Michaela de Pury: A Longer Conversation
Michaela de Pury on living with art and seeing the present more fully
She has helped make markets, build an auction house and shape collections. Her most exacting test for a work of art happens after the excitement subsides: whether it can keep you looking.
An eye trained before the catalogue
Michaela de Pury's art education began at floor level. As a small child, she recalls, she danced on a Chinese plate in the family living room and broke it. She thinks it may have been Ming. The dynasty remains uncertain; the family's willingness to live among objects plainly does not.
Her father, Rudolf Neumeister, ran the German auction business whose name she would later help lead. Paintings, sculpture, silver, porcelain and furniture were part of the household's ordinary vocabulary. More consequential than proximity was instruction: her father taught her to notice the fine differences between an original and a copy. When she wanted to travel to exhibitions, he asked her to weigh their importance, then supported the decision. Looking came with responsibility.
She went on to study art history, archaeology, literature and philosophy, completing doctoral research on medieval and Renaissance art. That training remains unexpectedly useful to a specialist in the ultra-contemporary. She sees historical periods as connected changes in how people imagine bodies, space, belief and knowledge. "You really have to learn to see," she says. The newest work arrives with a long past attached. An informed eye can recognize a historical echo without mistaking every echo for an original voice.
Professional experience widened the frame: Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby's in New York, Old Masters at Christie's in London, and the different auction culture she encountered at Tajan in Paris. She was studying how companies worked as carefully as what they sold. After returning to Neumeister, she helped build Phillips de Pury, where she became a senior partner and later a senior director. She subsequently co-founded de Pury & de Pury. Today she describes her own business as Contemporary Culture, encompassing art alongside design, music, fashion and architectural projects. The range suits the way she speaks: fast, associative, impatient with unnecessarily small compartments.
The collection is giving you away
For someone who has spent so much time arranging transactions, de Pury offers a striking account of who initiates them. "It's the art that chooses you," she says. A work sends signals; different people receive different calls. Advisers can provide context, but the response cannot be delegated.
Taken seriously, the idea makes a collection unusually revealing. She calls it "a collaged self-portrait". Entering a house, she believes she can often distinguish a collection shaped by its owner's convictions from one assembled through an adviser's taste or the influence of friends. The wall can be an expensive place to discover that someone else has been making your decisions.
Her point has room for scholarship and pleasure alike. A collector may want art-historical significance, financial value, an immediate personal connection, or some negotiation among them. She wants the purpose stated clearly. An adviser who understands the brief can help sharpen the eye; an adviser cannot supply an inner life on the client's behalf.
That conviction has a practical boundary. "I give my clients the first pick," she says. "I don't want this conflict of interest." She limits her own collecting to avoid competing with the people she advises. The distinction is consequential: the person entrusted with a client's judgment should not quietly become a rival for the same work.
She recalls buying a Peter Doig only after offering it to a client who declined. The anecdote matters for the order of events. In a business built on access, who gets asked first is an ethical decision.
A good work survives the honeymoon
Her most useful lesson in collecting came through prolonged exposure. During auction previews, she would spend days and evenings with works she initially admired. A week later, the object of her attention might have changed. One painting had exhausted its appeal; another had quietly become indispensable.
"Art needs time," she says. The statement sounds almost indecently modest in a market that can make hesitation feel like failure. Yet it introduces a demanding distinction between being impressed and remaining interested. A work may photograph brilliantly and reveal little more in person. Another may resist the camera and reward the person willing to stand before it. De Pury says her choices from images often differ from those she makes in an exhibition.
Living with art extends the encounter. "An artwork is like a family member," she says. "Every day it poses you questions." It gives pleasure, reveals an overlooked corner and occasionally makes things difficult. Familiarity can deepen the relationship. It can also expose how little there was to sustain it. This is a form of due diligence no auction result can complete: discovering whether the work retains its necessity once the urgency of acquiring it has passed. Foremost I d say in almost all cases the individual joy of looking-feeling beauty, technique, materiality, composition, story-telling and content with all senses involved is the long lasting factor for a ¨contemporary culturist¨ (artist, photographer, designer, architect etc) & his works to gain fame & value.
Live with it is the principle running through her account. It asks for enough time to discover whether a work continues to alter the room—and the attention one brings into it. One develops instincts over time. Instagram offers the brisker rhythm she mimics as "zap, zap, zap". Art, in her telling, is one reason to stop obliging the feed.
The market has learned to keep appointments
De Pury's enthusiasm for contemporary art comes with a clear memory of the business that grew around it. At Phillips, she helped develop a more socially energetic auction culture, closely attuned to younger art. She readily includes that enterprise in the story of collecting's transformation into a lifestyle. Her criticisms arrive with a measure of professional self-implication.
What concerns her now is the pressure to produce. She remembers studio visits in an art world with more tolerance for disorder, delay and changes of mind. Today, in her account, a gallery's calendar, premises and commercial commitments can make an artist's uncertainty inconveniently expensive. "They have to produce. They have to paint," she says. Inspiration is expected to arrive before the opening. Her concern is what such regularity does to the uneven, exploratory time of making. A calendar can accommodate a delivery; whether it can accommodate a necessary hesitation is a harder question.
She remains drawn to artists who find a different way to articulate familiar human questions. Love, mortality, politics: the subjects recur, while the means of thinking through them change. In a studio, she wants to understand the seriousness of a practice and the person sustaining it. She likes meeting artists, even though she knows charm is no guarantee of an oeuvre.
"It's a guess into the future," she says. An apparently promising artist might decide to become "a chef in Tunisia or something". The joke restores an inconvenient fact to the investment conversation: artists have lives. Her interest in mid-career practices follows the same respect for evidence. An established body of work gives her more to examine than an early surge of attention. It still provides no guarantee about the next chapter. Also the evolution of taste is of immense importance here: originally considered weaker new work phases of an artist overtime can make up to be most sought after; - as it happened for example with Picasso.
What the numbers leave out
Technology receives the same unsentimental treatment. AI art and NFTs, she says, have yet to convince her. She leaves room for the possibility that she has something to learn. Her interest is in what a technology allows an artist to imagine or formulate; novelty alone does little to settle the question. She points to Anicka Yi, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno as artists whose use of technology interests her.
Market data has a place in the conversation too. She finds analytical tools useful and argues with the conclusions drawn from them. Price histories cannot perform every task of looking. "If I would just go with the data to buy art, I tell you it would not work," she says. Her objection concerns the inference drawn from the figures. A record of transactions establishes what has sold, under particular conditions, to particular buyers. Deciding what deserves sustained attention requires another kind of argument. Financial value, art-historical relevance and personal conviction may overlap, but they do not measure one another reliably.
"We are not obsolete," she says of art advisers. The line has a welcome lack of apology. It is also a claim that places an obligation on her profession: to contribute judgment, context and access that a database cannot simply reproduce.
Her own prescription for developing that judgment is stubbornly physical. Go to museums. Look at the strongest work available. Keep testing the eye. Experience is valuable when it remains capable of changing its mind.
Seeing the present more fully
Asked what collecting might pass to the next generation, de Pury moves beyond the objects themselves. She speaks about curiosity, respect for craft and the capacity to remain with something one does not immediately understand.
"You don't understand things necessarily in the beginning, but then you learn to live with them and to understand it," she says. The awkwardness of an unfamiliar work can become an education in responsiveness. Understanding is allowed to develop; possession need not deliver an immediate verdict.
Looking beyond, she explains, "is not escaping the present but seeing the present more fully and in its cultural interconnectedness, richness & layered depth throughout the centuries." That distinction gives her approach its intellectual weight. A work participates in histories of making and seeing that extend beyond its own moment. Knowledge of those histories can make us more exacting about what is happening now: which ideas persist, which forms acquire another meaning, and where an artist has changed the terms of the conversation.
We are, she reminds us, "part of a longer and ongoing conversation, interconnected and built up at all times." A collection enters that conversation through its particular choices and juxtapositions. Its coherence can emerge through relationships across periods, materials and ways of thinking. The self-portrait she describes is therefore also a record of encounters with other lives, including lives far removed from our own.
Empathy matters to her here: the effort to enter another way of seeing, including one that initially resists us. This gives her insistence on looking a dimension beyond connoisseurship. A child learning to stay with an unresolved image is also learning that another perspective may deserve attention before it becomes fully intelligible. Cultural inheritance entails learning how to receive what we have not made ourselves.
"Art time travels," she says. To live with it is to recognize that our own judgments belong to a moment too. Her confidence in the trained eye carries an accompanying discipline: the readiness to let another work, or another generation, show it something it has missed. Through history we learnt that our knowledge is limited within the time we live, and that generations to come with extended knowledge will look back an re-evaluate.
