Live from Paris, it’s this week’s True Colors. In this issue: private tours of the Louvre while it’s closed post-jewelry-heist, Miuccia Prada’s dinner for a risk-taking young artist, and the most expensive eight-figure artworks sold at Art Basel. On the scene: James Murdoch, Michael Govan, Rick Owens, Jerry Seinfeld, Alex Da Corte, Diane Kruger, Vincent Cassel.
Around the time my train got into Gare du Nord in Paris on Sunday ahead of the opening of Art Basel, masked men broke into the Louvre and stole jewelry appraised to be worth over $100 million. The thieves are still at large and the heist has captured the world’s attention. Locally, that was a problem. The world’s most famous museum was forced to shut its doors during the city’s cultural glow-up.
That didn’t stop those in town for Art Basel. Though the Louvre was closed until Wednesday, more than one fair attendee told me on Tuesday that they had been able to secure a private tour of the museum even when it was closed.
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Apart from getting access to a museum investigating a recent heist, there were other ways to assert one’s cultural importance over the course of the week. One of the hottest tickets in town is the Gerhard Richter show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which opened to the public the week before. One has to receive a timed ticket for entry, and unless you had a connection to the museum, all public tickets had been taken by the time the fair started. I got tapped for something even better: I could meet a friend at the museum at 9 a.m., a full hour before anyone from the public was allowed in. It was pretty remarkable to stroll through the empty museum—well, empty apart from small tour groups from The Met, LACMA, and Christie’s, as well as donors to the exhibition. As soon as the clock struck 10, the museum was absolutely packed with a frenzy for Richter.
The same could be said of the Bourse de Commerce, François Pinault’s epic private museum in the former stock exchange. The other big institution highlight this year is the opening of the Fondation Cartier in a former department store reimagined by architect Jean Nouvel. Perhaps you’ve noticed that these three museums are all private institutions owned by luxury brands. That’s not exactly a coincidence. Even with the Louvre closed, the most famous museum city in the world, thanks to the fact that it’s also the world’s fashion and luxury headquarters, is just humming.
Another reason for buzz: There are some changes to the ways major collectors can see the art at the fair.
A little history lesson. Queuing up at the start of an art fair used to be civilized. Quaint even. When I first attended the Art Basel fair in Switzerland, well over a decade ago, I approached the Messeplatz minutes before the starting gun to find a single orderly line consisting mostly of those essential to the picture-selling business.
No longer. By the time Art Basel Paris opened in the newly renovated Grand Palais last year, it had become a packed-to-the-gills spectacle of contemporary art. And so the fair decided to make the proceedings a little bit more exclusive.
A few weeks before everyone jetted over to France, word got out that select VIPs would be granted entry to the fair on Tuesday afternoon, nearly a full day before those who had secured First Choice VIP tickets, which allowed Wednesday morning entry. This viewing for the elitist of the elites would be called Avant-Première, and it gave the real buyers what they wanted: a chance to see the works without randos getting in the way, and a chance to thank the galleries that invited them. The invite, sent out in late September, called the occasion “an intimate gathering” exclusively for “esteemed guests of our participating galleries.”
In the days before the fair, the normally blabbermouth gadabouts in Paris swerved away from the question of Avant-Première access—even if one got the nod, no one wanted to mortify a ticketless peer across the dinner table. So as I walked to the entrance on Tuesday afternoon, I was going in blind: Who, exactly, are the V-est of the VIPs? In front of me in line was Jonathan Anderson, creative director of Dior, and in front of him was Hedi Slimane, former creative director of Celine. Not bad company. As I crossed into the magnificent palace I spotted artists Ryan Gander, Tyler Mitchell, and Camille Henrot. A great start.
And then it became immediately clear that it wasn’t going to be, like, empty. The initial rumor was that each gallery got six invites, but it was roughly double that: 3,000 tickets released, or 6,000 with the plus-ones. That’s still roughly half of the crowd at the “normal” invitation-only VIP morning on Wednesday. And it felt more intimate, certainly to those mega-collectors who once waited patiently outside of the Messeplatz, now happily ducking in and out of booths—I spotted Maja Hoffmann, Howard Rachofsky, Tom Hill, Craig Robins, Tony Salamé, and many others.
It did seem a tad more refined, this chill early opening. Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz was chatting with collector Komal Shah as fellow collector Neda Young walked by. Jen Rubio, the entrepreneur and leading arts patron, was admiring a work by Joseph Yaeger in the Gladstone booth. I was somewhat surprised to see Jerry Seinfeld—famously a rabid collector of vintage cars but not a regular on the art fair circuit—present for the Avant-Première, browsing the Sadie Coles booth with a quite remarkable Sarah Lucas sculpture in the center.
James Murdoch, whose Lupa Systems bought the largest single stake in Art Basel’s parent company and is leading its expansion into Doha, Qatar, next year, was there with his wife Kathryn, and they beelined to the Gagosian booth to see the only old master that was permitted to be shown in the contemporary art fair, a Peter Paul Rubens that was authenticated in the ’50s and was last sold in 2020 for $7 million.
There was an institutional presence, as Michael Govan led some board members through the Neugerriemschneider booth, and a few booths over Scott Rothkopf was checking out new prints by Gerhard Richter at the Zwirner booth alongside the new president of the Whitney board, Anne-Cecilie Engell Speyer.
But even in this super-exclusive, strictly invite-only party at the art fair, there was still one thing on everyone’s mind. At one point, I saw Met director Max Hollein and museum curator David Breslin admiring an exceptional Modigliani in the corner of the Pace booth. But Pace president Marc Glimcher wasn’t trying to sell this Modigliani to The Met. It had already sold, in the opening minutes of the secret preopening event, to a private collector for just under $10 million.
One of the most talked-about exhibitions in Paris is 30 Blizzards, a large-scale deeply ambitious installation-slash-opera performance by the artist Helen Marten—and it was presented by Miu Miu, the ready-to-wear brand that is owned and designed by the mega-collector Miuccia Prada. Marten’s work is housed inside a former palace kitty-corner to the Grand Palais. Above is a gigantic contraption on which freight-train-esque vehicles wheel around, and through the room are five different video works and five different sculptures. Cast as the 30 characters in the opera are model-y types in head-to-toe Miu Miu, and they’re all sprawled down on high beams and installations, all singing constantly. It’s part of the public program of Art Basel Paris, and it’s really good.
At a certain point, Marten, who was sipping water in the back of the room with friends, was summoned toward the front. Mrs. Prada had come to take in the spectacle and wanted to see Marten. Not only is she a collector, but through the Fondazione Prada and her own endeavors Mrs. Prada is one of the great arts-programming benefactors, who trusts her instincts and goes to great lengths to support artists with singular visions.
After the opening, a very select few—the V-est of VIPs—were whisked away in sprinter vans and taken to Maxim’s, one of the most Paris restaurants in Paris, if that makes sense. As I walked in, I was taken aback at the sheer number of bigwigs who had cleared their nights to come. On one of the biggest and busiest nights of the art fair calendar they show up for Mrs. Prada.
There Horowitz was flanked by several current or former European museum directors, including Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Beatrix Ruf. Also at the table was Alex Da Corte—he was in town along with his gigantic work Kermit the Frog, Even, a nearly 32-foot-long replica of the Kermit balloon that fell during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Next to him was the artist Cy Gavin, and nearby sat Donna De Salvo, the former Whitney curator who told me about the Walter De Maria show she had put together for Gagosian’s Le Bourget space just outside of town. At the other end of the table was Meriem Bennani, who was commissioned by the Fondazione Prada a few years back for its Milan space and who currently has a show at the Lafayette Anticipations here. Myriam Ben Salah, who organized an early institutional show of Bennani at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, was also at the end of the table. Coles had a table, as did Marten’s dealer in New York, Carol Greene.
Mrs. Prada’s table was even more stacked: Govan and his wife Katherine Ross, Francesco Vezzoli, and the dynamic duo of Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist, two of the great curators of their era, now two of the most important museum directors in Europe. Also present at her table: the great French actor Vincent Cassel, fellow actor Diane Kruger, Art Basel Paris director Clément Delépine.
As dinner in this town tends to do, things went late, and even as I slipped out close to midnight, trays of Negronis were still being held by Maxim’s waiters and all the principals were still in attendance.
“I can’t believe they’re still going,” said De Salvo, nodding toward Obrist and Biesenbach, deep in conversation with Mrs. Prada.
There was much discussion of whether the Avant-Première gambit worked in everyone’s favor. It was designed to address the issue of overcrowding: too many hangers-on, not enough buyers. But one dealer at dinner was slightly concerned about the possibility that some collectors would think that everything had already sold to those who got early access and wouldn’t show up.
But on Wednesday morning I dropped into the classic opening day of the fair, and it was just as crowded as any fair in recent memory. What’s more, stuff was moving. Rick Owens and his wife, Michèle Lamy, were on the scene, which was quite exciting to dealers in the booths. Zwirner had two editioned Richter prints, each in an edition of 12—by Wednesday it had sold 16 of them, netting $6.4 million. Pace had sold that Modigliani for just under $10 million, and by Wednesday White Cube had sold a Julie Mehretu for $11.5 million.
But there was something much bigger—I heard on the ground of the fair that Hauser & Wirth had sold a 1987 Richter painting that had an asking price of $23 million. Not only that, it was not presold; there was no guarantee a deep-pocketed Gerhard-head would waltz into the booth. But someone came up to the booth during the Avant-Première, saw the picture, liked the picture, and paid something around $23 million for the picture.
“It was a bold decision to show a masterpiece at the fair like this without a safety net,” Iwan Wirth, the gallery’s founder, told me. “All I can say is it was a good decision by the fair to focus on the people who really want to transact, and that has helped a lot.”
He only had a moment, as he was simultaneously negotiating with two clients who wanted to buy the Bruce Nauman neon off the booth. He noted that when you sell a $23 million Richter at Basel, that’s a big deal—art sells at this price point through the gallery in private deals, he explained, but it’s rare to get something this high at an art fair.
“With great things people step up—and we see that in the gallery,” he said. “But it’s nice to see that in a public setting, because we can talk about it.”
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