WHEN Tom Cruise parachuted onto the Grand Palais in Paris in the blockbuster Mission: Impossible—Fallout, he landed with surprising delicacy, given the jump.
Art dealers will be striving for a similar light touch when they gather for the 30th edition of La Biennale Paris, the venerable fair underneath the glass roof of the Grand Palais that opened on Saturday and runs through September 16.
Last year the big Biennale news was stripping mention of antiques from its name and its shift to an every-year presentation—big changes, given that the fair made its debut in 1962, the brainchild of novelist and French Culture Minister André Malraux.
This time, the primary shift is the fair’s reduction to about 62 dealers, down from 94 last year.
“It’s a smaller group of galleries, and more in the tradition of the Biennale when I first knew it,” said Christopher Forbes, the fair’s president.
According to Forbes, the American collector and heir to the publishing fortune, who is known as Kip, this year’s edition also corrects a hiccup in the arrangement of the galleries.
“If I could fault anything, it was the layout,” he said. “Some booths were not ideally positioned. There were dead ends.” So this time around, the single ring of dealers should take care of that, given that there are no hidden corners.
Forbes said that, otherwise, feedback from the 2017 iteration was positive.
“Attendance was up 8.5 percent, and it was profitable,” he said. “And those are good directions to be going.”
Of course, when the wares are high-end ones like an 18th-century armchair or a rare clock, the number of visitors can matter less than the type.
“There were a lot of American museum directors,” Forbes said. “They came with their trustees, and their wallets, in tow.”
The fair, which focuses on older art but allows contemporary work, too, is known for its stringent vetting, the process by which the artworks are deemed authentic.
“They are very picky,” said Marianne Rosenberg, of New York’s Rosenberg & Co., who is exhibiting at the Biennale for the first time. “They love certificates.”
The fair is organized by the National Federation of Antiques Dealers, known by its French abbreviation, SNA, but the objects are vetted by a separate committee. “The vetting is absolutely independent,” said Mathias Ary Jan, president of the SNA.
“The SNA can’t overrule the vetting. And it has been reinforced this year.”
Ary Jan is also an exhibitor subject to that vetting. His Paris gallery specializes in material from the late-19th century and early-20th century. Among the 25 objects in his booth will be a 1949 gouache by renowned French painter Jacques Majorelle, Kasbahs dans la Région de Ouarzazate, Maroc.
About two-thirds of the galleries hail from France. “It’s got that French touch,” Ary Jan said of the fair.
That’s certainly true of the special nonselling Napoleon exhibition at the Biennale, L’Empereur Sous la Verrière (which could be translated as The Emperor Under the Glass Roof), featuring objects owned by collector Pierre-Jean Chalençon, a specialist in Napoleon-related antiques.
The display was designed by the Biennale’s guest artistic director, fashion designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. He created what he called a “vertical gesture” of hanging, colored flags that create a tent shape around the objects. And he went so far as to imagine the emperor himself commissioning it.
“I said, ‘Yes, majesty,’” said Castelbajac, who is the artistic director for Rossignol and Le Coq Sportif. “They are new colors for an old empire. It’s quite spectacular.” Despite deeply Gallic touches like that, some of the galleries from other countries include São Roque, of Lisbon, and Whitford Fine Art, of London.
But even Rosenberg & Co., though now based in New York, traces its roots to Paris. Rosenberg’s great-grandfather, Alexandre Rosenberg, founded it there in 1878, and began a storied history of dealing with top artists. “Picasso was my father’s godfather,” Marianne Rosenberg noted.
The gallery had been on a Goldilocks-like search for a fair that was just right.
“We, like many galleries, are desperate to find a quality art fair,” Rosenberg said. “So many are ultracontemporary, and we don’t fit.”
Rosenberg & Co. shows everything from early cubism to the work of Henry Moore, as well as that of living artists—but she pointedly said it is of the more conservative type.
“Our contemporary artists know how use a paintbrush,” Rosenberg said. “They are not doing the unmade bed and a plank with a light bulb.”
Her Biennale booth will feature Paul Eluard’s 1913 oil Le Cirque (Triptyque), among other works.
“We need the right kind of people traipsing through,” Rosenberg said of her hopes for eager buyers. Anthony J.P. Meyer, who runs Galerie Meyer in Paris, is exhibiting at the Biennale for the third year. Meyer—who deals in Oceanic art, which he defined as “from the Pacific, but before the arrival of Captain Cook”—agreed with Rosenberg that the crowd was everything.
“If you just sit in your gallery, these people will never walk by,” Meyer said. “But at the fair, it’s a captive audience. We’re there to do business, not twiddle our thumbs.”
Among other works, he is exhibiting a 3,500-year-old crouching stone figure combining animal and human characteristics that was found in what is now Papua New Guinea.
Meyer also exhibits at Parcours des Mondes, a tribal art fair in Paris that overlaps with the Biennale.
“Most galleries find it difficult to do both, but they have different clients and direction,” he said. “I’m at the Biennale for a specific kind of client, a crossover collector, someone we don’t know yet.”
Meyer said sophisticated fans of modern and contemporary art would realize that “tribal art is the foundation on which later art was built,” and that they look good together.
“An Oceanic mask next to a great painting is beautiful, and it works,” he added.
Although a hothouse atmosphere of high-end merchandise and deep-pocketed buyers may be good for growing sales, the Biennale is making efforts to reach out to the wider world, too.
The organizers are noting that it is concurrent with Paris Design Week and the design fair Maison & Objet, the idea being that the whole city is a hub for lovers of fine things. And for the first time, the Biennale is part of European Heritage Days, a Continentwide effort to open cultural attractions to the public. “It makes the whole show seem more accessible and less elitist,” Forbes said. “That’s important these days.”