About
Lukas Fuchsgruber is an art historian based in Berlin, who recently completed his PhD thesis about the creation of the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris in 1852, under the supervision of Bénédicte Savoy. From 2011 to 2014 he worked as an author and researcher for “Art TransForm”, a German-French research project (DFG/ANR) on transnational artist formation in the nineteenth century. Since 2014 he is affiliated with the “Forum Kunst und Markt” (Centre for Art Market Studies) in Berlin, taking part in the organization of the annual workshops, coordinating the young researchers initiative and contributing to the Journal for Art Market Studies as a writer and guest editor. In 2017 he was a research fellow at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. His postdoc project is a digital analysis of archival material in museums about forgeries. Education
2005 – 2012 Studies of Art History and Economics in Nuremberg and Berlin
2012 M.A. Art History and Technology of Art at TU Berlin, with a thesis on Otto Mündler
2013-2015 Member of the German-French Doctoral College “Construire les differences”
2013-2016 Fellow of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation
2018 PhD defense. Thesis on the creation of the Hôtel Drouot auction house Work Shared in CORE
Articles
Book chapters
Online publication
Projects
PhD (2013-2018): Art Auctions in the 19th Century. The Creation of the Hôtel Drouot and the Development of the French Art Market
In 1852, the newly built auction house Hôtel Drouot opened its doors to the public. Here, the Association of Auctioneers organized countless sales of artworks, furniture, decorative art, fashion, and curiosities. Since 1801, this association had possessed a legally sanctioned monopoly for all public auctions – a monopoly that remained unbroken until the year 2000. Not only did the Hôtel Drouot provide a central venue for the auctions, the impressive new building also consolidated the change in the auctioneers’ role who, over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, had both broadened the range of their competence while also improving their social standing. This is particularly evident in the newly styled art sales: now auctions of contemporary art and large, staged auctions of whole collections began to take place. Along with the founding of the auction house came an intensified engagement with the valuation of art that allows for an exact historical analysis of this discourse and is the focus of the investigation.
Postdoc (2018- ongoing): The archive of the „Association of Museum Officials for Defense against Fakes and Improper Business Practices“
The project works with digital tools and towards a digital presentation of research, the core materials are archival media that the museums used, like x-rays and detail photography, as well as internal documents of expertise. The archive collects fake objects and was maintained and circulated internally by museum officials in the first half of the 20th century. This was a collaborative archive in which museums kept track of the art market. The relation between museums and the art market was often one of conflict, which becomes particularly evident with problematic objects such as forgeries.
Memberships
Centre for Art Market Studies (Berlin)
