At Art Basel's first Paris Fair, great expectations meet great wealth

Bloomberg News

It's a small art fair saddled with massive expectations. 

Well before it opened on Wednesday, Paris+ par Art Basel had become a symbol of Paris's ascendance as a contemporary art capital. London, the story goes, is hobbled by self-inflicted economic wounds, while Paris is newly business-friendly, filled with fresh galleries, and ready to return to its 19th century cultural dominance.

Within that framing, the success (or failure) of the fair's first edition, which runs through Sunday, Oct. 23, could be seen as a bellwether for the city's art scene as a whole. If it does well, it's a sign that Paris is back. If not … tant pis.

It's a neat narrative, and perhaps it's even partially accurate. But as the doors opened promptly on Wednesday at 10 a.m. inside the Grand Palais Éphémère, a temporary structure used for events while the Grand Palais is renovated, dealers being dealers were mostly concerned with the pragmatics of how much art would be sold, and to whom.

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"I think it's a banality to say that Paris is the place to be nowadays due to Brexit, even though it's true," says the French dealer Jérôme Poggi, whose Paris gallery is located next to the Pompidou Center. "I've received many messages from collectors around the world saying they'd be coming to Paris, and usually they don't, they go to Frieze," last week's art fair in London, where both dealers and attendees were as preoccupied by how this new art fair would go as much as they were by the strength of the dollar in relation to the pound.

Poggi's booth was filled with contemporary art but also showcased a €2.5 million painting by Edvard Munch from 1911. He had sent out a preview of what he planned to bring to the fair to collectors, and immediately sold three works before the fair even opened—one to an American, two to people in France. As a consequence, he says, he had to scramble to fill his stand with fresh, unsold art before the fair opened.

But, he adds, he's not overly focused on sales. "I'm not into that," he says. "I find it very vulgar."

A Very French Fair

Paris+ par Art Basel (an unwieldy name, and one that almost no one uses, instead simply calling it "Paris+" or "Art Basel Paris"), began in a swirl of intrigue. The stalwart Paris fair FIAC, which took place every year a few weeks after Frieze, was blindsided when the cultural organization that oversees the Grand Palais opened FIAC's slot to a public competition, which it then lost out to Art Basel.

After Art Basel's new fair was announced in late January, the organization, which is a subsidiary of MCH Group AG, had nine months to pull it together. "There'd been a fair amount of pessimistic speculation about this," says Marc Spiegler, the global director of Art Basel, speaking a day before the fair opened. "You know, everybody wants progress, but nobody wants change."

The goal, Spiegler continues, was to keep the regional flair of the French fair, but attract an international swath of collectors who'd perhaps stayed away from FIAC. 

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"We have a contractual obligation to the Ministry of Culture as part of our deal, to maintain the same level of French galleries in the fair as FIAC had before," Spiegler says. That said, Art Basel "has more than 30 people working with VIPs all over the world," he continues, "and you'll see that reflected in who shows up to the fair this week."

Big Collectors

The fair's first day opened to a calm, comparatively subdued line of well-dressed collectors who shuffled, unhurriedly, through the doors. But after a few hours had passed, aisles and booths for the fair's 156 galleries were packed with people speaking what felt like an equal division of French and English.

"It's very Haussmannian," says Francois Trausch, the CEO of Allianz Real Estate GmbH, standing in one of the fair's aisles and talking of the new fair in general. "Very well-organized."

His companion, the consultant and arts patron Alexandra de Royere, says that they began their day in the back of the building, where younger, somewhat emerging galleries are grouped. "We started with the young galleries, because we wanted to see two artists," she says, "but all the big collectors were there."

The fair, she adds, is filled with "big collectors, and not just French ones."

Bigger Sales

Smaller galleries' booths were indeed swept through. "Sales are going well," says Alexander Hertling, standing in the booth of his Paris-based gallery Balice Hertling. He points to a €15,000 work by the artist Zhi Wei, which he says "we could have sold five times."

Similarly, Hertling says that "people are fighting right now" over a €35,000 ($34,179) painting by the highly sought-after French artist Pol Taburet; contenders, Hertling says, include multiple Parisian museums. "We're going to have to figure it out," he says.

There was similar enthusiasm in the front of the building, where the mega-galleries were clustered.

There, the dealer Thaddaeus Ropac, who has gallery locations in Paris, London, Salzburg, and Seoul, says that he'd brought "more important works this year for Paris, which we'd normally consider for Art Basel," referring to the original Swiss edition held in June. In the first hours of the fair, he sold "three or four" paintings by Georg Baselitz for €100,000,  a sculpture by Antony Gormley for £450,000, and a hyper-realist sculpture by Ron Mueck for $850,000.

"I sometimes felt that London is a business place and transactional, and Paris was more about the beauty of the place," Ropac says. "And this changed, because transactions are much easier here now than they used to be."

Other large galleries say that they notched similarly robust sales.

David Zwirner says it sold over $11 million worth of art on the first day, including a $4.5 million painting by Joan Mitchell from 1989 and a 1963 work by Robert Ryman for $3 million.

Hauser & Wirth reported nine sales including paintings by George Condo for $2.65 million, Avery Singer for $800,000, and Rashid Johnson for $1 million; each of these, the gallery says, was painted this year.

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So: did the fair's day-one success mean that Paris is now the continent's cultural king?

"The fact that Art Basel is here is very good for our business," says Sarah Lévénès, a director at Marcelle Alix, a gallery in Paris's Belleville neighborhood, which had a booth filled with work that ranged from about €2,750 to €32,000. On an international scale, "Art Basel is doing a great job calling collectors and making Paris attractive, and that's good for us too."

Even a week before the fair, her gallery held an opening that was attended by Chinese, American, and British collectors, she says. "We met new people, and had a great exchange."

Perhaps, Ropac suggests, the fair's success could mean that Paris is simply more appealing to visit for a few days.

"In the last few years London just had a more international crowd, with American collectors, and this year it's reversed," he says.  "It doesn't matter where you do it, it matters if you have the players. And they're here, now."