Mr. Feigen spent 20 years guiding the lavishly spending Steinbergs through the Byzantine process of amassing a world-class collection. Still, whenever the time came for Mr. Steinberg, the chairman and former chief executive of Reliance Group Holdings Inc., to sell off one or two of the works, he always called Sotheby's-or, as sources told the Observer , he awarded the auction house for the tenacity of their unremitting solicitation.

But in February, when the Steinbergs sold their 34-room triplex apartment for about $37 million, Mr. Feigen overcame his "shyness" and his desire to not "pounce" on his friend's collection as Reliance's stock plummeted, dramatically losing more than 50 percent of its value in the past year. He reasoned, "If you don't have a huge apartment, where are you going to put 60 paintings?" Especially when those paintings include huge stretches of canvas like Vasari's Fishing , Jacob Jordaens' A Twelfth Night Feast ("The King Drinks" ) and Titian's Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, valued respectively by the dealer at $3 million, $7 million and $12 million.

Seated in the living room of his Fifth Avenue duplex almost two weeks after snaring the rights to unload the $52 million collection, Mr. Feigen had little sensitivity left for the situation. His primary emotion was relief that his old friends had not once again been "swayed by Sotheby's into putting their works at auction." He said the Justice Department's investigation into commission rates at Christie's and Sotheby's had allowed him to get a foot in the door.

The only downside of the Steinberg coup is that Mr. Feigen couldn't stop the presses on his soon to be published memoir, Tales from the Art Crypt: The Painters, the Museums, the Curators, the Collectors, the Auctions, the Art (due from Knopf on June 23), to add another chapter. It might be called "Saving the Steinberg Collection," since many of the chapters are about Mr. Feinberg's defending elitism over mediocrity in the art world.

In recounting an entertaining, if slightly random, selection of anecdotes from his storied career, Mr. Feigen has not penned an autobiography-he actually fired two ghostwriters who tried to do exactly that. Instead, he offers a series of career highlights and life lessons. The best courses in connoisseurship were the lunches hosted by art teacher Paul Sachs at Harvard; contemporary art galleries should follow contemporary artists in foraging new ground as Mr. Feigen did with Leo Castelli when he opened one of the first galleries in SoHo; there is value in preserving the integrity of important collections by offering time and expertise to organizations such as the Barnes Collection; cultivating sources for artwork by soliciting artists' widows with designer silk scarves works wonders.

Mr. Feigen also writes that he probably shouldn't have become an art dealer-which he arrived at by way of Harvard Business School and a brief stint with an insurance firm-because he could have contributed more as a private collector. And gotten a lot more respect.

Still Getting Royalties From Wall Street

Mr. Feigen was born in Chicago, attended Yale University then Harvard. His first job was for Lehman Brothers on Wall Street before he moved to California to take a job with a family insurance company. He left California after six months and bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, which he sold when he decided to open his first art gallery in Chicago in 1957. Six years later, he opened a gallery on the Upper East Side and, a couple of years later, another in SoHo. Now the main gallery is run out of a townhouse at 34 East 69th Street and there's a contemporary annex at 535 West 20th Street in Chelsea. His is one of the only galleries selling works spanning over 400 years. His clients have included Ronald Lauder, Henry Kravis, Wendell Cherry and Alfred Taubman. He is divorced and has two adult children.

In his 43 years as a collector in dealer's clothes, Mr. Feigen, a lean, white-haired, 69-year-old with a handsomely chiseled face, has merged Chicago street smarts with an ultra-refined level of connoisseurship that extends from his hand-tailored suits to the 19th-century English landscape by John Constable that hangs on his living room wall (the latest addition to his vast and eclectic personal collection). He plays the role of the gentleman collector. Some say he is constantly dropping the names of royalty and traveling to museums across Europe to gloat over the pieces he's sold them. And he enjoys being served a cup of coffee as he sits beneath his 17th-century Baroque Masterpiece by Orazio Gentileschi, and makes sweeping pronouncements like, "What I really care about is effecting taste."

But he has a reputation for his forward ways and he is credited with bringing the pressured work ethos of Wall Street to the Old Master trade. According to the book, he once persuaded Barbara Walters to use her televised interview with the Empress of Iran to help him sell her a rare manuscript; he moved Tom Wolfe to memorialize him in Radical Chic ; and he professes to have saved SoHo almost single-handedly from the proposed Cross Manhattan Expressway, and the beleaguered National Endowment for the Arts from being run by a provincial Clinton functionary.

Mr. Feigen fervently rejects the implied characterization of being merely a dealer who furnishes New Money with pictures that lend an "ancestry for their lifestyle." Nonetheless, his flamboyant persona and powerful clientele fit so perfectly into the 80's clichés of excess that Oliver Stone cast the dealer to play himself in Wall Street . "They gave me one of those trailer cars, and I still get a little tiny check every once in a while for $36 from the Screen Actors Guild," Mr. Feigen laughed.

He reveals in the book that he almost played a role in another drama of the 80's when Michael Milken approached him with a proposition to finance his business to the tune of $200 million using junk bonds. He was tempted. Mr. Milken had after all created the vast fortunes of several of his clients.

When asked if he regrets turning down the offer, Mr. Feigen said, "It's a question that has been unanswered for the last 14 years. My friend Carl Icahn says if I had done it I wouldn't be calling Air France about getting screwed out of a mileage ticket. I'd be having my airplane take me across the ocean."

In the end, Mr. Feigen declined because he was afraid of having to spend all the money at once and therefore having to pay "too much [for] paintings that were just not good enough." But he calls Mr. Milken a genius. After meeting him briefly at The Beverly Hills Hotel, said Mr. Feigen, the investor "with no prior knowledge of the art business, comprehended and solved all the problems I had been puzzling over for 25 years." On the other hand, Mr. Feigen writes that Mr. Milken is one of the only people he has ever met with absolutely no capacity to become a collector.

The Met 'Turns Tricks for Pocket Change'

One chapter in particular "might cost me a few clients," said Mr. Feigen, referring to "The War of the Museums," a section that presents a scathing view of how corporate culture has changed America's cultural institutions for the worse.

Mr. Feigen singles out the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "For all these years all they have done is proliferate building and whenever they run into red ink they do another Renoir show," he writes. He likens the august institution to "a nice girl from a good family who just once in a while goes out and turns tricks for pocket change."

There's a split, he argues, between those who believe in caring for objects and developing exciting exhibitions around them on one side (Him) and those who see museums as Cineplex-like entertainment palaces that only give the public what it already knows about on the other (The Met). Particularly, Mr. Feigen writes that a Met show scheduled for 2001 under the title Gentileschi: Father and Daughter , will damage the reputation of a serious artist (the father, Orazio Gentileschi) in order to draw people in through the salacious reputation of a minor artist (Artemisia Gentileschi, the daughter, whose rape and dramatic trial has generated far more attention than either of their art).

Between his gallery and his private collection, Mr. Feigen owns three of the 60 known works by Orazio Gentileschi, whom he considers to be a far more important painter than his daughter Artemisia. To him, a much needed major Gentileschi exhibit should focus on Orazio and his influence, not on his relationship with Artemisia. "With the press and the feminists at work, you're going to read about Artemisia and her father who also painted," he writes.

Henry Holzer, spokesperson for the Metropolitan, described Mr. Feigen's accusations as ironic. Mr. Feigen is "one of the people who helped invent the cult of the daughter," said Mr. Holzer. In 1998, a show entitled Passion and Painting with works of father and daughter was shown at the Richard Feigen gallery in connection with the release of the Miramax film Artemisia , based on the daughter's life.

But what seems to most rile Mr. Feigen about museum politics is that despite his private collection and vast knowledge, his professional position as an art dealer doesn't earn him enough respect or influence. "As a dealer, I am assumed to have these wares to sell, even if I have bought them for my personal collection," he said. "If more people had seen the work that I had put together, more people would have seen my point and not assumed that I had an ax to grind because I sell paintings. My collection might have been borrowed by a museum and my point therefore gotten across. I might have been on an acquisition committee in a museum and had a chance to change their collecting pattern. There are a lot of things I might have done."

In 1988, Mr. Feigen chose to decline a seat on the board of the Barnes Collection because of a potential (but highly improbable, since the works are not for sale) conflict of interest. He said that if his collection was private, he could hold such positions and maybe museums would listen more attentively to his suggestions.

"My whole life has been about putting together my collection, what matters is not what I sold; it's what I kept," he said.

The Best Chapter Is in the Back Seat of a Taxi

Mr. Feigen has one significant nemesis in the art world whom he had planned to skewer in his forthcoming book: the late Norton Simon, a restless California industrialist who dedicated the last 25 years of his life to building a $100 million collection of Old Master paintings.

The tense relationship between dealer and collector ended when Mr. Feigen learned that Mr. Simon had bragged that he paid only $42,500 for a Matthias Stomer oil that Mr. Feigen had not yet had the chance to carefully examine but ultimately determined to be worth $150,000. When Mr. Simon implied that he had swindled Mr. Feigen out of more than $100,000, he became the only collector ever to be banned from the Richard Feigen gallery.

Mr. Feigen was preparing a rancorous chapter on the "nasty man who formed a very great collection by picking brains all over the world," until he left all the original documents and letters that would have supported this chapter in a taxi. "People have had Stradivarius violins and vast sums of money returned to them. I called and faxed every cab garage in the city," said Mr. Feigen. "There are over 200 of them. I even sent employees out to La Guardia airport to pass out flyers offering a cash award for the documents' return."

The pages were never found and Mr. Feigen decided not to start again from scratch. And according to Mr. Feigen, while other people are familiar with Simon's sordid story, he doesn't know of anyone else inclined to write it down.

"I can tell you one thing, though," he said, "It would have been a good chapter, because I can't think of a single person who can say they liked him."

Sources close to Mr. Gagosian said that the meeting had been called by Mr. Newhouse to discuss the future of key artworks in Mirage's $400 million collection–accumulated by Mr. Wynn, controlled by Mirage and showcased in the Bellagio–considering that the company was in the process of being acquired by rival Kirk Kerkorian's MGM Grand Inc. Several New York dealers told The Observer that Mr. Newhouse would likely have been trying to lay the groundwork for capturing the 1942 Picasso oil painting, Portrait of Dora Maar , one of Mr. Wynn's most prized possessions, which he acquired in 1997.

"Gagosian is Newhouse's middle man of choice and the [increased] activity at [the Gagosian gallery] has been palpable since Kerkorian consumed Wynn," said one dealer.

For at least the past five years, Mr. Gagosian has brokered deals between the two men who share a passion for collecting masterpieces at almost any price–Mr. Newhouse very privately, Mr. Wynn very publicly. "Wynn has poached extensively from Newhouse's collection for the Bellagio," said a SoHo gallery owner.

These matters almost never happen face to face. In a May 1998, Sotheby's auction, the two chief executives unwittingly engaged in a bidding duel–while on separate telephones–for one of Andy Warhol's iconic images of Marilyn Monroe, Orange Marilyn (1964). When the auctioneer announced a final sale for $17.3 million, four times the previous record for a Warhol, the audience in the salesroom exploded into a riotous round of applause. Mr. Newhouse celebrated quietly.

But, sources say, Mr. Newhouse arranged the unusual tête-à-tête with his sometime rival because he had become aware of an extremely privileged arrangement between Mr. Wynn and MGM, which announced on March 3 that it would acquire Mirage for $6.4 billion. Mirage currently owns outright half the Bellagio collection–as it is called–and leases the other half from Mr. Wynn for $5 million per year. According to S.E.C. filings on the acquisition, in addition to a golden parachute deal and the continued income of the lease, Mr. Wynn will have the right of first refusal on all sales of works from the Bellagio collection for the first five years after the acquisition goes through.

For Mr. Wynn, the deal gets even sweeter. A clause in the agreement specifies that if he chooses to exercise his right of first refusal, he can either pay an appraisal price set by Christie's International or Sotheby's Holdings Inc., or a pre-established price based on Mirage's valuation of the piece, even if the price is lower than an offer made by another party.

In other words, the cozy agreement creates the potential for Mr. Wynn to purchase these masterworks at below-market prices–and sell them again to interested parties like Mr. Newhouse.

The afternoon after his art world power dinner, Mr. Wynn appeared at the Mirage Resorts' annual shareholders meeting and announced that he was stepping down in view of MGM's takeover. He confidently told those present that MGM company chairman Terry Lanni has promised that for the time being the Bellagio collection will remain intact.

But a more accurate pronouncement would have been that while MGM does recognize the branding value of the Bellagio collection–it attracts almost 2,000 visitors a day, which at $12 a pop generates enough income to cover its operating expenses–there is the suggestion that the company would be interested in selling at least portions of the Bellagio collection. Mirage came with $2 billion in debt that the Mirage carries which a dozen or so select works might easily erase.

After Mr. Wynn's speech, which included a battle cry for keeping the Bellagio a cut above Mr. Kerkorian's mass-market gambling meccas, several shareholders climbed to microphones to rhapsodize about Mr. Wynn's tenure. Others mobbed the developer for his autograph. To many present, the meeting seemed more like a tribute to Wynn than what it actually was: a final public acknowledgement that his glitzy excesses and fatal decision to build the Beaux Rivage Casino in Biloxi, Miss. had failed to protect the company's stock from predatory investors.

But not all shareholders were swept up in this premature outpouring of nostalgia for Mirage Resort's Wynn era–especially after they became aware of the same information Mr. Newhouse had stumbled upon. On March 28, less than a week after the strangely celebratory shareholder meeting, five parties including an investment consortium called Crandon Capital Partners, filed suit in Clark County District Court to stall what they presumed to be the inevitable sale of a large portion of the Bellagio collection to Steve Wynn at a bargain basement price. The suit accuses Mr. Wynn of using his influence to "structure his deal at the expense of Mirage shareholders," and the Mirage board members of failing in their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value when they agreed to the deal. The shareholders are seeking a court order forcing Mirage to "seriously consider all bona fide offers for Mirage's assets and to conduct fair and active bidding procedures."

Mr. Wynn's Las Vegas attorney, Mark Tratos said neither he nor his client could comment on the future of the Bellagio collection at this time because of its possible effect on the price of Mirage stock.

Mirage Resort's spokesman, Alan Feldman, found the suit dubious, hypothetical and, above all, premature. He said the suit is based on the agreement for the transfer of art if and when a bidder should present itself, and that Mirage "will let the lawyers review the case and they will respond to it with the proper procedures in court."

Bear Stearns & Company vice president of Equity Research, Marc J. Falcone, said the true financial complication with the sale of works from the Bellagio collection is that "Steve Wynn often sells off pieces from the collection to help finance new acquisitions, so with half the art nobody knows which individual art piece belongs to Mr. Wynn and which to Mirage."

This is not the first time Wynn's wheeling and dealing of the Bellagio collection has, to put it kindly, generated spirited debate. In recent years, Wynn came under fire first for dedicating disproportionate amounts of Mirage's resources to purchasing art, then for unloading Mirage stock to finance further acquisitions for his personal collection. He also miraculously convinced the Nevada state legislature to enact a tax break on publicly displayed art, created explicitly for his financial benefit.

"Wynn is passionate about art. He thinks it's a better investment than the market," said Prudential Securities Senior Gaming and Lodging Analyst, Joe Coccimiglio.

At least for a time, he was also extremely passionate about the alluring Portrait of Dora Maar that prompted Mr. Newhouse's visit to Las Vegas. After purchasing the work from his first art world mentor, the New York dealer Bill Acquavella, Mr. Wynn stopped collecting Impressionist works and focused for a time exclusively on Picassos. He collected dozens of paintings by the artist, and more than 40 of his ceramics. He later bid on a celebrated Picasso portrait from the Ganz estate, Dream , although he lost it to another collector who paid $48.4 million for the piece in November of 1997. Mr. Wynn even commissioned the painter's son, Claude Picasso, to design the furniture and carpets for the Bellagio restaurant that bears his father's name.

Perhaps it is only fitting that Mr. Wynn, at this stage, would finally consider letting go of his former muse, as he leaves behind his empire and the hotel he built as a shrine to the best of everything.

Maybe he'll find another muse. "I wouldn't be surprised if he bought Sotheby's," said Mr. Coccimiglio. "If he could find a way to take it private."