MAASTRICHT.- Over the past 20 years The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) held annually in the Dutch city of Maastricht has undergone an extraordinary transformation from a little known art and antiques show to one of the most important events in the international art market calendar attracting collectors and connoisseurs from all over the world. TEFAF will open its doors for the 20th time from 9th to 18th March at the MECC (Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre), an important moment in its history that will provide an opportunity to reflect on how far the fair has come over the past two decades. The number of 220 dealers has more than doubled since 1988 while visitor figures last year (over 84,000) were more than four times as many as at the first TEFAF.

Although TEFAF is now a major destination fair that no serious art buyer wants to miss, its origins were humble. It began life as the Pictura Fine Art Fair in 1975 with just 28 exhibitors specialising in Old Master paintings and medieval sculptures and was held in the Eurohal in Maastricht, a building that has since been knocked down.

“The Eurohal was on the banks of the River Maas and was a large concrete and glass barn which I think had a corrugated iron roof because when it rained or hailed the noise was indescribable,” recalls Johnny Van Haeften, a leading specialist in Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings who is a former chairman of the paintings section of TEFAF and still a member of the fair’s Executive Committee.

David Mason of the MacConnal-Mason Gallery, London, which specialises in 19th and early 20th century European paintings, says: “In the early days it was like a provincial fair and there was not much business. It took time to establish it and bring in customers and it was certainly not like it is now with private jets flying into the local airport and the hotels in Maastricht full.”

The clientele was less sophisticated then and Raphael Valls, the London-based Old Master paintings dealer, remembers selling a painting depicting pigs to a buyer who liked it because he was a leading sausages manufacturer. “The fair was much smaller and more provincial and our most expensive painting was £5,500,” says Valls. “Even by the early Eighties our average price was about £2,000.”

Pictura expanded steadily and in 1985 merged with another fair called Antiquairs International to form the Antiquairs International and Pictura Fine Art Fair at the Eurohal. “It became obvious that this title was a bit of a mouthful and so in 1988 it was renamed The European Fine Art Fair and moved to the MECC,” says Van Haeften. “The word ‘The’ was used to emphasise that there was and is no other fair like this.”

“At first it was uphill work with relatively few visitors. On one occasion when it snowed and the motorways were closed so few people came that the dealers played boules in the corridors of the fair. But it evolved and we tried to make it international right from the beginning because we felt that if we got international dealers they would bring international clients and that is what happened.”

The first TEFAF in 1988 had 97 exhibitors and attracted 17,672 visitors. Over the next five years international interest in the fair rose steadily as new sections for modern and contemporary painting and contemporary jewellery were added and by 1993 40,364 people came to see 158 dealers’ stands. In 1994 visitor figures rose dramatically to 61,452 when TEFAF hosted a loan exhibition of treasures from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

The fair went from strength to strength, selling Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Young Man for $4.8 million in 1996, the year that it changed its name to TEFAF Maastricht. Catering facilities were improved, the design was radically changed and a series of important studies into the art market launched by TEFAF received widespread publicity. On 16th March 2006 the fair received its millionth visitor and total visitor numbers last year were a record 84,020, an 8 % increase on 2005. Such popularity could threaten TEFAF’s reputation for quality and exclusivity and so entrance prices have been raised which should stop the visitors growth in 2007.

This year TEFAF will have a spectacular new design of the entrance and 219 of the world’s leading dealers will exhibit paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, classical antiquities, illuminated manuscripts, textiles, porcelain, glass, silver and other works of art. The total value, excluding the contemporary jewellery section, will be well over $1 billion.

Maastricht’s central position in Western Europe, intelligent marketing of the fair and the organisers’ rigorous insistence on quality have all played a key part in TEFAF’s success story. “Today it is unrecognisable from the fair 20 years ago,” says Van Haeften. “A lot of people who visit TEFAF come with the specific intention of buying. From the visitors’ point of view where else can you see so many dealers from all over the world? You can cover the entire art market in a single day.”