Turquin Teams Up With Stéphane Pinta and The de Bayser Family
Eighteen-year Turquin veteran Stéphane Pinta and Patrick, Louis, Matthieu and Augustin de Bayser have bought stakes in the expertise firm to ensure its long-term future. Éric Turquin answered our questions.
PHOTO Henri du Cray
Why did you sell stakes in the company to Stéphane Pinta and the de Bayser family?
There’s an old saying: “If you want to walk fast, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.” I’ve always needed others. When Stéphane or Philippine Motais in Narbonne find a painting in Toulouse, it gives me more pleasure than if I had found it myself. Just like when Jérôme Montcouquiol makes an attribution. It increases the possibilities.
So you’re not leaving the business?
Quite the contrary, but it would be inconceivable to jeopardize over 350 auctioneers’ studies if anything happened to me. If I died today, none of our clients would feel the consequences, and it’s essential to keep our partners’ trust. I owe everything to the auctioneers, especially that. I’ve always introduced Stéphane as my partner. After 18 years with me, when he pitched in to modernize our working tools while making a name for himself in the field of expertise with his major discoveries, it seemed natural for him to play a key role in our future by becoming associate director. As for the de Baysers, their youth, the proximity of our offices, the sharing of our documentation and the long friendship that binds me to their history through Bruno de Bayser were essential to our discussions with Stéphane, which quite naturally led us to become closer. It was indispensable to preserve our independence, a prerequisite for our business, and we need young people as a matter of renewal. Together we’ve designed a balanced model where none of us holds a majority stake.
Who are Turquin’s future experts?
I’ve had five new trainees every three months for 20 years. I can assure you I won’t run out. I’ll have all the intellectual resources I need.
Expertise and responsibility are the be-all and the end-all.
You have to differentiate between the noun and the adjective. You can have expertise in one field, but being an expert for customs or auctions is an extremely serious matter. In front of a judge, either you’re an expert or you’re not. France has three experts’ organizations. I belong to the largest, the Syndicat français des experts professionnels en œuvres d’art et objets de collection (French association of professional experts in works of art and collectors’ pieces), which brings together 46 specialties and over 142 professionals. We’ve signed a good conduct charter on the basis of which we negotiate an insurance contract for our expertise with a broker. One expert may not carry much weight, but 120 contracts do.
Do you think the profession is under threat?
Yes, because our role as middlemen is relatively expensive. It accounts for 6% of the sales price, so auction houses are tempted to bypass us. Unlike Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which are cutting back their expertise departments at great cost and to the detriment of their image, if La Mer de Glace in Chamonix decides to do without our services from one day to the next it doesn’t owe us any severance pay. It can freely change experts without incurring any costs. However, in return for that 6%, the Mer de Glace auction house can count on the work of 15 specialists dedicated to researching the paintings, attributing them, documenting their history, putting a value on them, exhibiting them before the sale and finding buyers. That’s what allowed Mr. Le Coent de Beaulieu in Senlis, Mr. Cortot in Dijon and Mr. Rouillac in Vendôme to sell paintings worth several million euros based on our research and reputation. Our services enabled them to give Christie’s and Sotheby’s a run for their money.
Why wouldn’t an auctioneer come to you?
I see two trends unfolding. The first, which you might call traditional, involves going straight to a specialist, if there is one, to obtain a certificate and sell the painting without using our services. This is a common practice in modern and contemporary art, where the expert’s role is often less crucial. Recent works, which are usually signed and well documented, pose fewer restoration and authenticity problems. The second trend on the horizon is somewhat related and involves the use of AI, which in the long term could allow auction houses themselves to conduct the expertise, for example on 17th-centuryDutch seascapes, with the risks that entails.
What would you say to the auction houses?
This form of “self-medication” has advantages like speed and lower cost, but also significant risks. To use a metaphor, when a masterpiece, which by definition defies categorization, eludes us it’s like a doctor missing a serious illness. Increasingly often, the trust of a buyer who hasn’t seen the object sets the final price. A work’s value is based not just on its authenticity, but also on the buyer’s ability to place it in a historical or personal context where its full meaning, power and beauty are revealed. I put a lot of emphasis on our profession’s technical aspect, which is necessary but not sufficient. I’m convinced that, for now, AI can neither create nor fully appreciate a work’s beauty, because beauty is a profoundly human criterion and that’s the way it must stay. We don’t just work on oils, panels and copper, but on beauty.
What’s your main weapon in the fight against fakes made by AI?
An in-person examination of a painting is an emotional experience that photography cannot match. AI might be able to compete with the mechanical aspect of the expert’s memory, but the crucial element of our expertise remains our sensitivity enhanced by direct experience, comparisons and the continuous quest for new impressions of art works. Our keen sensitivity is our best asset and our most effective response to the advances of AI and the inevitable increase in counterfeiting it will bring about.
It sounds like Turquin has a bright future ahead of it.
I sincerely think so. More and more European auction houses request our services. Stéphane and I have forged strong partnerships with auction houses in Sweden, Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, etc. and we’re developing ties with others in Italy. We also work with the Hôtel des Encans in Montreal, although Europe is still our main area of activity. Our goal is to offer our services, including 600,000 photographs and 20,000 books, to auction houses that can’t afford an in-house expert. An expert without adequate documentation is like a surgeon operating without x-rays. I often think of something I heard during my internship at Hôtel Drouot: “It will fetch the right price.” But sometimes a work of art doesn’t fetch the right price when it’s sold, which is unfortunate for the seller, the auctioneer, the expert and France. That’s exactly why I decided to open my business in Paris. We’re here to defend sellers the way lawyers defend their clients.
The outlook seems bright today.
I’ve never been a fan of big maneuvers. I think success in business, expertise and sales is based on agility and mobility. French auctioneers have demonstrated a terrific ability to innovate by developing cutting-edge tools like Drouot Live and Interencheres to adapt to the Internet age. The lockdowns and the transition to all-digital have allowed them to leap five or 10 years forward. The possibility for an owner in Dijon to sell within his legal framework, in his local area, with a trusted auctioneer who’ll achieve the same result as in New York, is a revolution. When a legal problem arises in Dijon, it costs about €1,000 to consult a lawyer. When you have to take legal action in New York, as I have, you’ve got to shell out $50,000 right off the bat. Since the law of December 31, 1992 limiting the number of national treasures to just eight to 10 a year, all specialties combined, came into effect, the State no longer relies on the 1941 law to despoil owners. It took 25 or 30 years to smooth over relations with sellers, but today trust has been fully restored. Bruno Le Maire has perfectly understood the art market’s strategic importance for France’s influence by making a 120-degree turn. The Ministry of the Economy recently sent a strong signal by lowering the VAT to 5.5%, the lowest rate in the European Union, which will turn Paris into a magnet. Once, a shrewd buyer would ship a work found in the provinces or at the Hôtel Drouot to London or New York. Today, it’s the opposite. Every week, I see paintings acquired abroad arriving in Paris for sale here at home. The city is on the right track to once again become the art market capital of the world, a title it already holds on the continent.
Do you still dream of becoming an auctioneer?
I learned everything I know at Drouot, and if I didn’t become an auctioneer it was because I couldn’t afford an auction house. I’m deprived of the pleasure of picking up a painting from an elderly customer, convincing a young woman who visits the gallery that it’s for her, getting her bid and selling it to her. But I still think like an auctioneer.
