WHERE THE WILDLY EXPENSIVE THINGS ARE

In a small city in the Dutch hinterlands, sharp-elbowed dealers hunt the biggest game of all: billionaire collectors voracious for treasures from the last art fair that truly matters.

-  SIMON KUPER

In a regular week, the usually homely Maastricht Exhibition & Conference Centre, in the Dutch city of Maastricht, hosts runof-the-mill functions such as a pub quiz and a flea market. Then, every March, for a few days it gets dressed up with banks of flowers to welcome an altogether different crowd.

That's when museum directors, art advisors, and billionaires from around the world descend on this provincial backwater straddling the Meuse River, many of them swooping in via private plane, to attend TEFAF, arguably the world's most discerning art fair.

"It's truly the best," says Aerin Lauder, the New York designer, collector, and member of TEFAF's global advisory board. "The heritage of it, what it represents, and the people who come."

Co-founded nearly 40 years ago by the Dutch art dealer and gangster Robert Noortman, TEFAF, or The European Fine Art Foundation, has grown with the stratospheric rise of the international art market, which before the Covid pandemic reached heights estimated at more than $67.4 billion. Recently there has been grumbling from more clout-chasing rival fairs of a slump in this once booming sector. But do big buyers at Maastricht even understand the meaning of the word slowdown? Seven days in March may deliver an answer and set the tone for the year.

When the fair opens on the 15th, visitors may get their only glimpse of a Matisse that hung for a century in some European château and is on show for the briefest moment before disappearing again inside a Gramercy Park mansion. At last year's TEFAF the Canadian dealer Robert Landau showed up with a Kandinsky that he had bought at auction for $45 million, and a first-time exhibitor, the New Orleans gallery M.S. Rau, sold an early Van Gogh, the name of which translates to "Head of a peasant woman in a white cap," to a museum for 4.5 million euros. Workers setting up before opening hours would come over and stare at it.