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Many major museum curators have Ph.D.s, and yet some are going back to school this month during an art fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands.
Last year, the European Fine Art Foundation, the nonprofit organization that puts on the fair, held its first Curator Course. The coming second edition will have 10 participants from museums all over the world, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Hong Kong Palace Museum and the Frans Hals Museum, based in the nearby Dutch city of Haarlem.
The five-day course — unusual for an art fair — is intended for what TEFAF calls “emerging” curators. It includes lectures, panel discussions and mentoring sessions on topics ranging from insuring artworks to negotiating and fund-raising to acquire them, as well as a peek into TEFAF’s process for vetting objects. The curators’ museums pick up their expenses for the trip; there is no charge for the course itself.
The idea is that although curators have expertise about the importance and history of the objects in their charge, some savvy about the buying and selling process is necessary when it comes to making acquisitions for their museums.
“Most curators don’t have the opportunity to get involved in the market and learn about it,” said Paul van den Biesen, TEFAF’s head of museums and collectors. “We wanted to bridge that gap.”
Van den Biesen conceived of the course. “We had an informal dinner after one of the board meetings,” he said. “Someone asked, ‘What would your dream for TEFAF be?’ And mine was to start a course for curators.”
He runs it in partnership with Rachel Pownall, a professor of art and finance at Maastricht University, who leads the course with help from guest lecturers and specialists. She noted that for 2024, there were around 80 applications for the 10 spots.
The Maastricht fair is known for attracting the leaders of art institutions. Last year, the fair logged visits from 525 museum directors and 622 museum curators.
“The fair is sold on, ‘This is where the museums go to shop,’” said James Rolleston, a London dealer of English furniture and Asian works of art, particularly from China and Japan, who is exhibiting at this year’s event.
In the 2024 class of the TEFAF Curator Course, some were veterans of the fair and others had never attended it.
Katharina Weiler, a decorative arts curator at Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, works with a collection of some 40,000 objects and did the course last year.
“The job is preserving the existing collection, but it also means adding to the collection,” Weiler said. “What made me curious about the curator course is the insight into the art market and its players, and it gave me deeper insight into those dynamics.”
Weiler had been to other art fairs but never to TEFAF Maastricht, and she knew it by reputation as a “must-go” fair, she said. Weiler was duly impressed, calling it a “playground of the most magnificent objects, all in one place.”
By contrast, Ada de Wit, a curator of decorative art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, has been to every edition of the Maastricht fair since 2010.
De Wit formerly worked at the Wallace Collection in London, which does not acquire new work, and it was her 2023 move to the Cleveland museum, which does collect, that made the course attractive.
“I liked talking to dealers about how they see those transactions,” de Wit said. “It’s hard for museums to compete with private buyers, who can move much faster. There’s prestige in selling to a museum, but also risk.”
De Wit did have some constructive feedback. “It’s a new course but I think they need to fine-tune the program by defining the target group,” she said. “It wasn’t always clear what the experience level of curators was supposed to be.”
Overall, de Wit said the course was “a great initiative,” especially discussions about provenance, the history of an object’s whereabouts and ownership. “That’s increasingly important in the art world, especially in the decorative arts,” she said.
Tara Contractor, an assistant curator of European painting and sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be getting her first taste of the TEFAF fair as a participant in the course next week.
“I’m pretty new to art fairs,” said Contractor, a British painting specialist whose Philadelphia museum role is her first curator job. She noted that in January she attended New York’s Winter Show, a fair with strength in traditional artworks.
Even at a major institution like the Philadelphia Museum, her department would likely acquire a very small number of works in a year, she said. But she was already strategizing possible acquisitions from TEFAF, since dealers have already revealed some of their offerings.
“I have my eye on some women artists,” Contractor said. “That’s a priority here these days. There are some works I’m excited by.” She declined to say which ones, lest she tip her hand to the competition.
On the last day of this year’s course, the curators will make what the fair calls “acquisition presentations” to Wim Pijbes, formerly the director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and now TEFAF’s global chairman of vetting. It is the course’s equivalent of a final exam.
“They learn to tell a narrative about how an acquisition will fit a collection,” Pownall, the Maastricht University professor, said.
Weiler said that she did not initiate any acquisitions from her time at last year’s fair, noting that her museum is a publicly funded one.
“I envied my American colleagues who came with a budget and went on a shopping tour,” she said. “It’s a very competitive market.”
But she may have a chance to use some of the skills she learned in the coming months and years, particularly from the acquisition presentation exercise. She has her eye on a 13th-century reliquary casket from Limoges, France, that could be bought in honor of the museum’s 150th anniversary in 2027.
Weiler, who also intends to be at the Maastricht fair next week, said, “If you really want something, you have to know how to convince others.”
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