“Sellers and buyers alike must be able to trust completely the knowledge, expertise, seriousness, judgment and discretion of the expert. This has always been my personal badge of honor.”
Marc Maurie
MY STORY
“I come from the town of Périgueux in Dordogne in southwest France, not far from Bordeaux, famous for its truffles and Foie gras. My father was in the military and served for France in the Second World War and in Indochina — something he never ever talked about. We moved around quite a bit in France during my youth, following his stationing. In Aix-en-Provence, I met my Swedish wife since forty-nine years, who was there studying French. So of course it was love that brought me to the north…
I arrived to Stockholm in January 1973 and was immediately employed at an express service company, through my wife’s contacts. I remember vividly the shock of the extreme winter cold and my rugged colleagues who went to buy vodka and offered me Swedish `snuff´, chewing tobacco, that made my mouth burn for a week. I had to prove myself, carrying heavy cupboards and other pieces up staircases using a harness. I bruised my shoulders but decided to `man it out´ and eventually gained respect. It was a real crash course in Swedish society.
Bukowskis, Sweden’s leading auction house, under its legendary owner and director Gregor Aronowitsch, was a big client of the company I worked for. We handled the moving of all art, furniture and antiques for their sales, which were of course very different in those days. I really had no background in art from my family, but it was like Ali Baba’s cave opened up for me. I loved everything about this world. Pretty soon, the staff requested me to come in for every auction. They discovered that I had a visual memory that saved time, for example by being able to recognize a painting just from its frame in the storage. In 1979, I was offered and accepted the job as manager of the Bukowskis Service Department.
The storage facilities in Bukowskis at Arsenalsgatan in central Stockholm were, in those days, connected with the art reference library. I started spending all my spare time there, looking up information about art works, going through catalogues and reading artist monographies, which I consumed as if they were suspense novels, gradually building up my own education, while at the same time handling the art works. It was quite a fantastic university! I found that I had an unusual talent for memorizing art, learning the ouvres of various artists by heart. With time, Gregor Aronowitsch and Johan Nordén, the executives of the auction house, developed more and more confidence in me. Then, in 1983, when a number of experts left to found a competing auction house, Beijers, and a vacuum occurred, my rare chance came when Nordén suddenly said: `You will take over the Art Department!´
I began my appointment as head of the Art Department in 1984, at the height of the art boom in the eighties, and soon had the thrill of experiencing the sensational breaking of many records in Swedish auction history, with sales at previously unimaginable levels. Those times were really crazy. Memorable milestones were paintings like Nils von Dardel’s Den döende dandyn (The Dying Dandy), sold to famous collector Fredrik Roos for 3.4 million Swedish Crowns, at the time the record price for a Swedish painting. In 1984, August Malmström’s Grindslanten (The Gate Penny) sold for one million, and then again for 13 million in 1990. Then there was August Strindberg’s Underlandet (The Wonderland), with a new record price for a Swedish painting at 22.2 million.
I was the head of the Art Department at Bukowskis from 1984 to 1992. During this time I got to know and work with all the great collectors and legends of the Swedish art world. I also began my long-term collaborations with international experts such as Eric Turquin, Pierre Etienne and Stéphane Pinta in Paris. Another long-term contact that I established was Ivar Samarine in London, the Russian art expert who initiated the first Russian sales at Sotheby’s. I also became involved with numerous prominent international collectors and clients around the world.
With the financial crash in 1991, many collectors went bankrupt, resulting in a collapse of the auction business. The record-price Strindberg painting was force-sold by an executor two years later for 3.6 million. Shortly thereafter in 1992, Johan Nordén, my boss from Bukowskis, founded his own auction house, Nordén Auktioner — a bold move at that time. He recruited me to operate the business together with him and I was the head of the Art Department during a decade. Those were very tough and strenuous years with copious amounts of work, but extremely challenging, fun and exciting times. It’s fair to say that we pioneered the business in a number of fields — with our radical advertising and marketing, our exhibitions presented in former bank premises, and our auction sales staged at Grand Hôtel Stockholm.
Then in 2001, I was approached by Niclas Forsman, managing director of Stockholms Auktionsverk, the world’s oldest operating auction house. It was previously owned by the City of Stockholm but had changed into private hands. At the time, the auction house was located in premises at the subway level at the Gallerian shopping mall at T-Centralen Station in central Stockholm. Niclas and the owners had the vision of challenging Bukowskis — a wild idea as it seemed at the time. I told him that one can’t compete with Bukowskis from a subway station. Shortly after, Niclas returned and showed me their new stylish premises in the Östermalm district and asked if I would come aboard. I said yes, on one condition — that we’d launch a collaboration with Eric Turquin, the head of Old Masters from Sotheby’s in Paris who had, by then, opened his own business, Cabinet Turquin in Paris. Niclas accepted and so, I got to enjoy the ride from the beginning.
My eighteen years at Stockholms Auktionsverk were fantastic. During this time, we came on a par with Bukowskis and at one point even surpassed them as market leaders — a feat no one in the business would have thought possible. I can name so many highlights — such as the record sale of Anders Zorn’s Sommarnöje (Summer Pleasure) in 2011, which is still the most expensive Swedish painting ever sold at 29.45 million Crowns. We also broke the all-time record for any painting sold in Sweden with Kandinsky’s Kreis und Fleck which was sold in 2017 for 39.125 million. The sales of historic, legendary collections became a specialty for us — such as the Fredrik Roos collection, the Lundberg collection, the Eva af Burén collection, the IngaBritt and Arne Lundberg collection and many others. Our hugely successful Russian sales, where we collaborated with Ivan Samarine, were other highlights. I could go on and on about those great years.
For forty-five years I’ve always loved my job and cherished going to work every morning. It’s also been very tough and certainly stressful, with constant huge responsibilities and pressures of various kinds. I’m proud to say that throughout my career, I’ve been able to stay clear of major scandals such as sales of false artworks and similar. In a business of trust, like art dealership, this is crucial. Sellers and buyers alike must be able to trust completely the knowledge, expertise, seriousness, judgment and discretion of the expert. This has always been my personal badge of honor.
Though I still love the pulse of the auction business, I think that, having reached a respectable age, the time is right for me to start working alone and on my own conditions — though I continue consulting auction houses. With the knowledge and expertise I’ve amassed over the decades and all of my contacts and experience, I know that I have a lot to offer to private collectors, corporate clients and art lovers all over the globe.”