian stand’, 1851) and Eugene Lami (View of Russian Stand, 1852), made especially for Anatole Demidoff. But the promotion of malachite by Anatole was not limited to the Exhibition display. During the exhibition, several pieces were given as presents, one to Queen Victoria (now in the British Royal collection, Budrina, 2017a, p. 237), and another to Count Esterhazy and now in Schloss Esterhazy, Eisenshtadt, Austria. After the event, two ensembles, each with a table and chair, were sent to Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany (Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy) and to Queen Isabelle II of Spain (Casa del Labrador, Aranjuez, Spain) (Budrina, 2013a). The other pieces that were still unsold or unattributed, were sent to Villa San Donato outside Florence, which had been begun by Nicolay Demidoff at the end of his life and finished by Anatole just before his wedding in 1840. Since the end of the 1850s, the villa was open to visitors and at the same time, a very detailed description of its interiors was published by the comte de Vandoni (Vandoni, 1858). Much attention was given to the malachite pieces, which were displayed in the entrance hall of the Villa. These included

The strategy of a new material  189 some large vases from the 1851 collection and a tazza from 1819 (Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma, Italy) (Budrina, 2016, p.  142); in the Fragonard room, the doors, chimneypieces, tables, vase, chairs were all of malachite and in the Gallery of Tapestries, the columns, the chimney garniture of a clock and candelabra some tables and the surtout de table which had malachite details set in bronze…. At the beginning of the 1860s, this interior was reproduced in a watercolour by Emanuel Shtekler, The Gallery of Tapestries at Villa San Donato, in the archives of The State Hermitage Museum, Saint-​ Petersburg; it was first published in an article by O.  Sychev in Star of the Renaissance (Sychev, 2013) and then analysed with the identification of the malachite pieces by the author of the present article (Budrina, 2018, p. 200). After the Demidoff factory closed in Petersburg, Anatole Demidoff sought new collaborations. His first choice was still for French workers in hardstones, who were well-​known through their collaborations with furniture and bronze makers. In 1855, Anatole signed an agreement with Joseph Theret (?–​1872), who would produce pieces for the European market in the ‘French taste’ from Demidoff malachite (Accord, 1855). Anatole Demidoff created the first strategic promotional campaigns, using exhibitions and related publications to make malachite more recognised. He opened his villa and commissioned their descriptions to make the green stone more attractive and to encourage his sales. And, he searched for collaborators in Europe to create pieces in malachite that were more adapted to the European taste.

Paul Pavlovich Demidoff, and the American market Anatole Demidoff died without direct heirs and his estate, the title of Prince of San Donato, his part of the family fortune and his entire collection became the property of his nephew, Paul Pavlovich, who also inherited all the duties of his uncle. In the last months of Anatole’s life, the impressive sales of the San Donato Palace began. The first sale that included malachite took place in March 1870. Here, about ten important and many smaller pieces were offered. The next, in Florence in 1875 passed without success and a great number of the important pieces (some from the 1851 collection) remained unsold. By the middle of the 1870s, malachite and imperial luxury goods had become old fashioned in Europe. To encourage potential purchasers, and more specially from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Paul launched a new and important campaign. Firstly, he exhibited some malachite at the Universal Exhibition in Paris of 1878, consisting of one big block and three vases from the London collection unfortunately, without favourable press coverage and without any medals (Catalogue officiel, liste des recompenses, 1878). Then, he commissioned a set of articles from Paul Leroi, which was published with illustrations in the Parisian review L’Art from 1879 to 1880 (Leroi, 1879–​1880). Such extensive coverage and sequence of articles was unprecedented, but the decision to sell the entire San Donato collection obliged the journal to publish more than one article in each issue.

190  Ludmila Budrina The sale of San Donato with its illustrated catalogue showed the success of the company. All the big pieces in malachite were sold—​from the enormous Medici vase (acquired for Vanderbilt family and now in the Metropolitan Museum) to the ensemble with the doors and tree vases from the London and Paris exhibitions, both bought by Porfirio Diaz and now in the collection of Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City, Mexica (Budrina, 2013a, 173–​175). From this moment until the middle of the twentieth century, malachite became a material than was very much appreciated by the American tycoons (Budrina, 2017b), and even up to the present day is regarded as one of the most recognised symbols of luxury and fashion. For the last period of the history of the Demidoff malachite in the market, they used the well-​established concept of malachite as a symbol of luxury. Once this idea was no longer relevant in the European market, the Demidoffs expanded their promotion into new markets using the same methods of promotion through reviews in journals.

Conclusions The Demidoff family’s strategies to promote the material of malachite provide a complete case for the study of the development of a promotional strategy during a single time period. As first, the result of random successes, it became a well thought out advertising campaign. This example is of further interest as a reflection of the development of how promotional tools have remained the same today, with international exhibitions, positive, illustrated press articles, illustrated catalogues of public sales through large public relations departments and companies, as well the search for new geographic territories once traditional markets declined. Thus, the success of the promotional strategies employed by Demidoff to create and develop a market for his malachite wares and the creation of an enduring interest in the material can be seen in the same light as the strategies to create long-​term interest in their collections by designers and couturiers such as Tony Ducquette, Christian Louboutin, Monique Luillier and many others (Budrina, 2020a). Also, this study demonstrates that traditional instruments for art history research can be used in other areas. This new approach to the history of the taste and setting it within the context of the art market, uses tools for understanding the contemporary marketing of luxury products applied to an historical perspective to open the way to a new understanding of the relationship between art and money.

Note 1 ‘Je vais faire pour le mieux de vos intérêts et des miens, il parit que cette matière n’est pas beaucoup connu içi et j’espère par ce moyen piquer leurs courieusité.’ Author’s translation.

The strategy of a new material  191

References Archival Sources Accord (1855). [Accord with Joseph Theret]. The Demidoff Family Collection (1267, box 8, file 1636, pp. 2–​12). The Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Moscow (RGADA). Carbonelle, L. (1816, May 3). [Letter to N.N. Demidoff]. Demidoff family collection (1267, box 2, file 201, p. 2). The Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Moscow (RGADA). Carbonelle, L. (1824, May 3). [Letter to N.N. Demidoff]. Demidoff family collection (1267, box 2, file 201, p. 334). The Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Moscow (RGADA). Carbonelle, L. (1825, February 18). [Letter to N.N. Demidoff]. Demidoff family collection (102, box 1, file 140, p. 346). The State Archive of Sverdlovsk Region, Ekaterinburg (GASO) Report on incomes (1850). [Commentaire to the Consumption]. Demidoff family collection (1267, box 8, file 1476, p.  13). The Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Moscow (RGADA),

Published References Budrina, L.A. (2011). The Malachite’s Rooms of Saint-​Petersburg, Russia, Europe… [Малахитовые залы Петербурга, России, Европы…]. In E. Chernyshova (Ed.). Brilliant Petersburg. The Role of the 19th Century Architects in the Creation of the City’s Image. Kafedra [Блистательный Петербург. Роль архитекторов ХIХ века в создании неповторимого облика города. Кафедра] (pp. 23–​49). Saint-​Petersburg, State Museum-​Reserve ‘St. Isaac cathedral’. Budrina, L. (2013a). La produzione in malachite dei Demidov, sulle trace degli oggetti alla prima esposizione universale. In L. Tonini (Ed.). I Demidoff fra Russia e Italia. Gusto e prestigio di une famiglia in Europa dal XVIII al XX secolo (pp. 151–​176). Firenze: Leo S. Olschki. Budrina, L.A. (2013b). The Parisian school of the lapidary in the first third of the 19th century and orders of Nicolas N. Demidoff [Парижская школа камнерезного дела в I трети XIX века и заказы Н.Н. Демидова]. Izvestia. Ural Federal University Journal. Series 2.  Humanities and Arts. [Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2. Гуманитарные науки], 1(111), 5–​19. Budrina, L. (2016). Lapidaires parisiens aux services de Nicolas Demidoff , la collection des objets en bronze doré et malachite avec des mosaïques en reliefs des pierres dures réalisés par Thomire (d’après les documents inédits et les collections européennes). In N. Coquery, J. Ebeling, A. Perrin Khelissa, Ph. Sénéchal (Eds.). ‘Les progrès de l’industrie perfectionnée’. Luxe, arts décoratifs et innovations de la Révolution française au Premier Empire (pp. 136–​ 145). Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi. Budrina, L.A. (2017a). The attribution of works of Russian stonecutting factories, object, design, and issue of authorship in the context of cross-​cultural exchange [Атрибуция произведений русских камнерезных фабрик, предмет, эскиз и проблема авторства в контексте кросс-​культурного обмена]. Izvestia. Ural Federal University Journal. Series 2. Humanities and Arts. [Известия Уральского

192  Ludmila Budrina федерального университета. Серия 2.  Гуманитарные науки]. Vol. 19, 4 (169), 231–​240. Budrina, L.A. (2017b). Russian malachite in the collection of American billionaires, from World Exhibition to the Soviet sales 1920s–1930s [Русский малахит в коллекциях американских миллиардеров, от всемирных выставок до советских распродаж 1910-​х–​1930-​х годов]. The Man in the World of the Culture. Regional Culture Studies. [Человек в мире культуры. Региональные культурологические исследования], 2/​3 (21), 22–​25. Budrina, L. (2018) ‘The sumptuous surtout de table’ (1822–​1824) on the order of Nicolas N.  Demidoff [«Великолепный surtout de table» (1822–​1824) по заказу Н.Н. Демидова]. Star of the Renaissance [Звезда ренессанса], pp. 26–​27, 196–​213. Budrina L.A. (2020a). Fashion for malachite, malachite in fashion. In International Scientific ‘Man in the World of Culture, Problems of Science and Education’ Conference (pp. 183–​186). KnE Social Sciences. Doi: 10.18502/​kss.v4i5.6541. Budrina, L.A. (2020b). The role of the documents and published sources in assessment and attribution:  the case study of the malachite history. In V.  Demenova (Ed.). Questions of Expertise in Culture, Arts and Design (pp.  21–​26). Dubain:  KnE Publishing. Catalogue officiel, liste des recompenses (1878). Paris, Imprimerie nationale. Description des Expositions des produits de l’industrie française. (1824). Vol 2… Paris: Bachelier. Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851. (1852). London: Dickinson, Brothers Her Majesty’s Publishers. Journal des débats politiques et littéraire (1 January 1825). Le Palais de cristal, journal illustré de l’exposition de 1851. (1851) N 15, 19, 20. Ledoux-​Lebard, D. (1975). Le Grand Trianon. Meuble et objets d’art. Paris: Edition des Musees nationaux. Ledoux-​Lebard, R.G.C.  (1944). Les malachites montées par Jacob pour le Grand Cabinet de l’Empereur aux Tuileries. Travaux et Documents de l’Institut Napoléon (pp. 2–​5). Paris: J.Peyronnet et Cie. Leroi, Ch. (1879–​1880). Le Palais de San Donato et ses collection. 1 (1879): 1324–​325; 2, 309–​309; 4, 151–​157, 184–​186, 200–​209, 245–​248, 293–​300; 1 (1880): 3–​10, 41–​ 46, 67–​73, 93–​100, 109–​117, 137–​146, 205–​215, 234–​242, 265–​267, 304–​315. Malachite Doors, and Vases from Russia (1851). Reproduced in The Illustrated London News, July 26. Measuringworth. (2020). Created by L. Officer and S. H. Williamson. Retrieved from www.measuringworth.com Musée industriel, description complète de l’exposition des produits de l’industrie française faite en 1834 (1838). Vol. 3.  Paris, Au bureau de la Siciété polytechnique et du recueil industriel. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nation (1851). Part V –​Foreign States. London: Spicer Brothers, Wholesale Stationers; W. Clowes & Sons. Rapport du jury sur les produits de l’industrie française. (1806). Paris:  Imprimerie impériale. Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes Into Which the Exhibition Was Divided. (1852). Vol. II. London:  Spicer Brothers, Wholesale Stationers; W. Clowes and Sons, Printers. Russia. Art, Royalty and the Romanovs. (2018). London: Royal Collection Trust.

The strategy of a new material  193 Sychev, O. (2013). The vase-​tripods of Pierre-​Philipp Thomire from the decoration of the villa San Donato of the Prince Demidoff [Вазы-​треножники работы Пьера-​ Филиппа Томира из убранства виллы Сан-​Донато князей Демидовых]. Star of the Renaissance [Звезда Ренессанса], 19, 16–​17. Tolstoï, P.A. (1893). Political correspondence. In Collection of the Imperial Russian Historical Society [Сборник Императорского Русского исторического Общества]. Saint-​Petersburg: Tipographia Skorokhodova. Travaux de la Commission française sur l’industrie des nations (1855). Vol. 7. Paris: Imprimerie impériale. [Vandoni, de’ B., conte.]. (1858). Le maraviglie di S. Donato. Villa dei Principe Demidoff presso Firenze: Firenze, Le Monnier. Veblen, T. (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class. Retrieved from http://​moglen.law. columbia.edu/​LCS/​theoryleisureclass.pdf.

15  New markets for old items Selling aristocratic collections of art and antiquities in interwar Slovenia Renata Komić Marn and Tina Košak

Introduction The dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy in the autumn of 1918 and the birth of the successor states changed the cultural and economic dynamics in Central and Central Eastern Europe. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (from 1929, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) was but one of the several new states, whose formation reflected the century-​long struggles for emancipation (Trencsényi, Kopecek, 2007; Ersoy, Gorny, Kechriotis, 2010; Rumpler, 1997). This confederation, with provinces that differed in social and religious backgrounds, developed a particular regime to emphasise its unified national character (Perovšek, 1993, p.  20; Perovšek, 2016, pp.  47–​65; Luthar, 2013, pp. 383–​397). In the light of the ‘South-​Slavic union’, art and cultural heritage were used and appropriated to construct and promote the new Yugoslav and Slovenian culture and contribute to its recognisability. Cultural politics, museum collections and the art market were all subject to this cause. Based on extensive archival research, this paper discusses the rise of a secondary market for art and antiquities in interwar Slovenia, the northernmost of Yugoslav territories. By analysing the peculiarities and limitations of a smaller, provincial art market, it provides an insight into the practices of a lesser known region. By complementing qualitative archival research with analysis of contemporary legislation, it sheds light on three crucial aspects that characterise the market in post-​WWI Slovenia: the role of politics and the impact of legislation, domestic character of art market achieved by prioritising national museum institutions as buyers and the decisive role of heritage protection. The study aims to show how the dynamics of the market and relations between its main protagonists were shaped by restrictive political circumstances, social and class transformation, and economic crisis. As they deviate from the established artist–​dealer–​collector model, they represent significant counterpart to standard art market research. So far, markets in unfavourable times have been researched with regards to larger societies in times of war (e.g. Austria and Germany during WWII), drawing mainly on auction catalogues and dealers’ archives. Researching a minor territory, such as Slovenia, involving a smaller community, enables a combined

New markets for old items  195 qualitative–​quantitative approach, involving more different points of reference (i.e. respective collectors, dealers and professionals) and reveals interconnections and networks in progress relatively early. Such art market research, which in Slovenia is still in its initial stage, can provide a nuanced overview, serving as a point of departure for more extensive quantitative and data-​driven analyses in wider Central European contexts, which will probably reveal further cross-​border networking and dissemination.

New state, new legislation and the emerging market Having been under Habsburg rule since the fourteenth century, Slovenia experienced radical changes after its collapse. By far the largest number of old Austro-​Hungarian aristocratic families lived or owned residences and estates in this part of Yugoslavia and their legacy was the nucleus of the region’s artistic heritage. The decline of the nobility and its decreasing influence in social and political life had begun long before the dissolution of the Austria–​ Hungary, but in the newly established and highly centralised Kingdom ruled by the Serbian dynasty of Karađorđević, the once trendsetting Austrian elite became visibly unwelcome (Ruhkopf, 2015; Preinfalk, 2004, pp.  507–​510; Preinfalk, 2010, pp. 7–​11). In the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, radical tax and land reforms were introduced. The agricultural estates of the nobility and landowners were expropriated and put to the use of farmers, and the state authorities increased their control of companies and estates (Brashich, 1954; Janša, 1964; Giordano, 2014, pp. 31–​42). Individual art and archaeological collections were temporarily sequestrated and sealed (see Dular, 2009, pp.  30–​47; Polizzotti Greis, 2006; Komić Marn, 2016, pp. 100–​103). Moreover, owners of large residences were highly affected by the increase in the real-​estate tax, which between 1914 and the early 1920s reached a staggering 300 percent (Mosetizh, 1928, pp. 574–​596; Kresal, 1995, p. 421). Due to high taxes and the infrastructural costs, the owners of manors, castles and large villas could no longer sustain their properties, which resulted in increasing emigration. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was not the only Central European state to take up such measures. Similar measures were, for example, introduced also in Czechoslovakia (cf. Uhlíková, 2016, pp. 232–​245; Kocowska-​Siekierka, 2017, pp. 169–​172). An additional problem was the Great Depression in the later 1920s, which negatively affected not only the antiquities trade but also the Yugoslav market for contemporary art. As deduced from official explanations, it also contributed to the slow internationalisation of contemporary Yugoslav art. That the latter was not among the priorities of Belgrade cultural politics, can, for example, also be seen in the late participation of Yugoslavia at the Venice Biennale. Despite the initiatives from 1930 onwards, the first Yugoslav attendance occurred only in 1938, officially due to the low budget for the arts, but in reality mainly due to the fact that it was allocated to the construction of

196  Renata Komić Marn and Tina Košak the Prince Paul Museum in Belgrade, the new museum of Yugoslav contemporary art (Koščević, 1988; Bogdanović, 2019, pp. 85–​91). To restrain the exodus of cultural assets, the Slovenian government issued the temporary decree for the protection of artworks in 1921, according to which the export of artworks and objects of cultural heritage was only possible with an export permit issued by the government following authorization from the head conservator. Not being able to export their artworks and antique furniture, the owners of larger collections had no other choice but to sell them in Slovenia. The 1921 decree had two immediate results:  it limited exports and contributed to a local market in art and antiquities, most of which originated from aristocratic residences. As the head of the heritage protection office France Stele (1965, pp. 25–​26) noted decades later, by WWII most castles and manors had been emptied of their antique furnishings and collections, while the majority were emptied altogether. Art collections, assemblages of historical furniture and other collectable items were, together with other property, mostly sold at public sales. According to Ivan Komelj (1983, p. 22), around 40 large sales of complete castle furnishings and collections took place in Slovenia between 1923 and 1935, but there were many more sales that included artworks and antiquities, thus introducing a new and significant type of market into this part of East-​Central Europe. The number of sales increased massively in the later 1920s and the early 1930s, owing to the Depression. Although antiquities overflowed into the market, no auction houses or larger art-​dealers operated in Slovenia. The small-​scale market was based on second-​hand and antiquity shops (Glavan, 2003, pp. 315–​318). While local buyers, who attended sales in the 1920s and 1930s in Slovenia, came mostly from the capital, Ljubljana, buyers also arrived from other Yugoslav towns. Together with buyers from the neighbouring Austria, they could offer more and usually bid higher than the locals.

Buying for the nation as a strategy While the number of publicly accessible private museums in the interwar period in Slovenia could be counted on one hand, the National Museum which had been transformed from a typical Austrian provincial museum (Landesmuseum), dominated cultural sphere of the 1920s and 1930s. Its director, historian Josip Mal, was as also the chief secretary of the governmental advisory board for culture—​the body founded to establish Slovenian cultural politics within Yugoslavia. He could use his influence in political circles to the museum’s advantage (Dolenc, 1996, p. 18; on Mal, Horvat, 2010). Together with some other cultural–​ historical societies, the National Museum was among the most interested buyers at sales. Their main problem was, however, low budgets. To ensure acquisition of items, the museums attempted in various ways to minimize the values and to reduce purchasing

New markets for old items  197 prices of objects. Tactical, often unfairly downgrading significance and value in negotiating prices with sellers, was approved and encouraged by both the general public and experts. As seen from the surviving museum correspondence, the museum curators and experts were also affected by the century-​long Habsburgs and Austro-​Hungarian dominance, by the complex of being peripheral, and by the tradition of the most exquisite items from the province being selected and transferred to the antiquity stores and museums in Graz and Vienna (Mantuani, 1918; Steska, 1919; Žibert, 1919; Mantuani, 1920; Kresnik, 1920; Mal, 1926). To ensure a better position for the new Slovenian National Museum, the authorities occasionally failed to convey information on sales. In cases when objects of greater artistic or historical significance were being sold, the notaries occasionally ‘forgot’ to inform the public to prevent them from coming to the auction. With the cooperation of the lawyer and creditors, selected objects were removed beforehand and sold underhandedly to museums at the starting price or even with a discount. Thus, for example, at the sale of the collection of the deceased Hans, baron Kometer in Pukštajn Manor in northern Slovenia, the National Museum acquired around 80 objects at reduced prices. The remaining part of the collection was put on sale and partly exported to Austria (Stele, 1965, p. 26; Horvat, 2010, p. 426; Košak, 2012, pp. 590–​592; Lazar, 2015, pp. 57–​60). There was a similar outcome in 1929 with the forced sale of Gornja Radgona Castle. Before the sale, the National Museum and the local historical society were offered antique furniture and other items at a substantial 50 percent discount on the starting price. A significant part was later sold to private collectors from Zagreb (Schneider, 1982; Pasini Tržec, Dulibić, 2017). As regards the tactics of buying underhandedly and avoiding bidding for objects, the sale of Karl von Strahl’s collection in 1930 was an exception. After a decade of unsuccessful negotiations with the National Gallery and the National Museum for its acquisition, Strahl died. In his will, he made a special clause which enabled the museums to select and purchase artworks at reduced prices before the auction (Komič, 2009; Komić Marn, 2016). Although this was interpreted as a patriotic act, it was actually a canny gesture by the owner who, as a renowned jurist, was familiar with the mechanisms of public sales. Knowing that museums were generally entitled to objects at radically reduced prices, he preferred to donate them officially. Since it was museum experts themselves, who often acted as appraisers, reducing prices—​ which had already been low—​ was successful. The only legally authorised appraiser in Slovenia at that time was the former National Museum director Josip Mantuani. Although he made numerous appraisals prior to 1930, his valuations were often doubted by his fellow colleagues as being too high (see Komić Marn, 2016, p. 132). Thus, for example, soon after Mantuani’s catalogue of the Szapáry collection in Murska Sobota was published, the experts involved were notified that the starting prices were set too high (Melihar, 1930). Due to pressure from his colleagues, Mantuani had

198  Renata Komić Marn and Tina Košak

Figure 15.1 Items from the collection of Hans Kometer, Pukštajn (Puchenstein) Manor, 1932. © Heritage Information and Documentation Centre, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.

no other choice but to reduce the starting prices for 450,000 dinars, that is approximately 25 percent of the original total value of the all listed objects from Murska Sobota (Komić Marn, 2019, pp. 103–​104). Similarly, at the sale of the Strahl collection in the same year, the organisers refused to appoint Mantuani as appraiser. Instead, the painter Matej Sternen and President of the National Gallery Society and the head curator Ivan Zorman were selected. In fact, at this sale they appeared not only as appraisers, but also as buyers (Komić Marn, 2016, pp. 178–​182). ‘Multitasking’ of museum and heritage protection experts, which was at the very least a serious conflict of interests, illustrates the scope of control they had over both the market and the acquisitions. Criteria for museum purchases were strongly influenced by the national-​ oriented state-​and cultural policy. Artworks by local artists, archaeological items excavated in the Slovenian territory and those that emphasised national—​whether Slovenian or Yugoslav—​identity were a priority or even a

New markets for old items  199

Figure 15.2 Collection of Karl von Strahl, Stara Loka Castle, 1930. © Heritage Information and Documentation Centre, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.

prerequisite. In the period when the national cultural institutions were founded or were establishing their permanent collections, they were in search of predominantly local or Slovenian art that would emphasise the national character of the collections and the emancipation from the former Austria–​Hungary. A permanent display of historical furniture was being formed, which resulted in an increased interest in pieces of furniture sold at castle sales, while the opening of the new National Ethnographic Museum permanent exhibitions, resulted in higher demand for local ethnological collections, such as the large Grebenc collection (Rogelj Škafar, 2011). While very high prices were paid for Slovenian, even Croatian artists, international art was considered less relevant. While older international art was, though very rarely, still occasionally acquired for the National Museum, the National Gallery’s regulations limited its acquisitions almost exclusively to works by the contemporary, still living local artists. How in the first years of Gallery’s existence, the latter influenced purchases, is illustrated by the fact that the Gallery’s expert board, founded on 18 September 1918, was comprised exclusively of artists. Moreover, according to the statute, the board was elected by the National Gallery Society member artists (see Jenko, 2008, pp. 36–​37). Until 1924, when the board was reorganised due to the rising criticism, it was thus the most renowned Slovene

200  Renata Komić Marn and Tina Košak artists themselves—​such as Rihard Jakopič, Matej Sternen and Gojmir Anton Kos—​who decided upon Gallery’s purchases of their own artworks.

Heritage protection and cross-​border trade Although successful networking with the National Museum and cultural societies and cooperation with customs officers and gendarmerie enabled France Stele as the head of heritage protection to have a good overview over the movable cultural assets in the country, he could not prevent illicit cross-​ border trade (Stele, 1965). It was not rare that the latter was stipulated by owners themselves. Thus, for example, a large number of items of historical furnishings and antiquities was sold to art dealers in Vienna (mostly to Egon Ephron) and in Prague by the passionate collector and amateur archaeologist from the old Austrian aristocratic family, Johann Joseph, Count Herberstein-​ Proskau (1854–​1944). The fact that he managed to illegally export a mid-​ sixteenth century carved canopy bed and sell it in Prague testifies that it was not impossible to smuggle even larger pieces of furniture across the borders. Nevertheless, although dealers in Austria and Czechoslovakia offered higher prices, the fact that the old Herberstein bed, which had originally been estimated at 150,000 Czech crowns but was eventually sold only for 18,000, testifies that prices of antiquities were decreasing abruptly as was also the case in other Central European countries (Ciglenečki, 1992, pp. 49–​52; Štefanič, 2014, pp. 71–​129; Košak, 2016, pp. 209–​235). This illicit trade continued until the beginning of WWII as is revealed by the documentation, issued in 1941, in German-​occupied Slovenia. Immediately after Austrian heritage protection office in Graz took over north-​eastern Slovenia, the Gaukonservator Walter von Semetkowski addressed an official notice to the regional civil administration office with a request to instigate measures against the Austrian art and antiquity dealers who had been purchasing items in Slovenia so as to resell them at a higher price in Austria (Semetkowski, 1941). The fact that the notice was sent just weeks after the territory was occupied and from an Austrian heritage office illustrates the scale of the cross-​border trade problem. With the 1921 temporary decree being the only valid act in the field of heritage protection, the lack of more detailed legislation enabled France Stele to adjust criteria of issuing export permits to the current needs and the financial situation of local museums and cultural societies. Issuing export permits was occasionally delayed in case a buyer from Slovenia would show up or museums would raise sufficient means to buy off the objects. How unreasonably long some of these delays were can be seen from the case of Murska Sobota Castle Sale. The Austrian collector and art dealer Geza Kodella, who purchased an entire parlour with wooden panelling and eight eighteenth-​century portraits of the Habsburg-​Lorraine dynasty, waited for four years before the export permit was finally issued (see Komić Marn, Košak, 2018). Moreover, in the case an export permit was granted, compensation in the form of donation

New markets for old items  201

Figure 15.3 Mid-​16th century carved canopy bed from Hrastovec Castle, exported, and sold in 1929. © Heritage Information and Documentation Centre, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.

of selected items for the National Museum collections was often requested from the owner. In accordance with the acquisitions policy, the compensation requirements mostly consisted of national art and local items. In 1926, the export of 94 old paintings, mainly of the Italian schools, from the collection of Ludwig von Gutmannsthal-​Benvenuti (1810–​1890) was approved to the new owner, who purchased the collection in order to resell it for higher price in Austria. As a compensation, he was requested to donate seven paintings by the local painters to the National Museum (Stele, 1926; Košak, 2012). Similarly, when the export of the collection of 20.000 prehistoric archaeological items of the late Duchess von Mecklenbourg to the United States was approved, 151 items were selected for the museum (Ložar, 1934; Dular, 2009). The documentation of the Gutmannsthal collection sale is especially telling as it testifies to all the above-​mentioned problems.

202  Renata Komić Marn and Tina Košak

Figure 15.4 Collection of Ludwig von Gutmannsthal-​ Benvenuti, Novi Dvor near Radeče, 1926. © Heritage Information and Documentation Centre, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.

Stele first unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the owner to sell the paintings at a public auction in Ljubljana, which would give the local museums a pre-​ purchase right to select items for their collection. Subsequently, he tried to find a buyer among other Yugoslav museums—​in Zagreb, in the Strossmayer Gallery, and in Belgrade, where he notified the National Museum and the protocol of the King’s residence (Stele, 1926, p. 111; Košak, 2012, pp. 588–​590). None of them could afford the items at the required prices nor were interested in them, and Stele had no other choice but to sign the export permit. The case of Gutmannsthal’s Madonna with a Child and Goldfinch by Giandomenico Tiepolo confirms that the collection was sold and dispersed immediately after being exported from Yugoslavia, while the Head of Turbaned Philosopher by Lorenzo Tiepolo at the Bohm Antiquitäten, reveals that some of them still circulate in the art market (cf. Venturi, 1927; Meke, 2015, pp. 829–​830; Bohm Antiquitäten, 2021). The sales of private properties represented a segment of the art market which, due to particular circumstances such as unfavourable political and legislation changes, mass emigration of the higher social strata and export limitations,

New markets for old items  203 exceeded all other forms of the art and antiquities market in interwar Slovenia. Adjusting cross-​border trade and exports to the current needs of national institutions, the state apparatus to appropriate the cultural assets of the former (‘defeated’) elites, and the rising economic crisis all resulted in an increase of such conservative types of auctions throughout the later 1920s and 1930s. As Stele (1926, p. 112) emphasised in one of his annual reports it was ‘the absence of art market infrastructures and independent expert-​guided dealership’, that was a core problem, leading to frequent manipulations from both the state-​led institutions as well as the owners. State control over the art market, which had been initiated in the Interwar period, reached its zenith after WWII in socialist Yugoslavia. The remaining private aristocratic collections and furnishings of aristocratic residences were confiscated and the large majority of contemporary artistic production was state commissioned.

Conclusion Research into the interwar art-​dealing and musealisation of antiquities in Slovenia not only provides insights into an emerging art market in the time of social changes and Great Crisis but also contextualises the rise of restrictive legislative and political mechanisms that fully developed in the later regimes. The information gained through comprehensive archival research is invaluable not only for art markets studies but also for collecting, provenance and transfer research, which in this part of Europe is still at an early stage. It enables us to pinpoint the protagonists, trace the networks, and identify artworks and antiquities from Slovenian collections that resurface on international market, and, most importantly, raises our knowledge of still unexplored parts of former Yugoslav state collections. Archival sources and the information they provide can themselves be seen as a network surpassing state borders, thus enabling critical overview and comparative research over the once common Yugoslav artistic space, and beyond. * Research for this paper has been conducted within the research project Art and the Nobility in Times of Decline:  Transformations, Translocations and Reinterpretations (J6-​ 1810) and the core funding programme Slovenian Artistic Identity in European Context (P6-​ 0061), both funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. The paper has been written in the shared co-​first authorship.

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Index

Abattoirs, Les, Toulouse 13 African artist 40, 44, 45, 47, 100 African contemporary art see Tate Modern 37–​48 Albani, Francesco 158–​164 Albers, Josef 107 Alexander, Jane 47 amateur collectors 3 Anatsui, El 45 André, Carl 16 Appadurai, Arjun 2 Appel, Karel 44 Araeen, Rashid 47 ARCO 67 Arman 14, 15, 20 Art Basel 81, 100, 101–​110; brand 101; catalogue 101–​102; innovation 101–​102; see also fairs Art Basel Miami 67, 81, 101 art market development art system 63–​64, 68, 70 Artfacts 7 artist brand: action vs. strategy 77; agent-​oriented approach 75, 82; artists’ choices 77–​79; auction houses 81; centre–​satellite system 75, 76; co-​active ecosystem 77, 82; Cultural Branding Theory 76; experts, critics and media 80–​81; galleries and dealers 79–​80; information asymmetry and 75, 79, 81; museums and curators 80; peers of artists 79; as signal of quality 76; social, cultural and symbolic capital 78; technical quality, decline of as market criterion 76 artist collectors: artist–​gallery exchanges 16–​17; exchanges between artists 15–​16, 18, 22; guardian figures 15; reciprocity 20, 22; reputational

interest 20, 22; social networks 19–​20, 21–​22 artistic marriage 112, 115 Artnet 142, 148, 149 Artory 7 Artprice 7, 44, 142, 148, 149 ArtRio 67 Arts Council 59 Artsy 7 ArtTactic 7 Ashmole, Elias 27, 33 auction market in Czechoslovakia 113 Auguste, Henri 183–​184 authenticity 7, 33, 80, 143 Banksy 78 Beauvais 159 Becker, Howard 1 Beckford, William 28–​29, 30, 31, 35 Beech, Dave 60 Belkahia, Farid 47 Ben (Benjamin Vautier) 14, 15, 20 Benjamin, Walter 67 Benois, François 185 Bentley, Richard 28 Birch 157 Birth of RMB City 57, 60 Boilly, Louis-​Léopold 171, 172, 178 Boston Athenaeum 59 Boston Museum of Fine Arts 59 Bostonian Brahmins 58, 59 Bourdon, Sébastien 158–​164 Bourgeois, Louise 118 Brazil, private contemporary art collecting in: acquisitions, sources of 66–​67; characteristics of collections 66; demographic profile of collectors 66; importing, barriers to 66, 69; institutions linked to private

Index  209 collections 64; management of collections 67; private institutions 68–​70; provisions for future of collections 67–​68; São Paulo, centrality of 63, 70–​71 Brazilian Agency for the Promotion of Exports and Investments 65 Brazilian Association of Contemporary Art 65 Bridgewater 160 Brill Art Sales Catalogues Online 146 British Museum 38 Bruegel family 5 Bruscky, Paulo 70 Bruun Rasmussen Auction House 129 Bryan 159 Buccleuch, Duchess of, Charlotte Ann 33 Buchanan, William 144, 148 Bulhões, Maria Amélia 64 business model 86, 101 buying-​in see eighteenth-​century London auctions Caldas, Waltercio 69 Cao Fei 57, 60 Castelli, Leo 21 Catherine the Great 144 Cattelan, Maurizio 78, 81 Cawthorne 159, 160 César Baldaccini 14, 15, 54 Chalupecký, Jindřich 115, 116, 120 Chamberlain, John 16 Chanel 57 Château de Versailles 15 Chenard, Simon 171–​178 Cheng, Adrian 56 chess game, art scene as 3 Chinese private art institutes: art–​ consumption fusion 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 60; ‘art retail model’ 56; chronopolitics of circulation 55; cosmopolitanism 51, 56; economic growth, art as booster for 52–​53; museum retail model 58–​60; video artworks 52, 55–​56, 57 Chiu, Julie 55 Christie’s auction house 149, 157, 158 Christo 15, 20 Chute, John 26 Clarke, Toby 44 co-​creation 76, 77 Cold War 118 collector choices vs. institutional choices 3, 4

Colnaghi, Paul 158–​164 Communist oppression 112 competencies 89 competitive advantage 101 conceptual art 13, 20, 21, 22, 56, 113, 122 connoisseur collectors 3 Constantin, Guillaume-​Jean 169, 171, 175, 178 Cooper, Paula 21 Coxe’s auction house 157 Cragg, Tony 17 ‘curious individual’ collectors 3 Czechoslovakia: art historians, power of 114; gender bias in museum acquisitions 118; married artist couples 112, 115–​123; patriarchal nature of society 114–​116, 123; private collectors from intelligentsia 114, 122; state control of art market 113–​114, 120; state museums 122 Dai Zhikan 53–​55, 56, 59 Danish Artists’ Society 130 Danish Arts Foundation 130 Danish Colleting Society for Visual Rights (VISDA) 135, 136 Danish contemporary art market: art buyers, types of 127, 128, 129, 131; art clubs 128, 131, 132, 134, 138; artists’ turnover 127, 129, 131–​135; composition of 126, 127, 136; demand-​side 128–​129, 131–​132; development of 126, 127, 133–​134, 135, 136; difficulties of studying 126; growth of 133–​134; income distribution 132–​133; intermediaries 127, 132; market boundaries 127; primary art market 128; private market increase 133; public market decrease 133; size of 126–​127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134–​135; ‘substitute’ markets 134–​135; supply-​side 129–​131, 132 Danish Visual Artists (BKF) 130 Dantas, Marcello 67 d’Arcangelo, Allan 16 Darly, Matthew 155 David, Jacques Louis 175 Davies 157 Davis, Charles 33 de Beauharnais, Joséphine 175 de Berry, Duc and Duchesse 176–​177, 185

210 Index de Kooning, Elaine 118 de Montferrand, August 186 de Wailly, Charles 169, 172 Delacroix, Eugène 176 Delorme, Raphael 147 Demidoff, Anatole 186–​189 Demidoff, Nicolay 183–​185, 186 Demidoff, Paul 185–​186 Demidoff, Paul Pavlovich 189–​190 Demos, T. J. 38, 39 Dercon, Chris 38, 40, 44, 47 Descamps, Jean-​Baptiste 145 Deschamps, Gérard 14, 15 Diderot, Denis 144 Ding, Zhang 56 diversity 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 108, 110 drawings see early nineteenth-​century Paris modern drawing market du Sommerard, Alexandre 175, 177 Duchamp, Marcel 15, 18, 21 Dufrêne, François 14 Duplessis, Georges 146–​147 Dwan, Virginia 21 early nineteenth-​century Paris modern drawing market: albums 176, 177–​179; Chenard as collector 171–​178; medieval and picturesque subjects 175; motivations for collecting 172; ‘pensées’ 169–​171; Salon and 176; Schroth and 168–​169, 176–​177; signifiers of taste 178–​179; sociability networks 178; Société des Amis des Arts 169, 171, 172, 174, 177, 178; support for promising artists 174–​175; Valedau as collector 171–​178 Eastern Bloc 112, 116; propaganda of 115 ebony furniture market: dealers, role of 32–​34; dissemination of taste for 29–​31; earliest English collections 27–​28; Esher Place collection 27; Fonthill collection 28–​29, 30, 31, 34; identity, changing perceptions of 25; Oriental attributions 29; Regency taste for 29; Strawberry Hill collection 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 33, 34; Tudor attributions 24, 28, 33; Windsor Castle collection 30; Wolsey association 28, 29, 31 economic growth, art as booster for 52, 126

ecosystem, art market as 1 Edgecumbe, Baron 27, 28 eighteenth-​century London auctions: auction catalogue 152, 153, 155–​156, 157; Auction Duty Act 153, 154; auction lot 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165; auctioneer–​dealer agreement 154; bidding process 155; bought-​in 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165; ‘burned’ artwork 153, 154; buyer vigilance 158; chandelier bidding 152; dealers’ lots 155; dealers as market agents or intermediaries 164; dealer’s strategy 152, 155; declining prices of bought-​in items 157–​158, 164; dominant seller 159, 160, 164; fictitious bidding 153; fixed reserves 153; flexible reserve, buying-​in as 153, 164; increasing European dominance of 155; hammer price 158; information asymmetry 152, 155–​156; London as European hub 152, 155; lot ordering by quality 155, 161, 164; lots sequence 161, 162, 163, 164; market regulation 153, 155; market testing, buying-​in as 154, 165; ‘morning effect’ 155; phantom bidding 153, 165; pre-​decimal system 157; price distribution 161, 164; private estimate 153, 155, 158; private value 164; reserve price, fixed and flexible 153; secondary art market 152, 155; transaction costs 164–​165 El Salahi, Ibrahim 40, 44–​45 Ellsworth, Kelly 16 Enli, Zhang 56 entrepreneur, artist as 5–​6; artist–​ entrepreneur behavioural overlap 86–​87, 89; behavioural science approach 88–​90, 93–​94; intrinsic motivation 92–​93; personality and creativity 91–​92; tolerance of risk and uncertainty 90–​91 Enwezor, Okwui 38, 47 Esher Place 27, 28, 29 Espace de l’art concret 13, 15 Eudel, Paul 144 Even-​Zohar, Itamar 63 experience economy 51, 52, 60 fairs: artists’ ages 108; artists’ nationalities 103–​104, 107; artists’

Index  211 visibility 105–​107; catalogues 101–​102; curatorial dominance of 99, 102, 108, 110; developing countries 100; ephemeral art 102; geo-​political dominance 103, 104, 110, 99–​100, 102–​103, 110; support of artists by domestic galleries 104–​105, 110 Fama, Eugene F. 141, 142 Figueiredo Ferraz, João Carlos 69 Fillitz, Thomas 53 Fiske, John 60 Fiszman, Isi 15 Flavin, Dan 14, 15, 16, 18, 19 Fosso, Samuel 47 Foster’s auction house 157 Foucault, Michel 2 Frankenthaler, Helen 118 Freeman, R. E. 76 French Revolution 8, 145, 148, 168, 169, 171, 178 Gaba, Meschac 40, 41, 47, 48 Galeria Chaves 68 Ganchewa, Ljiljana 116 Garaicoa, Carlos 70 gatekeepers of art market 79, 80, 91, 127 Gates, Theaster 56 George IV 30, 32, 185 Gette, Paul-​Armand 15 Getty Provenance Index 157 Giroux, Alphonse 178, 179 global art world 44, 48, 53, 99, 100, 149 Gornja Radgona Castle 197 Goulart, Claudio 68 Gouldner, Alvin A 20 Granovetter, Mark 17–​18 Gray, Thomas 26, 27, 28 Great Exhibition (1851) 186–​188 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior 144 Guaranty Trust Bank 40–​41, 44, 45, 47 Gucci 57 Gutmannsthal collection 201–​202 Habsburg empire 113–​114, 194, 195, 197, 200 Hains, Raymond 14, 20 Hallet, William 27, 28 Harris 157 Harvard University 56 Haskell, Francis 8 hegemony 101, 102, 110 Heitlinger, Alena 114–​115 Helguera, Pablo 3

Hirst, Damien 2, 5, 57, 81 Hoet the Younger, Gerard 144, 146 Honegger, Gottfried 21 Hutter, Michael 52 India Art Fair 100 information efficiency in art markets: art prices 143; auction house data 142, 144; Brill catalogue 146; digital revolution 148–​149; Duplessis’ comprehensive catalogue 146–​147; Dutch Golden Age artists 145 early Dutch price catalogues 144; early Parisian price catalogues 144–​145; Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) 141–​143, 149; geographical proximity 148; insider information 143; Lebrun’s international catalogue 145–​146, 148; London sale catalogues 148; Lugt’s comprehensive catalogue 146–​147; slowness of market 143; speed of information transmission 144, 149 Inhotim 68–​69 Institute of Contemporary Culture 64 Institute Figueiredo Ferraz 69 internationalisation 51, 99, 100, 101, 105, 108, 110 Invaluable 148 investment, art as 7 Isabey, Jean-​Baptiste 169, 173, 177, 179 ISCO occupation codes 126 Isozaki, Arata 54 Jakopič, Rihard 200 Jan and Meda Mládek Foundation 120 Janoušková, Vêra 113, 115, 116, 123 Jeunesse des musées 4 Joffriaud, Louis 186 John, Jiří, 120 Joseph, Johann, Count Herberstein-​ Proskau 200 Joullain, François-​Charles 144–​145, 146 Judd, Donald 14, 15, 16, 18 K11 Art Mall 51, 56–​60 Karsten Greve 107 Kawara, On 16 Kent, William 27, 28 Kerrigan, F. 76 Keynes, John Maynard 59 Kirkman 159, 160 Klein, Yves 14 Kline, Franz 18

212 Index Kmentová, Eva 113, 116, 118, 123 Kodella, Geza 200 Kolář, Jiří 116, 120 Kolářová, Bêla 113, 116, 123 Kometer, Baron 197, 198 Koons, Jeff 2 Kopytoff, Igor 2 Kos, Gojmir Anton 200 Kosuth, Joseph 16 Kounellis, Jannis 21 Krasner, Lee 118 Kumo, Kengo 54 LADYMAX 57 Lambert (collection) 13, 15 Latitude –​Platform for Brazilian Art Galleries Abroad 65 Latour, Bruno 54 Lauritz.com 129 Lebrun, Jean-​Baptiste-​Pierre 145–​146, 148 Lehninger, Johann August 169–​170 Lenoir, Alexandre 175 Leroi, Paul 189 Lévy Gorvy 107 LeWitt, Sol 14, 15, 16, 17, 107 Lichtenstein, Roy 16 Lingelbach, Jan 146 living artist collections 3–​4 Lopes, Vanderlai 70 Lu Yang 55 Lucy, George 30–​31, 32, 33 Lugt, Frits 146–​147 Majluf, Natalia 48 Mal, Josip 196 malachite, development of market for: American market 189–​190; Exposition des produits de l’industries Françaises 184, 185; French market 184–​185; Great Exhibition 186–​188; luxury status symbol 183, 186, 190; Russian market 185–​186; St. Isaak Cathedral 185–​186; Universal Exhibition 189; veneering technique 182, 183; Villa San Donato 188–​190 Mancoba, Ernest 47 Mantuani, Josip 197–​198 Mathilde de Montfort 186 Mayer, Enrique 148 Mayer, Hans 16 Meirelles, Cildo 68–​69 Metropolitan Museum 56, 190

Meyrick, Samuel Rush 33 Michelangelo 6 Milhazes, Beatriz 69 minimalism 15, 20, 21, 22 Mládek Foundation 123 Mládková, Meda 120 MOCA LA 56 Moma PS1 51, 56 Monde de Bernar Venet 13 Montagu, Duke of, John 27, 33 Montagu House, London 27 Mori Museum 51 Morris, Robert 17 Mosset, Olivier 20 Motherwell, Robert 44 Moulin, Raymonde 1 Murakami, Takashi 5 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban 157 Murillo, Oscar 56 Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon 15 Musée des Augustins 175 Musée Fabre 172 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 39, 48, 51, 56, 58, 59 museums: individuals buying places on acquisition committees 37, 39, 45; private collections as origin of 4, private funding, increasing reliance on 38, 39; private museums, rise of 39 Mutualart 148, 149 NACE industry codes 126, 129 Napoleon I 184, 186 Napoleonic wars 8, 154 National Endowment for the Arts 59 neoliberalism 38, 63 Netherlandish Golden Age 8 new markets 7–​8 New Realism 14, 15 Ngwenya, Malangatana 47 Nicolas I 185 Njami, Simon 37 Nochlin, Linda 112, 118 Nodier, Charles 175 North, Michael 154 Nunes, Silvio 68 Ono, Yoko 54 Oppenheim, Dennis 15 Orléans, duke of, collection 144 Ormrod, David 154 Ose, Elvira Dyangani 40

Index  213 Pace Gallery 60, 107 Paillet, Alexandre-​Joseph 171–​172 Paris Salon 94, 169, 171, 176 Parke-​Bernet Galleries 18 Parte Contemporary Art Fair 67 Paz, Bernardo 68–​69 Pessoa de Queiroz, Bruna and Ricardo 70 Phillip’s auction house 155, 157 Pinho de Almeida, Regina 64 Polke, Sigmar 107 polysystem theory 63–​64 Pompidou Centre 56, 122 popular collecting 53, 59 post-​socialist China 55 Post-​WWII era 59 Powell, Walter W. 19 Preece, C. 76 Prud’hon, Pierre-​Paul 169 Public Art Fund 56 public–​private hybrid model in Euro-​ America 59 Pukštanj Manor 197 Raphael 2 Regnault, Jules 141 Reinhardt, Ad 18 Reitlinger, Gerald 7 Rembrandt van Rijn 5 Reni, Guido 6 Reset Modernity 54 Rheims, Maurice 67 Rio Grande do Sul, University of 64 Rockefeller family 58, 59 Rosenberg, Pierre 143 Rosenquist 16 Rotella, Mimmo 14, 20 Royal Academy, London 56, 169 Rubens, Peter Paul 2, 5, 31 Rudolf, Lorenzo 101 Rufino, José 70 Salon 169, 171, 176 Schroth, Claude 168–​169, 176–​177 Scully, Sean 54 Semetkowski, Walter von 200 Shanghai: art–​consumption nexus 52 Shanghai Document: Uniform Motion 55–​56, 60 Shanghai Himalaya Museum 51, 53–​56 Shaw, Henry 33 Silicon Valley 60 Silveira, Marcelo 70

Šimotová, Adriena 112, 115, 116, 118–​123 Slovenia, interwar period: emigration of nobility 195, 203; export restrictions on cultural heritage 196, 200; Great Depression 195, 196; Grebenc collection 199; Gutmannsthal collection 201–​202; illicit exports 200; local sales, burgeoning of 196; National Gallery 197, 198, 199–​200; national identity, art exploited for 194, 198–​199, 201; National Museum 196–​197, 201, 202; radical tax and land reforms 195; Strahl collection 197, 198; undervaluing by state purchasers 196–​198; World War I 194; World War II 194, 196, 200, 203 Smith, Tony 16 Société des Amis des Arts 169, 171, 172, 174, 177, 178; see also early nineteenth-​century Paris modern drawing market Sommariva, Giovanni Battista 172 Sotheby’s 81, 149 SP-​Arte 67 Spaniol, José 70 St. Isaak Cathedral 185–​186 Statistics Denmark 129, 130, 135, 138 Stele, France 196, 200, 202, 203 Stella, Frank 14, 21 Sternen, Matej 198 Storr, Robert 39 Strahl collection 197, 198, 199 Strubing 157 Stukeley, Sir William 26 Susse, Jean-​Louis 178 Szapáry collection 197 Szapocznikow, Alina 116 Tanning, Dorothea 44 Tate Britain 40 Tate Modern: Across the Board project 40; African acquisitions, pattern of 47; Africa Acquisitions Committee 39, 40, 44, 45, 47; Gaba acquisition 40, 41–​44, 48; global acquisitions vision 38–​39; Guaranty Trust Bank partnership 40–​41, 44, 45, 47; high profile of 37; individuals buying places on acquisitions committees 39, 45; Middle East and North Africa

214 Index Acquisitions Committee 40, 44, 45; private funding, increased reliance on 39; transparency, lack of 41, 44, 47, 48 Taylor, Isidore (Baron) 175 teamLab 60 Templon, Daniel 16 Thaddaeus Ropac 107 Theret, Joseph 189 Thomire, Pierre-​Philippe 183–​184 totalitarian art 113–​114 Trouvé, Tatiana 56 Trustees 38, 39, 40 Tsim Shan Tsui 56 Tunga 68, 69 Twitschin, Mischa 41 UB 12 group 116 Universal Exhibition (1878) Usina de Arte 69–​70 Usina Festival 70 Usina Library 70 Valedau, Antoine 171–​178 Vallois, Georges-​Philippe 99 value chain 99 van der Grijp, Paul 53 van Gogh, Vincent 90 van Gool, Johan 144, 145 Varejao, Adriana 69 Venet, Bernar 13–​22 Venet Foundation 13, 22 Venice Biennale 101, 195 Vera Chaves Barcellos Foundation 68 Villa San Donato 188–​190 Villar Rojas, Adrin 56 Villeglé, Jacques 14, 15, 20 Viola, Bill 54 Viveros-​Fauné, Christian 60

Vivre l’art: collection Venet 13 von Gutmannsthal-​Benvenuti, Ludwig 201–​202 von Strahl, Karl 197, 198 Walpole, Horace 24–​28, 31, 33, 34, 35 Warhol, Andy 16, 78, 107 Warsaw Pact 113 Watelet, Claude-​Henri 170–​171 Wen Zhenmin 55 Wolsey, Thomas 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 women artists in Czechoslovakia: career paths of 113, 115–​123; gender inequality 113, 116, 118, 123; museums and 114; political suppression of 113; private collectors and 114; recognition of 112, 118, 120, 122, 123; under socialism 114–​115; Western women artists, compared to 123; as wives of male artists 113, 115–​118; see also Kmentová, Eva; Kolářová, Bêla; Šimotová, Adriena; Janoušková, Vêra women in Czechoslovakia: employment 114; gender inequality 114–​115; World War II Woodburn 157 Xu Beihong 55 Yang, Haegue 56 Yang, Lu 55 Yi, Anicka 56 Zarobell, John 46–​47 Zheng Zhigang 58 Zorman, Ivan 198