Market dispatch·Paris
$150M Picasso, Warhol and Richter hang in a Paris apartment as Sotheby's opens its richest-ever European private sale
Sotheby's has opened Chez Sotheby's, a week-long salon-style private selling exhibition in a Rue de Rivoli apartment during Art Basel Paris, showing nearly $150 million of art by Picasso, Matisse, Warhol, Richter and Bacon — the most valuable private sale exhibition the house has ever staged in Europe. Six works had already sold during the preview.
Sotheby's has turned a Rue de Rivoli apartment overlooking the Jardin des Tuileries into a temporary salon for selling art, opening the doors on October 19 during Art Basel Paris. Conceived with the creative studio _POLIMENO, the week-long project, called Chez Sotheby's, runs through October 24 and presents nearly $150 million of Modern, Post-War and contemporary art available by private treaty. The house describes it as the most valuable private-selling exhibition it has ever presented in Europe.
The display deliberately avoids the white-cube format, arranging the works as if in a collector's eclectic home. Visitors pass a trio of Lucio Fontana canvases at the entrance — including a red work with three slashes and a rare fluorescent-red example — before reaching Picasso's 1968 Deux nus couches, shown beside a manuscript by Oscar Wilde. Paintings by Henri Matisse, Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol fill rooms set out for dining and conversation, with all works consigned by collectors from Europe and the United States.
The hospitality is part of the strategy. A restaurant designed by Tarek Shamma serves a menu by chef Erika Blu, with the drinks programme overseen by Colin Field, formerly the head barman of the Ritz Paris's Hemingway Bar. David Rothschild, Sotheby's head of contemporary art private sales in Britain and the global lead for its selling exhibitions, said the goal was to present works the way ambitious collectors hang them at home — a modernist canvas sharing a room with an ancient artifact — and let sales grow out of unhurried looking rather than saleroom pressure.
Early signs suggest the formula is working. By the end of the preview, six works had already found buyers, among them a Warhol Flowers canvas and a small Triple Dollar Sign, Francois-Xavier Lalanne's Les Trois Oiseaux de Williamsburg, a painting by Wayne Thiebaud and a work by Jonas Wood. The initiative extends a pattern of auction houses borrowing from the experience economy: Sotheby's London editions of its Apartment format were well received, and the Paris debut scales the concept up for a city already crowded with art week visitors.
