TEFAF NEW YORK

TEFAF New York is an art fair of some ninety dealers, held for five days in May at the Park Avenue Armory. They bring Greek and Roman antiquities, jewellery, twentieth-century design and contemporary art, and the fair is about a third the size of its parent at Maastricht.

The rules are Maastricht’s. The building is New York’s.

Two Fairs

TEFAF came to New York in 2016 with two fairs, both at the Armory, in partnership with Artvest, a New York firm whose own spring fair there became TEFAF’s.

The autumn fair, first held that October, showed everything from antiquity to the early twentieth century. The spring fair, from May 2017, showed the twentieth century and after.

The pandemic cost it two years, and in 2021 TEFAF gave up the autumn fair for good. Since 2022 there has been a single fair, in May, and it takes in the whole range.

It kept Maastricht’s ways. Its objects are vetted, and the flowers came with the name.

In 2026 it held its twelfth fair, ten years after the first.

The Company Rooms

The regiment that built the Armory was divided into companies, and each had a room of its own on the second floor, to meet in. Each was fitted out by the leading decorators of the day.

There are nine. Company C keeps its painted ceiling and the mace-shaped lamps put up in 1897. Company K is a Queen Anne room of 1880, and its oak and mahogany locker doors are still inscribed with the names of New York families.

TEFAF is the only fair allowed to show in them. Several dealers take a room rather than a stand, and set out their pieces among the panelling.

Below, the drill hall holds the rest of the fair, beneath the flowers.

What to Know

The Collectors Preview is on the Thursday evening, a benefit for Memorial Sloan Kettering. The museums come to it: in 2026, more than a hundred of their people did.

The fair opens to the public on the Friday and runs for five days. Tickets are sold online.

A lounge suit.

The Armory fills the block of Park Avenue between 66th and 67th Streets, and the hotels of the Upper East Side are a walk away.

Frieze falls in the same fortnight, and the evening sales fill the nights.

The mistake is to leave without going upstairs. The company rooms are what no other fair can show.

The Court

TEFAF New York is not the Court’s own. Places at the Collectors Preview, and introductions to particular dealers, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.