ART TODAY

Lunch with the FT: Wirth’s fortune

How, at the age of 34, does the son of a Swiss architect and teacher become the second most powerful art dealer in the world? Ranked number 11 in Art Review’s recent “Power 100” of the international art market, this London gallery owner is also judged more influential than the collector Charles Saatchi, Christies’ chief Francois Pinault, or the million-dollar-a-canvas painter Gerhard Richter. Will such a person be insufferably bumptious, or maddeningly nice? And will he mind that I am late for our lunch?

In the sedate calm of the George Club in Mayfair, Iwan Wirth leaps from his chair to greet me and apologises for being early. Tall, broad-shouldered and open-shirted, he has the eagerness of a bouncy cub rather than a young lion of legend, and yet there is something instantly reassuring about his solid presence and informal manner. “I am happy that people trusted me,” he says of his early days as a dealer, and you can see why they did.

Chubby baby face; dark curly hair framing a high, wide forehead; large black-rimmed glasses: his intellectual look stands out among the bland faces in suits and the blondes in diamonds who are our fellow diners. Several have beside them not one but two nearly-full glasses of champagne. Wirth, however, asks for water and launches into a story about a business “disaster” - he acquired a late Picasso portrait of his wife Jacqueline, signed in her lipstick, which no one bought for 12 years, at which point he “sold it at a huge loss”.

His quiet, serious voice, the hint of a German accent adding gravitas, distinguishes him from the generally pushy New York dealers (”American galleries are sharp”) who have long dominated the art world. Nevertheless, though self-deprecating at times, he also allows himself to revel. “It’s such a beautifully unregulated market,” he sighs, as if the entire art world were some particularly fine objet. “The whole system works with tools that would be illegal in any other market - fixing prices, having a cartel. The art market needs that. I really enjoy being in a market where one can be a real entrepreneur. And who knows for how much longer?”

Indeed. In the past four years, the Sothebys chairman Alfred Taubman has been imprisoned for price-fixing, the New York dealer Larry Gagosian has been embroiled in a tax evasion scandal, while in Germany questions have been raised about insider trading and the influence of Wirth himself on one of his clients, Friedrich Christian “Mick” Flick. The grandson of a notorious Nazi industrialist, Flick is showing part of his collection of contemporary art in an exhibition at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof - a state museum. German critics say that the collection looks suspiciously similar to a recent roll-call of work at Wirth’s three galleries: Hauser and Wirth, in London’s Piccadilly and Zurich, and Zwirner and Wirth, New York.

The art market, says Wirth, is a “people business” and “the relationship between a gallery and a collector is very close. It’s a creative process, and that can only happen when you like each other.” On the other hand, he says, “it’s more important to be a good book keeper” than anything else.

As if to moderate his own strength of character, he demurely asks the waiter’s advice on a starter. Tomato, onion and mozzarella salad arrives, piled up like a tottering red tower of Pisa, and collapses at the first stab of his fork. “I’ve ruined it,” he shrugs. The menu is waved away as if it were a distraction and then, without hesitation, he orders a main course, vitello tonnato (slivers of veal in tuna sauce), from the passing trolley, because it happens to catch his eye.

”You can be a good dealer but still not have a good eye. I believe in what I do. But that is not true for everyone who is successful in this market,” Wirth says. Cynics say it is easy for him to put his money where his mouth is because he has such a lot of it: in 1996 he married Manuela, the Hauser in Hauser and Wirth and heir to a giant Swiss retail fortune. She is now occupied with building up the family collection of contemporary art, housed at St Gallen, Switzerland, and is expecting the couple’s fourth child. Theirs was an office romance with class: Wirth’s mother-in-law, Ursula, a modern art collector, was a business partner at his first gallery.

There was “never any question” but that he would be a dealer, he says. As a child, he remembers learning to read for the first time when he was desperate to decipher the wall captions at a Giacometti exhibition. “I couldn’t afford collecting because I had no money, so I thought of a gallery, as the cheapest, most efficient way to be surrounded by art.” He wanted to study law because great 20th-century dealers, such as Leo Castelli, were lawyers by training, but he gave it up after three weeks.

When he was 15, he drew up a business plan and got himself a lawyer and a deal with a landlord. In 1986, aged 16, he opened his gallery, on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons and all day on Sunday: the only times of the week in Switzerland when school is out. He began with one artist - Bruno Gasser from Basel - who had responded to his out-of-the-blue letter with an invitation to a working trip in Egypt. “I couldn’t tell him I’d never flown,” says Wirth. “I did everything wrong. I didn’t have a passport, didn’t know how to check in, drank water from the wine glass.”

But the Hauser backing meant Wirth could soon lure the hippest talent from both sides of the Atlantic and across three generations. His vertical market business model includes the 93-year-old feminist sculptor Louise Bourgeois and the 33-year-old Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal, the newest star of Saatchi’s “The Triumph of Painting” exhibition; the Americans Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades and Roni Horn; the Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist, whose installation “Homo Sapiens Sapiens” at the San Stae church in Venice is one of the most popular draws at the Biennale; and the Turner prize-winner Martin Creed.

Wirth got the big names because he realised from the start that “no artist needs a gallery in Switzerland. We had to give them a reason to show with us. We do more.” Providing production teams, technical crew, studios and storage, Wirth is the Mr Fixit of the art world because he understood instinctively that the old gallery model of buying and selling was outdated. “When Pipilotti came to us, she said, what I need is this, and this, and this. And we’ll spend four weeks setting up the installation for our new Jason Rhoades show [which is now open].” In an art world dominated by installation and video work, his youth works in his favour: he grew up in the age of information overload and makes no distinction between different media (”too boring to discuss, the brush is now everything”).

That his seriousness, too, is an advantage reflects the changing nature of the contemporary market, “a truly global business” that thrives on increasing affluence and education. “Our artists are considered difficult, so the entry level is high. We hardly ever meet idiots.” Yet art has “become a lifestyle”, he says, gesturing to the smart hedonists around us. “If you ask at this restaurant, 90 per cent would say they were interested in contemporary art. Twenty years ago it would have been 10 per cent. There are worse things you can do with your money than buy art. You’re not harming the environment. You’re not hurting other people.”

Most of his business is done in the US - New York “will remain the art capital of the world” - but London, to where he has just moved with his German-speaking family, has “more creative energy, the most interesting potential”. Confidence in the market, he believes, grew in America after 9/11. Why? “Confidence!” he replies with glee - dismissing the desert trolley but feasting on the lurid outsize Smarties (”you can’t stop eating them”) that come with the coffee - “Philosophically, it was about intimacy. How do you want to lead your life? People don’t want to travel... It’s a spiritual thing.”

It’s also a money thing. When I inquire into the rumour that all 35 of his artists are going to contribute a piece for his new home in Holland Park, he mutters “not all of them”, with a quiver of embarrassment. Who are his favourite artists? “I have 35 - I’ve never lost anyone.” What does he think of Saatchi’s collection? “No comment!” In a slip from evenhandedness that seems to astonish even him, he admits that “I’m not a fan” of a certain rival dealer, then grabs my arm and demands “Don’t write that!”

How would he reply to those who say visual art is in terminal decline? His eyes light up. “If it’s downhill, there’ll be lots of opportunities.” No, I say, I mean the rubbish flooding the market. “Oh, there’s much more of that than 20 years ago. That’s why you have to be ever more selective and choose your adviser.” But, as I ask for the bill, insisting that the FT always picks up the tab, he neutralises the salesmanship with a play at unworldliness. “Oh, I didn’t realise. I was worried, I had to stop on the way here to make sure I had enough money to pay.” And then, with the charming smile and firm handshake of old European courtesy, this perfect Swiss balancing act disappears into the jumble of a bright London street, leaving me wondering how many tricks I’d missed.

George Club, Mount Street, London

1 x tomato, mozzarella and onion salad

1 x smoked salmon with poached eggs and avocado

1 x veal in tuna sauce

1 x vegetable rissotto

2 x mineral water

1 x espresso

Total: £77.05











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