Dealers of an allegorical turn of mind may reflect that while three of the Four Seasons are kind, one is sharp. The harvest of the late 1980s broke all records, but those golden days of haymaking are now little more than a delirious memory: Winter has come. The economic downturn is affecting even this most exalted area of retailing, not perhaps because the wealth of individual buyers is seriously threatened, but because talk of financial stringency has for a time supplanted talk of spending money. Those who were able to afford fine art can still afford it, but at present they are distracted by headlines which suggest that they can’t. In due course the climate will change, for the desire and the means to own works of art are only in abeyance. The Gulf war caused further stagnation by deterring the art-buying community from travel.
This combination of economics and war has certainly tested the nerves of some dealers. In March one prestigious firm confided that they had not sold anything since October; others hoped that the quiet spell might be broken by a mood of post-war euphoria.
April, coming between the Maastricht fair at the end of March, and the traditional unfurling of banners in May, is a quiet time for exhibitions in London. Harari & Johns were to have held their exhibition “Five Centuries of Old Master Paintings” between 11 April and 10 May but, owing to the unfavourable conditions, put it back to 3 May to 12 June. Others are undeterred. Spinks’s oriental department is publishing its spring catalogue “Chinese Art at Spink”, with the seventy-five artefacts exhibited together between 8 and 19 April. The highlight of the show is an exceptional life size marble head of the Buddha from the Northern Qi period (A.D. 568-572) Prices start at £1,000.
A theme, if not an exhibition, may be found at Mallet at Bourdon House, who have furnished a room in the Victorian gothic-revival taste, comprising of two bookcases, an octagonal table, a desk, four chairs, an ottoman and two stools. Appropriately £90,000 is asked for the ensemble, though it is for sale piecemeal. Adherents of this period who are quick off the mark may catch the end of “John Ruskin and the Alps”, a loan exhibition of drawings by Ruskin at the Fine Art Society until 5 April. The show is part of a drive to raise awareness and money for the projected Ruskin Library at Lancaster Universitya home for otherwise scatttered collections. Likewise speed will be required (and rewarded) to catch the loan exhibition “Gainsborough and Rowlandson” at the Leger Gallery until 5 April, the last port of call for a travelling selection of seventy-five drawings by these artists from the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
The April hang at Wildenstein & Co presents examples by post-Impressionist and early twentieth-century masters, including Bonnard and Marquet. Until 13 April, Marlborough Graphics have an exhibition covering sixty years of John Piper’s prints. Piper began printmaking in the 1930s, and Marlborough, among others, have published his works since the mid-1960s. Prices range from £500 to £2,500.
While auction prices are by no means depressed, on the whole it is a buyers market.
