The art market: Steinitz's Paris showroom and an unknown Rembrandt

The French antiques dealer Bernard Steinitz is something of a legend in Paris, as much for his remarkable "eye" and his rags-to-riches story - he started in the flea market - as for the opulent interiors he and his son Benjamin created for clients that range from Sofia Coppola to French luxury-goods mogul Bernard Arnault. Now Benjamin has opened a sumptuous new gallery in Paris, bang opposite the Hotel Bristol and close to the Elysee Palace. The four-floor space is the antithesis of contemporary minimalism, with its period wood panelling, parquet flooring, delicate 18th-century Chinese wallpaper, inlaid French furniture, gilded clocks, Renaissance sculpture and Oriental porcelains. One room is hung with a glittering set of 18th-century Russian embroideries, completely covered with multicoloured glass beads.

For sale are individual pieces - a Boulle desk at €5.5m, Louis XVI candlesticks at €45,000, a pair of allegorical marble vases from 1867 ('Earth vase', pictured right) - but the space is also a showroom for the Steinitz "look", which is popular with clients in the US, India and Russia. "I put together atmospheres rather than historical reconstitutions," says Steinitz, who has even popped some Jeff Koons ceramic puppies - gilded, of course - atop a pair of 18th-century French commodes.

The art superstar Takashi Murakami is everywhere at the moment. A show of his self-portraits, featuring his bright, smiley flower faces, has just opened at the Perrotin gallery in Paris, and another show opened at Gagosian in New York last week. Murakami has just been picked to exhibit at Versailles next year, following Jeff Koons and the French sculptor Xavier Veilhan. And Tate is giving a whole room to Murakami in its upcoming show Pop Life, opening October 1 (see Peter Aspden's preview).

Murakami prices at auction went stratospheric last year, reaching a stunning £9m ($15.16m) for "My Lonesome Cowboy" (1998), a fibreglass sculpture of a spiky-haired youth clutching a lasso of his own semen. But since then his market has weakened and prices have fallen sharply. Buy-ins rose by 43.3 per cent between September 2008 and July 2009, according to the auction database www.artprice.com. One major failure was at Phillips de Pury last October, when the 23-foot paint-and-steel Buddha figure, "Tongari-kun", (2003-2004), estimated at £3.5m, failed to raise a single bid.

Prices at the Paris show range from $150,000 to $2.2m and according to Emmanuel Perrotin, virtually all the pieces were sold even before it opened. So what is happening here? Trade sources say that the market has collapsed in the mid-range, but remains strong for top-of-the-range work. And Murakami has some powerful collectors, including the US hedge-fund manager Steve Cohen and Christie's owner Francois Pinault.

Even biennales have their satellite art fairs these days. The Lyon Biennale, now in its 20th year, was launched last week in France's second largest city with a four-venue event orchestrated by the Chinese curator Hou Hanru. The biggest display is in La Sucriere, a disused sugar warehouse by the Saone river - and tucked right up beside it was the small but perfectly formed Docks art fair. Created by a couple of local art dealers two years ago, the fair has a simple but effective formula: each of the 32 exhibitors has a 30 sq m white cube in which to show one artist.

This is the second edition of the event. "When we started in 2007, I told our exhibitors that we couldn't guarantee they would sell, but that they would gain good visibility for their artists," says organiser Patricia Houg, "And in fact sales were very good as well."

"This is an ideal formula to show 'Afterimage' (2009, €35,000), a single light piece by Vincent Lamouroux," said the Paris-based dealer Georges-Philippe Vallois. "His work has already been shown in a local museum, and a fair like FIAC would be too big."

Exhibitors and local galleries believe there is considerable potential for expanding the market for contemporary art in the region, which also attracts buyers from nearby Switzerland and Italy. "We have been here for 29 years - in the first 10, we didn't sell to any Lyonnais," said photography dealer Catherine Derioz of the photography gallery Le Reverbere, "But now 60 per cent of our clients are local." And at the fair, Todd Rosenbaum of the Hogar Collection, the sole US exhibitor, immediately sold an abstract painting by Peter Fox, "Tremor" (2009), for €7,600 - to a local collector.

An even smaller fair opens on Tuesday this week in London's Cork Street. Tribal Perspectives aims to revive interest in tribal art in the capital; it groups just eight dealers, including the Brussels-based Oceanic art specialist Wayne Heathcote, textile and tribal art dealer Clive Loveless and Bernard Shapero Rare Books, showing tribal photography. "Britain used to be an important market for tribal art, until about 1990," says organiser Ben Hunter. But, he says, now London only has a "tiny footprint" compared with Belgium, France or the USA. "Contemporary art has boomed in the UK, so it is about time that we put quality tribal art back in front of people," he says.

Christie's has snagged a major Old Master painting for its December 8 sale in London. Rembrandt's "Portrait of a man half-length with his arms akimbo" (1658, pictured right) features in every catalogue raisonne of the great Dutch painter's work, but has been unseen, in a private collection, since 1970. It carries an estimate of £18m-£25m.

As announced in this column two weeks ago, the French fair organiser Patrick Perrin is planning the "1st Berkeley Square Art and Antiques Fair" to fill the gap left by the demise of Grosvenor House in June next year. But the very first antiques fair in this location is actually opening on Thursday next week, organised by the LAPADA association of art and antique dealers. The fair groups 87 dealers in a capacious white marquee, smartly tricked out in gold, black and white. On offer will be everything from a pair of Gillows breakfront cabinets (M & J Duncan, £35,000), a mid-16th-century drawing of a plump cupid perched on an extravagant urn (Joanna Booth, £5,500) to more contemporary objects such a sinuous white 1969 "Boomerang" desk by Maurice Calka (De Palma, £27,000) - the French president Georges Pompidou owned a larger version of this desk. The fair will also be the chance for dealers to see whether, with the recession, collectors are turning back to the more tried-and-trusted field of traditional antiques and art.

Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper

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