This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Accessible, wide-ranging and continually fascinating, Stourton’s story of the art trade in London focuses on the period from the Goldschmidt collection Impressionist sale at Sotheby’s in 1958 to the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997. The cast of auctioneers, dealers, collectors and sellers is international and stretches from barrow boys to dukes. It is a story of modern Britain, of the successes and crises of its latter-day globalisation, and a moral tale, of venality, hubris and fraud, but also of connoisseurship, care and enterprise.

The pen portraits are arresting, both those quoted by Stourton (“we were maybe barking up the same tree and pissing on both sides of it at the same time”, of two dealers) and his own, which can be blunt (“He had little charm and no time for small talk or glamorous parties”, of Christopher Weston of Phillips). Stourton, however, can on occasion be too smooth, circumspect and kind. (Having myself had the misfortune to sit next to Norman Rosenthal at a dinner held at the RA, I can only wonder why he was not dissected with Stourton’s somewhat feline scalpel.)

Through being at the heart of Sotheby’s for so long, Stourton is able to offer a comprehensive anatomy of the London art scene. His reach extends in this book to silver, furniture, sculpture and to particular players from the British Rail Pension Fund to the forger Tom Keating (“a case of poor connoisseurship”) and to specific developments from the rise of Victoriana to that of Young British Artists. 

All are handled with care and an able dissection of which auctioneers, dealers and collectors played a central role. Thus we have Jeremy Maas, “who always attributed his discovery of Victorian painters to the fact that he had not studied art history” and Andrew Lloyd Webber for Victoriana and Charles Saatchi for Young British Artists. Stourton is also very keen on particular periods, notably, but not only, the Sixties.

Finance is a key theme, from the ability to sell American-owned French paintings to Americans in London or “American art to Germany and German art to America”, to the rising property prices that hit Bond Street galleries: landlords had to be paid even if some dealers managed to shaft their painters. 

Robert Fraser, a first-generation Etonian whose grandfather had been Gordon Selfridge’s butler, is described as owning a white Rolls Royce, keeping a chauffeur and not paying his debts. Many dealers made their money not so much from dealing but from the property/galleries they purchased and from the art they put aside for their own collections.

Art as investment meant art as the safety-valve for rotting roofs and marriages, with Turner’s Rome, View from Mount Aventine becoming Rome, View from Mount Alimony. Investment also meant exposure to financial movements, for example the dramatic fall of the Japanese stock market in 1990. 

The Falklands War affected Argentinian purchases, and 9/11 led to far fewer Americans coming to London. But by then, the fall of London as the centre of the world art market had already been softened by the arrival of the Young British Artists; Stourton is a clear-minded and fair guide to both rise and fall.

Money today certainly dictates trade, with the buyer’s premiums introduced in Stourton’s period now standing somewhere between 20 and 32 per cent. Alongside the seller’s commission, this means the possibility for major gains, but also room to negotiate on terms. Inevitably, the reader is left wanting more from this cornucopia, including a more systematic account of the impact of politics (domestic and international), tax changes, entry into the EEC and links with the trade elsewhere in Britain. The pursuit of vexatious legal cases would presumably have deterred Stourton from going beyond the opening of Tate Modern in 2000, but I will be far from alone in hoping for a sequel.

Stourton has delivered a fascinating tale, often Hogarthian in its cast (“Kasmin enjoyed his time there [Gallery One] but found himself the ‘sex slave’ of the owner’s wife, Ida Kar, an experience he recalled as ‘quite taxing’.”) Stourton’s story is a rollercoaster ride for the individuals and concerns described and a more insightful work than most novels. Although Andras Kalman is described as Dickensian, only Vanity Fair might strike some as a worthy comparison to this excellent story.