Larry Gagosian and Ed Ruscha.

California art icon Ed Ruscha, famed for his stark paintings of desolate gas stations and floating phrases like “PAY NOTHING UNTIL APRIL” and “HOLLYWOOD IS A VERB,” and the Gagosian Gallery (which is concurrently exhibiting “Ed Ruscha: Books & Co.”) are part of the New York Public Library’s “LIVE from the NYPL” series. Bring your sketch pads and tape recorders as Mr. Ruscha talks candidly with Paul Holdengräber onstage about his prolific career, his many books (including Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Every Building on the Sunset Strip and A Few Palm Trees) and his influence on countless modern artists.

Steven A. Schwarzman Building, Celeste Bartos Forum, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, (917) 275-6975, 7pm, tickets $25

Illustration by Amy Melson

Tom Wolfe’s new novel, the Miami-set Back to Blood, has not been particularly well-received by book critics, but at the balmy, prosecco-soaked doorbuster sale and glad-handing jubilee known as Art Basel Miami Beach in early December, attendees armed with e-readers passed around one brief passage with gleeful approval. The scene, which comes midway through the book and is set at the same fair, introduces a character in whom many see an eerie resemblance to dealer Larry Gagosian—the art world’s widely admired, widely feared and widely resented top dog. The character, a gallery dealer named Harry Goshen (the name is perhaps a tip-off) is described as “a tall man with gray hair, although he doesn’t look all that old, and eerie pale-gray eyes like the slanted eyes of a husky.”

A bit mesmerized, Mr. Wolfe’s narrator circles back to Goshen’s eyes a few lines later: “So pale, those eyes ... they look ghostly and sinister ...”

Several fairgoers who encountered Mr. Gagosian in his booth in the Miami Beach Convention Center took note of his eyes as well. Not sinister, they said, just tired.

“Maybe it’s getting to him,” one art adviser surmised. “The travel, the expansion. At some point, it hits you the wrong way. It’s hard to satisfy everyone and keep all the balls in the air, and when you go to the top like that you become a target. People love to get the giant.”

It’s been an unusually challenging period for Mr. Gagosian, the art world’s silver-maned dealer-emperor, whose sharp eye for talent, business prowess and aggressive style of deal-making propelled an ascendancy from modest beginnings as a Los Angeles street peddler—hawking cheap posters in Westwood—to a position of unrivaled dominance in the international art trade, a sovereignty that some are predicting, a tad eagerly, may soon come to a close.

Even as he grapples with a pair of ongoing lawsuits—one brought by billionaire investor Ronald Perelman and another by art collector Jan Cowles—accusing Mr. Gagosian of enriching himself at clients’ expense, his empire has been rocked by a string of high-profile defections.

As Basel got underway, smartphones began vibrating with a curious piece of news: dealer David Zwirner, the serious-minded German known for shepherding cerebral artists like Neo Rauch to world acclaim, would be mounting a New York exhibition of Jeff Koons, long a prized show pony in Mr. Gagosian’s crowded stable and, perhaps coincidentally, the subject of that lawsuit by Mr. Perelman. Though a Gagosian spokesperson made it clear that the gallery would continue to represent Mr. Koons, who also shows at Sonnabend, the move seemed a noteworthy poke in the eye, and the timing a further thumb-twist.

Then, less than a week later, Damien Hirst—a shrewd market operator in his own right—announced that he was leaving Gagosian after 17 years. Never mind that the dealer had helped turn Mr. Hirst into the world’s richest artist (reportedly worth upward of $300 million) and had recently given over his entire network of galleries around the world to a blockbuster exhibition of Mr. Hirst’s Spot paintings (complete with a zany Amazing Race–type contest prodding jet-setting aficionados to hit all 11 shows).

Hirst was history.

And those Spots of his weren’t the last dominoes to fall. A day later, the dotty Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama—who was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum—announced her own defection from Gagosian.

Three artists out of more than 75 that Mr. Gagosian works with—a number that includes estates like those of Picasso and Warhol—may seem like small potatoes for a world-straddling powerhouse. But there is a common thread that may make their loss a bit more impactful for the gallery, and portentous for the market as a whole. “Look at what they all provided: unlimited supply,” noted an art consultant who has had numerous dealings with Mr. Gagosian. “How many Hirsts do you think they sold? Thousands. How many Kusamas?” Despite her voluntary residence in a Japanese mental hospital, Ms. Kusama remains highly productive. “‘Forty-eight by forty-eight? Can do! You want red? White? No problem!’” the consultant continued, imagining the gallery’s sales pitch. “There are very few artists like that, and he managed to get them. The question is, who can he push to fill that void? Who will be the next million-dollar artist who can churn out a thousand pieces?”

Such artwork, the consultant said, is “like candy”—a quick hit of acquisitional glucose for collectors, necessitating regular replenishment. “‘You have a Hirst? I want a Hirst.’ ‘You have a butterfly? I want a butterfly and a cow.’ Collectors were buying two, three, four at a clip. Because a million dollars didn’t mean anything to these people.”

If the art market has been experiencing a bubble—and many observers believe that it has—this may signal the beginning of a much-needed correction. “I think the whole business has been slowing down,” said one prominent collector, who cited the disappointing auction results for Mr. Koons and several other of Gagosian’s artists at last November’s contemporary sales, despite record-breaking prices for a number of other artists.

Perhaps the gallery overplayed its hand. “City by city, they saturated the market with [Richard] Prince and Koons,” the collector said. “Instead of working with an artist to have longevity—with a slow output, distributed internationally over years—they blitzkrieged and carpet-bombed each city with the work. Everybody got a Hirst.” Perhaps, the collector speculated, these artists were leaving simply because they’d already sold everything they could to Mr. Gagosian’s clientele and it was time to tap a new user base.

“Larry is quite phenomenal,” the collector added. “He got these collectors to buy anything he put out there. ‘Larry’s going to show it!’ became an instant recipe for money. It was absurd.”

These high-level defections follow the deaths last year of several of Mr. Gagosian’s blue-chip artists, the losses of whom likely will be felt not only personally but financially. Cy Twombly, long a jewel in Mr. Gagosian’s crown (newly launched Gagosian galleries in Rome, Paris and Athens all opened with Twombly shows), died in July of 2011, followed by Richard Hamilton, John Chamberlain, Mike Kelly and Franz West.

And then there are those pending lawsuits. The allegations themselves are not terribly dramatic—let’s see you try selling a billion dollars worth of art in a year, as Gagosian reportedly does, without breaking some crockery—but of far larger consequence might be the unflattering light they have shed on the inner workings of the Gagosian empire. Dozens of emails and hundreds of pages of deposition testimony have been made public, opening the kimono on the dealer’s typically discreet business affairs.

This unusual drumbeat of bad news has the art world muttering about a once-unthinkable possibility: could the invincible Larry Gagosian actually be in real trouble? Could a “post-Gagosian era,” as one longtime art writer put it, be at hand?

Is Go-Go a goner?

“People are saying, ‘The whole Gagosian empire is falling apart!’” the prominent collector said.“‘Oh, the whole thing is going to collapse!’ There’s a lot of jealousy.” Art world sources contacted by The Observer were universal in their praise of Mr. Gagosian’s business instincts and his curatorial acumen, noting with particular approval the many influential museum-quality exhibitions his galleries have mounted over the years. They also called him tough, Machiavellian and hard on his employees, a thick-skinned bunch for whom a ready box of Puffs is nonetheless said to be standard equipment. Many sounded mirthful about his string of difficulties. And they all flatly refused to be quoted by name.

“Look, Larry is not a liar, he’s not a cheat,” said the collector. “But he is a frigging bully. He’s very good at intimidating people and running his social pressure on them, and he’s good at image-making, putting out the idea that everything he touches turns to gold. Which of course is bullshit. It worked for a certain amount of time, but no longer.”

Larry Gagosian (Getty)

A spokesperson for Gagosian did not respond to a request for comment, but in a 2010 interview with the Financial Times, the dealer defended his approach: “As long as you behave well, there’s nothing wrong with being aggressive,” he said.

“Everyone wants to see Larry fail,” the adviser noted. “I’m not in that camp. I think he’s extraordinary. Maybe it’s just his time, though. One thing after another put a chink in the armor.”

Mr. Perelman, the billionaire investor and chairman of Revlon, has been a client of Mr. Gagosian’s for more than two decades. The two of them are also, as Mr. Perelman noted pointedly in his lawsuit, longtime friends and business partners (both are investors in the Blue Parrot restaurant in East Hampton). “Accordingly,” the original complaint put it, “Gagosian owed Plaintiffs the highest degree of loyalty and fair dealing.”

In other words: this time, it’s personal.

The rather complicated suit concerns a series of deals—both purchases and trades—between Mr. Perelman and Gagosian Gallery, including a $4 million sculpture by Mr. Koons, Popeye,and works by Richard Serra and Cy Twombly. Mr. Perelman alleges that in multiple instances, Mr. Gagosian misrepresented the market value of these works in order to maximize his own cut on various transactions. Mr. Gagosian’s legal team declined to comment on the Perelman case or any other pending legal matter.

None of the art-world insiders The Observer spoke to believed Mr. Perelman would prevail, and some noted that the complaint served mostly to advertise the plaintiff’s apparent, if implausible, naïveté. There is, for instance, the contention that “Plaintiffs depended on defendants, whose knowledge of the market and judgment in these matters were without peer, for their decisions with respect to art transactions,” which is a little like relying on the salesgirl at H&M to tell you whether your butt looks big in that sequined A-line cocktail dress. It’s her job to move merchandise.

“That’s the game,” said one well-regarded art adviser who has worked with both men. “They’re all in the game together—Perelman’s like that, too.” Likening the relationship to a marriage gone bad, the adviser added, “People get along for years, and then they get a divorce and want to kill each other.”

“I think Ron would sue his dog-walker, and he probably already has,” the collector noted.

Despite Mr. Perelman’s well-established litigious streak, the move raised eyebrows because it seemed to violate the omertà that has long prevailed in the art world. “It’s shocking,” said the art consultant. “It’s a very respected collector standing up to Gagosian for the first time, and doing so in a very public way, saying, basically, ‘I’m not going to take this shit anymore. I’m not going to dummy up.’ I think that’s what’s happening here—when somebody’s the king of the world, nobody wants to alienate them, but the minute people start to defect, they all start piling on.”

If so, Mr. Gagosian might want to seek the advice of his onetime boss Michael Ovitz, for whom he worked as secretary for a brief period in the 1970s. Years later, after co-founding CAA, Mr. Ovitz came to rule Hollywood in much the way Mr. Gagosian dominates the art world; when the spell was broken, with Mr. Ovitz’s firing from Disney in 1997, the many enemies he’d made along the way lined up to get their licks in.

Whatever its chances of success, the Perelman suit raises a thorny issue for the art world: what information, if any, must a dealer disclose to those with whom he does business, be they artist, buyer or seller? As Mr. Perelman’s complaint claimed, “Unbeknownst to his customers, Gagosian and the Gallery are often on all sides of the transaction—representing the buyer, the seller and the artist—and they use these multiple roles to their advantage by undervaluing works when purchasing them, overvaluing them when selling them, and pocketing the substantial differential.”

Which sounds like a pretty good definition of the gallery trade, except maybe the part about it being unbeknownst to anyone.

Another recent lawsuit also raised the matter of Mr. Gagosian’s supposed fiduciary duty to a client, and some onlookers believe the case may redefine the way business is done in the art world.

An edition of Roy Lichtenstein's 'Girl in Mirror' at Sotheby's in London.

In 1964, Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl in Mirror—an “enamel” on steel, made in an edition of eight—was a newly minted, fresh-faced ingenue with a bright future and the world at her feet. Today, a little worse for wear, she has emerged as the unwitting subject of a $15 million lawsuit filed by lawyers for art collector Jan Cowles. Ms. Cowles, 93, suffers from dementia, and the suit filed on her behalf alleges that her son, Charles Cowles, who put the Lichtenstein on consignment with Mr. Gagosian and then sold it to him, did not have the authority to do so—and therefore the dealer had no right to sell it to a third party. The suit further alleges that Mr. Gagosian took advantage of Mr. Cowles, who was in tough financial straits, to obtain an unusually rich commission on the sale.

Mr. Cowles, it should be noted, is no novice in the art trade: a longtime dealer himself, he ran a New York gallery for 30 years until closing it in 2009. What’s more, he has a history of unloading works from his mother’s collection—as it turns out, sometimes without her say-so. Indeed, in a settlement agreement between Jan and Charles filed earlier this year after Jan’s attorneys threatened legal action against him, Charles admitted to selling his mother’s art without permission and agreed to pay her back. How he will do so is hard to fathom, though, since the amount owed is said to be approximately $12 million, and Mr. Cowles has no apparent source of income.

In a November court proceeding, the defense stated its intention to add Charles Cowles to the case, a move that the court seemed to approve of. “Well, I’ve been surprised that the son wasn’t brought into the action initially,” Judge Charles Ramos admitted. The defense also indicated that it was considering adding Lester Marks, Ms. Cowles’s accountant and attorney-in-fact, to the case, on the theory that he may have some liability in failing to prevent Charles from selling the artworks.

In late November, both sides agreed to move forward with voluntary mediation, putting litigation on pause.

The Girl in Mirror controversy began in March 2011 with a suit filed over another unauthorized sale. Art collector Robert Wylde sued Gagosian Gallery for fraud after Mr. Gagosian sold Mr. Wylde a Mark Tansey painting, The Innocent Eye Test, that had been consigned by Charles Cowles. It turned out the painting did not belong to Mr. Cowles, but instead was jointly owned by his mother and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mr. Cowles was quick to take responsibility for the debacle. “I didn’t even think about whether the Met owned part of it or not,” he told The New York Times after Mr. Wylde filed suit. “And one day I saw it on the wall and thought, ‘Hey, I could use money’ and so I decided to sell it ... And now it’s a big mess.”

Mr. Cowles, whom Mr. Gagosian referred to in a deposition as “a train wreck,” has claimed in an affidavit that he has been treated for memory problems in recent years. He did not respond to requests for comment.

But Charles Cowles wasn’t the one being sued. Mr. Wylde sought $6 million in damages from Mr. Gagosian for selling him a work without proper title, and Mr. Wylde was sued in turn by Ms. Cowles, who demanded the painting back. The case was settled last October. Mr. Gagosian paid Mr. Wylde $4.4 million, Mr. Wylde returned the painting to Jan Cowles, and Ms. Cowles promptly gifted the painting to the Met, where it is now on display.

For Mr. Gagosian, though, l’affaire Cowles was far from over. The Tansey deal, it transpired, had been part of a larger transaction between Mr. Cowles and Gagosian Gallery in August 2009 that also included Girl in Mirror.

Though the dealer the originally told Charles he expected to sell the enamel for at least $3 million, of which Cowles would receive $2.5 million, he had been unable to do so, eventually paying Charles a total of $3 million for both paintings.

In January, Ms. Cowles filed suit over the Lichtenstein. In addition to taking issue with the unauthorized sale, the suit alleged that Mr. Gagosian falsely claimed the piece was damaged in order to induce Charles to accept a lowball price of just $1 million. Evidence revealed that the work had been restored and showed discoloration and wear, but it remains unclear how much its condition should have affected the price.

In papers filed in March, Ms. Cowles’s lawyer, David Baum—an aggressive litigator whose Facebook posts taunting Mr. Gagosian briefly made their way into the proceedings—brought to light an explosive email. The message was sent to Thompson Dean, the enamel’s eventual buyer, by Gagosian Gallery director Deborah McLeod in July 2009, a month after Charles Cowles announced he was shuttering his own art gallery: “Seller now in terrible straits and needs cash,” she wrote. “Are you interested in making a cruel and offensive offer? Come on, want to try?”

Ms. McLeod had initially approached Mr. Dean about the piece in January, at a price of $3.5 million, but he’d cited liquidity issues, suggesting they get “creative/attractive” on the price. By summer 2009, the recession was in full effect, and Mr. Dean got his Lichtenstein for $2 million. “Approx. half off, so I like it,” Ms. McLeod wrote him. Without disclosing to Charles Cowles that a buyer had made any offer for the piece—and certainly not $2 million—the gallery offered to take both the Lichtenstein and the Tansey off his hands for a total of $3 million. Of that, $1 million was earmarked for the Lichtenstein, which meant a hefty 50 percent commission for Gagosian. Mr. Cowles bit.

Mark Tansey's 'The Innocent Eye Test,' 1981.

The complaint alleges that the gallery breached its fiduciary duty to Charles Cowles by working both sides of the deal without full disclosure—in effect using knowledge of Charles’s desperate financial condition to solicit a lowball offer, then lowballing him further and pocketing the difference. Ms. Cowles is asking for some $15 million, which includes the value of the painting plus interest and $10 million in punitive damages.

The art adviser we spoke to recalled seeing the enamel in Basel, where Mr. Gagosian had placed it on view. “It was a tough year,” the adviser said, noting the recession underway at the time. “But you know Larry got somebody to buy it and led Charlie to the bone and took the most monstrous commission anyone’s ever heard of in the art world.”

That said, everyone knows a smart dealer will maximize his profits, and of course Charles Cowles—whatever his personal circumstances—was under no obligation to accept the $1 million offer.

How one views the case is a matter of perspective. Whereas writer Felix Salmon wrote that the deal smacked of “skulduggery,” Art Market Monitor thought the emails merely “show[ed] a high pressure sales organization working hard to make a deal. Though Gagosian made $1 million on the sale himself, I doubt he rubbed his hands with glee. No one in 2009 was confident they would be able to cover their overhead.” Besides, while Mr. Cowles’s financial situation was in fact dire, that’s hardly an uncommon circumstance for collectors looking to part with works of art.

“Look, Larry’s fine to take a million if he can get away with it,” the art adviser admitted. “But seeing the inner workings of the conversation and the McLeod email casts a very poor light on how business is done. I’ve heard a lot of rumblings from collectors wondering about whether they’ve gotten a fair shake in their deals.”

In the art market there are, broadly speaking, two ways to structure a resale. The first is a consignment. The seller consigns an artwork to a selling agent, who markets it on his behalf, taking a percentage of the sale as commission. The second is a buy/sell, in which the agent buys the work from a seller and sells it on to a buyer. At the time Mr. Gagosian got his offer from Thompson Dean, Girl in Mirror was still on consignment. It subsequently appears to have morphed into a buy/sell.

When the judge denied Mr. Gagosian’s motion to dismiss the Lichtenstein case in September, he noted that “Gagosian, as an agent acting on behalf of its consignor, had a fiduciary duty to act in the utmost good faith and in the interest of Charles, its principal, throughout their relationship.” The standard desk reference on art law—which, as it happens, is co-authored by longtime Gagosian attorney Ralph Lerner—takes the same view: “On accepting works from an artist on consignment,” it reads, “the dealer becomes the artist’s agent, and the law of agency applies.”

Should the case go to trial, it may turn in part on whether Mr. Cowles’s role in the transaction is seen as comparable to that of an artist or consignor, or if he was acting as a fellow dealer instead, and was therefore not owed the same fiduciary duty—as the defense will likely contend.

Nonetheless, in his deposition, Mr. Gagosian indicated that throughout his career he has represented both sides of transactions without disclosure of that fact to either party. “To be honest with you, the question hardly ever gets asked,” he said. “I never get asked the question, ‘Are you representing both sides?’” He said he thought the information was “implicit,” adding that “My objective is to pay the seller and to make a profit for the gallery.”

“Lawyers and past clients of Gagosian’s who are not of good will would definitely find ammunition in that type of testimony,” said longtime art lawyer Thomas Danziger. But Mr. Gagosian, Mr. Danziger added, “is the most important and most successful art dealer out there. If he believes this is correct, it should be no surprise that other dealers feel the same way.”

Fiduciary duty is “not well [enough] understood” in the art trade, Mr. Danziger said. “Larry Gagosian’s view as expressed in the deposition might even be the majority view among art dealers, which is that they are representing ‘the deal.’ In point of fact and under New York agency law, you cannot represent both parties on the same transaction unless there is full and informed consent, and that is clearly what has been missing in a lot of transactions we’ve been reading about.”

Whatever the outcome of the Cowles and Perelman suits, many think change is long overdue. “People are going to have to be regulated,” the art adviser said. “More transparency may just be what everybody needs. Then again, maybe if you regulate the art world, it will fall apart.”

“A lot of people think this is the end of the art world as we know it,” the consultant agreed.

As for Mr. Gagosian, the recent patch of rough ice has exposed him—and the freewheeling industry he has helped to create—to unaccustomed scrutiny.” He puts winning first, and he doesn’t care who he steps on or screws,” the advisor said, “but that’s what it takes. It’s all a snake pit. These people deserve each other. And when you think about it, it’s all quite entertaining and amusing.

“The art world is constant entertainment.”

agell@observer.com

"DJED" (2009-2011) by Matthew Barney.

The materials of Richard Serra’s two enormous new sculptures, currently dominating the Gagosian Gallery on 24th Street, will be recognizable to anyone who knows Mr. Serra’s work. They’re made from curved, continuous steel plates more than thirteen feet high, rusted into shades from powdery orange to Martian mahogany, and marked with what are or appear to be scales, drips, streaks, stretch marks, shadows, calcium deposits, water stains, and lightning bolts. The rust continues so evenly that it’s only the occasional glint of a silvery, unrusted corner that looks like evidence of the human hand. Seen from above, their shapes are also recognizable: Cycle is a triskelion composed of three floppy, interlocking “S”s, which create three roughly circular clearings and three spiraling corridors. Junction, also made of steel plates doubled into corridors, looks more like a pinched, four-pointed star.

An abundance of visual references presents itself, too. Two great, bowed curves meeting in a single opening—the visitor’s first view of Cycle—seem to mean something clear enough, particularly when, on closer inspection, the one opening actually offers two, one leading quickly into an empty round chamber, the other continuing on with narrow walls that move rhythmically together and apart. Walking between them doesn’t feel like something that should be done in public. But then that tunnel becomes a primordial cave, and the cave becomes the ocean, and the swaying of the walls, the tides, and you pass glaciers and teepees and burial mounds and abattoirs until you emerge into a grotto where a surprising patch of light falls on a splash of brighter orange. When you stop walking, you see nothing but steel.

Because the only place you can see Junction and Cycle from above is in photos on the gallery’s website. The impossibility of seeing the whole of a piece from any single angle, a defining feature of sculpture as a medium, is raised in Serra’s work to a monumental haughtiness. Their size and the size of their fame always draw an audience—people take pictures of their friends against the rust while little children go running past them—but it’s an audience that’s merely permitted, not required. And the pieces are certainly activated by walking. Every step reveals a new grand gesture of color and shape, and a numinous presence seems to hover behind you as you move. But the effect is less like art speaking to you than it is like a striking desert vista changing the way you hear yourself. Even the strips of black rubber hidden between the joints read like some geological buildup. It’s sculpture that can be looked at but refuses to be seen.

Matthew Barney’s “DJED” at Gladstone Gallery, another crowded spectacle, is equally monumental in its conception and also uses large quantities of metal to imposing effect. But where Serra’s monuments can be remote, casting off emotion, images, and ideas with the same indifferent tranquility, the four large sculptures here have, if anything, as many ideas as they can handle.

Canopic Chest, DJED, Secret Name, and Sacrificial Anode, being shown along with a dozen drawings, were made in connection with a multi-part, multiple-site-specific, not yet completed opera—directed with Jonathan Bepler, who also wrote the music—that takes its name and its conceit from Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient Evenings. Mailer’s novel follows one ancient Egyptian soul through death and rebirth in three successive incarnations; in Mr. Barney’s opera—which hovers over “DJED” like the ghost of Egyptian grandeur over the British Museum—the hero is incarnate as multiple cars: a 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial, a ‘79 Trans Am, and a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria.

DJED, twenty-five tons of iron poured live during the performance of the opera’s third act in Detroit, is now a smokey gray puddle with two spindly tributaries flowing out to two hard graphite blocks, with a casting of a car’s  undercarriage set beside it. Secret Name is a broken, melting bathtub cast in lead and partially covered in white plastic. (There’s also a short, thick wall of black plastic, a piece of copper with the texture of scorched pig skin, and a self-consciously arranged cast lead rope.) Secret Name shares with DJED the power of its monumental scale, which, even prior to its particular formal details, inspires you to imagine our small American stories with the silent, alien grandeur of the distant past. Sacrificial Anode, meanwhile, a row of crowbars and rods cast in zinc and arranged on a white plastic beam, marks out an intriguing alternate direction: the smallest piece, it’s also the only one that could really stand alone as a sculpture without the context of the larger project.

The supporting mythology of divine incest, murder, and miraculous rebirth, as detailed in the illustrated libretto booklet, seems disturbingly well chosen and fresh. After Osiris, the prototypical Egyptian god-king, is murdered and dismembered by Set, for example, his wife Isis finds and reassembles all of the pieces except the penis, which she can’t find and so replaces with a replica made of gold. Canopic Chest is a bronze casting that looks like a pile of black slag molded into the shape of a car hood and infested with short lengths of protruding wire, and on top of it there rests a long, golden, ibis-shaped crowbar. What could possibly be a better metaphor for where we stand as a country than a reassembled Chrysler sarcophagus with a prosthetic gold penis?

editorial@observer.com

Raymond Pettibon's "No Title (But the sand...)," made for the auction and expected to sell for between $300,000 and $500,000.

This morning, before the press preview of the 26 works expected to bring in some $10 million in the Artists For Haiti charity auction at Christie’s on Thursday, the assembled press waited in the foyer just beyond the entrance to the auction house. Flipping through the Raymond Pettibon-covered catalog, which includes works by Urs Fischer, Chuck Close, Neo Rauch and Luc Tuymans, the media representatives — mostly photographers — sat on red leather couches before giant videos of G.E. Smith of the Saturday Night Live Band hanging out with Richard Gere and playing his guitars (going to auction on Oct. 11 with 107 lots). Members of a Swedish TV crew stood near the entrance, fiddling with a boom mike with an unrecognizable logo.

“Ben!” said a press person with open arms, as Ben Stiller walked through the front door. Mr. Stiller greeted Chelsea art dealer David Zwirner, and he greeted Amy Cappellazzo, chairman of the Christie’s post-war and contemporary art department. He greeted representatives of charities in Haiti. Though there were only some 20 assembled people in total (there was another preview at the gallery earlier this month), it would be at least two minutes of greeting before he was even able to hand off his sunglasses to a woman trailing him, which he did as the group walked to the gallery off the main staircase.

In his welcoming remarks, Mr. Zwirner spoke of the trip he took to Haiti with Mr. Stiller shortly after the actor came to him with the idea for the auction, and thanked the participating artists and galleries, among them Acquavella, Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth.

“The dealers who represent these artists were equally generous, so I thank my colleagues,” Mr. Zwirner said. “It’s a very competitive field, and it’s a great experience to turn the in-fighting into a joint effort.”

After those welcoming words, Ms. Cappellazzo, Mr. Stiller and Mr. Zwirner took a stroll around the gallery as flashbulbs went off and the boom mike angled.

“By the way, that’s a bikini thong,” Mr. Stiller said, pausing at a crescent-shaped Jeff Koons silkscreen of a sunset. He explained that he’d met Mr. Koons at an event over a year ago and his was the first number he called when he had the idea for the auction. Mr Koons was instantly on board. “When I went to David and I said I got Jeff Koons, that really meant something to him, and I think it really kick-started the whole thing.

“So this thong is really meaningful to me,” he waved his hand over it to wrap up the speech, to laughter.

Mr. Stiller started his flirtation with the art world about a year ago, he told The Observer after the press event, and met Mr. Zwirner through Steve Martin. His interest in the Chelsea life sprang largely from friends like Owen Wilson who have already made their entrees to collecting. (Mr. Wilson apparently collects American contemporary work like Donald Judd). After securing the Koons, Mr. Zwirner made overtures to his artists and others, bringing Mr. Stiller with him on studio visits. The two stopped by Urs Fischer’s workspace in Red Hook together. “It was insane,” Ms Stiller said. “He gave me this crazy print of this he-she female guy I can’t even unroll because my children would freak out.”

“It’s not dirty, it’s just…” he trailed off. “Terrifying. In a fun way.”

Walking into the next room during the tour, Ms. Cappellazzo explained that not just up-and-coming artists were represented in the auction; plenty of the “old guard” was represented too. She led the pack to the Jasper Johns.

“This is a very classic work on Mylar, signature style, with the ink washed throughout the top,” she said. “For anyone who’s a sign-language aficionado, you will see that he spells his own name in sign language.”

“Can I just say something about Jasper Johns?” Mr. Stiller asked the assembled cluster, holding up his hands to stop the crawl. He pointed at the work. “Keep your eye on this guy.”

Mr. Johns is represented by Matthew Marks, who convinced the artist to join the cause.

"We’re just colleagues, Matthew and I," Mr. Zwirner said. "We're not friends. He doesn’t owe me a favor, so it was a very positive experience for him to say yes."

Asked whether it was easier to go through galleries or artists for the auction, Mr. Zwirner said he found the artists to be easier, despite the fact that, unlike galleries, they cannot claim a tax deduction on anything besides the materials used in the work.

“It’s very hard for the artist to say no. One of the jobs of the galleries is to protect the artists,” he said. "Let me put it this way — quite often I got an initial ‘no’ and then asked for a second session where I got the ‘maybe’ and then the third where I got a 'yes.'”

“I was sneaky," he added. "I brought along a lot of photographs that we took down in Haiti.”

“We were way on-board before artists were committed,” Ms. Cappellazzo told The Observer. Christie’s has waved its fees and commissions for hosting the sale. “We were useful in suggesting what kinds of works would be the most commercial, helping to value them. We’re very involved in selling the sale, that is to say, reaching out to a lot of our clients who are interested in things here, who might not be David’s clients or other dealers’ clients. We know, for example, who buys Chris Ofili, who buys Rudi Stingel, because we sell them at auction.”

After the tour of the works and the end of a brief question session, Mr. Zwirner began to wander away, but Ms. Cappellazzo motioned him back with an arm swoop for a group photo in front of one of the works. A photographer poked his head out from behind his camera and recommended that they choose another piece, since the Dan Flavin — a diamond-shaped light installation — was so bright that it would have ruined any photos.

“Oh, not the Flavin — of course!” Mr. Cappellazzo said looking behind her as she waved the group to the right. “It wouldn’t become us!”

The works hit the block on Thursday evening at 7 p.m.

Let's make a deal. (Getty)

For five years, the Harkness Mansion lay vacant, a shell of its former record-setting self. Built in 1896 by shipping magnate Nathaniel McCready, it would change hands over the years among the city’s industrial elite. IBM president Thomas Watson bought the home in 1939 and sold it years later to the Harknesses, Standard Oil investors who also owned a mansion across the street. It was turned into a studio and school for the Harkness ballet company in the 1960s. In 1987, Jacqui Safra, the Swiss banking heir and Woody Allen investor, bought the rare, 50-foot-wide limestone mansion for $6.9 million. Two decades later, just as the real estate bubble was on the verge of bursting, private equity impresario J. Christopher Flowers dropped a staggering $53 million on the 20,000-square-foot home, the highest price ever for a residential property in the city.

Shortly after taking over the home, he began demolishing the interiors, preparing for a top-to-bottom gut renovation that would cost millions of dollars more. Instead, it was Mr. Flowers who got hit in the gut, when his wife asked for a divorce. For two years, the manse went wanting because buyers tend to prefer a move-in-ready home. “It was a black hole,” Mr. Flower’s broker, Brown Harris Stevens’s Sami Hassoumi, told The Observer last Thursday. “What I was showing wasn’t a house, it was a construction site. I had a temporary construction staircase that was scary. We had to wear hard hats.”

For most buyers, this would have been a nightmare. Not for Larry Gagosian, proprietor of the eponymous gallery empire, which is headquartered two short blocks away at 980 Madison. Not only does he pick up one of the most coveted properties in the city, but like the art he swaps on a regular basis, it was achieved through a deal that almost no one else could have expected or achieved. “They said they weren’t taking a penny less than $40 million,” broker A. Laurence Kaiser said. “And look what he got it for.” He got it for $36.5 million.

Mr. Gagosian’s purchase of the home is in some ways no different from his approach at auction. He knows how to spot value, an opportunity. Witness his purchase, last November, of a 1980 painting by Roy Lichtenstein for $2 million at Christie’s. Mr. Gagosian stayed until the bitter end of the auction to pick up the picture—it did not have many other bidders. In his booth at the Art Basel fair in June, the painting was on offer for $5 million.

It would not be surprising for Mr. Gagosian to fix up the Harkness, give it his signature shine, and sell it for well more than Mr. Flowers paid in a decade or two. For that matter, consider Mr. Gagosian’s savvy purchase, in 1999, of the West 24th Street building that now houses his gallery there. He bought it from the Gambino family for $5.75 million. In 2007, it was estimated to be valued at around $40 million, with air rights.

In the meantime, the Harkness is so much more and so much less than a home to Mr. Gagosian. It is a would-be gallery, a statement of intentions, a way of life, just another deal on the way to countless more. A showcase, a showpiece, a show stopper. “He thinks of himself as a billionaire and wants the lifestyle of a billionaire,” said one collector who does business with Mr. Gagosian. He shuttles between his 11 worldwide galleries on his private jet; two years ago he had Christian Liaigre design a home for him in the ultimate billionaire vacation spot: Flamand’s Beach, on St. Barth’s. Now he has the Fifth Avenue mansion to go with all that.

For someone who grew up in a modest home in Los Angeles, Mr. Gagosian’s art has always been entwined with the buildings in which he shows it, perhaps more so than any other gallerist to come before him. Fifteen years ago, Mark Stevens, then the art critic for New York magazine, wrote an article describing the look of what he called “power galleries.” Mr. Gagosian told him, “I’m out there, I don’t hide. People say ‘high profile.’ I’m not doing it because I want to be high profile. That’s the tail wagging the dog. Somebody said, ‘Why don’t you live in a little house with an old car? Nobody will write about you.’ But I grew up in a little house with an old car.”

From Venice, Calif., to the Upper East Side, Soho to Chelsea, and around the globe, the lengths to which Larry Gagosian goes to present his art are unparalleled, and now he owns the ultimate stage. In buying the Harkness Mansion, Mr. Gagosian not only purchased a century-old limestone shell, he also purchased a regal facade, into which he can pour his architectural and artistic dreams.

The gallery. (Property Shark)

Real estate is woven inextricably into Mr. Gagosian’s art world ascent. “If I weren’t doing this, I’d probably be in real estate,” he told then-Village Voice art critic Peter Schjeldahl in 1981. The New Yorker had come to L.A. to assess the local art scene, and in Mr. Gagosian’s gallery he found “the cold excitements of money.” An early profile observed that Mr. Gagosian “works in a manner more typical of real estate developers and movie executives.”

By this point, what is perhaps lost in the sands of time is the simple fact that Mr. Gagosian’s empire is built on a single, canny real estate move. In the early 1970s, when he was in his 20s, he spotted a vacant patio space in an old Spanish building in the center of Los Angeles’s Westwood Village. “It just struck me that that would be just prime real estate—why is it sitting there?” he said in an early interview. “So I found out who owned the building and I asked him whether I could rent this vacant courtyard for an arts-and-crafts kind of show there.” Mr. Gagosian, who was then selling posters, paid the first month’s rent of $75 with a loan from his mother. According to a 1972 article in the Los Angeles Times, he charged the 25 craftsmen manning the card tables that made up his Open Gallery—they sold things like purses and candles—$6 a day plus 10 percent of their gross.

Once an art dealer, he was no stranger to living with his work. Seven years before he rented the ground-floor space in artist Sandro Chia’s studio building on West 23rd Street in 1985, Mr. Gagosian briefly operated a private gallery in a loft at 421 West Broadway, in collaboration with the dealer Annina Nosei. Mr. Gagosian was spending most of his time at his gallery in Los Angeles then, but when in New York he continued to live in the loft even after he opened in Chelsea. (Mr. Gagosian has said he bought that loft in 1978 for $10,000 and a Brice Marden painting. Peter Marino did the renovations.)

In his native Los Angeles, Mr. Gagosian briefly ran a similar operation in the early 1980s. In addition to his gallery in West Hollywood, Mr. Gagosian held at least one exhibition in a building he built on Market Street in Venice, which also served as his Los Angeles home. In the late ’70s, before Venice gentrified, Mr. Gagosian pounced on a vacant lot there and hired the architectural firm Studio Works to create an innovative structure for him. In the late 1980s, it sold to Andy Summers, guitarist from rock band the Police, and on the occasion of L.A.’s bicentennial, it was designated one of the 200 most significant buildings of the past 200 years.

Craig Hodgetts, who ran Studio Works with Robert Mangurian, recalled the day Mr. Gagosian walked into the architects’ office on the Venice boardwalk. “We were on the beach and had a garage door we left open. This guy comes through the door, looks around the office, and says, ‘Are you guys architects? I just bought a property around the corner and I wonder if you would be interested in designing something.’” It was seemingly casual, but in hindsight, Mr. Hodgetts said, “I think he knew exactly what he was doing.” He must have known a bit about architecture, since he had been living in the Richard Neutra-designed Strathmore building in Westwood, in the same apartment Charles Eames once called home.

And then there is Toad Hall. The spectacular beach house in Amagansett was built for Francois de Menil by architect Charles Gwathmey in 1979, one of the postmodernists’ most celebrated homes. Mr. de Menil sold the home 12 years later, after “a lifestyle change.” It went on the market for $12 million, and while the price is not known, it was bought after a bidding war between Edgar Bronfman, Jr., who prevailed, and Mr. Gagosian. In the early 1990s, the newly divorced Mr. Bronfman bought a townhouse on East 73rd Street, and his broker, Roger Erickson, leafleted the neighborhood to promote his business. “I get so much junk mail from you,” Mr. Gagosian told him, according to a New York magazine profile of the broker. “But since you’ve bothered me again, I’ll ask you if Bronfman wants to sell his house in Amagansett.” Just like the Harkness deal with Mr. Flowers, it was a broken man in a broken economy. Mr. Gagosian got his beach house, and he only paid $8.15 million for it.

Mr. Gagosian mixes work and hearth to this day. On Oscars weekend this year, he installed an exhibition of artworks by Richard Prince at his new Holmby Hills home in L.A.—he had just purchased it for a cool $15.5 million the year before—and hosted a tony get-together there. According to The Wall Street Journal, members of his staff “mingled with guests, discreetly passing a rolled-up sheet of paper between them like a baton. The sheet listed prices for nearly every artwork in sight.”

Indeed, a similar air of showiness suffuses Mr. Gagosian’s current home—which he bought in 1988 from Schlumberger heiress Christophe de Menil—inside a converted stable at 147 East 69th Street. (The street has long been a haven for artistic types—Mark Rothko had and Jacob Collins has a studio down the block.) Pieces from his prodigious private collection hang on the walls, including Richard Prince, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Damien Hirst, Roy Lichtenstein and countless contemporaries. Photos of a 2009 party there reveal guests swilling wine feet from multimillion-dollar paintings. Mr. Gagosian is said to have what may be Picasso’s last painting hanging over his bed.

The carriage house. (Property Shark)

While The Observer would never attempt to divine what goes on in Larry Gagosian’s head, based on discussions with real estate and art world experts, it is quite possible the Harkness Mansion could serve, in some capacity, as gallery, showroom, salon.

“The answer is, yes, it’s been done,” an attorney who specializes in zoning told The Observer. “It’s a residential district, which precludes any commercial use, but there is nothing stopping him from putting a gallery in the first few floors.”

The mansion’s cavernous 20,000 square feet could not be entirely given over to art, because the Department of Buildings still requires certain amenities for a residential building to get its certificate of occupancy. In this case, that includes a kitchen and at least one bedroom. The residences could occupy a few floors, or be nothing much more than a garret in the sixth-floor attic.

There are still further restrictions on a gallery conversion. There can be no separate entrances for the home and the gallery and no signage on the doors. Business hours are strictly forbidden—this is not a venue for public viewings. “But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t throw a party there every night if you wanted,” said the attorney.

The stately house would be a nice addition to the 11-gallery Gagosian empire, his most upscale space so far. Yet Mr. Gagosian would not want to go abandoning the mothership at 980 Madison, either. The biggest restriction of all is that no commercial activity could take place in the home. Even for the notoriously behind-closed-doors Mr. Gagosian, the convenience of going around the corner to sign over art would be essential.

Galleries in townhouses on quiet Upper East Side streets are nothing new. L&M Arts operates one, as does Marianne Boesky. Unlike Mr. Gagosian’s new manse, both are partly zoned for commercial use. In Ms. Boesky’s case, it was a doctor’s office on the ground floor that was converted to a gallery in 1971, according to city records. Still, this did not keep her from staging the “dwelling” show in the spring, occupying every floor of the brownstone. Just because it’s a bedroom does not mean it cannot also become a gallery space.

Allan Stone lived over the shop on East 90th Street for 16 years until his death in 2006. The converted firehouse was sold this summer for $9.875 million and is reportedly being turned back into a single-family home. Richard Feigen’s gallery is located on the first few floors of his home, but any sales must be done off-site due to the aforementioned residential restrictions.

Perhaps the best known—if most notorious—example of a gallery inside an Upper East Side mansion was the $150,000-a-month 71st Street palace that another Larry once occupied. The disgraced Salander O’Reilly, at 22 East 71st Street, actually lay within a commercial district, making sales there legit. Well, legit from a zoning perspective.

The mansion. (Property Shark)

Still, odds are this will be nothing more than a home for Mr. Gagosian, which is to say, of course, that it will be a gallery, as well, or more than a gallery, even. The thrill of buying off the gallerist’s walls is paramount, and at three times the size of Mr. Gagosian’s current home, oh, will there ever be a lot of wallspace. His current house is by all accounts stunning but has relatively small entertaining areas. A good portion of one floor is occupied by a lap pool.

While few of the mansion’s original details remain, the soaring, five-story atrium, which used to be an entrance for horse-drawn carriages, remains—big enough for a Serra or two. And it gives his stable of beloved architects plenty of space to play with. Like the 1,200-square-foot terrace looking across the avenue to the park, all of it perfect for entertaining.

And that is precisely the point.

The collector familiar with Mr. Gagosian insisted that the art on the dealer’s walls is his own collection and is not for sale. Yet it serves a purpose even more important than sales, as an example to the guests he entertains. This is how a megawealthy person can live, should live, must live—with great art. A visitor might think, I could live like this. If that visitor decided to do so, he or she would know where to go to buy such things.

“Is it anything a standard gallery person could do and get away with? Probably not,” said one source. “It’s not something Gavin Brown could or even would do. But Larry’s a word-of-mouth, private-client, private-banking kind of guy. It won’t be his gallery. It will be his salon.”

Or, it could just be his home. He is, after all, perhaps the only art dealer who has managed to attain the lifestyle of his billionaire clients. It is about time he started really living like one.

With additional reporting by Elise Knutsen.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

The Mansion. (Property Shark)

While The Observer would never attempt to divine what goes on in Larry Gagosian's head, based on discussions with real estate and art world experts, we feel safe to say that the Harkness Mansion is more than a home. It could also serve, in some capacity, as gallery, showroom, salon.

"The answer is, yes, it's been done," an attorney who specializes in zoning told The Observer. "It's a residential district, which precludes any commercial use, but there is nothing stopping him from putting a gallery in the first few floors."

The massive 20,000-square-foot mansion could not be entirely given over to art, because the Department of Buildings still requires certain amenities for a residential building to get its certificate of occupancy. In this case, that includes a kitchen and at least one bedroom. The residences could occupy a few floors, or be nothing much more than a garret in the fifth-floor attic.

There are still further restrictions on the gallery plan. There can be no separate entrances for the home and the gallery and no signage on the doors. Business hours are strictly forbidden—this is not a venue for public viewings. "But that doesn't mean you couldn't throw a party there every night if you wanted," said the attorney.

The stately house would be a nice addition to the 11-gallery Gagosian empire, his most upscale space so far. Yet Mr. Gagosian would not want to go abandoning the mothership at 980 Madison, either. The biggest restriction of all is that no commercial activity could take place in the home. Even for the notoriously behind-closed-doors Mr. Gagosian, the convenience of going around the corner to sign over art would be essential.

A Gagosian spokesperson declined to comment on the gallerist's plans for his new home.

Still, Mr. Gagosian is just about the perfect buyer for the Harkness Mansion. As The Observer reported Thursday, one of the reasons J. Christopher Flowers was having such a hard time selling it, after paying a record $53 million in fall 2006, is because the Harkness had been gutted, in preparation for a renovation that was derailed by an acrimonious divorce.

Most buyers want something that is move-in ready, but assuming Mr. Gagosian plans to turn at least some portion of the mansion into a gallery, buying a shell actually makes that job easier. Not only does he save on demolition costs, but the shrewd dealer could also negotiate down the price of the home, which had been asking more than $40 million but sold for $36.5 million.

Galleries in townhouses on quiet Upper East Side streets are nothing new. L&M Arts operates one, as does Marianne Boesky. Unlike Mr. Gagosian's new manse, both are partly zoned for commercial use. In Ms. Boesky's case, it was a doctor's office on the ground floor that was converted to a gallery in 1971, according to city records. Still, this did not keep her from staging the “dwelling” show in the spring, occupying every floor of the brownstone. Just because it's a bedroom does not mean it cannot also become a gallery space.

Perhaps the best known—if most notorious—example of a gallery inside an Upper East Side mansion was the $150,000-a-month 71st Street palace that another Larry once occupied. The disgraced Salander O'Reilly, at 22 East 71st Street, actually lay within a commercial district, making sales there legit. Well, legit from a zoning perspective.

Allan Stone lived over the shop on East 90th Street for 16 years until his death in 2006. The converted firehouse was sold this summer for $9.875 million and is reportedly being turned back into a single family home. Richard Feigen's situation is very much like that of Mr. Gagosian, in that his gallery is located on the first few floors of his home, but any sales must be done off-site due to the aforementioned residential restrictions.

The carriage house. (Property Shark)

Something of a live/work space would not be unusual for Mr. Gagosian. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, before he got a space in Sandro Chia’s studio building on West 23rd Street in 1985, he operated a private gallery in a loft on West Broadway, where he continued to live after he opened in Chelsea. (In an early interview, Mr. Gagosian recalled buying that loft in 1978 for $10,000 and a Brice Marden painting.) The West Broadway space, which was at one time operated by Mr. Gagosian in cooperation with dealer Annina Nosei, was, in fact, where David Salle had his first New York exhibition.

In his native Los Angeles, Mr. Gagosian ran a similar operation in the 1980s. Exhibitions were held in a space on Market Street in Venice in a gallery that was attached to his home there. That building was designed for Mr. Gagosian by architect Robert Mangurian in the early 1980s.

He mixes work and hearth to this day. On Oscar weekend this year, Mr. Gagosian hosted a get together at his new Holmby Hills home in L.A.—he had just purchased it for a cool $15.5 million the year before. According to The Wall Street Journal, members of the staff “mingled with guests, discreetly passing a rolled-up sheet of paper between them like a baton. The sheet listed prices for nearly every artwork in sight.”

Indeed, a similar air of showiness suffuses Mr. Gagosian's current home inside a converted stable at 147 East 69th Street. (The street has long been a haven for artistic types—in addition to Mr. Feigen's gallery, Mark Rothko had and Jacob Collins has a studio on East 69th.) Pieces from his prodigious private collection hang on the walls, including Richard Prince, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Damien Hirst, Roy Lichtenstein and countless contemporaries. He is said to have what may be Picasso's last painting hanging over his bed.

Since the Harkness Mansion is more than three times as large as Mr. Gagosian's current 6,525-square-foot abode, it may well be the manse will be his new home. Which is to say that no Gagosian home is ever just a home. The Harkness gives him considerably more space in which to hang personal art, which everyone knows, despite appearances, is all always for sale. After all, buyers love buying off the gallerist's walls. It's an old trick that gives the art a personal touch and, naturally, drives up the price.

“Is it anything a standard gallery person could do and get away with? Probably not,” said one source. “It's not something Gavin Brown could or even would do. But Larry's a word of mouth, private client, private banking kind of guy. It won't be his gallery. It will be his salon.”

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Today Art Market Monitor's Marion Maneker spotted this snapshot of embattled mogul Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendi at the April Gagosian exhibition "Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: Amour Fou" in the gallery's Facebook album.

Mrs. Murdoch is an investor in the "Pandora for art" start-up Art.sy, which Larry Gagosian advises. But her most recent appearance on the art scene (on July 16, while Rome burned) was the Hamptons screening of "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan," hosted by rival Pace Gallery.

The painting pictured above depicts Picasso's decade-long muse and lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, to whom the Gagosian exhibition was devoted.

Jerry Saltz wrote of Walter:

Not only was she his submissive sexual conquest, artistic muse, psychic victim, and mother of his daughter; she’s the fleshy subject of some of his juiciest paintings. Picasso said she saved his life. And it’s true that from the moment she appears in his work, in early 1927, his art gets plusher and more immediate, catapulting him out of Cubism, paving the way for all his subsequent efforts. Marie-Thérèse is the fertile inspiration that made Picasso Picasso after Cubism.around the artist's

Picasso was 45 when he picked up the 17-year-old Walter with the line, "I am Picasso."

Mr. Murdoch was 66 when  met his third wife in Hong Kong in 1997. She was 29.

Donald Judd (2011) at David Zwirner.

While much of New York’s art world is away on a European grand tour—starting with the Venice Biennale, moving on to Art Basel, the annual art fair in Switzerland, which opens next week, and winding up in London for a round of auctions—a handful of museum-worthy exhibitions make this a good time to visit Chelsea’s galleries. Artists on view through June include both past masters (Pablo Picasso, Vladimir Tatlin, Donald Judd) and living legends (Jasper Johns, John Chamberlain).

If you are interested in the spectacle of powerful men having affairs—and judging from the recent media attention given to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Anthony Weiner, who isn’t?—it’s worth visiting Gagosian’s “Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou.”

This focused glimpse into the private lives of a famous man and his young, secret lover is curated by the couple’s granddaughter, the art historian Diana Widmaier Picasso (along with Picasso scholar John Richardson). It is a story of a very private arrangement told through 80 Picasso paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs.

The exhibition begins with photos of Marie-Thérèse Walter, a confident, sunny 17-year-old French girl. Picasso saw her on the street in 1927, when the already-famous artist was 45 and married to Ballets Russes star Olga Khokhlova. “I am Picasso,” he said to Marie-Thérèse. His name meant nothing to her, but she said later that she found him charming.

In snapshots of Marie-Thérèse taken in Monte Carlo and Chamonix, we recognize the blonde bob and Grecian nose of one of the great Picasso faces: the crescent profile of the women in Guernica, the female figure in many of his best works.

Their affair lasted for over a dozen years, with Picasso arranging for his lover to be near his family at all times. But it began as a secret even from their friends, and remained so, to a certain extent, even after Marie-Thérèse had their child in 1935. When people would catch a glimpse of the girl, he’d call her the gardener’s daughter.

In Nue endormie (1932) and Nu couché (1932), charcoal-on-canvas sketches of a sleeping Marie-Thérèse, undulating lines trace her body. In early paintings she is abstracted, her figure broken down into geometric shapes; in others she is shown with lips sewn shut, or reduced to a set of initials on a vase: a cryptic monogram hidden in plain view.

This show has a tension that derives from placing intimate matters on display. That their relationship was clandestine, that Gagosian keeps the lights so low, and that many of the works come from private collections creates a frisson of voyeurism: Picasso may have made these works to be seen, but seeing them in this context we feel we are getting a peek at something that wasn’t meant to be shown.

In paintings and drawings of Marie-Thérèse such as Femme nue dans un fauteuil rouge (1932) and La sieste (1932), Picasso drew attention to her breasts and pudenda. Judging by the number of sculptures in this show, he clearly enjoyed representing her voluptuous body in three dimensions. (One  Picasso catalogue notes dryly that the artist’s wife, Olga, a dancer, was flat-chested). Yet in his work, Marie-Thérèse also becomes an allegory for eternal youth, her skin rendered in lilac and a range of pinks. She is girlish even when most womanly, e.g., even when pictured nursing their daughter, Maya: while her nipples are depicted protruding pertly from her swollen breasts, her daughter might be a toy in her arms.

Most of all, Marie-Thérèse provided an endless site of experimentation for Picasso: sometimes she appears in electric, fauvist colors; other times the palette is muted; sometimes her figure is painted thickly and sometimes she is rendered by a single line; sometimes she is dressed up as the bride she would never become, Sleeping, thinking, reading, playing with dolls, nursing, Marie-Thérèse is a paradise of seemingly uncomplicated sexual and artistic fulfillment.

Some might consider Picasso a pederast for taking up with a girl not yet of the French age of consent. Yet he paints himself as the wounded minotaur. In Minotaure blessé et Naîade (1938), he is a love-sick boy or Humbert Humbert, the victim of his passion for a young girl. And yet, to hear him tell it, this passion is what restored him: he said at one point that meeting Marie-Thérèse saved his life.

In a film loop composed of old photographs, she seems happy, entertained by the adoration of Picasso’s camera, a model for only one pair of eyes.

The Gagosian exhibition is tightly focused: it omits Dora Maar, whom Picasso was seeing concurrently with Marie-Thérèse, as well as Françoise Gilot, his much-younger mistress through much of the 1940’s. Also missing is the postscript: his marriage to Jacqueline Roque in the 1960’s after his divorce from Olga in the 1950’s. (Roque, like Marie-Thérèse, took her own life after Picasso died.) It’s a show of strategic omissions and extraordinary visceral pleasures—a fitting framework for an affair.

It was not Picasso’s dreamy Marie-Thérèse paintings, but his cubist guitars that inspired the Russian Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin when Tatlin encountered them in Paris in 1914.

Shafrazi gallery’s exhibition of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1915-20) is dedicated to the dynamic architectural model of one of the most famous unbuilt buildings of the 20th century, on view for the first time in the United States.

Tatlin’s original 16-foot model was destroyed in 1932. The electric-powered piece at Shafrazi is a (rather disappointing) Swedish 1960’s scale reconstruction, albeit one with an impressive pedigree: it was built under the supervision of Tatlin’s original collaborator.

The 1,300-foot-tall behemoth this lost Constructivist curiosity anticipated ran into engineering problems and steel shortages and was never realized. Yet the utopian piece loomed large in the collective imagination of American artists of the 1960’s: during his lifetime the minimalist Dan Flavin, known for his fluorescent light tube sculptures, assembled 39 homages to Tatlin’s tower.

At Shafrazi, gears grind wearily, turning stacked geometric shapes intended to house branches of the Communist government. (The original model was operated by a small boy, hidden from view, turning a hand-crank.) The surrounding scaffolding is one part Eiffel tower and two parts vintage roller coaster. The structure is set at an improbable angle corresponding to the axis of the earth’s tilt.

Accompanying the Tatlin replica is a side exhibition, “Revolutionary Film Posters: Aesthetic Experiments of Russian Constructivism, 1920-1933,” consisting of two rooms of terrific vintage Soviet film posters shown to a blaring soundtrack of music from Sergei Eisenstein’s films. It is entertaining, but ultimately slight.

Tatlin’s notion of truth to materials—his belief that wood, metal and glass impose different necessary conditions on the art object—and his interest in the fusion of art and technology are one of the precursors of Donald Judd’s Minimalism, currently on view at David Zwirner.

Zwirner’s gallery, which recently began representing the Donald Judd foundation, reunites 12 works that figured in a 1989 Judd exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden. For obsessive enthusiasts of Judd’s work—and there are many—this chance to observe the first time Judd used colored anodized aluminum in such a large, floor-mounted format, as the gallery’s literature puts it, is cause for excitement.

For those not enticed by this formal description, however, there is the overall appearance of the exhibition. Light falls from the Zwirner skylights, catching each of the regal open aluminum boxes, hitting the orange and turquoise plexi interior panels and radiating onto the walls of the gray aluminum cubes. A subtle effect is produced that is both atmospheric and antiseptic.

From drawings on display we glean the logic of the show: large, open aluminum boxes with black, blue or orange inserts configured systematically; the dozen boxes together create a set of repeated forms.

Judd famously defined his works as “specific objects”—neither painting nor sculpture. He jettisoned most of the qualities that people associate with art (representation, flatness, composition) while retaining others (rectangularity, space, form and color). Judd’s objects are simple forms that employ new industrial materials like formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglass and brass.

As usual, Judd’s claim to the pure logic and compositional order seems suspect, and what you experience here is the beauty of the color and texture of these supposedly banal materials, and the eccentricities of what he proposed were systematic compositions.

As New York’s museums battle for visitors and put on exhibitions that sometimes seem safe or uninspired, commercial galleries are increasingly filling in the gaps. Dealers hire guards, pay commercial rents and manage block-long lines. Sure, these shows may be ways for galleries to advertise their clout to prospective clients, but they display remarkable artwork at no charge to the viewer, so, in the end, we all profit.

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Mr. Prince emerged as part of what the Metropolitan Museum of Art dubbed in a recent show the "Pictures Generation," an 1980s group of artists that includes Jack Goldstein, Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine. Though I don't believe he invented "appropriation," he is definitely the most successful practitioner of the technique. It entails taking an image from one place, and creating a work of art by changing its context. Hard to believe, but that's all he did in many cases, and in so doing, he carved out his own place in art history, as well as disrupting traditional definitions of what constitutes "photography." This because his "Cowboy" photographs are just pictures of existing Marlboro ads, and his "Girlfriends" are just re-photographed pictures of pages in biker magazines. So his photographs are pictures of pictures; He's carved his place in art history for that. He gives them new meaning by making us see them out of their original context, which is the thread that holds all his work together: cowboys, girlfriends and what came next.

It was at a Barbara Gladstone gallery show in 2003 that Mr. Prince showed a new body of work: paintings that were based on pulp fiction book covers from the '50s and '60s. These were soft-core porny novels like Nightclub Nurse and Man-Eating Nurse. The paintings, priced at $75,000, sold out immediately. By July of 2008, only five years later, Overseas Nurse made almost $8.5 million at auction, a more-than-100-times return on the original investment, making Mr. Prince one of the most expensive living American artists.

By the fall of 08' he had already left Gladstone and joined Gagosian gallery when he debuted with his apocalyptic "Canal Zone" series. His prices were doubled for this auspicious occasion (new paintings were then priced up to about $3 million), but neither the artist nor his gallery could predict that the world would be entering an apocalyptic financial crisis of its own. The timing couldn't be worse, so if the artworks of Rastafarians with whited-out eyes and electric guitars as machine guns didn't scare off most collectors, the prices sure did. Stylistically, the works suggested Bob Marley as a terrorist rampaging through Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. To make matters worse, the Rastafarians had been lifted from a recent book titled Yes Rasta by French photographer Patrick Cariou. The Frenchman didn't approve of the use of his images out of context, and sued.

On March 18, in U.S. District Court, he won a summary judgment against Richard Prince and Gagosian Gallery for copyright infringement, fair use and liability. (In the lawsuit, we learn that only 8 of 28 paintings found paying clients.) Now a judge has ruled that the entire series is illegal; even worse, it was decided that the gallery must "deliver for impounding and destruction all infringing copies including paintings and unsold copies of the book." The court went even further, declaring that the "paintings were not lawfully made under the Copyright Act and they cannot be lawfully displayed."

I always liked the series, and I'm a contrarian, so, in the pit of the crisis (summer 2009), I had bought a big one, and proudly hung it in my living room where many have shown curiosity and some experience serious disapprobation. Did I know about the lawsuit at that time and was I concerned? Yes, it was a perfect Richard Prince scenario: a work that was made under a potential copyright violation, the subject of a lawsuit, by a self-avowed "appropriation" artist.

Now some have mistakenly interpreted the judge's decision to read that I need to give it back to the gallery, but possession is 9/10's of the law, and there is a whole chapter in this story yet to been told.

A few days ago, I spoke to Patrick Cariou. He said that he was never offered any settlement money by Prince or his gallery before, during or after the show. He felt that that the artist had exhibited "arrogance, an overwhelming sense of power, and plain laziness."

The Frenchman was clever to hold out in court, his damages will be substantial and they will be decided on May 6.

But, I wondered: What of his subject matter, the poor Jamaicans living up in the hills. Did they get a modeling fee? Did they give consent to the publication of their likeness for profit? What, if anything, were they paid, and shouldn't they be entitled to some share of the suit proceeds? Well, Mr. Cariou agreed, he said "absolutely they are, and if I get anything, they will." It irks him that the images were used out of context, "he (Prince) made them look like zombies, it's a racist piece of art." He summarized his views for me: "Hell, No. Fuck Prince, Fuck Gagosian".

Synonyms for appropriation include stealing, confiscation, seizure, usurpation as well as pilfering. If, as Pablo Picasso (paraphrasing T.S. Eliot) is oft quoted as saying, "Good artists borrow but great artists steal," then there is no doubt that Mr. Prince is a great one, since he has stolen successfully for years. With the "Canal Zone" series, the law says he went a step too far, taking images out of a book recently in print and without any semblance of concern for ownership of copyright. But the paintings were really good, and as collectors, that's all we care about. This time, Mr. Prince got busted, but I'm not too concerned for him.

These days, he can well afford it.

The artist recently surprised onlookers by leaving Pace, his gallery of 20 years, and moving to Gagosian--though he had done a show for art financier Ernest Mourmans in Switzerland last summer, so he may have been a "free agent" for a while. Somehow, Steven Henry of the Paula Cooper Gallery anticipated the move and has mounted an impromptu Chamberlain show through April 2, so now is a good time for collectors to see the elegant if somewhat modest show, and rethink and reassess the 83-year-old's work.

So many factors come into play when considering a career that spans more than 50 years. When I learned that the great Donald Judd dedicated an entire building to his own fabulous collection of about 20 Chamberlain sculptures, I realized that this was a career of real historical gravitas, one that had lost its mojo in the art market of the past decade.

I've often heard Mr. Chamberlain referred to as an "Abstract Expressionist" sculptor (think of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline brush strokes, but done instead with slices of bent car doors and bumpers). But he came later, and I find him more masculine, raw and kind of raunchy. The concept of the car, and the car crash, is such an quintessentially American image that I can't help but think of him as a Pop artist, or at least one who falls in between the Abstract Expressionist and Pop concepts; perhaps that's why he's never fit into the tidy little box that many collectors need. In an early interview, he refused to be categorized as the artist of the "car crash" and said that his contemporary Claes Oldenberg best understood his work when he said that his colleague made "hard things soft."

Of course, every great artist is too clever to let himself be pigeonholed and categorized, but today, in the age of Richard Prince car hoods, the Bruce High Quality Foundation's ambulance, Nate Lowman's hubcaps or Dan Colen's pile of Harley-Davidsons, there is no doubt that John Chamberlain's work is a reference we will find over and over again. He is also an artist to be found in just about every museum in America. So, then, why did his career appear to go so cold for the past several years?

While every artist's career is different, there are defined  patterns the market follows in valuing the work. The early breakthrough pieces are most often the acknowledged best: Most artists have a fresh moment of discovery that may last as long as a decade. But they eventually fall into a rhythm, which can eventually look like a routine. Though the galleries keep a commercial market for their output chugging along, from a curatorial perspective, most of the work in the middle can look gestural or mannerist, and often ends up looking decorative. Then, a resurgence of interest occurs close to the end of an artist's career. Think of prices for Picasso, de Kooning, Warhol and so many more. It is a part of the very nature of the art-making/selling process. Artists will inevitably recede from the spotlight as newer, fresher talent takes their podium space, and then the good ones will inevitably return for a grand finale with a flourish and a bang. Amid this pile of half-truths and clichés, one thing is for sure: Mr. Chamberlain will be in every single art-history book you ever pick up. He has produced many different types of the same work, not unlike a Robert Ryman or a Donald Judd, and though he has always used bent metal in his "process," he is far from a one-hit wonder. He went from crushing and welding doors and bumpers and corrugated steel in the '60s to using the metal to make gaudy-looking painted monsters in the '80s; the process evolved into using multicolored strips of van roofs in the '90s. I'm certain that all of it will look good in the near future, and even though some of the bright colors may look dated today, they're definitely funky. With Mr. Chamberlain, the classic "only buy the early work" conservatism doesn't work; he has created a whole range of options and explorations.

Does a change of gallery assure that prices will adjust to where they should be? Absolutely not; as a matter of fact, L+M did a great Chamberlain show just after the crash that suffered only from bad timing. Though some of the works sold, for the most part, the market didn't budge. But today collectors are looking for historical value; they want to invest in art that is proven.

Fresh eyes and the new context of a different gallery will provide a catalyst for the reevaluation of Mr. Chamberlain's works. If you own one, it's a very good thing; if you don't, now may be the time. Most collectors can't afford to buy Abstract Expressionism (de Kooning, Pollock, Smith, Rothko, etc.), and great Pop Art is generally out of reach. That's why we have to overpay for today's big names or tomorrow's promising young talent. Value opportunities like this one are few in today's super-efficient market, but they are important, because the artist deserves the recognition, and because collectors shouldn't only be chasing the next hot thing.

I overheard a respected curator gripe that artists jump from one gallery to another just to cash a check and flatter their egos. Some of this has to be true, but when you're in your 80s, perhaps things take on a different meaning. You can't really spend all the money, and you've already earned most of the accolades. The artists I know are extremely competitive, and I'm sure Mr. Chamberlain is no different. When it comes to his place in art history, he's still keeping score, and he's ready to go into overtime.

editorial@observer.com