Photography by Jay Fram
Web Exclusive: Read the story of "the mysterious Matisse" sold at Ivey-Selkirk Auctioneers.
Sally Brown sat in the Ivey-Selkirk auction room, watching people bid on the funny little pigs that her mother had collected. The wooden toys and marbles; the whale-oil lamp that once held steady while a ship rocked; the African and folk art, pewter, hand-forged rushlight holders. The old wooden dough box where they stashed the family photographs. The wooden Shaker chairs sized for a child.
Her mother was gone now, and Brown and her siblings had reluctantly decided to sell everything and use the money for repairs on their family farm in O’Fallon, Illinois. These hand-wrought primitive objects spelled home, but to a stranger they’d signal a carefully curated collection well ahead of its time. So the family called the well-respected Ivey-Selkirk Auctioneers, the nation’s second-oldest auction house.
It had taken months to pack everything up. Now, Brown watched each object come up in turn, and the bidding rise, and the gavel crash down. Several times, she raised her paddle until she won back an item she couldn’t bear to let go.
Her family never received their $22,000 (their share of the $28,900 proceeds). “So I bought stolen goods,” she says, “and I paid for them twice.
“It seems silly to be emotional about this,” she adds, “but I’m not used to having people lie to me. Someone should turn this into some weird psychological opera.”
*****
OK, Here’s the Prelude
For the role of Malcolm Ivey, you’d need a tenor, light-voiced, with a natural, unforced charisma. “I wanted to buy back some of our chairs,” Brown recalls, “and people weren’t really responding, and I started to bid, and he said, ‘Well, OK, so now you woke up!’ He was delightful behind the auction block, funny and a little bit acerbic, but cute. You couldn’t see how anyone could not like him.”
At a spring auction several years ago, he’d teased a guy in an orange shirt who’d put his paddle up thrice, froze with it down, then lifted it just as the gavel came down and a gold head of Athena sold for $2,000. “Little late, sir,” Ivey said. “He who hesitates…loses.” When a cameo raced no one’s pulse, Ivey said, “How about 100 bucks for it? I think it’s worth it. Make it $75?” It sold for $200. He held up a cat brooch and waited. “Where are you cat lovers? I don’t blame you. I don’t like cats either.” A paddle flipped up. “I’m glad you made the drive, sir.”
Only when Ivey reached a piece of serious value did the patter stop. “There’s a lot of interest,” he said, his voice going quiet. A flurry of bids rose up like a flock of starlings, then vanished, leaving two contenders who wanted the prize more every time they lost it. You could feel it in the air: the half-sick lurch into bidding past reason, the breezy refusal to care, the sudden emptiness as the guy lowered his paddle, the soaring elation of the win.
At that point, Ivey was still coasting. In 2007, the house had sold an 1852 Frederic Edwin Church landscape for a record $2.5 million. The following year’s economic crash snatched away some collectors’ cash, and sales dropped $5 mil-
lion. (The anomaly of the Church sale the year before explained only half the difference.) Overall, Ivey-Selkirk wasn’t getting as many blockbuster consignments as it had in the old days, becauseSt. Louisans had figured out how to sell online or in Chicago, New York, or London. But Ivey-Selkirk was a cherished St. Louis institution, strong in regional art and collectibles and gaining strength in contemporary art. A few years ago, Ivey finally took the bidding online, and Kevin Manning, who owns the UPS Store that shipped for Ivey-Selkirk, noticed a surge in volume right away, as swaddled parcels crossed the ocean in both directions. Ivey told friends business was great: “You wouldn’t believe the number of European buyers!”
Even in the incestuous, gossipy auction world, there wasn’t a whisper of trouble.
Act I
A 2001 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article reported that Malcolm Foy Ivey “majored in journalism and marketing” at Saint Louis University—but he was only registered there for one year. He left to take a job as auction clerk at Selkirk’s in 1973. He stayed 12 years, rising to vice president, but Selkirk’s was a family business, and Bruce Selkirk Jr. was waiting in the wings to take over from his grandfather. So Ivey called friends he’d made in the banking industry, landed a job at a local bank, and spent 15 years managing the kinds of estates he’d helped liquidate.
“He handled some very important, prestigious relationships,” says a longtime friend who knew him in a business context. “There was never any suggestion of impropriety on Malcolm’s part. He’s got the most engaging personality, very gregarious, always upbeat.”
He did just fine. Then, in 1998, Bruce Selkirk Jr.was diagnosed with a cancer he couldn’t survive. After careful deliberation, he chose Phillips, founded in London in 1796, to take over the family business.
A year later—mercifully, after Selkirk’s death—Phillips was acquired by LVMH (purveyor of Louis Vuitton luxury accessories, champagne and spirits, and other necessities of life). LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault fancied a race with another self-made French billionaire, François Pinault, who owned Christie’s. So for about a minute, LVMH soaked money into the auction business. Phillips-Selkirk tripled the size of its staff and splashed ads in international art magazines.
Then LVMH merged Phillips with de Pury & Luxembourg, art dealers with a gallery in Zu-rich and showrooms in New York and Geneva. Kathleen Guzman, president of Phillips North America and St. Louis, wanted to move to New York. She hired Mark Howald to be managing director for Phillips-Selkirk in St. Louis, and when he didn’t want the position, she fetched Malcolm Ivey back from the bank.
(“You want to blame somebody, blame Kathleen,” grumbles a local collector. “She put him into the job, and she knew better.”)
Phillips’ notion of taking the big pieces away to sell in New York didn’t sit so well with St. Louisans, and even its other houses were barely profitable. After the global market for luxury goods weakened in early 2001, LVMH started to shed its auction houses like a molting mink.
In 2002, Ivey bought the St. Louis house. Insiders say that LVMH held the paper and Ivey didn’t bother to make payments. The Selkirk family gave him permission to retain their name.
His way had been smoothed: He’d have his very own auction house.
*****
People liked Ivey. They liked the way he pulled out pictures of his kids at the slightest invitation. The way he turned into a 10-year-old boy at any mention of the Cardinals. The way he liked them, with sincere enthusiasm and no pretense.
Affability became his biggest asset, compensating for a noticeable lack of specialized training and aesthetic passion. “My mother used to go to all the previews at the old Selkirk’s,” says Manning, “and there’d be a thousand lots, and she’d point to one thing and Bruce Selkirk could give her a complete description on the spot.”
Selkirk used to walk through estates with a Dictaphone, appraising as he went. Ivey left that kind of expertise to his staff. He’d stroll through the gallery cheering them on, then go back to his office and pick up the phone, searching, in his relaxed and unaggressive way, for estates he could charm through the doors.
Marlene Marcella had worked for Selkirk’s for a quarter century, doing a bit of everything. By the time Ivey took over, she was doing the marketing. She pulled off events with young friends groups (future collectors) from the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, a coup she’s not sure Ivey even noticed.
Years passed. Then Ivey started behaving oddly. When people came to the door, he’d run out of his office to greet them himself, instead of letting Marcella find out what they needed. She shut her eyes, trying to imagine Bruce Selkirk, in one of his dark Brooks Brothers suits, racing to the front door. Selkirk spoke French; he traveled through Europe and brought back his finds; he ate lunch at the Racquet Club Ladue. Where did Ivey eat? Probably Quiznos. He wore khakis and open-collared shirts to work. Dark suits came out for meetings with his banker friends. But if the Cardinals were on a roll, the whole staff had to drag out something red. It was a fine-art auction house, for God’s sake!
He’d tried so hard to get Stan Musial’s estate. Once, he put Cardinals memorabilia in the display window even when it wasn’t being auctioned. Selkirk had fought the landlord (Washington University) for that windowed front entrance on Forsyth Boulevard. Now there were weeds in the planters, and Ivey kept locking the doors so people had to enter from the parking lot.
He was a nice man, though: family-oriented, always friendly, never lost his temper. He even kept the pension plan Phillips had put in place. Marcella never checked her statements—as a single woman, she supposed she ought to—but she remembered somebody else asking about the level of the matching funds, and Ivey saying he was a little late but he’d get to it. And he had.
He cared about his staff. He just never seemed to care much about art or antiques. “I go to the symphony and the art museum all the time, and I’m a nobody,” she thought. Ivey…went to Cards games. He had a modest story-and-a-half frame house in Glendale (Selkirk had lived in Ladue), and people still talked about the time he’d bought furniture at—was it Pier 1 Imports? “Some crappy paper compound fiber table,” Lauren Pressler guessed.
Pressler—young, lovely, pre-Raphaelite, with fiery red hair and an artist’s critical eye—had the passion. She couldn’t understand how Ivey could refuse to pay for a cleaning service. (They all took turns with the vacuum.) “Here, you have Mr. Busch coming in with a string of pearls he got in Naples, and the guy has no place to sit down,” she groaned. She had a master of fine arts degree, and she studied antiques and wore black dresses to the auctions and couldn’t fathom Ivey’s casualness.
He once called an auction “the perfect cheap date.” Marcella overheard him telling a prospective consignor that people just didn’t entertain with silver anymore, and you couldn’t put it in the dishwasher. This, soon after they’d auctioned a silver centerpiece for $30,000! When a friend asked Ivey how he could resist all of the treasures around him, he shrugged, nonchalant as somebody who’d eaten too much caviar—or didn’t like black fish eggs in the first place.
His staff pored over paintings glowing with vermilion and raw umber, Art Deco vases, Per-sian rugs, 18th-century French demilune cabinets, and Limoges porcelain, excited just to have a chance to research such exquisite objects’ provenance. But Ivey drew his joy from people. In 2001, he told the Post his favorite part of his job was “working with our clients and staff.”
What he liked least, he told the reporter, were “client complaints.”
*****
Clients started complaining rather loudly in spring 2010. Attorney Mark Bishop filed suit for a couple who still hadn’t been paid for estate treasures that sold months earlier. He’d tried contacting Ivey on his clients’ behalf and got no response. Then he’d checked with the Better Business Bureau and found similar grievances. “That’s when I knew, ‘I gotta file a lawsuit right away,’” Bishop says. “I was concerned that he was robbing Peter to pay Paul, and it would collapse. When I saw it in the paper last December, I was like, ‘Oh, it took that long!’”
Ivey-Selkirk settled that initial suit and a few others. But complaints kept coming, like hand grenades hurled at unpredictable intervals. In June 2011, the Better Business Bureau issued an alert. Ivey had given understandable reasons for delays in payment: the recession, changing tastes in collectibles, the Internet bringing in more overseas business, with payments by credit card instead of wired money. “In fairness, we wanted to give them an opportunity to straighten things out,” says investigator Bill Smith.
The next year, the number of complaints shot from 10 to 17. On December 4, 2013, the BBB issued another alert—and an F rating—and Ivey stopped responding to the complaints. A company owned by billionaire Bruce Karsh, a former St. Louisan who now lives in Beverly Hills, California, sued for $56 million, proceeds from the sale of his British landscape and portrait collection, and managed to have the funds garnished from an account at Jefferson Bank and Trust.
The 28 lawsuits that followed Karsh’s had a hard time finding any funds to garnish. “They can seize assets, in theory, but if they’re not a matter of public record, the way a house would be, it’s very difficult to know what’s out there,” attorney Phil Christofferson said this past spring. “We’ve hired private investigators in the past, but it’s difficult. We are hopeful that the attorney general’s office will undertake a good investigation. Unfortunately, Mr. Ivey’s gone into seclusion.”
He hadn’t, actually. On March 21, he was served with three lawsuits. On March 29, he was served again. And on April 2. And on April 3. He was still seeing friends, who didn’t dare bring up the scandal. He was still going in to the office—alone, locking the doors behind him, and ignoring the aggrieved litany of messages because, really, what was there to say? Eventually, the phone stopped ringing, because the service was cut off.
Ivey, who’d once responded to clients with warmly cordial notes on heavy cream stationery with burgundy letterhead, didn’t even answer the certified letter that Marilee Manning sent to his home: “You have no idea the financial hardship you’ve put on me,” she remembered writing. “I’ve had two sick cats. I’ve been making promises to my utility company. How do you sleep at night?” She’d auctioned sports memorabilia handed down by her father, an early sports director for KSDK-TV. “Good ol’ Mr. Ivey signed for my letter himself,” she said, describing the capital M’s soft, uneven peaks and the squiggle over to a Y’s loop and upward slash.
He’d also stopped talking to reporters; he did not return requests, by letter and phone, to comment on this article.
Consignors with unsold property peered through Ivey-Selkirk’s windows or walked around back to the dock, wondering how to reclaim their treasures. Often, Ivey was inside, trying, like Hercules in the Augean stables, to figure out who’d consigned what and how to get it back to them.
*****
So much either hadn’t been paid for or hadn’t been returned. A $20,000 Dale Chihuly cylinder. A Snake Man sculpture by Ernest Trova. Egyptian bronze pharaoh statues. An antique French snuffbox, handpainted, with a silver rim and lining. Some of the losses were huge; others small, crushing disappointments.
Eric Hofmeister had sold Limoges china and a set of antique stone building blocks from Germany. “I called Malcolm. ‘Oh, hey, yes… We’ll get you a check out next week,’ he said.” Three weeks later, Hofmeister called again. “He said, ‘Oh, man, we’ve been so busy prepping for auctions. I’ll put it in the mail to you tomorrow.’” It never came.
Judith Warren had felt guilty about selling the linen-and-silk sampler that had been in her family for years, but she knew her kids could use the money—$10,000 they never saw. For philosophy professor Stephanie Ross, the proceeds from her Russian émigré mother’s antique jewelry would have defrayed the expense of boarding her cherished horse.
Ross Verbisky had sold his Peter Max Flag WithHeart, framed. In the future, he said, disgusted, “I’ll just leave my paintings to somebody or give them to my family, who wouldn’t appreciate them anyway.” Adam Frey had sold a painting ofchickens in a farmyard handed down by his great-great-grandfather, a Missouri circuit court judge. Steve and Aubrey Bronskill had consigned eight hand-knotted rugs from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and five sold. Aubrey left messages on Ivey’s private line, essentially saying, “I hear you are not doing well. I guess we’re not going to get any money back. But can we at least get the rugs back that didn’t sell?”
Norman Ogles, a military veteran with disabilities from Puxico, had sold a fishing village, hand-carved from about 10 pounds of ivory, for $2,500. “Ivey called me once, end of February, and said he’d be sending the check in two weeks,” he says. “After I called his home and talked to his wife, he called the police and said I’d threatened to burn the house down.” Ogles denies making the threat, but later remarked, “There’s a long line of people willing to do it.”
Pete Gillett, a retired newspaper editor in Belleville, Illinois, had deliberated before taking his Ansel Adams photo to the auction house. “I even bumped into Andy Selkirk, and he cautioned me because they were a little bit slow. I said, ‘Well, I’m already committed to Ivey. I’ll see how it works.’” The photograph didn’t sell at auction, but Ivey found a buyer who’d purchase it at the reserve price of $30,000. “He finally got in touch with me in the middle of March,” Gillett says. “He said not to worry, they’d get me taken care of. If he’s walked off with that money, how is that any different than if I’d taken that photo down to Forsyth and been robbed at gunpoint outside the door?”
One after another, attorneys won lawsuits against Ivey, who never appeared in court or even sent a lawyer. But the victories were Pyrrhic. “Sometimes, you can get a $1 million judgment, and it may not be worth a dollar and a half,” noted Joseph Bante, attorney for Constance Kling. “My client could force an involuntary bankruptcy, but it tends to be expensive.” He sighed. “Most of the time, in something like this, the debtor steps forward. This one seems to be a little unusual in the level of silence that has come from Mr. Ivey.”
Where had all that money gone? Gossip found no toehold—no excessive drinking, gambling, affairs, or lavish travel—and so leaped to speculation: Ivey’s investors had withdrawn $1 million. He was hiding in a fallout shelter under his house. He had a Swiss bank account. He had money waiting in the Cayman Islands.
On April 7, Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster petitioned the court to freeze all assets, prevent Ivey from working in the auction business ever again, and force him to make restitution, return property, and pay penalties (to be determined by a judge), as well as all investigative and court costs. When Koster’s investigator, Megan Schwartz, got to work, the total of unpaid consignors stood at 208.
Meanwhile, the St. Louis County Library Foundation and the Humane Society of Missouri had erased Ivey from their boards. Members of the Selkirk family—whose auction house had been above reproach since 1830—were kicking themselves for letting Ivey hyphenate their good name. They’d bestowed it like a wedding present of shining Georgian silver, and now it was smeared dull, blackened with disgrace.
The next time Ivey heard a gavel, it would be in a court of law.
*****
Act II
Susan Kime has a soft voice and a cool, Grace Kelly poise. Kime graduated from Villa Duchesne, studied art in Paris, and earned a master’s degree in art history before going to work for Bruce Selkirk. She specialized in appraising paintings because she found their beauty peaceful.
Twenty years later, in December 2013, she opened her newspaper, read about Karsh’s lawsuit, learned there were more lawsuits, and nearly lost that cool. Some of these plaintiffs were her clients. She learned later that they’d thought it a kindness to shield her from their legal plans—but she would have liked to know.
Kime said she’d never paid much attention to Ivey’s side of the auction house, just sending clients to him if they had questions about payment. He handled all of the money stuff himself, and he never discussed any of it. But Kime had been nervous since the fall, because outstanding accounts were stacking up like planes on a blocked runway. “We knew the payment process was getting slower and slower,” she said. “But we didn’t know it was going to come to a screeching halt.”
Her husband, Michael Kime, a lawyer who advises on business plans at AEGIS Professional Services, had long urged her to start her own auction house. She’d shushed him, overwhelmed by the thought of such a massive undertaking. But now his words rang louder. Auctioneer Terry Beye, who’d worked for Ivey-Selkirk even longer than Susan had, knew an investor interested in backing them. The conversation got serious.
The January 2014 Jackson Room auction was, one regular auctiongoer says, “the thinnest I’d ever seen it. Things were going for a few dollars at the end.”
Staff begged Ivey to discuss the worrisome media reports. Instead, a former employee says, he “waltzed around and seemed cheerful, like nothing was wrong.”
At January’s end, Kime and six colleagues—half of Ivey-Selkirk’s staff—gave notice.
Caught off guard, Ivey announced that he planned to restructure, that he’d had some banking issues that would be addressed in the restructuring, and that for the time being, Ivey-Selkirk would do business by appointment only.
But nobody could reach him to make an appointment.
One week later, Kime announced that the Ivey-Selkirk expats were opening a new auction house, Link Auction Galleries, on the Holy Corners—the church-lined intersection of Washington Place and Kingshighway Boulevard in the Central West End. Link would be housed in the 1902 St. John’s United Methodist Church, a Greek Revival masterpiece designed by Theodore Link. Developer Pete Rothschild had bought the church with the Kimes, but he stayed quiet at first, leaving the limelight to Link. Susan and her colleagues would rehab the historic space, supported by investors but retaining majority ownership. They vowed to pay consignors within two weeks of receiving sale proceeds.
While they scrubbed the walls and painted, they went over and over what had happened. People read the newspapers and assumed the entire staff must have known the place was collapsing. But Ivey had never even hinted at any serious financial crisis. His wife and two daughters—both of whom worked at Ivey-Selkirk—seemed as shocked as the rest of the staff.
Early on, Ivey had cited the 2008 recession as the start of his problems. This puzzled Marcella: “Bruce always told me a recession works in our favor.” Granted, there weren’t as many people throwing around small change. But recessions didn’t touch serious money. The wealthy could snatch up bargains for sport or investment.
“People don’t collect the way they used to,” chimed in Danuta Krol, who grew up in Poland and mourned the days when clients hunted obsessively for fine porcelain figurines. But instead, young people were buying contemporary and regional art. And Ivey’s rent and employee benefits were expensive, but that expensive?
He’d never been aggressive about bringing in new business, the expats reminded each other. He wasn’t the brazen type who’d schmooze his friends. He placed local ads in odd places, like on sports radio, which brought in boxes of worthless trinkets they had to catalog and store…
“It was a combination of personality and bad management,” Kime concluded. “I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s criminal. He maybe had a hard time facing reality.”
*****
By late April, Link’s rehab was pretty well finished. The walls in the church’s former tearoom, which has a fireplace and would be used to show off small, pricey decorative arts and jewelry, were painted that twilight-in-Paris shade, a dusky blue grayed with lavender. In the chapel, a backlit religious painting had been replaced with a discreet white Link sign and logo, and phone lines were strung to the choir loft, where staffers would take telephone bids and signal to the auctioneer.
Friction had been developing with the largest investor, Mark Rayfield. From the start, he disliked the name and wanted to call the business Legacy, which reminded Susan of either a funeral home or a pawn shop. She’d held fast, but it had become a sore point, brought up often.
Consignments were coming in. As they tagged articles and researched prices, the staff bantered, their mood light. Their first big auction would be July 12 and 13, and they wanted to make a splash—and enough money to start paying back their investor.
On April 29, the news broke. Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, a Chicago house with five regional offices, had rented space in Clayton.
“It’s 3,000 square feet,” Susan pointed out calmly. “All it is is a satellite. They will just ship everything to Chicago. We can compete with that.” She smiled. “There’s always been some animosity between Chicago and St. Louis. Let them come and try to take our good property!”
True, Hindman had been cherry-picking in St. Louis for years. But Bridget Melloy, the new office’s business development manager, said the company now planned to hold at least three or four auctions a year here, in addition to sending the more fabulous stuff up to Chicago, where it might command a better price. “We saw the opening of the market,” she explained. “And since we already knew there was great property here… St. Louis has such a rich history. There’s a lot of great art here, and a lot of old wealth. It’s a town to be mined.”
Hindman would soon bring in appraisal specialists, scheduling its St. Louis Inaugural Auction for November 21.
Link ignored Hindman and popped champagne for its grand opening on June 26. People entered through the courtyard, past a grand piano and a marble table topped with a huge centerpiece. In front of the piano’s glossy bench stood a wolf feast bowl painted in black, white, and clay red, a skull rattle resting in its hollow back.
In every room, you’d glimpse strangers’ obsessions, pieces of their lives: toys and tea sets; dolls and English landscapes; art jewelry; a giant giraffe; a miniature white ceramic salesman’s-sample stove in flawless condition. Looking felt almost too intimate, like walking off with somebody else’s grocery cart. Yet people paraded through, traipsing across Oriental rugs up for auction. “A lotta Lincolns,” one man said, gazing up at Zack Smithey’s contemporary interpretations of that somber visage. Collectibles expert Dave Weber showed off a mechanical sign-lifter consigned by the Conrad family, St. Louis grocers who once distilled Laurel Springs Kentucky bourbon. The figure’s hands trembled as Weber reached deep into the chest for one of the signs.
The wild card, said specialist Paul Oligschlaeger, would be the contemporary Northwest Coast art, which could bring in thousands of dollars or not sell at all, depending on who was in the audience. “The shaman rattle is a modern representation of Haida. Retail on that artist’s work can go above $20,000. My estimate is $1,200 to $1,500, which I hope is extremely conservative.” He reached up and pulled a string dangling from a mask, and a wooden jaw dropped.
Aubrey Bronskill’s jaw dropped, too, when she answered her phone on June 30 and heard Ivey’s voice. “I about fainted,” she says. Ivey told her that he’d gotten everything sorted, and he wanted to return the rugs that hadn’t sold.
They met at the near-empty Forsyth office. “He’d lost a lot of weight,” she says, her voice warm with unexpected sympathy. “My husband asked him, ‘Do you think we’ll get any money back?’ and he said, ‘It’s in the court. There’s nothing I can do.’”
*****
Finale
On the Saturday morning of Link’s inaugural auction, July 12, people streamed in and gazed up at the former altar, washed with soft stained-glass light, and the Tiffany lamp silhouetted in the center. Some of the women came sleekly coiffed and zipped into designer dresses, others with cropped gray hair, sensible shoes, and husbands in short-sleeve plaid shirts. Dealers showed up, alongside young couples hoping to furnish their first home and neighbors in running shorts who popped in for a peek and wound up staying.
A young man clutched his paddle tightly as he looked for a seat up front. A blond woman moved through the crowd, bending every few rows to murmur to someone she knew, “When Terry comes in, we’re all going to stand.”
Beye stepped up to the pulpit. People jumped to their feet, applauding the return of a local auction house grafted from the Selkirk’s tree. For the dealers in the crowd, auctions were coolly calculated transactions. But for people who were entrusting heirlooms to the house or falling in love with an object, auctions were an intimate exchange, hopeful and risky and weirdly emotional. They clapped out of loyalty, grateful for the restoration of trust.
“It means a lot,” Susan had said earlier, “to have a chance to salvage our reputations.”
Beye spread his arms and welcomed the audience, then opened the bidding. The first item up was a Thomas Hart Benton limited-edition lithograph estimated at $1,000 to $1,500. “I have a $1,400 online bidder,” he announced. “I have $1,500 on the phone. $1,800,” as another caller signaled from the choir loft. “$1,900 to the room,” as a paddle came up. “I need $2,000. $2,250 is on the phone. I need $2,500. I have $2,500 in the room. $3,000 on the other phone. We’ve got $3,250. I’m asking $3,500. Last call, $3,500… Sold! The first lot at Link Auction Galleries, $3,250.”
The tension broken, staff and audience slid into the familiar rhythm. “$850 on the aisle, $900 bidding, $950, not yours,” Beye warned. “Who wants $1,300?”
St. Louis had its very own auction house again—not somebody swooping in from a bigger city and not an eBay auction to bid in a bathrobe. There was added interest in knowing not only items’ provenance, but also which grand house this painting graced, who ate Thanksgiving dinner at this table. St. Louis buyers were becoming part of the local lineage, keeping this stuff in the family, so to speak.
Up in the loft, Lesley Poggemoeller, a sweet young art-history grad who was thrilled when her colleagues at Ivey-Selkirk invited her to join them, took phone bids. “The opening bid is $500. Would you like $500?” “It’s still with you. He’s giving fair warning… Congratulations! You are the winner!” Some bidders held off at the outset, hoping for a low price—and then the phones all rang at once. “It’s the psychology,” Poggemoeller said later.“You want it as low as possible, but you want it.”
On the floor, a young man with heavy black glasses, tattoos, and a crew cut snagged a Gary Passanise painting for $850. An older man bid a piece of art into the thousands, then folded his arms. At the same instant, his wife nodded. “She said yes!” Beye teased. The husband grinned and raised his paddle.
A heavyset man stood in front of the sanctuary, an apron of sweat darkening his blue oxford shirt, and gave a loud “yip” whenever he spotted a paddle Beye might have missed. On the other side of the room stood another spotter, Mike Kime, who managed to look both distinguished and a little dorky—a tall, brainy numbers guy with a sweet smile. Oligschlaeger, square-faced and intense, sat at a low table, laptop open in front of him, tracking live Internet bids. He reached up to Beye’s pulpit with his right hand and kept his fingers curved over the edge, tapping whenever he had a bid.
Beye didn’t miss a wink or a paddle twitch, but he moved at a clip, his voice strong and his wide, thin-lipped mouth enunciating every word. He wasn’t quite as funny and charming as Ivey—but with Beye, people always knew where they were.
When the catalog’s cover image, Joseph Vorst’s Drought, flashed up on the screen, a here-comes-the-bride hush fell. “Beautiful piece,” Beye said. “I must break bids and start at $16,000.” The bids rose fast, to $19,000, $20,000. “I need $22,500 to continue. Scott’s got it at $22,500. I have $25,000 in the room. Scott says no to $27,500. Sold!—to paddle No. 60,” a private collector in the room.
The estimate had been $14,000 to $18,000—and the total sale price, with the buyer’s premium tacked on, was $30,000. The previous record for any Vorst, set back in 1998, was $7,000.
A desert landscape estimated at $40,000 to $60,000 brought a top bid of only $32,500, beneath the seller’s reserve. No sale. A tiny Pierre-Auguste Renoir etching went for $125; an Alberto Giacometti etching for $325. Birger Sandzén’s Pines by the Lake hammered at $17,000, and the buyer yelled, “Yessssssss!”
“I think he’s happy,” Beye said dryly.
A heavy mahogany dining-room set—a server and a buffet topped with black marble—went, as expected, for a mere $600; people don’t want big furniture anymore. The Conrad sign-lifter went for $3,000. The wolf feast bowl, estimated at $700 to $900, hammered at $2,500.
The two 15th-century Chinese Ming bronzes had multiple online bids waiting, one $22,500 against a $12,000 to $18,000 estimate. But the big surprise was, indeed, the Northwest Coast art. One 8-inch mask with white hair sprouting from the top of its clean wood carving, estimated at $200 to $300, sold for $8,500. A shaman’s mask and a warrior’s mask, both with equally conservative estimates, brought $2,250 apiece. The shaman rattle brought $1,900.
Oligschlaeger watched with a dazed grin.
*****
Curtain Calls
The opera’s coloratura moment came on July 31,when Susan Kime asked Beye, Oligschlaeger, and Weber to leave Link. It was becoming painfully obvious that there were two different visions of the business. They wanted to forge a niche as a firearms auction business, a strong interest of Rayfield’s. The Kimes had never been wild about the idea of selling guns and had said it would depend on neighborhood approval.
The conflict came to a head over a $29,000 bill charged by Rayfield’s son for computer help that he claimed to have provided to Link. Beye attempted to pay the bill without consulting with Susan Kime. On July 31, Kime dismissed Beye, Oligschlaeger, and Weber. Link is now suing CompuTech Advanced Computer Solutions, a company that is owned by Rayfield’s son, for fraudulent billing.
“We had a plan six months ago, and it’s going in a different direction,” Beye said a few days later. “I was trying to do something a little different and really, really good. I wanted this thing to take off.” He paused. “What they’re doing, heck, it could work.” He declined to go into further detail, saying only that he was appalled by the rumors already floating and was tempted to call one of the antiques dealers and ask just who it was who’d come in saying Link had been raided the previous week and somebody had been taken away in handcuffs.
That was operatic nonsense—but another rumor was substantiated a few weeks later. Garth’s Auctioneers & Appraisers, based in Ohio, was coming to St. Louis.
Inside gossip said Ivey was helping the company open a satellite operation on McPherson Avenue—which would have been a violation of court order. In fact, Ivey was talking with the owners of Garth’s, Jeff and Amelia Jeffers, because they wanted to buy and resurrect the Ivey-Selkirk name. According to Jeff, the Missouri attorney general’s office had been aware of the negotiations from the start.
The better Jeffers and his wife, Amelia, got to know St. Louis, the more they realized it was “a warm, approachable place,” he said. “This idea of taking things out of the market is not where we wanted to be. And people were heartbroken about Ivey-Selkirk going away.” So the Jefferses bought the name, the trademarks, and the brand.
“We thought, ‘Why the hell not? Let’s bring it back strong.’”
