Tefaf Maastricht: The Wish List The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

(MENAFN- USA Art News) At Tefaf Maastricht, a Bejeweled Kelmscott Shakespeare, an Emily Kam Kngwarray Canvas, and a Rare Rietveld Beach Buggy Lead the Conversation

Tefaf Maastricht's most persuasive objects this year are not necessarily the loudest. They are the ones that make craft, provenance, and cultural history feel inseparable: a jewel-encrusted Kelmscott Press Shakespeare, a late painting by Australian Indigenous artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, and a brightly colored beach buggy by De Stijl designer Gerrit Rietveld.

A landmark of British bookmaking is arriving via the London dealer Peter Harrington: a Kelmscott Press first edition of Shakespearean poems priced at £125,000. Kelmscott Press was founded in 1891 by the English designer and author William Morris, whose private press became a touchstone for Arts and Crafts printing. This copy, however, is defined as much by its exterior as by its typography. It is housed in an opulent Sangorski and Sutcliffe binding, set with mother-of-pearl and more than 100 precious stones.

The decoration is not merely ornamental. Details are keyed to the poems inside: the inside back cover is tooled with gilt flowers - violets, roses, and lilies - referenced in sonnet 99, while the inside front cover carries hearts and cupid's arrows in a nod to sonnet 116. Emma Walshe, a rare books specialist at Peter Harrington, has described the volume as“a landmark of decorative book arts,” placing it within the mythology that has surrounded Sangorski and Sutcliffe since the loss of the bindery's famed“Great Omar,” which sank with the Titanic.

Across the fair, D Lan Galleries is spotlighting the accelerating international attention on contemporary Australian Indigenous art with a group of 13 works spanning the 1970s to today. The selection includes“Untitled-Winter Awelye” (1995) by Emily Kam Kngwarray (around 1914-96), offered at $380,000.

Kngwarray, a member of the Anmatyerr people, has become a defining figure for collectors and institutions alike. She holds the auction record for an Australian female artist and the second highest price for an Indigenous artist:“Earth's Creation I” (1994) sold for A$2.1m (around $1.5m) in 2017. Recent museum programming has also helped widen the audience for the field, including the traveling US exhibition“The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art,” which recently closed in Washington, DC, and Tate Modern's recently closed survey devoted to Kngwarray.

“Untitled-Winter Awelye” takes its name from awelye, the Anmatyerr term for women's songs and ceremonies. The canvas carries Kngwarray's signature dotting while also pointing to her movement into more linear structures that evoke Anwerlarr (pencil yam), a native plant with deep cultural significance. The work was painted one month before“Anwerlarr anganenty (Big yam Dreaming),” a monumental painting now in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.

Design history is equally present at Galerie Van den Bruinhorst, whose stand is dedicated to Dutch furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld, a key proponent of De Stijl alongside figures such as Piet Mondrian. The gallery is presenting objects from each decade of Rietveld's career, including a pine-and-plywood“Bolderwagen (beach buggy)” from the 1920s, estimated at €250,000 to €300,000.

Painted in distinctive primary colors, the buggy is one of only three pre-Second World War examples believed to survive. Another is held by the Centraal Museum Utrecht, while later versions are in the collections of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum and London's Victoria and Albert Museum. The Rietveld restorer Jurjen Creman has called it among the best documented Rietveld works he has encountered, noting that it remained in the same Dutch family for generations. At Tefaf, the gallery plans to show archival photographs of the buggy in use, transporting children to and from the beach - a reminder that even canonical design objects often began as practical tools.

Taken together, the three offerings sketch a portrait of Tefaf at its most compelling: a fair where luxury is measured not only in price, but in the density of stories an object can carry - from the intimacy of a poem to the afterlife of a family heirloom, and from ceremonial knowledge to modernist form.

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