From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
James Stourton offers a roller-coaster ride through the post-war London art market, an almost breathless account of dizzying ascents and dramatic plunges told through a cast of characters at times barely credible – or perhaps all too credible? – and tales that may seem too fantastical to be true. Readers, however, should not be fooled. This pacy and entertaining narrative belies an insider’s deep understanding and astute analysis of his subject – the author spent 32 years at Sotheby’s, latterly as its UK chairman, and has interviewed a legion of key players. He has negotiated contentious and potentially tedious terrain with a lightness of touch, a genius for the telling anecdote or quote and an estimable ability to pare down facts to the essential.
Stourton vividly evokes the world that Wilson and Sotheby’s disrupted, that of the grandee dealers of Bond Street and the gentlemen’s club that was Christie’s, along with the pyramid of ‘runners’, small traders, specialists and emigré scholars that supported them. Their response to the changing order provides the arc of this book, as do the new markets – and marketplaces – that emerged in its wake. The decades after the war saw a significant rise in professionalism and greater transparency in the art trade. More recent collectors might be astounded to imagine auction catalogues with neither images nor printed estimates, or a system in which the auction houses published the names of buyers and pretended that all lots were sold. (The Times saleroom correspondent Geraldine Norman, a hero of the piece, blasted that practice out of the water.) It is astonishing to read how, at the height of the student riots in May 1968, Wilson, on learning that all flights in and out of France were cancelled on the day of a crucial appointment, simply chartered a plane belonging to the Duke of Richmond and landed unchallenged at a deserted Le Bourget – no air traffic control, no customs, no security. The past really is a foreign country. Sadly, it also takes a leap of imagination to contemplate daily auctions and literally hundreds of Aladdin’s Cave antique shops, collectors queuing to buy porcelain, or silver sales that were always around 95 per cent sold.
The book focuses on dealers who made markets – such as the dealer of Chinese art Giuseppe Eskenazi and the vanguard who promoted Victorian fine and decorative arts – and those who also almost broke them, most conspicuously the antiquities impresario and master smuggler Robin Symes, whose career is a story of hubris and nemesis. It also reflects constant evolution: how Victorian art was replaced by modern British art as the market on the rise; how the staid ‘brown furniture’ of Bond Street was usurped by the bravura style and shabby chic of Pimlico Road. A chapter called ‘The Getty Factor’ reflects on the transformation of a market – Old Master drawings – by the intervention of the richest museum in the world. ‘The Most Improbable Deal’ belongs to the late Oliver Hoare, the dealer in Islamic art whose ‘Cold War’ swap with the Iranians involved the exchange on an airport runway of an exceptional 16th-century Shahnameh for De Kooning’s Woman III (1953) that had been bought by the Shah’s wife. (Hoare’s own record of the event, The Exchange, was published last month.)
The rise and rise of contemporary art looms large in later chapters – it is, most conveniently, the only market in which supply will never run dry. The dealer Anthony d’Offay is given his due, as are the Young British Artists of the 1990s, and Tate Modern and the Frieze Art Fair are cited as game-changers for London. Curiously, the rise of modern and contemporary art had the effect of placing power back into the hands of the dealers, along with a new breed of art agents, although by this time the auction houses had long moved into the sphere of ‘private sales’ too.
Stourton includes scandal. As prices for fine art rose exponentially – one of the most remarkable developments of this half century – so, inevitably, did the incidence of fakes and forgeries. Here, the affair of Tom Keating, who maintained that he forged paintings not for profit but as a protest against the art world, offers a perfect example of how the public loves to see duped experts with egg on their faces. Stourton does not shirk his responsibilities regarding Sevso, the saga of a cache of exceptional ancient Roman silver, in which Wilson played a central role, or the collusion and commission fixing at Sotheby’s and Christie’s that in 2002 put Alfred Taubman, Sotheby’s controlling shareholder, behind bars. Stourton’s commentary is, however, essentially indulgent, if not benign. Some rogues are cast more as saints than sinners, perhaps with an eye to the libel laws. Others, he admits, may be relieved to be omitted.
Above all, this sweeping overview offers a salutary reminder of the cyclical and precarious nature of this singular market, and of ever-evolving taste. Only the astute or fleet of foot survive. Neither Sotheby’s nor Christie’s remains in British ownership and Stourton is ambivalent about London’s status as a hub of the global art market. Yet this tale of adaptability, resilience and reinvention offers hope.
Rogues and Scholars: Boom and Bust in the London Art Market, 1945–2000 by James Stourton is published by Head of Zeus.
From the October 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.