Loyal dealmaker comes to the fore

It seems only natural that growing up in a home filled with paintings and sculpture, Patricia Barbizet should return to the milieu of the art world, as the chief executive of Christie’s.

Her Parisian work base is a 19th-century mansion between the elegant Avenue Montaigne and the Seine. Its petal-shaped glass porch roof, designed by French conceptual artist Daniel Buren, projects patches of red, blue and yellow shades on the doorsteps. Inside, the walls are hung with abstract oils from the collection of François Pinault, her billionaire boss and owner of the auction house.

Yet, Ms Barbizet’s early working life was focused on exhaust pipes and engines, particle and circuit boards rather than art. “My mother was an artist, my brothers and sisters are film and theatrical producers, my father was in cinema. I chose Renault — spot the odd one out,” she laughs.

Ms Barbizet’s appointment as chief executive of the 249-year-old, London-headquartered auction house in December caps a career that started four decades ago in the treasury department of the state-owned carmaker’s truck division. She later helped Mr Pinault transform his timber business into Kering, a luxury empire — which includes Gucci and Bottega Veneta among its brands — and is now run by Mr Pinault’s son, François-Henri.

Her upbringing, however, proved useful when she accompanied her boss to art galleries and auctions when amassing his contemporary art collection. Then in 1998, as head of Artemis, the Pinault family’s holding company (which houses her Paris office), she negotiated the acquisition of a 26.4 per cent stake in Christie’s. It was followed, a few weeks later, by the purchase of the rest of the London-listed shares in a deal valued at £752m. “I wrote the cheque of the acquisition,” she recalls.

However, her replacement of the CEO Steven Murphy last year came as a surprise, only a month after Christie’s broke records in New York with a $853m sale of postwar and contemporary art. The shake-up followed the ousting of William Ruprecht, the chief executive of rival auction house, Sotheby’s, under pressure from its largest shareholder, investor Dan Loeb. For industry observers, it confirmed that like its New York competitor, Christie’s had sacrificed margins for market share by forgoing commissions and offering sellers price guarantees regardless of a sale’s outcome to win business.

The appointment of Ms Barbizet, who is viewed as a financier and dealmaker rather than an art expert, was interpreted as a sign that the auction house would be rationalised. The 60-year-old, softly-spoken executive insists the management overhaul was a “natural” move, driven by the need to streamline the auction house’s “abundant” specialist departments and adjust to new clients in emerging markets.

She dismisses rumours that she is a stopgap. “I am not looking for a successor,” she says. “The art world has changed a lot in the past five years . . . Some pieces have become icons, trophy purchases. There’s money, liquidity looking for investments in the world and finding its way into art.” She also underlines the importance of the expanded postwar and contemporary art departments.

Since Ms Barbizet’s appointment, the privately owned company has hit new records, fuelled by demand from investors who see art as an alternative asset class. Revenues rose 8 per cent to £2.9bn in the first half of this year, compared with the same period a year earlier, with new buyers making up a quarter of all clients. Over a week in May in New York, Jussi Pylkkänen, recently promoted as chief auctioneer, led the sale of postwar and contemporary art by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Lucian Freud for a combined value of $1.7bn. Pablo Picasso’s “Les Femmes d’Alger” was sold for $179.4m, the most expensive artwork ever auctioned.

Breaking records shows “we’re the leader, that we are able to connect more and more art to more and more clients”, Ms Barbizet says.
She buys contemporary art herself, including work by Tatiana Trouvé and Anselm Kiefer. As a child, her mother, Monique Cartier, an abstract painter, would take her to exhibitions. “I’ve known since I was a child that contemporary artists have a message to tell, that their work is not just decorative.”

But she also realised early that, unlike the other members of her family, she was not an artist. “I didn’t feel this imperious urge. I wanted to be in real life — management, finance, things that allow others to do things, artists to create,” she says.

In 1976, she was among the first 20 female graduates of ESCP, a business school in Paris. She joined Renault’s finance department after graduating, discovering she “loved” industry. Nonetheless, she felt that women were not “very welcome”.

There was a time, she recalls, when women were more likely to be let go because their salaries were considered as ‘accessory’ to their husbands’.” She is married to a banker who she describes as “very, very, very understanding”.

These experiences made her become a feminist, she says. “I have lived through this epic phase when impossible things became possible,” she says. “Forty years later, there’s still work to do.”

One regret is taking just over a month’s maternity leave after the birth of her daughter, Charlotte. “I was feeling so grateful for the job I had that I was thinking, ‘you’ll see, no one is going to notice I’ve had a child’,” she says.

Described as a down-to-earth, collaborative executive, who is quick to tell a self-deprecating joke, she has become one of France’s most powerful business leaders. Ms Barbizet sits on the boards of Total and Peugeot, as well as being vice-chair of Kering.

She would have probably stayed with Renault if it had not been for François Pinault. When she first met the entrepreneur in 1989, shortly after he had listed his Brittany-based timber business, she was struck by his “incisive eyes, his presence”. The encounter was awkward, she recalls, because Mr Pinault was under the impression she had accepted the job as his chief financial officer, while she thought she had just agreed to an informal chat.

Her decision the following morning to take the role led to a 26-year collaboration, marked by a string of acquisitions, including the Printemps department store, furniture retailer Conforama and luxury brands such as Gucci.

She talks about some of the deals fondly, recalling they came up with a price for Château Latour, the Bordeaux vineyard, on the fly in the car. It proved successful. “It was one of the most interesting contracts I’ve had to write, there were blanks everywhere,” she laughs.

Not everything was fun, though. For 15 years, she battled US prosecutors over Artemis’s role in Crédit Lyonnais’ disputed acquisition of Executive Life, a Californian insurer. She was pressed by prosecutors to testify against Mr Pinault and subjected to travel restrictions in the US, before the case was settled. Her only comment on this time is that “we were collateral damage”.

The episode did not, however, diminish her loyalty. “It’s a privilege to have earned such trust,” she says. “I am deeply conscious of my luck to have been adopted by the Pinault family.”

Culled from FT