“Since I started doing Fiac, I have never seen so few Americans. There are five good US collectors here,” said the Paris-based dealer Thaddaeus Ropac. He added that almost all the works on his booth had sold to “core Europeans”. Parisian collectors bought works by Tony Cragg, Yan Pei-Ming and Robert Longo, and Ropac also sold Georg Baselitz’s painting Guidiamo (2016), priced at €500,000, to a German buyer.
The recent terrorist attacks in France, the timing of discussions over Brexit by the UK government and the impending US presidential election are all likely to have deterred US collectors from attending the Paris-based fair, although dealers at Fiac cited the change in dates of London’s Frieze art fair this year, because of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, as another factor. “As an American collector, you had to make a choice,” said the New York-based dealer Rachel Lehmann. Her gallery, Lehmann Maupin, sold works by the South Africa-based artist Liza Lou, priced between $100,000 and $450,000, along with works by the Paris-born artist.
