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The Role of Art & Antique Dealers An Added Value


Other noted dealers included Paul Durand-Ruel who was one of the leading figures associated with the Impressionist movement. He is noted for being one of the first dealers to break away from a system of patronage and follow the high risk business model of heavily investing in a relatively unfashionable segment of the art market, as well as supporting artists directly through solo exhibitions and stipends. He and other colleagues such as Ambroise Vollard helped to create a new, more ideological role for art dealers in helping to create markets, leading rather than following public taste and acting as entrepreneurial patrons. This market became much more competitive in the latter half of 1800, with often intense rivalry between Durand- Ruel and newer dealers such as Georges Petit.


Durand-Ruel and his colleagues are also credited for encouraging the early globalisation of the art market. The spread of Impressionism into Germany was said to be helped by the alliance forged between Durand-Ruel and Paul Cassirer, a German dealer based in Berlin. Germany, although a smaller art market, also became a prominent centre of cutting-edge art by the 1890s, with another noted dealer and artist, Herwarth Walden, widely acknowledged as one of the most important discoverers and promoters of German avant-garde art in the early 20th


century.


Auctions also flourished in France during this period supported by wealthy collectors and the opening of the state sponsored auction house, the Hôtel Drouot, in the 1850s. In Britain, new laws such as the Settled Land Act of 1882 and the introduction of death duties in 1894, combined with the agricultural depression of the 1870s resulted in a number of auctions of aristocratic collections. As there were still a large number of wealthy art collectors in London, the combination of supply and demand brought about a period of prosperity for British art auction houses from about 1880 until the stock market crash of 1929. The first art auction house in the US was the American Art Association in 1883, but auction sales were slower to develop there initially.


The French reign as the centre of the art market was relatively short-lived, as wider economic and political events, a Wall Street market crash and a massive devaluation of the French franc caused many dealers to go out of business and shifted power towards the US and UK markets where economic and buyer power rested.


1.3 The Modern Period


One of the most significant developments in the art market post-1900 was the growth of the importance of US art dealers and collectors. During the recessionary bear market of the 1920s and 1930s, US buyers began to dominate the international art market, often engaging in opportunistic buying, especially in the Old Masters sector. As noted by one of the leading art dealers of this period, Joseph Duveen, ‘Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money’, and Duveen and his colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic capitalised on this, creating highly successful art dealerships. Much of Duveen’s prosperity was built around buying works of art from declining European aristocrats and selling them to the wealthy


12 Historical & Future Perspectives


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