THE ALCHEMIST.(Tobias Meyer)(Interview)

Not long ago, Tobias Meyer, the chief auctioneer and worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby's, visited the Robert Rauschenberg exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. He was there to look at a painting that was, potentially, in play for a private sale, and he wanted to inspect it closely, since, as he puts it, "these paintings really only come alive when you stand in front of them." Meyer arrived at the Met with his right arm in a sling, the result of a weekend ice-skating mishap that had left him in some pain. Even in this condition, Meyer, when he walked into the entrance rotunda, caused heads to turn. Tall, slim, and with an erect carriage, he has longish, wavy hair, which he wears swept back from his high forehead. His eyes are a transparent blue, his chin delicate, and although he is forty-three years old, he looks at least ten years younger. His clothes are custom-made, by a retired Savile Row tailor, and he was dressed casually, but impeccably, in a moss-green sports jacket with yellow windowpane check and mustard-colored corduroys of a wale so fine that I initially mistook the fabric for velvet. A blue-and-white polka-dot scarf was loosely knotted around his neck.

Meyer's stylishness and physical beauty are legendary in art and design circles, and can reduce even experts on such matters to near-incoherence. His friend Tom Ford, the former creative director of Gucci, says of Meyer, "If Tobias was naked, he'd be stylish; it's not just his clothes. It's that face. And the shape of his head, his nose, the way he stands--the way his chin is slightly up in the air--he has the most amazing posture; he's just so great looking, really sculptural. And that voice. You have to talk about the voice!" Meyer, whose Old World propriety forbids him any display of ego, shakes his head dismissively at such praise, as if to say that the virtues Ford extolls are mere trade details. "That's physical presence--which you need as an auctioneer," he says in a voice that is indeed remarkable, a resonant baritone lightly accented with his native German. (He's also fluent in French, has a good grasp of Italian, and speaks perfect English.) "To live under the gaze of twelve hundred people and not buckle under the attention, you need to sit in your own body and use your voice that way."

As we mounted the Met's central stairway to the Rauschenberg show, Meyer suggested a quick detour. He veered right, into a gallery of paintings by Antonello da Messina. Though his job at Sotheby's is to acquire and auction contemporary art, he is also an authority on Renaissance and rococo art, gilt bronzes, antique French furniture, German porcelain, French illuminated manuscripts, and countless other man-made objects. "He's a real connoisseur," his close friend the painter John Currin says. "That's actually not as common as you might think in the art world. He, more than almost anybody I know, is a real aesthete." Meyer's taste, expertise, and knowledge of the art market have earned him the trust of some of the most important art collectors, among them the music and movie mogul David Geffen. "If I have something that I want to sell, I usually call Tobias and ask him what he thinks the market is," Geffen told me. "Invariably, in my experience, whenever I've sold anything with Tobias he's been pretty much on the money."

In the Antonello gallery, Meyer walked over to an Annunciation on the far wall and explained that the painting was rare in that it depicted only the Virgin Mary, and not the announcing angel. "You, as a viewer, are put in the position of Gabriel, who comes to tell her of the miraculous birth," Meyer said. He stopped in front of the painting, which was made in about 1475 and is not much larger than a page of this magazine. Mary gazes out, past the viewer, her left hand holding her blue robe closed in what Meyer pointed out was a "protective" gesture. "Because you are a stranger," he said. Then he fell silent. Something about his focussed presence facilitated a deeper absorption in the work, a greater attention to its delicacy, its quiet grace, and its reserves of understated emotion. I could not recall being so moved by a painting. Only when I turned from the canvas did he smile at me and say, with an arched eyebrow, "Amazing, no?"

Later, I learned that my experience with Meyer in front of the Antonello was by no means unusual. The best auction professionals are distinguished by their ability to create such frissons in people in the presence of art. Bill Ruprecht, the C.E.O. of Sotheby's, says, "People make the mistake of describing our business as being about objects. It's not. I think we handle the interaction between people and objects. The cliche in the auction world is: 'We bring objects alive.' " Meyer puts it slightly differently. "What I love to do is put people in front of art and make them feel it, make them stop everything else they're doing and experience it, deeply," he says. "That's how I make art expensive. And that's my job, for the company and for my clients. To make art expensive."

Even at a time when the contemporary-art market is booming, Meyer has become famous for making works created since the end of the Second World War more expensive than ever. In May of 1998, shortly after he began his current job at Sotheby's in New York, Meyer sold Andy Warhol's "Orange Marilyn" for seventeen million dollars, a record price at auction for a Warhol. Last year, he set a record for contemporary art with David Smith's "Cubi XXVIII," which sold for almost twenty-four million, and he also set a world record for the most expensive art work ever sold at auction, when, in May of 2004, he brought the hammer down on Picasso's 1905 painting "Boy with Pipe" for a hundred and four million dollars.

But Meyer is also a tastemaker, whose personal style and mode of living are an index to, and catalyst for, certain shifts that have lately taken place in the art world. "A lot of the art-dealing in masterworks years ago was a very stuffy affair, and going to the auction was not a stylish event," Jeffrey Deitch, the New York dealer, who handled some private sales for Sotheby's for several years beginning in the late nineties, says. "Tobias is in the forefront of a trend to add style and glamour to this whole area. He's a master of being simultaneously uptown and downtown, European and American, more classic and elegant but also with a bit of a raffish edge. So he embodies a lot of what you seek in the most exciting contemporary art."