Paris, capital of art thanks to Brexit?

Perhaps you cannot go back to the past, but to the past.

In the 1920s, Paris was the center of the art market.

Dealers on the left bank of the Seine were renowned for their talent for discovering immense artists, beyond Picasso.

Paul Guillaume represented Matisse and Derain.

Léonce Rosenberg showed the cubism of Juan Gris, Léger or Braque.

And the Hôtel Drouot was the temple of auctions.

In 1925, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, a writer who would live for months in Paris, published

(in his apt title in French).

In one of his dialogues, the narrator, Nick Carraway, rebuts Jay Gatsby, an enigmatic millionaire, who has built an incongruous palace at the end of a jetty to recover his former lover, Daisy Buchanan, who time never sails against the current .

"That the past cannot be repeated?"

Exclaims Gatsby, disappointed.

Of course it is possible!

Paris wants to once again be a party for art, taking advantage of the chaos left by the British exit from Europe.

The scene is vibrant: there are artists, galleries, new museums (François Pinault will soon open his long-awaited Bourse de Commerce) and a lost generation of collectors returns.

"I see a large number of rich French people who had moved to the UK and are now returning," says Parisian gallery owner Chantal Crousel.

Avenue Matignon, the street of ambition

Maybe Paris is not Berlin.

But a renewed iridescence overflows the traditional Le Marais art district.

"Brexit has contributed to our decision to open a physical space in Paris," acknowledges Justine Durrett, director of the French division of the great David Zwirner gallery.

The street of ambition is the Avenue Matignon.

Despite the 11,000 euros per square meter that a local costs.

The Christie's bidding room, Almine Rech, Emmanuel Perrotin or Mariane Ibrahim can almost talk to each other without raising their voices.

This curvature of the world has been tightened by Brexit.

If something drives money away, it is uncertainty;

and art is money.

Controls at the English border make shipments of the works more expensive and delayed.

And nobody knows what tax will apply.

"London can become a kind of autonomous city within its own country," warns Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofía.

“But it would be a mistake to participate in this race.

Europe must recover what is public and be a place for the exchange of knowledge ”.

Although, for the moment, the only thing framed is the capital.

magazine

estimates that in 2019 the revenues of the big three houses (Sotheby's, Christie's and Artcurial) grew an incredible 49%.

This percentage resonates in the 2020 pandemic as an unrepeatable miracle.

But some of the lower-value trade — adventures economist Clare McAndrew — may move from London to Paris.

"The Parisian boom is related to the need to have a strong center of the art market within the Union", underlines Nicolas Nahab, director of the French space of the Marian Goodman gallery.

Some historians argue that the surrender of Paris came when the American Robert Rauschenberg won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1964. Perhaps it was earlier.

When World War II caused an exodus of gallery owners to America.

Or when Gatsby spotted Daisy's green light at the end of the jetty.

Reality dissolved dreams.

"Brexit will not add or subtract anything from the race of a runaway horse [the art market] that no one dares to imagine where it will stop," predicts Bartomeu Marí, head of the Lima Art Museum.

But contemplating the sunrise on the Seine, art feels that the Sun rises, again, for everyone;

and Paris longs for her party.