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.
