THE ART MARKET AND ITS MECHANISMS

“I speculate in rare art as I believe in it”, Flechtheim wrote the year he opened his gallery. How exactly he ran his gallery business is, however, something that will largely have to remain in the dark. Neither lists of artists or customers, nor ledgers for incoming or outgoing invoices, nor even records of commissions or inventories from Flechtheim’s galleries have survived. The question as to the structure of contracts between dealers and artists can often not be definitively answered either – except in a few cases, such as with the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and the artist Paul Klee. Outwardly, all background information about dealings in the art trade and the auction business was and still is treated confidentially and with discretion.
The most important mechanisms in the art market related to the effective work of the patron, intermediary and salesman, Alfred Flechtheim, are listed here.