The Da Vinci Masterstroke: How a ‘Wild Idea’ Became $450 Million

(Bloomberg) -- The vision came to Loic Gouzer when he was free diving in the Caribbean: Da Vinci and Warhol, together, on sale.

The Renaissance painter was on Gouzer's mind because his colleague Alex Rotter was trying to secure Andy Warhol's Da Vinci-inspired “Sixty Last Suppers” for Christie's to put under the hammer. Wouldn't it be something, Gouzer recalled thinking, if he landed Leonardo's “Salvator Mundi” and the two, the very old and the fairly new, were presented at the same auction?

“It was a wild idea,” said Gouzer, 37, who is co-chairman with Rotter of Christie's postwar and contemporary art department in the Americas. “But it felt very natural.”

At least, it did to Gouzer. He's known for pushing the art-marketing envelope. “He hatches these brilliant, creative plans that at first sound kind of nuts,” said Sandy Heller, the art adviser to Dimitry Rybolovlev, the Russian billionaire who owned the Da Vinci before it sold on Nov. 15 for a record-shattering $450.3 million.

The 1986 Warhol went for a respectable $61 million, by the way, not that anyone was really paying much attention. All eyes and astonished gasps were on “Salvator Mundi,” Latin for “Savior of the World.”

Believed to be the last Da Vinci in private hands, it commanded four times what Christie's had projected. The buyer still hasn't been identified. Some skeptics question whether it's the real deal. Rybolovlev is suing the Swiss dealer from whom he purchased it as part of a 40-plus collection of works, claiming he was overcharged by about $1 billion for the lot.

And “Salvator Mundi” was offered in a postwar and contemporary sale, rather than an Old Masters auction. The painting, thought to date to around 1500, was presented alongside a one-year-old installation consisting of a flock of balloonfish. (That fetched $516,500.)

‘Tapping Into The Moment'

Gouzer was one of several Christie's staffers who pursued the Da Vinci, and Rotter, in fact, placed the winning bid on behalf of the mysterious client. “It has been incredible teamwork that led to this result,” said Christie's Chief Executive Officer Guillaume Cerutti. But Gouzer, he said, was the catalyst.

Heller said he recognized the wisdom behind the unusual auction plan after he had lunch with Gouzer at Cipriani in Manhattan in May. “The painting deserved that kind of context, to be seen by the most committed art collectors, with the most money -- you have to go where money is.”

Christie's Old Master specialists worked with Gouzer and Heller over the summer to hatch a strategy for promoting the work: hiring the ad agency Droga5, putting the canvas on a world-wide exhibit tour, lining up scholars who vouched for its brilliance. As luck (or planning) would have it, the efforts coincided with the release of Walter Isaacson's new Da Vinci biography.

“We were tapping into the moment,” Heller said.

By the time “Salvator Mundi” made it to New York for display in November, people lined up around the block, in the rain, to see it. A video of their reactions, circulated by the auction house, shows some with tears in their eyes.

Gouzer, who grew up in Geneva and earned an art history degree from University College London, has made waves before. Soon after he arrived at Christie's from rival Sotheby's in 2011, he won a rare Yves Klein painting by persuading the owner to donate some of the proceeds to Oceana, a conservation nonprofit on whose board Gouzer sits.

“The owner didn't want to sell,” he said. “He said, ‘No, I don't need the money. I would not know what to do with it.' I said, ‘How about saving the world?”'

Gouzer said he likes to test conventions, such as when he marketed an auction with a video of a skateboarder riding among the riches at Christie's. In May 2015, he devised an uncommon hybrid event combining works from early 1900 to the contemporary era, called “Looking Forward to the Past.”

“I don't think art should be sold on a horizontal, generational plane,” he said. “Once in a while it's interesting to hit on a vertical.”

The 2015 sale at Christie's marked the peak of the last market cycle and included Pablo Picasso's “Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O).” Its sale price was $179.4 million -- and it remained the most expensive work of art sold at auction until this week.

To contact the reporter on this story: Katya Kazakina in New York at kkazakina@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Margaret Collins at mcollins45@bloomberg.net, Anne Reifenberg, Josh Friedman

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