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I had such high hopes for the final leg of my three-week sojourn with Mrs. Wallpower across Scotland, England, and Paris that even a four-day fever couldn’t derail them. I started mending just in time for our packed agenda, which included hitting the city’s dual set-piece fairs—Design.Miami.Paris and the city’s edition of Art Basel—as well as getting in some auction action. But it all started with a Metropolitan Museum event.
The Met was one among many major American museums with a presence in Paris this week—museum groups and directors were seemingly everywhere, escorting their trustees to shows and meetings with Brigitte Macron, or hosting dinners and arranging private tours. (You can do this sort of thing at the fair in Basel—sans Madame Macron, of course—but it doesn’t have quite the same effect or appeal as doing it in Paris.) The event was held at 7L, Karl Lagerfeld’s former library, which is now preserved as a bookstore and event space—a bibliophile’s fantasy, with 30,000 volumes stacked vertically in a skylit room. One would think Lagerfeld’s book collection would be useful to curators and students of fashion, but the Met’s David Breslin joked that he got his hand slapped on the one occasion he tried to remove a volume from the shelves to examine it more closely.
Breslin was with his boss, Max Hollein, to announce that artist Liu Wei had been chosen for the 2026 Genesis Facade Commission. That means Liu will create four sculptures to fill four alcoves in the museum’s Fifth Avenue facade, following artists like Wangechi Mutu, Carol Bove, Nairy Baghramian, Lee Bul, and Jeffrey Gibson. The Met also used the occasion to have architect Frida Escobedo walk the assembled group through her plans for the Met’s Tang Wing, construction of which will begin in earnest soon.
Alas, I couldn’t linger in Lagerfeld’s archive for long. Design.Miami.Paris was opening a few blocks away at l’Hôtel de Maisons, the huge private mansion that used to contain Lagerfeld’s rented Paris apartments. Design.Miami has quickly emerged as the Art Basel Paris opener, with similarly exceptional exhibitors, and the event space’s massive garden is an ideal venue for them to display their Lalanne tortoises and purpose-built sound-healing structures. Julie Hamisky, a Lalanne granddaughter, was there showing her electroplated flowers and other flora, and Vienna’s Yves Macaux gallery had brought Wiener Werkstätte gilded metal objects to the fair.
Throughout the morning, more and more significant collectors streamed into the grand building, and even a few exhibitors at Art Basel appeared as a prelude to the off-the-books opening of that fair scheduled for the afternoon. Still recovering from my illness, I skipped the Art Basel Paris Avant Première in favor of going back to my hotel to send you my Tuesday newsletter and have one of the best meals of our trip around the corner at Kubri, a Lebanese restaurant.
You’re All Special…
Wednesday morning, after Mrs. Wallpower and I demolished some l’escargot chocolat pistache from Du Pain et Des Idées, we set off for the Grand Palais. Despite Paris’s endless diversions—not just the pastries—all anyone seemed to be talking about was who had and had not gotten early access to the fair. Indeed, Art Basel seems engaged in a natural tension—leveraging the cultural attractions of Paris to make it the apex art-dealing fair while still protecting the stature of Basel… and hoping that the delights of the city didn’t distract buyers.
A West Coast advisor told me that many American collectors who normally skip Art Basel in Switzerland had come to Paris instead. A gallery owner offered a counterpoint. “Paris is a problem,” he told me repeatedly, because the city’s cultural grandeur overshadowed the trade fair aspect he was paying for—it was a distraction from getting business done. Meanwhile, dealers have begun to bring their very best objets to Paris, and more than one person suggested the quality of work on display this week was equal to or better than what’s normally on offer at Basel’s flagship fair in Switzerland in June. You definitely can’t please everyone.
Art Basel’s organizers circumnavigated this challenge with a simple art world solution—optimizing deal flow while trying to make people feel special. They wanted to give galleries a chance to get important works sold before the crush of the fair began on Wednesday. I was told that the galleries were each given six passes for Tuesday afternoon, when the fair opened early for serious buyers. With a little more than 200 galleries, assuming most buyers come with a spouse, advisor, or trusted colleague, that would amount to 1,200 to 2,500 early-access visitors. Inevitably, in an age of instant and constant communication, bruised feelings soon followed.
Once word got out that some collectors and advisors were headed to the fair early, the FOMO spread quickly. I spoke to some advisors who were very happy to have gotten in before everyone else, bought several works for their clients, and returned on Wednesday. I spoke to collectors who shrugged, admitting that they were maybe not the most important collectors, and thus were okay with having been excluded from the early access. Still others went to the fair late Tuesday afternoon perhaps just to be part of the scene.
If anything, the late Tuesday opening took a little pressure off the fair’s Wednesday preview without dissipating any of its heat. Most of the galleries I stopped into on Wednesday were teeming with visitors. One gallerist’s publicist had asked me to say hello to their principal, but I couldn’t get past the crush of clients after I arrived.
Paddles & Pastries
On Thursday, Mrs. Wallpower came back with more morning pastries, this time cinnamon rolls from Mamiche, our favorite patisserie. Before we wrapped up our stay in Paris, I wanted to see the minimalism show at the Bourse de Commerce. These exhibitions, in the massive, circular 18th century building, use works from the Pinault collection as the spine for larger and more comprehensive shows. The sections built around Lygia Pape and On Kawara were particularly effective.
Afterward, in the few hours we had left, we headed over to Christie’s to join the crowd in the tiny basement sale room (which the auction house’s chairman jokingly instructed me to describe as large but also packed) for the €59 million Avant Garde(s) sale. There we watched the massive, 14-foot Yves Klein painting sell for just a smidge below the advertised price. With fees it was more than $21 million, the sixth-highest price for a Klein at auction. I also spoke to an art advisor there who was still chuckling over the Max Ernst painting estimated at €800,000 that got bid to four times that price with fees. The advisor was pleased to have paid the premium. I asked another collector if he had bought something after getting outbid recently in London. He said no, but his friend had just made an unexpected windfall on a third-party guarantee for a bright yellow Lucio Fontana painting, which had been estimated at €600,000 but was bid to nearly twice that with fees.
I was back to writing this newsletter by the time Sotheby’s held its Paris sales, which opened with a tiny 5-by-5-inch René Magritte painting of a cloud-filled sky. It was priced with a robust €200,000 estimate, which would have yielded a solid €10,000 per square inch selling price. Turns out that was unrealistically low, and the tiny painting hammered at almost five times the estimate, or €950,000—nearly €38,000 per square inch. The big-ticket Magritte, La magie noire, from 1934, was estimated at €5 million but performed as well. After a slow start to the bidding, the final hammer price was €8.8 million, which translated to a $12.3 million selling price with fees. The top lot at Sotheby’s was a $31 million Modigliani, and all told the house hammered down nearly €90 million, or more than $104 million, in art. Clearly, there’s something more than vibes driving this market.
Many of the advisors and dealers I spoke to this past week in Paris asked me what I thought would happen next month in New York. I told them what I tell everyone: I can only reflect back the opinions people share with me, and I can’t independently verify either the dour gripes or the bullish hype. That’s why auctions are so important to the art market—they provide data. But I can say that many advisors feel the quality of artworks available on the market, especially the many estates coming up at auction in New York, has changed the playing field and the mood.
