On the flight from New York to Chicago, he happened to sit next to her mother, who was well-dressed, wearing diamonds and reading Artforum. At the time, he had a Soho gallery. "I'm thinking: Probably a good idea to talk to this woman sitting next to me." He ended up showing the two women around to galleries in Chicago and taking them to a blues club on the city's South Side. Mrs. Lévy danced; her daughter was embarrassed. "I was so prudish 25 years ago," Ms. Lévy said lightheartedly in December, in her booth at Art Basel Miami Beach, hearing Mr. Baer tell the story. "It took me a few years to follow her lead." These days, Ms. Lévy and her partner, film producer Dorothy Berwin, are known for the lively parties they host in their art-filled Yorkville duplex.Reins of the Jade Cloud Serpent She ended up buying work from Mr. Baer herself, including photographs by Lorna Simpson, and they have remained friends. He pares her to Jeffrey Deitch in her ability to be "both a connoisseur and pay attention to new things" in art.
Impressive in the art world, she failed to impress her father. "When I told my father that actually my passion was the art world, he sold his business, and in a way he looked at me and said, 'What are you going to do in this sort of dilettante or superficial' or something or other," she said. "His toughness was one of the biggest engines in my force or will or energy or determination. When my career first started to be profitable, I could say to him, 'Look, I can support myself,Reins of the Astral Cloud Serpent I can do all these things, and I've never asked him for anything.' He looked at me and said, 'Yes, but it's art.'"
After Sotheby's, she opened a Geneva gallery for the French dealer Daniel Malingue, leaving after a few years to start an independent curating business with Malingue co-director Simon Studer. In the mid 1990s, through one of their projects, she met the influential London dealer Anthony d'Offay and went to work for him, focusing on his American artists. "He took me to Jasper Johns' studio, Ellsworth Kelly; it was an extraordinary few years. But I was miserable in London, so I was living between London and Switzerland, and one day at one of the art fairs, I met Francois Pinault."Ms. Lévy is still closely associated with her four-year stint at Christie's, where she launched the pany's private sales department.