How to ship a priceless work of art

Venice water levels, New York road closures and London cranes — getting art around the world involves some heavy-duty logistics. The sheer number of museum exhibitions, art fairs and auctions means that keeping art on the move, and intact, is a multi-billion-dollar industry.

It is fraught with issues. “When art is in situ, it is relatively safe. When it moves, that’s the danger point,” says Robert Read, head of art and private clients at the specialist insurance company Hiscox. He says that half of the value of their claims from the past 20 years stems from accidental damage of art in transit.

There are plenty of horror stories. Rembrandt’s “Portrait of an Elderly Woman” (c1650-52), reportedly estimated for insurance at $12mn, suffered a three-inch-long slash to its bottom right-hand corner, having somehow come out of its packaging in transit between the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 2001. The previous year, vibrations during a flight to Australia meant that pigments on pages from Ireland’s treasured 9th-century “Book of Kells” were damaged.

Momart is all too familiar with Venice’s ‘tidal variations’, which mean if the water is too high then shipments don’t fit under bridges; if too low then transport can hit the bottom of the canals

Forklift trucks seem particularly problematic. “I remember a dealer in London who sent a contemporary painting to a client in the US, bought for a few hundred thousand pounds, and it was ruined by the prongs of a forklift truck. So, the dealer sent another work by the same artist to replace it — and the same thing happened again,” says Chris Bentley, head of fine art and specie at Axa XL.

More recently, Read says, technology has dramatically reduced the risks. “For sculpture, for example, you used to have layers of foam, cut out to sit around a work, but now you can 3D-print the exact shape around it,” he says. Experts also now share videos of how they pack an object at the start of its journey so that it can come back in exactly the same way, he says. For a priceless Picasso, the advice of insurers is succinct: “Use a top-end, specialist fine art shipper,” Bentley says. 

One of these is Momart, whose management is discreet about its clients but, says Guy Morey, its operations director, “you probably couldn’t name a museum that we haven’t worked for”. One recent project he does open up about is installing Conrad Shawcross’s swirling bronze sculpture, “Manifold (Major Third) 5:4” (2023) outside London’s Moorgate Tube station, part of the Crossrail Art Foundation’s public art programme. The 2.3 tonne work travelled by road from where it was made in Spain. Then, after “months of planning and discussions” with Transport for London and the City of London, early one Saturday morning it “was lifted and turned in the air, using a crane and installed with huge bolts fixing it below ground level,” Morey says. The size and weight of the late Richard Serra’s large steel sculptures mean that for his exhibitions at Gagosian Gallery in New York “we have to close the street and can only do so at certain times”, says gallery director Mark Francis.

People buy [art] without realising that it doesn’t fit through their front door. There are ways around — craning things over buildings or taking out part of a wall — but it is always worth checking

Momart’s Morey concurs that technology has been a game-changer for the industry. The biggest change, he finds, is less about 3D printing — “the packaging is rock-hard, you might need something with a bit more give” — but “the ability to track a work, where it is, monitor its temperature or humidity, or any shift in vibrations”. Individual couriers are still regularly used, particularly for major museum exhibitions. “There is a tendency when lending important works to send a personal escort, such as someone from the museum, not to carry it with them [art tends to go in the hold] but to be there as a work is loaded on to a plane, to watch it being unpacked, and so on,” Read says.

Shippers now also use unmarked fleets. “None of our vehicles are branded any more,” Morey says, adding “not that they’ve ever been targeted, it’s just to be as careful as possible.” Armed police escorts are also a thing of the past — “it seemed to draw more attention” — though for certain clients, unmarked decoy vehicles are used, he says.

Each art-filled city has its own distinct issues. In Venice, Gagosian is currently helping to support a show by Tatiana Trouvé at the Palazzo Grassi, her biggest solo show to date and including sculptures and large-scale drawings. “It is especially difficult logistically as everything is shipped by boat and you can’t control the height of the water,” Francis says. Morey says Momart is all too familiar with Venice’s “tidal variations”, which mean if the water is too high then shipments don’t fit under bridges; if too low then transport can hit the bottom of the canals. During the city’s prestigious biennale, there’s also the problem that one of its main exhibition areas, the Giardini, “is a garden, you can’t just drive up to the site,” Morey says.

Then there’s the cost of it all. Read gives a back-of-the-envelope guess that the value of art shipped around the world amounts to “at least $100bn” annually while shipping costs were found to be a significant portion of gallery expenses in the latest Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report (15 per cent), and with the steepest climb in the past year. 

This is part of the thinking behind a museum-share scheme that Gagosian gallery is organising on behalf of the American artist Jeff Wall, whose large-scale, hyper-real colour transparencies are mounted in light boxes, and who currently has consecutive shows around the world. “All the shows are separate, but we have organised for about 60 works to travel together each time and the museums can then choose what they want to hang — while paying about 15 per cent of the transport costs each,” Francis says.

Given the inherent risks, there are growing calls for art to travel less, compounded by environmental concerns. “There is this constant tension between museums being interested in outreach and accessibility while also worrying about their environmental impact. It is increasingly discussed, though I am not sure how it can be resolved,” Bentley says. More eco-friendly packaging is a constructive, “middle ground” solution, he says, noting Christie’s Ventures’ recent investment in Rokbox, a reusable shipping crate company.

Meanwhile, Morey says, there are more prosaic practicalities that can ease the path of priceless art. A repeated issue, he says, are “people who buy [art] without realising that it doesn’t fit through their front door. There are ways around — craning things over buildings or taking out a window or part of a wall — but it is always worth checking.”

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