In March 2019, a 42-foot-high billboard was installed on a Park Avenue building, unavoidable to passersby, and featured an aging white man and a slightly younger blonde woman. Most could chalk up the appearance of such a thing to some New York oddity, but to anyone in the know, it was the latest barb in a fight that had shaken Manhattan’s upper crust to its core. The billboard showed the real estate developer Harry Macklowe and his new wife, Patricia Landeau, whom Harry had reportedly been having an affair with while he was still married to Linda Macklowe, his wife of five decades.
It was the apex of the most high-profile New York–society divorce since, sigh, Donald and Ivana—one that got some final closure Monday when Sotheby’s auctioned off the first part of the collection in a blockbuster sale that brought in $676.1 million, more than any single-collection sale in the 277-year history of the auction house.
Harry and Linda were real estate titans laid low by bad bets and a wobbly economy. But even if his deals for Midtown skyscrapers blew up in the recession and sent the couple into massive debt, all the while they had been investing in something much more lucrative than buildings. During the years when her husband tangled in a variety of big-ticket Manhattan real estate transactions, Linda Macklowe worked as a curator, heading up the programming at public art spaces in the city and Riverside. Once the family had the means to start building a collection of their own, Linda started trophy hunting, and became the person every dealer wanted to sell to.
A gallery owner seeks out the most secure collection, and the Macklowes almost never flipped a work after they bought it. The idea was the collection would stay secure forever.
“Usually, the dealer with their name on the door wouldn’t rush out of their office to greet any random collector if they come in unplanned,” said a high-powered adviser in the hours before the sale. “When Linda Macklowe came in, they would run off of their desk and into the gallery.”
Over decades, the couple meticulously built up a stunning collection of works by dead and canonized 20th-century postwar titans, often cherry-picked from the most storied art collections on earth. They bought a Jackson Pollock and a Robert Rauschenberg previously owned by the late Condé Nast president Si Newhouse, a Willem de Kooning once owned by Dallas mega-collector Howard Rachofsky, and a magnificent Mark Rothko owned by Houston oil heiress Sarah Campbell Blaffer.
Equally impressive was the full trust in the living artists of the day, and their ability to foresee which artworks the next generation would deem masterpieces. The Macklowes bought a work by Jeff Koons from International With Monument in 1986, a massive Brice Marden directly from Mary Boone Gallery in 1988, and a gripping, challenging Robert Gober sculpture, Untitled (Butt), from Paula Cooper Gallery in 1994. None of the works ever changed hands again.
By the time Cy Twombly was making gigantic eye-popping three-paneled works for a show at Gagosian Gallery in 2007, Larry Gagosian could have sold all six of them, each priced at $5 million a pop, to any collector on earth. He sold one to the Macklowes, who installed it in their apartment until their divorce.
“There was no reason to think this collection would ever come to auction,” said an art consultant to a major collecting family. “Which makes it such an unprecedented sale.”
The long road to Sotheby’s took years. The divorce proceedings effectively began in the spring of 2016, but when the hearings began in court, the question of how to divide the art collection became the main sticking point in the split. First, the collection had to be officially appraised, and according to court documents, each team hired their own appraiser to assess the worth of each work. Linda tapped Christopher Gaillard, chief appraiser of Gurr Johns, while Harry roped in Elizabeth von Habsburg, managing director of the Winston Art Group.
Furthermore, Harry and Linda each hired their own swashbuckling rainmaker to act as their own adviser as they fought it out in court. Harry got Tobias Meyer, the former Sotheby’s contemporary-art head and principal auctioneer known for brokering $100 million deals on single pictures, and Linda got Laura Paulson, the former Christie’s chairman who now heads up Gagosian’s art-advisory arm. Documents show that the couple would argue over the value of a work, with the quibbling every bit as toxic as the negotiations over which houses and apartments each would win.
After appraisals found the horde to be worth anywhere from $625.6 million and $788.7 million, another art market macher, Acquavella director Michael Findlay, parachuted in to act as the court-appointed “receiver,” whose role was to figure out how to sell it off for the highest-possible total. More than a year later, Sotheby’s announced that it had nabbed the prize.
And then, after years of squabbling between the former Mr. and Mrs. Macklowe and sniping among the art world, the Monday of the auction arrived. Dealers jetted in from Europe, hoping to broker a sale that could net them a few million when their cut is calculated. Collectors such as Eugenio López and Patrick Seguin were staying at the Carlyle and had their town cars drive them the six blocks to the auction house. Jittery dealers and advisers calmed nerves with shots at the First Avenue dive Finnegan’s Wake. Upon arrival, guests were whisked upstairs, where Sotheby’s minders fluttered around with full trays of Champagne flutes, as attendees knocked back drinks and popped canapés.
After a few minutes of nervous chatter, the glammed-out crew took to their seats, with the camps from the world’s great art-market concerns settling into their areas like rival gangs in a schoolyard. The Nahmad clan was front and center as usual, and to their right, one row behind, was the Gagosian camp (though not Larry himself, as he leaves the auction business to his directors). To the left was David Zwirner, Jeffrey Deitch, and the teams behind Lévy Gorvy and White Cube. Slightly back were two illustrious collecting couples—Don and Mera Rubell, Adam Lindemann and Amalia Dayan—and Pace president Marc Glimcher.
Auctioneer Oliver Barker, natty in a tux, began the proceedings, and things ripped right off the bat. Former Sotheby’s chairman Amy Cappellazzo was in the audience bidding on behalf of clients on the phone and beat out the Nahmads for the first lot, Jeff Koons’s Baccarat Crystal Set; and a small Robert Ryman painting hammered at nearly twice its high estimate. The de Kooning that the Macklowes got from the Rachofskys sold for more than $24 million, and the Twombly from Gagosian sold for nearly $59 million to a collector on the phone with Lulu Creel, who runs point for Sotheby’s in Mexico City.
The hits kept coming. The Rothko sold for a staggering $82.5 million to a collector in Asia; a bidding war pushed the price of the Pollock to close to double its high estimate, and it sold for $61.2 million, a record for one of the best-known American artists of the last century. A rare Giacometti sculpture sold for $78.4 million to Justin Sun, a cryptocurrency tycoon, who said he will donate it to a foundation that can track NFT versions of masterpieces on the blockchain.
When the dust settled, the sale had a hammer price of $588.7 million, meaning that Harry and Linda Macklowe had each gotten $294.35 million richer in a matter of hours. Linda spent the sale hidden away in one of the private boxes that allows the most discreet buyers to watch out of view of the rest of the room, but her ex-husband, Harry, was sitting with his new wife in the middle of the crowd. When the sale ended with a whoop of applause, the auction house’s billionaire owner, Patrick Drahi, came up to the scarf-clad, smiling Harry Macklowe and embraced him in a big hug.
“Let’s pop some Champagne!” the French telecom executive exclaimed to Macklowe and his French wife.
Harry did the rounds, shaking hands and assenting to selfies, chatting with the house’s CEO Charlie Stewart and Barker, who managed to get through the sale’s 35 lots without breaking a sweat.
“I’m looking at Harry and I feel like I’m Tom Brady and I’ve just thrown a touchdown to win the Super Bowl,” Barker said in his posh English lilt.
As the Sotheby’s brass ambled through the salesroom Harry Macklowe stood back, taking phone calls, chatting with well-wishers, looking as if the five years of nasty mudslinging never happened. At one point, I was standing next to him, watching as the art handlers took down the Rothko and Giacometti masterpieces from their perches to ship them halfway around the world so they could be locked in some billionaire’s bunker, and asked Macklowe if he’ll miss the works. He spent decades living with them, most recently in the apartment that took up the entire seventh floor of the Plaza, back when he was still married to Linda.
“No, I won’t miss them,” Macklowe said. “I’m glad that I can share them with everyone who bought them.”
Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…
…We can reveal the buyer of the last copy of the U.S. Constitution in private hands was billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, who paid $43.2 million during a sale at Sotheby’s Thursday night. Griffin emerged victorious in the battle for the artifact after outbidding ConstitutionDAO, a consortium that had raised more than $40 million in less than a week through an unprecedented crowdsourcing effort. Alas, the Dao had to stop bidding at $40 million after calculating the insurance, shipping, and storage costs needed to care for the fragile document, and Griffin one-upped them with a bid of $41 million, where it hammered. Though there’s a silver lining for anyone who donated to the fund and still wants to see the Constitution: Griffin says he will loan the piece of American history to Crystal Bridges, Alice Walton’s museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, where admission is free to all.
…The estate of the artist John Giorno, who died in 2019, will be represented by Morán Morán, the Los Angeles mainstay that opened a second gallery in Mexico City earlier this year. “We are honored to represent the estate of John Giorno, a downtown New York fixture and legend and someone that identifies strongly with our past and future trajectories,” gallery cofounder Mills Morán said in a statement. “John’s poetry, spirituality, and activism distinguish him as an artist that comes up once in a generation.” The first show will be at the Morán Morán space in Los Angeles in the summer of 2022, with a Mexico City solo to follow. The estate is run by the Independent Art Fair founder Elizabeth Dee, and housed in 222 Bowery—a former YMCA known as the Bunker, which has acted as a studio for artists such as Lynda Benglis and Mark Rothko, and was William S. Burroughs’s Manhattan crash pad. The gallery plans to activate the Bunker through a variety of events and programming, opening up a long-private home to the public.
…After a year off, Art Basel Miami Beach returns in 10 days, and it returns with a vengeance. In addition to the main fair, which opens a day early this year to accommodate the global VIPs without packing in the convention center amid a pandemic, there will be a dozen or so other satellite fairs, pop-up galleries sprouting up all over town. There will be dinners for every gallery on earth taking over the restaurants that have opened in the last year and a half… and now there’s not just the new South Beach outpost of Carbone, but also the other Carbone that’s popping up a few minutes drive up the beach, in a tent outside the Edition. And the fashion brands have returned, too: Dior, Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Burberry are among the luxury houses with big events and unveilings during the week.
…Adele tweeted a video of her singing “To Be Loved,” a song from her new album, 30, giving us a glimpse into her artistic taste. Hanging on the back wall are a series of Josef Albers’s grid works, and behind the couch is Robert Rauschenberg’s Page 2 (Pages), a large donut-like sculpture made out of paper from 1974. Adele, show us more!
…The Lower East Side powerhouse that is JTT—which reps artists such as Sam McKinniss, Borna Sammak and Issy Wood—is moving from its second-floor Chrystie Street digs to a splashy ground floor Tribeca space, on the tiny stretch of Cortlandt Alley already home to Andrew Kreps, PPOW and Artists Space. The deal was brokered once again by the real estate agent Jonathan Travis, who has locked in new spaces for dozens of galleries that moved to the neighborhood in the last two years. Look for the brand-new JTT to open in March.
…Night Gallery, the Los Angeles art concern that began as a nocturnal operation open only from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., will be opening a massive new space near their current digs in downtown LA in January. And yes, it’s open during the day now.
…Eric N. Mack—the artist whose sumptuous fabric installations and massive collage works stunned at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum—is joining Paula Cooper Gallery, where last year he was in a three-person show with Benglis and Kelley Walker.
…Wangechi Mutu, coming off a hot streak with her acclaimed takeover of Legion of Honor in San Francisco, has installed a new sculpture at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, where she had her first American museum solo show, in 2013. At fifteen feet long, MamaRay (2021) is described by the museum as “part human, part manta ray and part supernatural creature.”
…Novelist Emma Cline is teaming up with Gagosian’s publishing arm to initiate a series of collaborations where an artist makes a work in response to a new short story by a leading author. First up is a delicious pairing: Ottessa Moshfegh has written a new short story called “My New Novel”, and Wood made a new painting in response called the down payment (2021). “Both Moshfegh and Wood share a gothic, spiky humor and an attunement to the darker currents of the world, the hidden realms where shame and desire intersect,” Cline said. Buy the publication, which comes with a poster of the work, at the Gagosian store on Madison Avenue.
…Lehmann Maupin is expanding its gallery footprint in Seoul with a new space, further cementing the city’s status as the center of the art market in Asia—it’s already a cultural juggernaut, thanks to chart-topping Korean pop stars and Oscar-winning Korean filmmakers becoming household names. Expect the first edition of Frieze Seoul, in September 2022, to be a truly global market bonanza that attracts a ton of collectors and dealers from Europe and the Americas—the first must-attend art fair in the region since 2019.
Most of the time, when it comes to picking the location of a dinner to celebrate a gallery opening, the artist and dealers chose some arbitrary spot—a reliable art world go-to like The Odeon, the hip new downtown boîte, or maybe just the closest place with a full bar. Gallery dinners celebrating shows of new works by Cynthia Talmadge are anything but arbitrary. In 2018, Talmadge staged a show at Ellie Rines’s scene-making Chinatown gallery 56 Henry where the paintings consisted of pointillist photorealist depictions of the exterior of the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, on the Upper East Side. A few months later, there was a reception held… at Frank E. Campbell, with attendees gathering as if for a wake but instead for an art show.
The opening reception Wednesday night for Talmadge’s latest exhibition at 56 Henry was, again, pretty spot on. The show transforms the gallery into an installation in which the interiors of two mid-century Los Angeles homes, that of Marilyn Monroe and her psychoanalyst, are recreated impressionistically in floor to ceiling sand paintings—the walls of the houses blended together and then exposed to the public as the gallery. After the attendees soaked up the show—only a few were allowed inside the immersive experience at the time—the dinner after wasn’t at the usual haunt, but at the private member’s only establishment: the National Arts Club, which has been in the same Gramercy Park headquarters for over a century. Like the show, it’s a historical but deeply private place, steeped in history and perhaps some secrets.
“I was able to put it together thanks to her,” Talmadge said once we were safely ensconced in a private room at the private club. She was pointing at someone who she claimed was a National Arts Club member, who then walked us over to a few more members: a man and a woman shooting at the billiard table, and an older white-haired doyenne of the club who claimed to be on the admission board. More people milled into the bar area—were they members, or just party attendees? The space was indeed striking—it was once the home of Samuel Tilden, the governor of New York who won the popular vote in the 1876 presidential election but lost to Rutherford Hayes in a disputed electoral vote count. Plus, membership comes with that most elusive Gotham pendant: a key to Gramercy Park. Suddenly attendees such as dealer Lucas Zwirner, designer Ricky Clifton, and artists Nate Lowman, Jonah Freeman, Al Freeman (no relation) and Brian Bellott started asking themselves: Should we all join the National Arts Club? If you see a few more people in that locked-up park, perhaps you’ll know why.
And that’s a wrap on this week’s True Colors! Like what you’re seeing? Hate what you’re reading? Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com.
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