Controversy Surrounds a Christie's Auction

Why has a multimillion-dollar auction produced so many bad feelings?

Last week, Christie's auctioned off 74 pieces from the collection of the Swiss art dealer Pierre Huber, including works by artists such as Mike Kelley, On Kawara, Thomas Ruff, and John Miller. The sale netted almost $17 million and set auction records for Mr. Kawara, Jim Shaw, Paul McCarthy, and Albert Oehlen.

But some of these artists and their dealers say that for years Mr. Huber claimed he was building a collection that would end up in a museum. On that basis, he acquired works, sometimes at discount prices, that he couldn't have otherwise. When the artists learned that, instead of going to an institution, their works would be going to auction at Christie's, they were furious.

"Pierre Huber flat-out lied to me," Mr. Kelley, whose installation, "Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known To Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses" (1999), sold for $1.1 million, wrote in an e-mail message. "He got this immense work for little over the costs of production based on his promise that it would be given to a public institution."

The gallery owner David Zwirner told Josh Baer, who writes a newsletter called Baer Faxt, that he thought Mr. Huber should be barred from the Basel Art Fair. "He has lied and misled not only his fellow dealers but artists such as On Kawara and Thomas Ruff on my end," Mr. Zwirner said, according to Mr. Baer. "I don't want to share an art fair with such a cheat and opportunist."

Mr. Huber said he doesn't understand why Mr. Zwirner is trying to start a fight. "The art market is a market like every market," he said. "You can't blackmail the collector, tell him, ‘You can buy but you can never sell.'"

The dealer Hudson (who goes by one name), of the gallery Feature Inc., who sold Mr. Huber a Tom Friedman work, "In Memory of a Piece of Paper" (1965), that was in the Christie's auction, said, "I always expect that anything I sell will be sold by the person, or the gallery or even the institution that purchases it." As for Mr. Huber, he said, "he's always been very straightforward with me, and never made any promises that these works were going anywhere but his personal collection."

Mr. Huber acquired several of the works auctioned by Christie's through his close friendship with Yves Aupetitallot, who is now the director of the Magasin – Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble and was then a curator there. The Magasin did major exhibitions by Mr. Kelley, in 1999, and Mr. Shaw, in 2003. Mr. Huber offered to cover the cost of producing the pieces, and then purchased the works from the artists.

Mr. Huber and Mr. Aupetitallot both said Mr. Huber considered giving his collection to the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland, but, according to Mr. Huber, the director turned him down. (The director of the museum, Christian Bernhard, could not be reached for comment.)

When Mr. Aupetitallot became the director of a proposed new contemporary art museum at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland, Mr. Huber considered depositing his collection there. (Mr. Huber said he did not plan to donate it outright, because "no one will respect something they get for free.") In 2005, presumably in anticipation of acquiring Mr. Huber's collection, the museum put on a large exhibition of works from the collection, with a glossy catalog.

Then, last year, according to Mr. Aupetitallot, the regional government changed, imperiling the new museum project. Mr. Aupetitallot left because "it was too provincial for me" and returned to Grenoble to become the director of the Magasin. Mr. Huber then withdrew his offer to give his collection to Lausanne.

At the same time, he said, his family was pressuring him to resolve the issue of his collection. "I have decided to sell the most complicated work so that my family is not in trouble if something happens to me."

Mr. Kelley said that when he learned about the Christie's auction, he asked Mr. Huber to remove his work so that he could arrange for a private sale through one of his galleries. "He never responded to me," Mr. Kelley wrote. "This is a work that should never have gone to auction; it's an immense piece that clearly can exist only in an institutional context. I am extremely angry with Mr. Huber and would refuse to ever have any further dealings with him."

Mr. Huber acknowledged that Mr. Kelley asked to have his work removed but said that at that point he already had a contract with Christie's. "If we broke the contract, we would have to go through a long process," he said.

The owners of Luhring Augustine, which represents two of the artists in the auction, Mr. Oehlen and Christopher Wool, said they refer to Mr. Huber as "Pierre Hubris." Lawrence Luhring said he didn't do business with him — Mr. Huber acquired the works instead through European dealers and the secondary market — because he "could smell a rat."

Mr. Luhring's partner, Roland Augustine, said the behavior of both Mr. Huber and Christie's, which recently purchased a private art gallery, Haunch of Venison, was blurring important lines in the art world, between auction sales and private sales, and between selling and exhibiting art. "[Mr. Huber] makes this big fancy museum catalog of this collection that he turns around a year later and sells at auction," Mr. Augustine, who is also the president of the Art Dealers Association of America, said. "It's clearly opportunism and profiteering at its worst, and it should not be condoned."

Janelle Reiring, a director at Metro Pictures, which represents Mr. Kelley and Mr. Shaw, said Mr. Huber's behavior was "pretty shocking," and she agreed with Mr. Zwirner's comments to Mr. Baer. But she gave Mr. Huber credit for acquiring works by some of the artists before they had attracted a substantial market.

Mr. McCarthy's "Bear and Rabbit on a Rock" (1992), for example, sold for $1.4 million at the auction, a world auction record for the artist. Mr. Huber said he purchased it in Paris for $700,000, which at the time was a world record. "You take someone like [Charles] Saatchi, they do that all the time," Mr. Huber said. "We did it only once, and everybody is complaining!"

In any case, as Mr. Huber acknowledged, he seems to have sold at the right time, since the next day the Dow Jones average fell 3.3%. Mr. Huber suggested that his critics not try to lay down rules for what collectors can and cannot do with the art they buy, because that will discourage people from getting into the market. "It's very important for the future that collectors don't feel in a ghetto," he said. "You never know what will happen in life."

Correction from March 7, 2007: Christian Bernard is the spelling of the name of the director of the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva. His name was misspelled in an article on page 1 of the March 5 New York Sun.