Mega-dealers Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner have had a bitter history—and their seven-year court battle is only now awaiting a final verdict
Every June they fly in like an air force of contemporary art: the world’s top dealers and collectors landing in Basel, Switzerland, for the year’s most significant fair. Of that glittering throng, four figures stand apart. The mega-dealers occupy booths no different from the rest. They just sell a lot more art: not a million dollars here at Art Basel, but tens of millions. Not tens of millions over the course of a year, but hundreds of millions. Or, in the case of Larry Gagosian, $1 billion.
Some dealers, like Gagosian, start with nothing. Most start with family money and connections. David Zwirner is one of those. His father, Rudolf, was a well-known German dealer and intellectual. David grew up above his father’s gallery in Cologne, hanging out with houseguests like Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Cy Twombly.
Zwirner had no doubt he could make West a major name in the United States. It was just a matter of keeping him on track as an artist and not letting his demons get the better of him. Zwirner acknowledges that he sometimes tried to monitor West’s behavior and keep him from engaging in excesses. That was a challenge, for West already had alcohol-related liver damage and at some point contracted hepatitis C.
One of his early breakthroughs was Cy Twombly, the artist whose elegant abstract paintings of hand-drawn scribbles and flower-like shapes weren’t yet astronomically valued, in part because Twombly had left the New York art scene years before to reside in Italy. At first, as Gagosian made his pitch to represent him, Twombly seemed standoffish, and the dealer feared his effort had been in vain.
Yet for all his success, Zwirner nursed a grudge against Gagosian, who, in turn, had his own grievances. He bridled at Zwirner’s public pique, expressed after Gagosian wooed away portraitist John Currin from dealer Andrea Rosen with a brusqueness that startled the art world. “Our generation doesn’t have that aggressive behavior,” Zwirner declared. Gagosian was furious. “If the tables were turned, he’d do the same thing,” Gagosian now says.
As they signed on with the older dealer, the artists experienced a new phenomenon: the Gagosian effect. His wealthy collectors stood ready to buy what Gagosian suggested they buy. Newly signed artists, as a result, tended to see their work spike in price over the course of a year or two. Collectors, more than artists, seemed to make Gagosian’s world go round. The dealer gave elegant dinners, either at one of his homes or his favorite restaurant, Mr. Chow, on East 57th Street.
As a Gagosian artist, Franz West saw his star rise, both in Europe and in the U.S. Along with his rough-hewn sculpture, he designed lines of playful furniture; Gagosian sold those, too. West had no quarrel with his dealer, or his principal go-between, Ealan Wingate—not yet, at least. His personal life was where the complications lay.
West had stabilized by the time Ealan Wingate dispatched a private plane to Naples. The urgent message, says Ledebur, was that West return with doctors to Vienna. Only there could they sign all the documents needed to ratify the foundation West had planned on. Ledebur says West protested: he wanted to stay in Naples and had managed to line up a potential liver transplant in Nice.
Less than a week later—on July 25, 2012—West was dead. His widow was shown the foundation documents: a. “The night after Franz died,” Ledebur recalls, “Ealan was standing in [the artist’s] flat, telling Tamuna that all this art now belongs to the foundation”—not to West’s two children, his direct heirs. Wingate, in Ledebur’s telling, conveyed it as good news, supposedly saying, “You don’t have to live in a museum. We can get you furniture you like.
Christoph Kerres says he found one clause of the new foundation’s documents mind-boggling—and motivating. The legal papers West had signed called forof his artworks to be put in the foundation. That violated a fundamental legal tenet in Austria, where children are entitled to 50 percent of a parent’s inheritance, period.
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