First of all, Jeff discovered, his name wasn’t Francis Arsenault. He was born Frank Busse, in Columbus, Ohio, in 1950, and was raised in unique circumstances. His father, Klaus, had been a labor lawyer and activist, and the family had moved wherever the work took him. They’d ended up in Columbus only because Klaus was there trying to push Robert Taft out of office in the senate elections that year.
Old Klaus refused to hold himself above the workers he represented, so despite having means, the Busse family always lived in working-class surroundings. Frank went to school with the children of the workers. His father believed that everyone should be treated equally. Frank’s classmates didn’t share the same belief. It didn’t matter that his father was on their fathers’ side. He had to fight them every day. Per several interviews, this “colorful upbringing” rendered him impervious to intimidation.
His grandfather, Alois Busse, whose industrialist successes Klaus’s life was dedicated to combatting, passed away when Frank was twenty, leaving the bulk of his estate to his third wife, a Floridian ballroom dancer thirty years his junior. However, wanting to make up for the life his son had imposed on his grandson, Alois left his entire art collection to young Frank. A dozen modern European paintings, including a Picasso, a Braque, and a bunch of Germans Frank had never heard of. A small Henry Moore sculpture, and a Calder wire portrait supposedly depicting Alois himself. This work he remembered from one of his few visits to the old man’s New York apartment. Lit from below, it cast an eerie shadow on the wall behind it, of a grotesque face. “The real Alois,” his father had told him.
Whether the bequest was meant to encourage the young man’s artistic aspirations or nudge him toward the world of commerce was unclear, but it had the latter effect. Frank first tried on the name Francis, coupled with his mother’s maiden name, Arsenault, when selling off a group of German expressionist paintings. The idea was to disguise his association with old Alois, so that Francis might seem like a legitimate dealer, rather than a rich kid unloading family heirlooms.
He tried to walk straight into the art gallery scene in New York in the 1970s and found it insular, closed off, peppered with a limited number of top collectors over whom all the dealers sparred. He managed to get a job at Marian Goodman’s Multiples, Inc., for a while, inspiring him to make two bold moves that would define the early part of his career. First, he would specialize in prints. Second, he would go to California. He knew that there were collectors in Los Angeles—he saw them or their representatives at the auctions and openings in New York—and he understood that below that level of collector was a massive underserved population of aspirants. People who couldn’t afford a blue-chip painting but wanted to signal to their acquaintances—in a city where people routinely walked their guests around their homes to show off the decor—that they were au courant and connected to cultural products from beyond the world of Hollywood. They weren’t the type to drop money on unknown and emerging artists. They wanted art that people would recognize.
He arrived in Los Angeles and discovered that others had already paved the way. He worked as an assistant at Gemini GEL in the period after Ken Tyler left, and though he didn’t stay long, describing himself as “ultimately unemployable,” he emerged with a Rolodex of artists, collectors, and other gallerists. He’d always been cagey about the next steps, skipping ahead to renting a space in Venice, with the obligatory “It wasn’t as nice as it is today” comment, and hanging the FAFA shingle, under which he sold prints and multiples at first, then, once he’d established himself, dipping his toe into showing original work.
He married Alison Collins Baker, one of his artists, a few years later.
14
When asked the secret of his early success—a question that came up in several profiles—Francis always gave the same answers: “I didn’t know enough to know what I didn’t know.” Or: “I discovered that I was good at throwing parties.”
When he emerged from his chrysalis in Los Angeles, no longer Frank Busse but Francis Arsenault, art dealer, he discovered that people actually wanted to be close to him, wanted to know him. To collectors, he played up being the grandson of Alois, carrying on a family tradition of supporting the art scene. To artists, he was the lefty son of Klaus, a man who lived by his values, who knew hardship. To himself he was Francis Arsenault, his own invention, ex nihilo.
And Francis Arsenault had an eye. It came up in every interview, profile, and article. The eye.
“You were nothing if you didn’t have an eye.”
“Even those who manage to anticipate every trend are going to get tripped up somewhere without a good eye.”
“When the bottom falls out—and the bottom always falls out—the good stuff holds value while the lesser work plunges. To know the difference takes a good eye.”
But the eye didn’t pay the assistants, the rent, the utilities. About the business end of the art world, Francis spoke as blandly and authoritatively as possible. The closer the conversation hewed to money, the more oracular he became.
Only one article talked about it in concrete terms. It focused on rumors of Francis’s inflating a seller’s price without telling the seller. Allegedly, he’d told the collector he could get $1.2 million for their picture, then turned around and offered it to another for $1.5 million, taking both his regular commission and the clandestine markup.
Among other nasty quotes in the article was this one from an “anonymous art-world insider”: “The only reason Francis is in this business is because it’s the most easily manipulated market in the world, and he’s a master manipulator.”
15
Every time Jeff read the word eye, he thought of Francis’s drooping eye, the eyelid, to be specific, on the right side. Looking at the photograph accompanying one of the articles about Francis, he saw it there, not hanging low enough to obscure his vision but distinctly lower than the left eyelid, a sleepy look that conveyed both seduction and skepticism. Jeff spent time looking over the photos of Francis, or at the smudged black-and-white copies he had brought home from the library, trying to see in them not only the highly successful art dealer but also the boy who had grown up an outcast, the young man who had been rebuffed by the New York art establishment. He looked, too, at the photo accompanying the wedding announcement. Alison Collins Baker, of Greenwich, CT, was a beauty whose perfectly symmetrical face stood in stark contrast to Francis’s. If Jeff were married to that woman, he thought, he certainly wouldn’t be risking everything to meet up with other women in fancy hotels.
The articles and photographs had filled in a lot of information, but Jeff found himself feeling a frustration similar to what he felt when following Francis from his gallery, that the surface of the man occluded rather than illuminated his essence.
16
“I could have read a thousand pages of that stuff and he would have remained opaque,” Jeff said.
“You didn’t get a sense of the arc of his life?”
“Sure, but biography creates that. The arc doesn’t exist otherwise. It’s an illusion. It’s a story about a shark compared to actually seeing a shark. There is no substitute for meeting someone in the flesh. In determining who they really are, I mean.”
“You mean like getting a vibe?”
“In a manner of speaking,” he said, tilting his head as if to say I hadn’t quite hit the target. “It’s not as binary as whether they’re trustworthy or not. That’s what I think of when I think of a vibe. Certain animal skills. What I’m talking about is far more subtle. Whenever two people interact, in person I mean, there’s an exchange of energy. Or energies. An overlap. This phenomenon is so complex, it exceeds our ability to perceive it. We don’t have the bandwidth.”
I must have made a face because he sipped his drink, mainly ice at this point, and said, “You see where I’m going with this?”
“Go on.”
“I needed access.”
I looked out the window at the low-hanging gray skies, the passing jets, and luggage carts.
“You could have walked away,” I said.