The scene is the invitation-only preview of the European Fine Art Fair, colloquially known as TEFAF, in New York in May. A savvy American collector who has known his way around the art world for decades is admiring a headless torso, gracefully chiseled in marble. All that’s left of the statue’s arms is a rough chunk above the right buttock, believed to be the remnant of a hand. The dealer, an elegant Parisian, carefully rotates the millennia-old figure on its turntable pedestal. “We have photographs of it before 1970,” he rushes to tell the collector—a claim that might sound like a non sequitur to the uninitiated but has become (faulty) shorthand in the antiquities trade for “legal to sell.”
After a recent barrage of headlines about archaeological artifacts seized from humiliated collectors and museums, dealers criminally indicted for trading in smuggled goods, and countries of origin agitating for the return of such pieces, valuable antiquities have become a hot topic, so to speak. It’s no wonder that some collectors are feeling skittish and dealers defensive: Navigating the art world can be daunting enough without the fear of law enforcement knocking on your door with a search warrant.
And yet interest in artifacts—whether from ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Asia, or Indigenous cultures—hasn’t abated. Unlike past eras, when scholarly collectors prided themselves on being among the foremost experts on narrow categories, today many collectors of contemporary art have begun to pepper their Warhols and Princes with Roman mosaics or Chinese Buddhas. At TEFAF, a handful of plum antiquities dealers are ensconced among the Gagosians and Paces of the world.
It was a contemporary-collecting couple, for example, who were drawn to a large, strikingly colorful image of the Egyptian goddess Amentet on a sarcophagus panel dating to about 700 B.C.E., on prominent display at the stand of Charles Ede. Even their art adviser seemed to be a novice in the category, Charis Tyndall, a director of the London gallery, tells Robb Report as she keeps an eye on browsing fairgoers, “and he said, ‘What questions should I be asking?’”
After Tyndall gave the adviser a crash course in condition (the pigment is all original; the wooden backing completely restored by the gallery’s conservator to prevent the plaster from crumbling) and provenance (the dealer has a Belgian certificate of authenticity from 1978, five years before Egypt banned the sale of such treasures), the couple promptly bought the piece, which was listed for about $223,000.
Naivete, combined with high demand and high risk, can produce an explosive cocktail—making the question of how to collect this type of material,
