Mixing Masters, Art and Auction
By opening a dialogue with contemporary art, dealer Katrin Bellinger wants to inject new energy into the Old Masters drawings market. By Bettina von Hase.
It is rare to find an Old Master drawings dealer who has bought not one, but two Michelangelos. But that is just what Katrin Bellinger has done. Those two deals highlight a career, marked this month by the 20th-anniversary celebration of her business in Munich along with the publication of a catalogue of some of the best works she has handled over the years. In 2001, besides continuing to deal on her own, Bellinger joined forces with fellow Munich dealer Konrad Bernheimer at the venerable London gallery Colnaghi on Old Bond Street, and now she is poised to broaden the gallery's collector base by intensifying the dialogue between Old Master and contemporary art.
At a time when sales of contemporary art are booming, Bellinger, who is also a collector, wants to inject some of that energy into the Old Master drawings market, which, she points out, is mostly coasting along, with a scarcity of first-rate material and an aging collector base. "l am beginning to worry where the young collectors are going to come from," she says, "or the new collectors, for that matter. So it’s obvious to look toward contemporary art," she explains. "I've always bought it for myself, mostly works on paper. It’s never been either-or." This is immediately apparent in her Notting Hill home, which she shares with her businessman husband, Christoph Henkel, and their two young sons.
There Bellinger displays works from her private collection, which is based on the theme "Artists at Work "—a framework for separating her collecting from her dealing ("so that I don’t compete against myself"). This gives her freedom to acquire works from the 15th century to the present in all media—drawings, paintings, prints and photographs. "Her entire being is captured in her collection," says Bellinger's friend Gina Thomas, a correspondent for the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung. On one recent occasion, Bellinger had on display a superb Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Academy of Piazetta, circa 1720, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's Portrait of A.G.L. Boucher-Desnoyers, from 1825. At the same time, she showed such contemporary works as a large-scale drawing of an urn by Sigmar Polke and a sculpture by Not Vital. There were also two portraits of Bellinger - an etching by A R. Penck and a watercolour by Francesco Clemente.
At 47, Bellinger is strikingly attractive. but what is most compelling about her is her intensity and her ability to focus. “Twenty years ago, she started as a young girl, with a seriousness of purpose, and step by step, she became a major dealer. She is one of the best drawings dealers in the world,” says George Goldner, chairman of drawings and prints at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which, along with the Getty and many of the major museums and collectors in the world, is one of her clients.
Walking through her house, Bellinger weaves stories, notes scholarly links among works and draws attention to the most minute details. There is something of the criminologist in her approach to the works, and this quality enables her to convert the crossover buyer—the one who collects contemporary art but whom she'd like to introduce to 15th to 17th century Italian, Dutch, 18th century French and 19th century German art. Her real passion is for Italian drawings, but because they are ever harder to find. she covers a much broader ground. One of Bellinger's strengths, in fact, is her ability to make fantastic finds. “Katrin has succeeded in raising her game,” says David Ekserdjian, former editor of Apollo and currently a professor of art history and film at the University of Leicester; he is the world's leading Parmigianino scholar. “Persuading people to give you their drawings is crucial,” he notes. “Her knowledge and her salesmanship are important features of the business.”
At Colnaghi, founded in 1776, she can flex her muscles. Last January the gallery held an exhibition in conjunction with Manhattan modern and contemporary dealer Michael Werner, showing 19th century drawing by Adolph von Menzel next to a 1964 work by Arnulf Rainer, and a circa 1530 sheet of five standing Oriental men by Sienese master Pseudo-Pacchia next to a 2002 Peter Doig, invigorating and allowing for a re-examination of the assembled works. A third of the material in that show went to collectors who had never bought a drawing before and who were that artworks of such quality were still available. "They couldn't believe how inexpensive drawings could be," Bellinger says. But building an Old Master drawings collection is very different from buying contemporary works, requiring equal parts art scholarship, enthusiasm and time.
There are many challenges today to collecting Old Masters, among them, busy lives led in white loft spaces, the shift away from classical education and the inevitable question of status. “You immediately recognise a Jeff Koons or a Frank Stella," Bellinger observes, "whereas an Old Master, you do not. If you have stamp-size Leonardo da Vinci, how many people would notice, let alone know what it is?" But she also believes that the unfinished quality of a drawing appeals to the modem eye. "The drawing gives you more immediate access to the creative process than a finished painting. It’s like seeing the handwriting of the artist on of paper." she says. Interestingly, there are many modern and contemporary dealers who collect drawings. Bellinger mentions Richard Gray, Jean Krugier and Eugene Thaw.
The Colnaghi exhibition, which opened last month to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair and closes November 4, challenges traditional perceptions and takes radical steps in juxtaposing old and new. “In the Company of Old Masters: Julian Schnabel, Tina Barney, Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation,” a collaboration with New York gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash, shows Schnabel’s paintings alongside 15th century Italian masters and Barney’s photographs of patrician families next to Old Master portrait paintings and drawings. Photographic stills from Sussman and the arts group Rufus Corporation’s video The Rape of the Sabine Women and an accompanying video storyboard, are installed along with 10 master drawings.
Bellinger began her art-dealing career from a one room space in Munich, with the help of a few collector friends, including Wolfgang Ratjen, Hinrich Sieveking and David Lachenmann, who advised her on acquisitions and helped edit her catalogues. "l must have been mad," she says, with the benefit of hindsight. A graduate of Hamburg University, she studied business. and admits that she had tried her hand as an artist and thought she wasn't "good enough." It was only after attending course at Sotheby’s that she discovered Old Master drawings and turned her "passion into a profession.
It was a very good moment to start. The first Chatsworth sale at Christie's London, in July 1984, had achieved a world record £3.56 million ($4.8 million) for Raphael’s Study of Man’s Head and Hands, one of several works in the sale to break through, for the first time ever, the £1 million ($1.4 million) barrier for a drawing. After that, good supplies ensured a very active market and huge price increases until it slowed in the early 1990s, only to pick up again and level out. Now there is greater competition for fewer works of exceptional quality, but as Bellinger points out, "In a small market, you don't have the dramatic upside and downside." She developed her network of collectors by showing in London for the first time at Harari & Johns, then with Mark Brady in New York, which she continued to do for several years.
In 1993 she acquired her first Michelangelo, The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John Baptist, circa 1530, for the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It was sold at Christie's London for £4.18 million ($6.27 million), a record at the time for a drawing. She purchased the Study for the Risen Christ, circa 1514, from the Brinsley Ford collection at Christie's, which she then sold to a private collector for £8.14 million ($12.3 million). Goldner, who was the Getty's head of drawings at the time, asked her to bld. "You have your heart in your throat—it's very nerve-racking and exciting," Bellinger says.
She and Bernheimer, who still maintain separate businesses in Munich, decided to collaborate under the umbrella of Colnaghi, a partnership formalized in 2001, when they bought the gallery's famous library, which was about to be sold separately. The partners buy stock and participate in about six fairs a year. They also stage six exhibitions a year, in a well-balanced program of large shows, such as the survey of German 19th century paintings, oil sketches and drawings, opening this month; smaller shows of living artists who fit the gallery's ethos, such as John Sargent, who will exhibit drawings in March 2006, and his wife, Caroline Sargent, who will have some paintings in Colnaghi's mixed Christmas show; and exhibitions with an art historical focus, such as one curated by John Spink on the 18th and 19th century English watercolorist Francis Towne, November 10 through 25, and another of Indian botanical drawings from the School of Calcutta, in May 2006.
While excited about the gallery's future, Bellinger pauses to reflect on her track record. "It's very rewarding that you can start not with a big name, just my name, and you can develop a solid reputation and a great business."