Acquiring Cultures. Histories of World Art on Western Markets

Bénédicte Savoy, Charlotte Guichard, Christine Howald (eds.), Acquiring Cultures. Histories of World Art on Western Markets, Berlin, De Gruyter, pp. 15-30, 2018

2024

This international three day colloquium will investigate the role played by auctions, dealers, collectors, and museums in the circulation of the decorative arts from 1792 until 1914. Beginning with the ‘ ventes des biens des émigrés’ in Revolutionary France and ending with the onset of World War I, these were years of seismic political and socio economic change that revolutionised the art market. It was during the nineteenth century that the decorative arts, originally described as ‘curiosities’ and then ‘antiques’, became the subject of intellectual curiosity. The period under review saw the emergence of a more scholarly approach and publications , the development of the antiques trade and of museum collections devoted to the decorative arts, facilitated by the expansion of global trading networks, extended by colonisation and encouraged by international travel and wo rld f airs . London and Paris led the growth of this market, but economic downturn in Britain and France resulted in the mass export of art to the Americas from the 1880s. At the same time, a new cosmopolitan elite stimulated purchase across Europe, competing with museums for prize objects. These developments were first charted by Gerald Reitlinger in "The Economics of Taste: The Rise and Fall of the Objets d'art Market since 1750" (1963) and then by Clive Wainwright in "The Romantic Interior" (1989). Art market historiography has increased exponentially over recent years with scholarship on dealers ( Lynn Catterson , Paola Cordera, Charlotte Vignon, Mark Westgarth), collectors and museums (Julius Bryant, Ting Chang, Suzanne Higgott, Sophie Le Tarnec, Pauline Prévost Marcilhacy), collecting culture (Elizabeth Emery, Tom Stammers, Adriana Turpin) and markets and networks of trade (Anne Helmreich, Léa Saint Raymond), among others as well as a dedicated Journal for Art Market Studies This has been augmented by the Getty Provenance Index, Bloomsbury Art Market, the Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America, the creation of specific publishers’ series (from Brill and Bloomsbury) the digitisation of auction and two programmes initiated by INHA (one on ‘Connoisseurs, Collectors and Dealers of Asian Art in France, 1700 1939 ’, and the other on ‘Sales of antiquities in nineteenth century'. To date, however, scholarship has largely centred on the fine arts. This conference will focus on the commerce and global circulation of the decorative arts in order to open new perspectives and approaches that will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the art market. ‘Decorative arts’ are taken to include furniture, metalwork, clocks, silverware, ceramics and glass, enamels, small sculpture, hardstones, ivories, jewellery, textiles, tapestries, and boiseries, from Ming dynasty porcelain, Mamluk glass, and Augsburg Kunstkammer objects to Boulle furniture and Thomire bronzes, not to mention the contemporary Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements. We hope to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue among participants specialising in art history, material culture and economic history.

2014

The legal protection of movable cultural heritage at the international level has been defined by a perennial tug-of-war between forces promoting international exchange and those seeking regulation of the transfer of the cultural objects. Shifts over the last century in how the balance between these twin aims is achieved reflect changes in the composition of Member States of intergovernmental organizations and their corresponding changing priorities. In the early twentieth century, the balance fostered under the League of Nations favored a cosmopolitan view promoting the circulation and interchange of cultural material to further knowledge and mutual understanding between peoples. The balance sought in the late twentieth century emphasized the importance of states being able to host representative national collections on their own territory. More recently, this position appears to be tempered by moves to make cultural objects exhibited in international exhibitions immune from seizure...

Handbook on the Economics of Cultural Heritage, 2013

The Getty Research Institute presents a symposium on the role of international art dealers in creating the collections, museums, and intellectual culture of the American art world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bringing together rich archival resources from the Getty Research Institute and peer institutions, and capitalizing on new methodologies made possible by the extraordinary quantity of information contained in the documentary record, this symposium illuminates the ways in which art dealers contributed to making America a prominent arena in the international art market, and their role in creating the major private collections that became the foundation of great American museums.

artcollection.io, 2020

The story of art collecting can be traced back to ancient civilizations and has unfolded in a continuous, evolving fashion ever since. What is the past, present, and future of art collecting? What are the main characteristics of this story? Given the complexity and extent of these questions, this article analyzes the main features of collecting art and the origins of art collecting up until the 19th century, while the second part focuses on the practice of collecting art in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Organized by Prof. Dr. Gregor M. Langfeld (University of Amsterdam/Open University), Kristóf Nagy (KEMKI/Central European University) and Prof. Dr. Lynn Rother (Leuphana University), 2024

Infrastructures of Trading and Transferring Art since 1900. 26-28 June 2024; Museum of Fine Arts – Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI) Budapest Organized by Prof. Dr. Gregor M. Langfeld (University of Amsterdam/Open University), Kristóf Nagy (KEMKI/Central European University) and Prof. Dr. Lynn Rother (Leuphana University)

Crime in the Art and Antiquities World, 2011

While there is some compelling evidence that certain elements of the traffic in illicit antiquities are organized, it is less clear how well this traffic fits common conceptions of organized crime. Clear indications of organization are present, certainly, in such varied examples as the "Cordata" found in Italy, the pattern of movement of the goods involved in the Salisbury Hoard, and in our case studies from SE Asia. While it is widely recognized that there are ambiguities and difficulties with the term "organized crime," for our purposes it involves market dynamics linking supply and demand, it is illegal, it is transnational in its reach, and therefore commonly requires division of labor. Three important features distinguish the antiquities traffic from other forms of organized crime: (1) it tends to be legal in the demand environments; (2) the demand often involves social elites as consumers; and (3) it only rarely attracts attention from law enforcement authorities. We emphasize these differences because of their importance in the consideration of forms of "market reduction" (for example, as discussed by Mackenzie, 2009), and we explore here policy initiatives which call for innovative mixes of deterrence (which theoretically might have some purchase when social elites are involved) with what has been termed "restorative justice."

During the colonial conquests, the arrival of African objects on the European continent took place in a situation of asymmetry of military and economic power. To reconstruct the memory of these artifacts, it is essential to consider their circulation paths. While prove-nance researchers are familiar with looting and "exploration" missions, the commercial circuits are still poorly documented as a whole, due to the lack of account books and archives. There is a document, however, that allows to consider an aspect of the market for these objects: the minutes of an auction sale, if the transaction took place in the Parisian arena. Thanks to this archive, it becomes possible to pinpoint the seller of each object, its buyer and its hammer price. Matched with the corresponding auction catalogue that gives all the information on the objects, the minutes provide a full picture of all the transactions at Hôtel Drouot. Based on a comprehensive database of all the Parisian auction sales of "primitive" ar-tifacts, and a quantitative and spatial analysis, this paper aims at reconstructing the commercial paths of the African artifacts, in the inter-war period. It will identify and map the private and public actors of this market, and cross this information with the origin of the items they sold or bought. The paths of the African objects were also obscured by the tastes of European collectors. Indeed, our dataset allows us to compare the prices and symbolical value of the African artifacts, with those of the other "primitive" ones. African objects were at the bottom of the scale of preferences in the interwar period and achieved comparatively low hammer prices, with a notable exception: objects from the Royal Palaces of Abomey constituted safe haven values against the background of the 1930s financial crisis.