Brian Balfour-Oatts

Brian Balfour-Oatts (born 1966) is a British art dealer, collector and writer. He published William Scott: A Survey of His Original Prints, a catalogue of William Scott's graphic work.

Early life and 1990s

Balfour-Oatts grew up in Hawick and was a child carer for his mother, who had Huntington's disease. He attended Hawick High School and, at 18, joined Sotheby's in London.

In 1988, he became curator and gallery manager at Mayfair Fine Art. At 22, he sold a portrait of Pablo Picasso’s muse Dora Maar to Heinz Berggruen,

Balfour-Oatts staged the controversial exhibition The Difficulties of Attribution in 1994 after being introduced, by art dealer Julian Hartnoll, to the famous forger Eric Hebborn. The exhibition of "recently discovered Old Master Drawings", complete with a mock auction catalogue was widely covered in the press. He subsequently purchased the rights to Drawn to Trouble, Hebborn's 1991 confessional autobiography, which was republished as Confessions of a Master Forger following Hebborn's death in 1996, with an epilogue written by Balfour-Oatts. In 1997 he completed and published The Art Forger's Handbook from Hebborn's manuscript notes, a book that achieved notoriety amongst the art student and art crime communities, a second-hand copy of which can command a price of several hundred dollars. Speaking about the project in an interview with the BBC World Service, he said "I didn't realise what a fuss it would cause and how we would still be talking about it, so much, twenty years later."

2000s

In 2005, Balfour-Oatts curated a comprehensive exhibition of William Scott's graphic work and published William Scott: A Survey of His Original Prints. Other exhibitions included a one-man show of Dan Flavin's work, Nothing As Full As The Air, and The Unseen Hand: Minimalism and Anonymity, featuring works by Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin in 2005 and 2006.

In 2007, Balfour-Oatts appeared in the news for his part in events that would lead to the reclassification of Andy Warhol's 1968 Brillo Boxes by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. Four years earlier, Balfour-Oatts had visited the elderly curator and former director of the Pompidou Centre, Pontus Hultén, at his home in France. Balfour-Oatts negotiated the purchase of the last 22 Brillo Boxes remaining in Hultén's collection. These boxes had, according to Hultén, been exhibited in his 1968 Warhol exhibition held at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, of which institution he had also been director. Balfour-Oatts consulted the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board prior to completing the purchase, who verified that they were indeed original works by Warhol. 12 of the boxes were sold to the American collector Don Fisher, founder of The Gap, and later presented to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The remaining 10 works were sold by Christie's to Anthony d'Offay. After Hultén's death, it became apparent that most of the Brillo Boxes may not have been manufactured in 1968, and had been made later under Hultén's direction. In 2007, the Authentication Board declared that it "… cannot determine whether or not these boxes were produced in accordance with the terms of a verbal agreement Pontus Hultén made with Warhol in 1968." The certificates of authenticity were not withdrawn, although the boxes themselves were subsequently reclassified by the Board as "exhibition copies".

Current Activity

In February 2023 Balfour-Oatts co-curated Pierre Soulages: Une Lumière Infinie, the first major posthumous exhibition of the work of the French painter and printmaker at Phillips (auctioneers) in London.

Balfour-Oatts was appointed advisor to the Estate of Emily Fisher Landau for art related matters in 2023. The auction of Emily Fisher Landau's collection in November 2023 at Sotheby's New York brought $406.4m, the 4th highest sale total in Sotheby's history and the most valuable sale ever devoted to a female collector in auction history. The sale was led by Pablo Picasso’s Femme à la montre (1932), which sold for $139.4 million, the highest auction price of the year. The average lot reached $13 million, with five works exceeding $20 million, including pieces by Jasper Johns and Ed Ruscha. Records were set for Agnes Martin and Mark Tansey. The collection ranked among the five most valuable single-owner estate sales, alongside those of Peggy Rockefeller and David Rockefeller and Paul Allen.

As of 2013, Brian Balfour-Oatts curates and deals for Archeus / Post-Modern, and Pierre Soulages.

Family

Brian Balfour-Oatts is the grandson of military figure Lieutenant-Colonel Lewis Balfour Oatts.

Publications