January 2009

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In August Salzburg hosts its second World Fine Art Fair, timed to coincide with the city’s internationally famous music festival. As Isabel Andrews discovers, the art is alive with the sound of music.  One could be forgiven for thinking that August is the month when the art world stops for breath and announces itself on holiday. But last year’s first Salzburg World Fine Art Fair proved itself a successful entry on the already packed circuit of international art fairs with a distinguished crop of top-end dealers and high-profile visitors – who included Christie’s owner, François Pinault – and is set again to be a highlight of the summer.

In an astute move, the fair’s organiser, Bruce Lamarche of Art Culture Studio – also the organiser of the Moscow World Fine Art Fair – has timed the event to coincide with the annual Salzburg Festival of music, which attracts up to 24,000 visitors each year. This exposure to an existing international audience is the principal draw for the 30 or so dealers participating, but exhibitors at a fledgling fair are still taking something of a gamble, as Konrad Bernheimer, director of Bernheimer Old Masters, explains, ‘Even if you have good prospective buyers you don’t know if they are going to be focused, but the potential is there.’ Nevertheless, at last year’s Salzburg fair many of the dealers dipping their toes in the water were top-end European galleries, such as Röbbig, B&B Steinitz, Bernheimer Fine Old Masters and Jean-David Cahn – despite the short lead-time available after the announcement of the fair (just two months before it opened).

This year it is Bruce Lamarche who has taken a gamble by moving the fair dates on two weeks (9-17 August) to coincide with the busiest week of the music festival and thereby give dealers potential access to a bigger audience. Lamarche concedes that it has been harder to get dealers from Paris and the UK to commit to this year’s fair, as it further interrupts the August break and is uncomfortably close to the Paris Biennale in September, which after the Maastricht TEFAF fair is the most important event in many dealers’ calendar. Even so, distinguished Parisian dealers such as B&B Steinitz – whose fair stands are exquisite recreations of period interiors, filled with 18th- and 19th-century furniture and objets d’art – are undeterred by the close Biennale fixture. As well as the cream of European dealers returning to Salzburg, there are also new exhibitors from Japan and America.

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