The Parking Lot at the Edge of the World
On a Friday afternoon in Amagansett — the best town in the Hamptons, on the best street, Further Lane — a seventy-eight-year-old man sat on a leather sofa in an eleven-thousand-square-foot modernist beach mansion with his back to the Atlantic Ocean. Two French bulldogs named Baby and Humphrey waddled at his feet. A butler called Eddie, slim and ponytailed, handed him a sparkling water. Before him: a life-size Charles Ray nude in reflective steel, a Damien Hirst grand piano lacquered bright pink with blue butterflies ($450,000 at a benefit auction), and a ceramic Yoshitomo Nara ashtray the size of a Frisbee, decorated with a picture of a little girl smoking and the words too young to die. The next morning, trucks would arrive at seven with garden furniture. There would be barbecue, pizza from an outdoor oven, an Aperol-spritz bar, a gelato truck. A hundred and forty guests — "billionaires, artists, neighbors," he said, pausing, a wolfish grin cracking across his face, "or want to be close to" — were coming, and every name on the list had been personally approved by the host. This was the predator between meals.
Larry Gagosian is not a household name, but among the very wealthy — and particularly among the very, very wealthy — he is a figure of colossal repute. He disdains the word "gallerist," which he considers a pretentious euphemism obscuring the mercantile essence of his occupation. He calls himself a dealer. Without apology. With nineteen galleries bearing his name across four continents, generating more than a billion dollars in annual revenue, controlling more than two hundred thousand square feet of prime exhibition space, he may well be the biggest art dealer in the history of the world. He owns the business outright — no partners, no shareholders, no spouse, no children, no one to answer to — and shuttles among his outposts on a $60 million Bombardier Global 7500. "The sun never sets on my gallery," he has observed, with the satisfaction of
Alexander the Great.
But here is the thing about the sun-never-sets line, the private jet, the Amagansett mansion, the twenty-thousand-square-foot town house on the Upper East Side with the swimming pool on the roof: all of it traces back to a parking lot in Westwood, Los Angeles, where a stoned, aimless college dropout in his late twenties noticed a man selling schlock posters — a kitten toying with a ball of yarn — at the edge of the asphalt. And thought: I can do that.
By the Numbers
The Gagosian Empire
19Galleries worldwide, from New York to Hong Kong
$1B+Estimated annual revenue
200,000+Square feet of exhibition space
100+Artists represented, living and dead
300+Employees globally
600+Art books published
$195MPaid for Warhol's 'Shot Sage Blue Marilyn' (2022)
The Son of Ara
The family never went to museums. Ara Gagosian was a municipal accountant in Los Angeles who retrained as a stockbroker, a man whose business seemed to consist mainly of persuading relatives to buy securities from him. He liked to gamble, Larry later said, "more than he should," and he drank "probably more than he should." But he always had a nice car in the driveway — an image of success disproportionate to the substance beneath it, a habit his son would inherit and transfigure into an art form. Gagosian's mother, Ann, had dabbled in show business, performing with an Armenian theatre troupe and securing a small role in
Journey Into Fear, a 1943 film produced by Orson Welles. Once, Larry asked what Welles had been like. She revealed that he'd taken her out for coffee. "And I said, 'O.K., I don't want to know any more,'" Gagosian recalled with a chuckle. "My mom was attractive."
It wasn't a happy childhood. Larry rebelled as a teenager, and he told Patrick Radden Keefe of The New Yorker that it was hard for his father "to discipline me, in a certain way, because his life didn't seem particularly disciplined." Born April 19, 1945, in downtown Los Angeles, the elder of two siblings — his sister, Judy, has declined all interviews — Gagosian grew up in the San Fernando Valley, the grandson of Armenian immigrants whose original surname was Ghoughasian, refugees from the Ottoman Empire who had crossed the Atlantic carrying that particular species of ambition that doesn't know yet what it's ambitious for.
One peculiarity of Gagosian's origin story, at least in his telling, is the notable deficit of ambition in his early years. He attended UCLA, studied English literature, joined the swim team, did a little photography. Dropped out twice. Took six years to graduate. The sixties were in full bloom, and he was in no hurry — a good-looking California kid who liked chasing girls, playing pool, getting stoned with his pals. There was a brief, ill-considered marriage in Las Vegas to a college girlfriend, Gwyn Ellen Garside. They divorced after sixteen days. In the papers, Garside explained she'd married him with the understanding they would "have children" and "both work and save to be self-supporting and to build a future together." Gagosian's aimlessness was so pronounced that his father once said, in exasperation: "If you just do something with your life, I'll buy you pot."
In 1969, the year Gagosian finally graduated, Ara died of lung cancer. He was fifty-nine. Larry was twenty-four, credential-less, directionless, grieving a father who had never made much money and never quite gotten his life in order, either. What followed was a string of menial jobs — record store, grocery store, graveyard shift at a gas station — and then, through a cousin, a position as an assistant at the William Morris Agency, answering phones and reading scripts for a young executive named
Michael Ovitz. He hated it. The airless corporate hierarchy, the jockeying colleagues. He compared the experience to "a knife fight in a phone booth." He has occasionally suggested he was fired; Ovitz insists he quit. "I tried to get him to stay!" Ovitz recalled. "The vocations are similar. You're buying and selling."
One other detail has gone largely unreported. In 1969, Gagosian pleaded guilty to two felony charges of forgery, stemming from his use of someone else's credit card. The card was "being passed around by a bunch of my friends," he said. "It was a stupid mistake." He received a suspended sentence and probation. He was twenty-four years old. His father was dead. He had no money, no plan, and a felony record.
He became a parking attendant in Westwood. He didn't mind the job: it paid better than the ninety dollars a week at William Morris. And then, one day, he noticed the poster guy.
The Frame
The posters were schlock. Kittens, sunsets, the kind of thing you'd find on the wall at a pediatrician's office. But they seemed to be selling. If Gagosian possesses one secret weapon — one quality that separates him from the thousands of other people who noticed poster vendors in the seventies and thought I could do that but didn't — it might be his disinhibition. He approached the vendor. The posters came from a company called Ira Roberts of Beverly Hills. Gagosian started buying directly from the firm and selling on his own. Art was an arbitrary choice, in his account: "If he'd been selling belt buckles, I might've tried to sell belt buckles."
But here is where the instinct kicked in: by adding a cheap aluminum frame, he discovered he could sell a two-dollar poster for fifteen bucks. The markup was the frame. He leased a little patio on Broxton Avenue in Westwood and sold framed posters to passersby. Gradually, the slacker instincts gave way to something harder, more hard-nosed. He began letting local craftspeople sell leather goods and painted trinkets on the patio in exchange for six dollars a day and ten percent of their gross. In an optimistic flourish, he bestowed a name on this ad-hoc enterprise: the Open Gallery. One early employee was Kim Gordon, the musician who would later form Sonic Youth. She assembled thousands of picture frames for Gagosian. In a 2015 memoir, she recalled him shouting at her when she worked too slowly, and noted, "He was erratic, and the last person on the planet I would have ever thought would later become the world's most powerful art dealer."
The pattern was set: from its very first iteration, Gagosian's business model was about adding a layer of perceived value — the frame, the imprimatur, the context — to something that existed before he touched it. The artist Mark Kostabi would later crystallize this insight with wicked precision, suggesting that whereas Gagosian started his career by adding a cheap metal frame to inflate a poster's price, eventually it was his own imprimatur that justified the markup. "He's the frame."
Sensing an opportunity to make a bigger mark, Gagosian began carrying fine art — mostly prints and photographs. Steve Martin, then a young comedian starting to collect, wandered in. "When he had his poster shop in Westwood, I went in," Martin recalled. "I was a novice art collector and he was a novice art dealer." Gagosian had no training in art history, but the business he'd stumbled into was one for which he was preternaturally suited: a keen sense of aesthetics, what connoisseurs describe as a near-photographic visual memory, and an appetite for self-education that bordered on the monastic. "Next to his bed, he had these stacks of art books," a woman he briefly dated recalled. "He was really studying."
It's sort of a halfway house, halfway between having to be in business for yourself and being a stone-freak-do-nothing hippie.
From the start, stories circulated about unpaid bills, creditors chasing him, a repo man showing up for his car. Doreen Luko, an early staffer, told The New Yorker that on payday Gagosian's employees "literally ran to the bank in hopes that there would be money there for our paychecks — whoever got there first was going to get paid on time." A UCLA classmate recalled Gagosian sometimes walking out of restaurants without paying the check. Gagosian denied this. But the portrait is consistent: a man projecting an image of success that outpaced reality, spending money he didn't yet have, betting on a future version of himself that didn't yet exist. Like his father, he kept a nice car in the driveway.
The Pope and the Parking-Lot Kid
One day in the mid-seventies, Gagosian was paging through a magazine and came across a series of moody black-and-white photographs by a New York photographer named Ralph Gibson. He cold-called Gibson — a characteristic act of disinhibition — and announced, "I've got this gallery." Gibson, who was selling prints for two hundred dollars, agreed to a West Coast exhibition on the condition that Gagosian buy three or four as a guarantee. Gagosian flew to New York with a check.
Gibson was represented by Leo Castelli. The name itself was a kind of incantation in the art world of the 1970s. Castelli, who had grown up in Trieste and come to America during the Second World War, was a debonair polyglot with courtly manners who didn't become a full-time dealer until middle age. He spoke five languages. He was so devoted to his artists that he supported many of them with generous stipends. He had nurtured the careers of Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Roy Lichtenstein. "In those days, Leo was just the Pope," Gibson recalled.
Gibson introduced Gagosian to the Pope. And Leo took a liking to him.
It was one of those relationships that transforms both parties. Castelli, then in his late sixties, was always looking for people who could keep him vital, keep him new. Gagosian — brash, hungry, utterly without pretension — was the opposite of everything Castelli embodied, and perhaps that was the appeal. Gagosian began spending more time in New York, cultivating the friendship over long lunches at Da Silvano. The photographer Dianne Blell once joked that Gagosian chased Castelli around "like a puppy." At one point, Gagosian presented the older dealer with a gold Patek Philippe watch. "I did not do a lot of blah-blah-blah," Gagosian later posited. "I think my bluntness appealed to him."
The art dealer Irving Blum knew both men during this era. "Leo was really aristocratic and civilized," Blum told The New Yorker. "And Larry" — he laughed — "Larry was a tiger."
Castelli specialized in what is known as the primary market: guiding the careers of living artists, selling their new work in exchange for a commission. He took pride in spotting talent in chrysalis. He said he dealt art chiefly "because of its groundbreaking importance" and regarded commerce as secondary. When Gagosian initially ventured beyond poster-hawking, he had no relationships with artists, so he couldn't be a primary dealer in the Castelli mold. But he had a gallery in Los Angeles, access to an untapped ecosystem of West Coast collectors, and one thing Castelli decidedly lacked: chutzpah. Castelli, who had no gallery in California, began consigning works to Gagosian, including pieces by Frank Stella.
Then came the encounter that changed everything. One day, Castelli and Gagosian were crossing West Broadway when Castelli greeted an unassuming-looking gentleman in his fifties.
"Who was that?" Gagosian asked.
"That was Si Newhouse. He can buy anything he wants."
Gagosian doubled back and introduced himself. "Give me your number," he suggested, without an ounce of blah-blah-blah.
Si Newhouse had a media empire. For more than three decades he owned The New Yorker. He was also obsessed with twentieth-century art. On Saturday mornings, a car ferried him from his town house on East Seventieth Street to the galleries of SoHo. Before long, Gagosian could be seen squiring him on these excursions. The parking-lot kid from the Valley had found his client — not just any client, but the kind of collector who could validate a dealer's entire operation.
"I'm a very bad salesman and Larry is a very good salesman," Castelli conceded, with a gentle caveat about his protégé: "Of course, he wouldn't be as scrupulous as I am in advising one of my clients not to buy a painting because it's not good enough for them." He added, "He also knows how to deal with very rich people."
The Hunt
What Gagosian provided for Newhouse — and what would become the engine of his empire — was not scouting the primary market. It was being his detective on the secondary market. The buying and selling of previously owned work. The hunt.
The oeuvres of even the most renowned artists are inconsistent. Masterpieces are rare and often hard to find. No central registry records the owners, locations, and prices of artworks. Being a good secondary dealer requires knowing which people are collectors, where they live, what hangs inside their houses — and whether they might be induced to part with any of it. In pursuing a very rich clientele, Gagosian carved out a niche that harked back not to Castelli but to
Joseph Duveen, the great early-twentieth-century dealer who assembled the collections of Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, and the other Gilded Age titans. Gagosian is a big reader, and he has devoured every biography of Duveen he can find. According to S. N. Behrman's classic account, Duveen made a point of "showing his multimillionaire clients that he lived better than they did." Sound familiar?
The telephone was Gagosian's instrument of choice. He often made upward of a hundred cold calls a day — sniffing out the location of an artwork, lining up buyers, haggling with owners until the work shook free. Jeff Koons, who first encountered him in this period and went on to work with him for years, said the young Gagosian infused the market with "a thrilling sense of possibility": significant art that had been "locked up" suddenly became accessible. One reason Gagosian knew where so much noteworthy twentieth-century art was hidden: he had access to a treasure map in the form of Castelli himself. "I could give him a lot of information on where the paintings were," Castelli once acknowledged. "Because I sold most of them."
Gagosian's hunger, aggressiveness, and stamina were so conspicuous that people in SoHo began referring to him as GoGo. Stories circulated of him venturing uninvited into private homes, wandering away from parties to take clandestine Polaroids of impressive art on the walls, then calling the hosts a few days later to startle them with the news that he had a buyer very interested in the Matisse above their living-room sofa. Douglas Cramer, a soap-opera producer and early client, told the New York Times: "I was in Larry's office once and I saw Polaroids of pieces that were in my home." Gagosian has denied surreptitiously photographing artworks for sale without authorization. The evidence suggests otherwise.
A version of this gambit — minus the Polaroids — remains part of his repertoire. Marc Jacobs, the fashion designer, described a dinner he once hosted at his apartment in Paris. Among the guests was Gagosian. Several days later, Gagosian called and proposed buying two paintings in the apartment — a John Currin and an Ed Ruscha. As it happened, Jacobs needed money for a new house. "The deal was he would pay immediately," Jacobs recalled. "Somebody came and picked up the paintings three days later, and the money was in my account. Done."
The Inversion
In 1985, at the age of forty, Gagosian relocated to New York and opened a gallery on Twenty-third Street in Chelsea, at the time a deeply inauspicious location. He has always possessed a genius for real estate; the investment paid off handsomely. His first show was an exhibition of Pop art from the collection of Burton and Emily Tremaine, a Connecticut couple with a sheet-metal fortune. He had found them in the phone directory. Cold-called. Offered to buy a Brice Marden painting they owned. Soon they were entrusting more of their art to him. Burton would call and say, "Larry, we got too much art, we need some cash." "I'm your guy."
The Tremaines owned Piet Mondrian's final painting, Victory Boogie Woogie. Gagosian told them he could get eleven million dollars for it. He telephoned Si Newhouse and sold it for exactly that amount. The deal was almost absurdly clean — a willing seller, a willing buyer, and someone like Gagosian to bring them together. "It doesn't take an eye to sell Mondrian's 'Victory Boogie Woogie,'" Newhouse said afterward. "It takes a willing buyer and a willing seller and someone like Larry to bring them together."
In 1990, with the art market cratering, Gagosian bought the Amagansett house — the very house where, years earlier, he'd eaten in the side garden, uninvited — for eight million dollars. He bought a carriage house on the Upper East Side with its own lap pool. He bought a Ferrari. He leased the gallery space in the Parke-Bernet building on Madison Avenue. Allan Schwartzman, then a journalist, recalls meeting Gagosian shortly after he signed the lease. The new space was still under construction. They stood in the vestibule, looking out at the wealthy men and women of the Upper East Side walking by, like salmon running thick in a river. "He was clocking which men of extreme high net worth and which existing or potential art collectors were passing by," Schwartzman said. "He knew who everyone was. He saw them before they knew him. That's the eye of an industrialist."
Something had begun to shift — not just in Gagosian's bank balance but in his relationship to the people he served. He had been so successful selling art to the masters of the universe that somewhere along the line he stopped being their servant. "He's one of them," Andy Avini, a senior director at the gallery, observed. In fact, for much of Gagosian's clientele, he was less a peer than an aspirational figure.
He inverted this thing where normally the art dealers were trying to emulate their clients. Larry's clients are trying to emulate him.
This was the inversion — the central maneuver of Gagosian's career, the trick that separates him from every other art dealer in history except perhaps Duveen himself. A friend of Gagosian's described attending a dinner at the dealer's Manhattan town house, along with a fabulously wealthy tech founder, and witnessing a look of "real consternation" on the young man's face as it dawned on him that, for all his money and power, he was not as connected as Gagosian, not as cultured, not as cool. Everybody was having a grand time, yet this potentate was experiencing an unspoken social demotion. He was a mere arriviste — a visitor at a club to which he didn't belong.
The irony, of course, is that Gagosian himself had been the arriviste, the guy eating in the side garden, the parking-lot kid cold-calling his way in. He had simply done it so thoroughly, so relentlessly, and for so long that the memory of exclusion had been overwritten by the fact of dominion.
The Crazy Armenian
The artist Cy Twombly, who died in 2011, was in his late fifties and dividing his time between Lexington, Virginia, and the port city of Gaeta, south of Rome, when Gagosian began telephoning him in Italy. Incessantly. Nicola Del Roscio, the president of the Cy Twombly Foundation, told The New Yorker that for a while Twombly greeted these intrusions by immediately hanging up. Finally, on one occasion, Twombly picked up and Gagosian said: "It's the crazy Armenian — don't put down the phone!"
Twombly was so amused that he decided to hear Gagosian out.
It was the beginning of an extraordinary relationship — perhaps the single most consequential artist-dealer partnership since Castelli and Johns. "I loved Cy," Gagosian said. Twombly began exhibiting at the gallery in 1986, and in the subsequent two decades he experienced the kind of late flowering most artists can only dream of — big, vigorous canvases that Gagosian sometimes sold days after they were finished. In a pioneering move, Gagosian opened international galleries — starting with London, Rome, and Paris — and he often inaugurated them with a show of new Twomblys. "It was an incredible collaboration," Del Roscio said. "They almost were trying to outdo each other, like a game." The new paintings often sold for five million dollars. With a commission rate of approximately thirty percent, if he sold ten paintings at an opening, Gagosian could pocket fifteen million dollars.
"Overhead is the mother of invention," Gagosian sometimes jokes, and it's not an exaggeration to say that his gallery's international expansion was subsidized largely by Twombly. The artist was the engine; the galleries were the exhaust. Each new outpost — London (2000), Rome (2007), Paris (2010), Athens, Geneva, Hong Kong — was both a monument to Gagosian's ambition and a machine for generating the revenue necessary to sustain the ambition of the next one. When Leo Castelli died in 1999, Gagosian inherited a number of his artists and collectors. ("I absorbed a lot of his, uh, clients," he said, when asked what he'd learned from Castelli.) When London's dominant dealer, Anthony d'Offay, retired in 2001, Gagosian inherited more. He poached others with abandon. The flywheel was spinning.
Tico Mugrabi, the dealer and collector who has made many deals with Gagosian, told a story about a pilgrimage to see Twombly in Italy. Mugrabi and two other collectors — Aby Rosen and Harry Lis — were willing to spend big money on paintings. But when they arrived in Gaeta, they found themselves stuck for days on a yacht Gagosian had chartered, moored next to an unsightly naval base. At breakfast, Gagosian would announce, "I've got to go to the studio."
"Take us with you!" the collectors would demand.
"I can't."
Each day, Gagosian returned with vivid reports of the magic he'd witnessed: "The paintings are incredible!"
"You son of a bitch!" Mugrabi said. "We're sitting in this port and you have the audacity to not take us to the studio?"
Reflecting on it now, Mugrabi told The New Yorker: "This is how Larry was able to lift the market: 'I can't show you the painting.' Then he shows you the painting."
Money on the Walls
The global art market, according to Bloomberg, is a sixty-five-billion-dollar industry. It remains largely unregulated. There is no securities commission, no disclosure requirement, no central clearinghouse. Prices at auction represent less than twenty percent of the market; the rest takes place in private, behind closed doors, in back rooms at galleries and over encrypted text messages. Gagosian reaps enormous profits from asymmetries of information. Buyers often don't know who the seller is, and vice versa. In any particular exchange, Gagosian might commission the artist, the buyer, and the seller — and not disclose a conflict of interest to any of them. When asked in a deposition whether he feels any "duty of loyalty" to the seller, it was as if he hadn't understood the question. "I just don't think about it in terms of — in those terms," he said.
Consider the Twombly painting Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves. The billionaire Ronald Perelman spotted it in the gallery in 2011, asked what it cost. Gagosian said eight million dollars. Perelman offered six. No deal. A week later, Perelman offered to pay the full amount. Too late, Gagosian said — he'd sold it to someone else. But later, Gagosian came back and said the new owner would sell it to Perelman for $11.5 million. After haggling, Perelman agreed to pay $10.5 million. What Perelman did not know was that the "new owner" was the Mugrabi family — Gagosian's frequent collaborators — who had bought the painting from Gagosian for $7.25 million. The Mugrabis had never even physically taken possession. In the resale, they made a profit of two million dollars. Gagosian got a million-dollar commission. When Perelman learned the details, he was incensed. He sued.
That description of Gagosian's practices — "undervaluing works when purchasing them, overvaluing them when selling them, and pocketing the substantial differential" — may seem shady. But it's also, Stefania Bortolami noted dryly, an apt characterization of what an art dealer does. Bortolami, who worked for Gagosian for several years before opening her own gallery in Tribeca, recalled a Lichtenstein she once handled for him. When the gallery was trying to acquire the painting, Gagosian disparaged it: "It was a good year, but this is one of the worst I've seen." Having established the lesser value, they bought it cheap. "Shortly afterward," Bortolami continued, "I hear Larry talking about it with another client as if it's the best painting that Lichtenstein had ever done."
Perelman's case was ultimately dismissed. Years later, after Revlon declared bankruptcy in 2022, Perelman — whose collection was long on the artists Gagosian especially knew how to sell — put up the white flag. "We've patched things up," Gagosian said, with regal magnanimity. "In the last couple of years, he's been quite motivated to sell." He added, "I like Ronald — he's an acquired taste."
When reached by The New Yorker, Perelman had jettisoned his righteous armor. He'd acted "more out of emotion than out of fact," he said. What had bugged him? "I don't even remember." He was back on the guest list for Memorial Day.
I was terrified of Larry, with Andy telling me all of these stories. And then Andy did a show with him, and when I asked why he was doing it after terrifying me for years about this guy, he said, 'Oh, well, it's cash and carry.'
The Physics of Desire
Walk into a high-end art gallery and you will find that prices aren't displayed. You must inquire, and that feels gauche. Already, you are conditioned by the imperious aura of exclusivity. Gagosian understood this physics instinctively — understood that the art market operates not on rational valuation but on manufactured scarcity, social pressure, and the discreet status anxiety of people who already have everything.
J. Tomilson Hill, a major collector and the former vice-chairman of Blackstone Group, described what it was like to buy from Gagosian in the nineties. He'd go to the gallery and, in a private room reserved for VIPs, spot something new on the wall. "I'd say, 'Larry, is that for sale?' And he'd say, 'Yes, I've got it until Tuesday.'" The identity of the seller and the terms of this short-term consignment could be anyone's guess, but the message was clear: Move fast. "We bought our first Picasso painting from him in that manner," Hill said. "Our first Francis Bacon, too."
The competitive dynamics of self-made billionaires do not go into remission once they've made a fortune. If anything, the competition migrates upward, from business to culture, from spreadsheets to walls. "That's why New York is such a great city for an art dealer," Gagosian told CBS News, "because you have all these super-competitive rich guys trying to outdo each other — 'I got one.' 'Oh, I got one better.'" In 2003, Steve Cohen — the hedge fund manager whose firm pleaded guilty to so much insider trading it paid a $1.8 billion fine — bought a Jackson Pollock drip painting from
David Geffen for fifty million dollars. Three years later, Gagosian asked Geffen if he'd sell a de Kooning he owned,
Woman III. Geffen said, "I suppose, if you got me a hundred and forty million." Cohen bought it that day. In 2020, after Cohen spent $2.4 billion to acquire the Mets, Geffen said to Gagosian, "Perhaps Steve's in the mood to sell." Gagosian orchestrated Geffen's purchase of a Giacometti sculpture from Cohen for $147 million.
This is the small club of extremely affluent collectors who repeatedly mix up their asset allocations — trading among themselves, through Gagosian, who collects a commission on every turn of the wheel. Serial commissions. As Geffen put it: "If Larry represents the owner, and you want it, you've got to buy it from him."
In the 2008 book
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, Don Thompson quotes a former Gagosian staffer who claims that when the gallery tells a client, "Larry said you need this for your collection," the client sometimes blurts "I'll take it!" before asking what the work costs or looks like. Such fealty may seem crazy. But from a purely financial standpoint, it might make sense. Even with secondary sales, Gagosian can demand a hefty commission — sometimes fifteen percent — but the mere fact that
he is the dealer endorsing and selling a work may well enhance its value. He's the frame.
Oligarchs, Freeports, and the Question Nobody Wants to Ask
One way Gagosian has insulated himself from the ups and downs of the art economy is by seeking out emerging markets — and not being particularly squeamish about who is buying. During the two-thousands, a generation of post-Soviet oligarchs became eager art buyers. Victoria Gelfand, a Belarus-born director at Gagosian then based in London, cultivated them. Between 2004 and 2008, Russian buyers were responsible for almost half of Gagosian's business worldwide. "You can e-mail a painting to Moscow and they e-mail you back the money, instantly!" he enthused in 2008.
Roman Abramovich, along with his then girlfriend Dasha Zhukova, collected on an enormous scale — a hundred and twenty million dollars at auction in a single week. In 2015, Abramovich and Gagosian threw a New Year's Eve party together in St. Barts, reportedly attended by Chris Rock, Lana Del Rey, and Jon Bon Jovi. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Abramovich was sanctioned by the U.K. and the European Union. The U.S. Treasury warned that the art market is "attractive for money laundering by illicit actors, including sanctioned Russian elites." An email went out to Gagosian employees: "You absolutely cannot sell to a sanctioned person."
When asked about Abramovich, Gagosian shrugged. "He's a nice guy." He emphasized: "When I was selling to him, there was no sanction. There was no war."
I asked Gagosian if there is anyone he would refuse to deal with on ethical grounds. He said he might not do business with a "convicted murderer," but that he doesn't want to draw such lines when it comes to lesser allegations. "If the money is correct, if the transaction is correct, I'm not going to be a moral judge." He has sold art to Sam Waksal (securities fraud, perjury), Peter M. Brant (tax-related federal charges), Leon Black (who stepped down as MoMA board chairman after protests over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein), and Steve Cohen. The art market, he pointed out rightly, is not a moral enterprise, and he wasn't alone in having done business with the oligarchs.
Meanwhile, the art itself increasingly disappears into storage. The Geneva Freeport — a tax-free zone in Switzerland — is thought to contain more than fifty billion dollars' worth of art and antiquities, including works by van Gogh, Picasso, and
Leonardo da Vinci. It would be one of the biggest museums in the world if it were open to the public. "More and more art disappears into loading bays in Switzerland," Irving Blum said. Great works reduced to stock lists, packing orders, lines on a piece of paper.
In the 2018 documentary The Price of Everything, Gerhard Richter walks into a show of his work. "I would prefer to see it in a museum," he says. "Not in a private collection." Gesturing to one of his canvases, he murmurs: "It's not good when this is the value of a house. It's not fair. I like it, but it's not a house." A shrug, a laugh. "Money is dirty."
The Eye and the Price Tag
There's no question that Gagosian cares about art. Like a lot of high-end collectors, he rhapsodizes about what it's like to "live with" a painting — suggesting that it's one thing to appreciate a work in a museum but a whole other plane of experience to wake up each day and see a Lichtenstein or a Warhol. For years, he had Picasso's last finished painting above his bed. When a reporter excused himself to use the bathroom at the Amagansett house, Gagosian instructed, with practiced nonchalance, "Take a hard right at the Damien Hirst pill painting."
But what does it mean to live with something if not, eventually, to take it for granted? Jenny Saville, the most expensive living female artist, who has worked with Gagosian throughout her career, made a devastating observation. "Larry loves art, but he also loves money in a way that I just don't understand," she said. "I remember there being a de Kooning painting, and we were both going to see it. I was devouring the brush marks, and I could see he was devouring the price tag."
Jean Pigozzi, the photographer and collector and longtime Gagosian friend, put it more broadly: "Sometimes it's a bit depressing to be with all these guys, because they don't really say, 'Oh, this is an incredible painting and the colors are fabulous and it was influenced by Renoir.' It's more, 'Well, this is seven million dollars, but Steve Cohen has bought one that sold for seven and a half, and there's one coming to auction that could reach nine.' Sometimes they forget that it's art."
And yet Gagosian is not a philistine. He is something more complicated than that: a man for whom the aesthetic and the commercial have become so thoroughly fused that the distinction may no longer be meaningful. Cecily Brown, the painter who grew up in England and showed with Gagosian for fifteen years, described his eye this way: "He had a knack for finding the oddball thing. There's always the obvious favorite, but sometimes the artist has a secret favorite, and I'd often find that Larry would home in on the oddball work in the corner and say, 'That's a good painting.'" Gagosian is not given to flowery disquisitions. He renders clipped verdicts: "She's a good painter." "Not his best." For all his avaricious energy, Brown believes, he couldn't have accomplished what he has without "that brilliant eye."
When Gagosian first took on Brown, he told her: "Your paintings are too cheap for my customers." She left in 2014, partly because — others suggested — the gallery placed too much emphasis on selling her work to plutocrat collectors and not enough on placing it in museums. "I heard she thinks my gallery has become too commercial," Gagosian said. Brown now has a solo show at the Met.
The tension between commerce and art is the central paradox of Gagosian's life, and it is one he has no interest in resolving. "It sounds egotistical," he told The New Yorker, "but I'm a little bit of a combination between those two" — Duveen and Castelli. "We represent some of the most important living artists, but we also have a very, very robust secondary-market business." The strategy is to skim the cream off the top of both markets. If you ask him to choose, he changes the subject.
What Happens When You Die?
Issy Wood is a thirty-year-old artist and musician in London who paints on velvet — cars, clocks, teeth — with a febrile air of detachment. In early 2020, Gagosian became interested in her work and arranged to visit her studio in East London. "This was the guy that, for better or for worse, built the world that I live in as a young artist," Wood told The New Yorker, "and he wanted to come to my disgusting studio." When he arrived, he moved quietly among the works and didn't say much. "He was shopping," she said. "Like it was Harrods."
During the pandemic lockdown, Gagosian started texting Wood, calling her, often multiple times a day. They developed a bond. She came to savor his stories, told "with varying degrees of lucidity." He wanted to mount a show of her work. It was unnerving, she said, to be on the receiving end of a charm offensive from "someone who has kind of transcended having to charm." Eventually the matter came to a head at his town house. They sat at an oversized table. An Olympic swimming event played on a silent TV. Wood wanted to know about the gallery's long-term future.
"What will happen when you die?" she asked.
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Gagosian exploded. "Talking about my death when we're trying to have a meeting!"
He protested: "I'm in the best shape of my life. No one understands your work like I do. I want to make you a star." When she wasn't won over, he pivoted: "I've done so much for you!" As Gagosian raised his voice, Wood noticed the butler, Eddie, had tactfully exited. She excused herself to the bathroom. Sat on the edge of the toilet, staring at the elegant marble, in no hurry to return. Then her phone lit up with a text from Gagosian — the same message, sent three times:
The other galleries you are considering will most likely go out of business before my demise.
Wood joined a smaller gallery. "I think she's a talented woman," Gagosian said afterward. "Why she went sideways like that I have no idea." He seemed genuinely hurt.
The question Wood asked — what happens when Larry dies? — is the question that haunts the entire enterprise. Other mega-galleries are family operations: Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Pace. Gagosian has no children, no obvious heir, no clear succession plan despite years of speculation. In late 2021, the gallery announced a board including Sofia Coppola, J. Tomilson Hill,
Evan Spiegel, Delphine Arnault, and Jenny Saville. The
New York Times headline read: "Without Heirs, Larry Gagosian Finally Plans for Succession." He bristled. "That's not really what drives this," he said. "I don't see it, per se, as succession planning." He assured reporters he has no plans to retire. "I enjoy what I do. I don't know what else
to do."
Andrew Fabricant was named COO in 2019, seemingly positioned as a natural successor. By 2024, he was gone. The art market rumor mill churned. Brooke Lampley, formerly of Sotheby's, joined as a senior director, reportedly bringing billionaire clients
Ken Griffin and Stephen Schwarzman with her. The board meets twice a year. "Everybody sits around one big table," Glenn Fuhrman, a member, said. But nobody seems to believe the board could take over should Gagosian die or retire.
Can Gagosian survive without Larry? Jean Pigozzi put it in stark terms: "If one day Larry goes, or retires, or whatever, I don't know what you're buying."
When The New Yorker asked Tico Mugrabi what might become of Gagosian's personal collection — a breathtaking assortment of twentieth-century masterpieces — he joked: "He wants to take it with him and do what the Egyptians do."
The Bookstore on Main Street
In the spring of 2025, word got out that BookHampton, a fifty-year-old bookstore on Main Street in East Hampton, was facing potential closure. A group of locals rallied, launched a fundraiser, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. No buyer emerged. Then, eventually, Larry Gagosian — who has lived in nearby Amagansett for thirty-five years, who holds a bachelor's degree in English literature, who was a voracious reader long before he was a voracious dealer — stepped in.
"I said, 'Let's buy the business and keep the bookstore in the community,'" he told The Art Newspaper. The sale was finalized in May. Visitors noticed changes almost immediately: the front tables that once held paperback fiction now displayed thickly bound catalogues on Jenny Saville, Peter Beard, Willem de Kooning, and Richard Prince. One series of Ed Ruscha catalogues was priced at $1,600. The artists — or their estates — are all represented by Gagosian.
One prerequisite to working in sales at his gallery has long been reading
Duveen, S. N. Behrman's biography of the legendary dealer. When he was young, Gagosian spent much of his spare time at
Free Press, a beloved campus-adjacent bookstore near UCLA that was eventually replaced by a Taco Bell. "Not that I have anything against Taco Bell," he said, "but it really was a tipping point for the neighborhood."
The bookstore purchase is a minor event in the arc of a billion-dollar empire. But there is something in it — in the eighty-year-old dealer who buys a bookstore on Main Street, stocks it with his own publications, and says he wants it to remain a community gathering place — that rhymes with the twenty-seven-year-old parking attendant who noticed a poster vendor and thought, I can do that. The frame has changed. The instinct hasn't.
At his Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire, Gagosian was asked his motto. He said: "Only the paranoid survive." Asked his greatest regret: "I did not stick with my piano lessons as a kid." The lowest depth of misery: "Loneliness." How he'd like to die: "In 100 years. On Mars."
On rainy Saturdays in East Hampton, BookHampton is bustling with locals and tourists. The world's most powerful art dealer is sometimes spotted browsing the shelves, bumping into people, picking up a novel or two. Just another customer. The sun never sets on his gallery. But in a bookstore in the Hamptons, it slants through the windows, catching the spines of six hundred art books published under the name of a man whose father died at fifty-nine, broke and undisciplined, with a nice car in the driveway and a son who hadn't yet done a single thing with his life.
