Delphine Arnault, the Dior chief executive and daughter of France’s richest man, was dropped off by a Mercedes limousine and strode into the Grand Palais to join a crowd of some of the world’s wealthiest people at Tuesday’s “Avant Première,” the inaugural V.V.I.P. pre-preview of Art Basel Paris, the world’s most glamorous, most exclusive international art fair.
It was the second year that Art Basel’s French show was held in the recently restored venue of the 1900 Paris Exposition, a venue with spectacular Beaux-Arts-period architecture but a display space about half the size of the purpose-built exhibition halls used for Art Basel’s other high-end fairs in Switzerland, Hong Kong and Miami Beach.
“It creates a bottleneck; we saw this last year,” Noah Horowitz, Art Basel’s chief executive, said of the Grand Palais’s space limitations. “The demand for attending in Paris is exceptionally high.”
“The dealers want to have conversations with their most important clients,” Horowitz said of the new private view, which was held over four hours on Tuesday afternoon before the traditional two-day vernissage. He said it was the art world’s first V.V.I.P. pre-preview of a fair.
Exhibiting dealers were keen to shake off the gloom that has hung over the international art market for more than two years. Geopolitical and economic uncertainties have dampened demand, according to the annual Art Basel & UBS Global Art Market Report, which said that combined auction and dealer sales had declined 12 percent last year to $57.5 billion. But Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union has directed greater interest to the Paris art scene, and the accumulated wealth in the city has recently reached “unprecedented proportions,” according to Le Monde.
All 206 of the fair’s participating galleries, spread over two floors, were allocated six “Avant Première” passes (each with a plus-one). These were augmented by Art Basel’s invitations to its Global Patrons Council, a group of some 180 of the world’s most prestigious private collectors. A spoof Instagram account joked that it was easier to break into the Louvre to “steal stuff” than to obtain a ticket for this ultra exclusive event.
Reactions were mixed.
“This is successful,” said Wendy Cromwell, a New York-based art adviser, surrounded by many of the art world’s biggest hitters. “It’s managed to attract a global clientele.”
“But I did think this pre-preview would be more special,” she added. “It’s crowded.”
American collectors were prominent among the V.V.I.P.s, including Pamela Joyner, Jose and Alberto Mugrabi, J. Tomilson Hill and Helen Schwab.
“Americans love an excuse to visit Paris,” said Cromwell, who had traveled from Britain after the Frieze London fair. “Paris is like a vacation,” she added. “It’s an obvious art capital, and it’s more intimate than London, plus the food, fashion and museums.”
The quality of the museum shows in Paris this week — which include the official opening of the vast Fondation Cartier for contemporary art, opposite the Louvre — clearly had a positive effect on the fair.
Collectors were in town to see the blockbuster Gerhard Richter exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, encouraging two early big-ticket sales of Richter abstracts. Both predominantly yellow and both from the late-1980s, they sold for $25.5 million and $23 million on the booths of Lévy Gorvy Dayan and Hauser & Wirth. George Condo is the subject of a major survey at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. The German multivenue gallery Sprüth Magers quickly found buyers for two 2025 paintings by Condo, each priced at $1.8 million.
Dealers understandably wanted to suggest that the mood in the market was brightening, at least at the very top, blue-chip end.
“The fair was four hours old, and it became our best-ever fair in Paris,” the New York-based mega-gallerist David Zwirner said on Wednesday, having sold more $25 million worth of artworks at “Avant Première.” “Yesterday was quite a surprise.” These sales included a hanging looped-wire sculpture by Ruth Asawa, whose career is currently the subject of a retrospective at MoMA, priced at $7.5 million. Back in 2021, Zwirner said he had been “a little disappointed with sales” at FIAC, the previous organizer of Paris’s fall flagship fair of modern and contemporary works. Art Basel took over the event in 2022.
Yet while business might have been encouragingly brisk for the elite galleries on the ground floor of the Grand Palais, the footfall was noticeably slower upstairs, on Level 1.
In the specialist “Premise” section, devoted to 10 smaller galleries presenting “highly singular curatorial proposals,” tucked away in the periphery of the first floor, the London-based Gallery of Everything was showing a museum-style display of works by Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948), a pioneering Haitian Surrealist admired by André Breton. Paintings were priced from 100,000 to 600,000 euros.
As of Wednesday afternoon, no significant sales were made. “But lots of museums are keen, and museums take time,” James Brett, the gallery’s founder, said.
The Zurich-based Karma International, which has been exhibiting at the Paris fall fair since 2009, had better luck in the main Level 1 galleries display. It sold three works at the “Avant Première,” led by the 2025 sculpture “Septic Sun (Painters Bench)” by the Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad, priced at $120,000. Business was “about the same” as last year, said a gallery co-founder, Karolina Dankow.
“We’ve covered our costs,” she added. “Now we have to work harder.”
Many exhibitors and visitors noted that the quality — and price points — of several works offered at Art Basel Paris were higher than those in June at Art Basel in Switzerland, which is traditionally the art world’s must-attend fair. (The fair organizer also plans to open a new event in Doha, Qatar, in February.)Back on the ground floor in Paris, Nahmad Contemporary of New York mounted a solo display of nine paintings by Picasso, two of which were each priced at just under $50 million, according to the gallery. White Cube told the organizers that it had sold Julie Mehretu’s 2007 painting “Charioteer” for $11.5 million. And Pace said it had sold an Amedeo Modigliani painting from 1918 for just under $10 million.
“Parts of Paris offer luxury and let’s face it, at a certain level, the art world also offers luxury of a certain kind,” the Berlin- and Vancouver-based collector Ann Webb said in an email.
Webb plans to arrive in Paris on Friday. “We have decided to skip the first few opening days of Art Basel Paris,” she said. “Last year, the opening days were just way too busy.”
Scott Reyburn is a London-based freelance journalist who writes about the art world, artists and their markets.
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