The 2006 Art Fair season is well under way - Palm Beach has just finished, and London opens on January 18th. Dealers as usual are packing up their wares and their bags in preparation for upcoming fairs. Should you, like them, make a point of attending the fairs that are near either to where you live, or where the art is most to your taste? They cost you time and money for the ticket - but it’s not hard to get a freebie from one of the scores of competing dealers: and there are always many goodies on display.
Opening the London catalogue, for instance, I was immediately overwhelmed by a gorgeous abstract by Patrick Heron. That dates from 1962: showing at the James Hyman stand, it’s a superb example of this artist’s full-blooded abstraction. Two pages back, though, there’s another oil (of a bedroom at Mousehole in Cornwall, painted in 1946, when Heron was still operating in the space between reality and abstraction that Picasso and Braque had mapped out.
That’s the fascination of fairs - the range of work on display, and the juxtapositions that abound on every side. But fairs vary greatly in their nature and their pecking order. I used to pay an annual visit to Chicago, whose collectors are keener than mustard, flocked into the disused naval premises - the Navy Pier; and in the good years practically tore paintings off the walls in their haste to buy. But the Pier shut down, three opened in various premises, and Chicago lost its lustre.
Friedemann Hahn Kirk Douglas in Lust For Life
The dealers moved to New York (surprisingly a laggard in the fair game) and Florida, where the superstar is still Miami - where the organisers of the Basle Fair made an unexpected hit in their first foray abroad. In fact, fringe fairs have opened to accommodate the dealers who can’t get in. Basle is used to being exclusive. It’s tightly controlled by rich and powerful Swiss dealers, assisted by the Germans, and is a place where dealers deal with each other in sums of many noughts. But even at Basle, amid the masterpieces of dead artists, you can enjoy the thrill of finding someone new - at least to you.
That was where I saw my first Friedemann Hahn, see left. Very well-known in Germany, he paints bold, expressionist works with brushstrokes that are swirls of rich, intermingled colours. My first Hahn shows, not van Gogh on his way to Tarascon, near Arles, but Kirk Douglas acting as Vincent. Hahn has very often used cinema stills as his motifs, being particularly fond of black films like The Maltese Falcon. He has been given shows in London and New York by Angela Flowers, and it must be only a matter of time before his reputation elsewhere reaches the German level.
Will you make similar finds at London? The catalogue has some very attractive buys, though it doesn’t include the asking prices, which are fundamental, of course. Nor does this year include some of the leading contemporary galleries, like Waddington and White Cube: in this fickle art world, the focus of London interest has shifted West, to the Frieze fair in Regent’s Park. But I won’t give the London Art Fair a miss - who knows what I may find?
The London Art Fair is at the Business Design Centre (near the Angel, at 22 Upper Street, Islington).
