TEFAF New York Keeps Its Focus on the Classics In a Turbulent Time

Highlights at this year’s fair include a circa 1933 mask-shaped plaster sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, a 1930s painting of a girl by the French artist Marie Laurencin, a blue acrylic coffee table (from 2012) designed by the architect Zaha Hadid, and a 1948 entrance canopy in folded sheet steel that was once part of a school in France, designed by the French architect Jean Prouvé.

Leanne Jagtiani, director of TEFAF New York, said the fair had a similar range of objects and historical periods as Maastricht, but was about one-third the size, with around 90 booths.

“Because we’re small enough, we can mix it all up,” she said. “You can walk past a design dealer, then your favorite modern and contemporary dealer, then a jewelry dealer, and there’s this element of discovery. We don’t section people off.”

That format allows visitors to “open their eyes to opportunities they might not be looking for,” said Jagtiani, who recalled that when she previously worked in private sales at Christie’s, she found that buyers “collect across much broader categories than perhaps we had realized.”

Jagtiani acknowledged the impact of “external economics” on this year’s event. She said President Trump’s initial tariff announcement had the effect of a “hand grenade” before it was rolled back. “Art fairs are a long-lead, live event. Galleries are going to start planning what they’re bringing, and how they’re getting it here, months in advance,” she said. To be faced with the prospect of tariffs as high as 40 percent came as a “shock wave,” she said.

Cross-collecting at TEFAF New York has been observed firsthand by one exhibitor: Charles Ede, an ancient art and antiques gallery founded in 1971 specializing in Egyptian, Greek and Roman art, as well as in European art from before A.D. 1000. “We’re selling to a lot more modern and contemporary collectors who are fascinated by our objects,” said Charis Tyndall, a director of Charles Ede who said that she attends the New York event every year. She said the aim was to remove antiquities from a “more stuffy academic or museum context,” and “make people see them as works of art, not as antiquities.”