Jun 23, 2026

Welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion Maneker.

By the time you read this, I’ll be well east of Cleveland and headed for home. Although I was trying to make miles yesterday, I did find time to stop at the Art Institute of Chicago to see the Willem de Kooning drawing show (more on that in another newsletter) and an impromptu tour of Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul’s collection before hitting the road. Then, this morning, I stopped in at the Cleveland Museum of Art. I’ll have reports on both museum visits when I’m back in July.

Tonight, the great Ingrid Abramovitch is here with a look at NOMAD, a pioneer art and design fair held in noteworthy settings where the rich vacation. Up top, I take a look at Friday’s Phillips sale in London.

Also mentioned in this issue: Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte, Todd Merrill, Giorgio Pace, Karl Lagerfeld, Robert Wilson, Franco Albini, Osvaldo Borsani, Sébastien Léon, Flynn McGarry, Sophie Dries, Noah Khoshbin, Dominique Nabokov, Abby Bangser, Laura Facey, Aurel Basedow, John Procario, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Anselm Kiefer, and more.

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Terms of Art

Phillips London preview: On Friday afternoon, Phillips will hold its London sale, leading with a David Hockney painting from 1991, The Only One With Waves. The work, which sold eight years ago for almost $2.2 million, is coming back to the auction block with an estimate of £1.8 million, which would mean a selling price close to $3 million. Of course, the artist’s recent death could provoke irrational auction results, and that might now be a conservative expectation. The seller is confident enough not to have taken a guarantee.

Phillips also has Yayoi Kusama’s white Infinity Nets (MAE), from 2013, which is coming to auction for the first time after changing hands four times in the past dozen or so years. It comes with the support of a third-party guarantee and is estimated at £800,000. In a similar price band is Jean Dubuffet’s Étanche Ibitryx Monte Crème, which is estimated at £750,000—a solid rise from the £540,000 or so paid for the work at Christie’s 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to see this 2024 Jadé Fadojutimi painting, O! The Climate Has a Temper Today, estimated at £300,000, on the market. There were two rounds of secondary sales—one in 2021 and another from 2023 into early 2024—when demand outstripped supply and Gagosian gallery was selling the artist’s work hand over fist. Prices for those works peaked at just under $2 million.

Phillips has also included works by M.F. Husain, the grandmaster of South Asian art, as well as Shahzia Sikander and Subodh Gupta, members of a generation of South Asian artists who came to prominence two decades ago. Gupta’s OK Mili, from 2005, which sold at auction in 2006 for £144,000 (and then sold four years later at auction for £265,000), is back at Phillips and estimated at £180,000. It’s another example of the historical turn in the market, but with a very interesting twist: Phillips is smartly latching on to the raging demand for South Asian art in an effort to attract new buyers to its contemporary sales.

Now, let’s go to the Hamptons…

NOMAD Takes the Hamptons

The roving art fair has already captivated the three-comma crowd with exclusive design offerings in rarefied settings—and now, despite recent turbulence, it’s setting up shop in the East Coast’s ultimate summer enclave.

Ingrid Abramovitch

Last summer, as he was making preparations to debut NOMAD Abu Dhabi in a decommissioned modernist airport, Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte announced a major new chapter for the roving art and design fair that he co-founded in 2017. For the first time, the event for deep-pocketed collectors would be coming to the Hamptons. Not included in the announcement, however, was the fact that NOMAD would be held without its other co-founder, Giorgio Pace. The two partners had disentangled a few weeks earlier. Pace, a luxury consultant with deep ties to the art and design worlds, was leaving to start his own cultural platform, Der Pavilion, based in St. Moritz. That meant Bellavance-Lecompte, a Montreal-born, Milan-based architect and curator, was now solely in charge of the fair.

From the start, NOMAD, with its pioneering anti-fair model and a peripatetic premise baked into its name, was an immediate and much-emulated success. The partners’ epiphany was that the best way to lure top-tier collectors was to offer them the insider experiences that big-tent fairs simply could not—an idea that has only accelerated in the post-pandemic years. NOMAD invited small groups of the world’s most exclusive collectible design and art galleries to mount exhibitions in architecturally significant venues—Karl Lagerfeld’s Villa La Vigie near Monaco, say, or a 16th century manor on the outskirts of St. Moritz. The European resort town settings were no accident: When visiting V.I.P.s weren’t skiing or yachting, there wasn’t much else to do except buy art and furniture.

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On the final day of that tumultuous July, Bellavance-Lecompte also informed NOMAD’s international cohort of galleries of a major coup: Not only was the event arriving in the Hamptons for its first U.S. edition, but its home would be Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center—the result of two years of negotiations with the avant-garde theater director and visual artist. “I met with Bob in Milan at Salone del Mobile to discuss it,” Bellavance-Lecompte told me. “He was super enthusiastic.” But hours after he shared his communiqué, Bellavance-Lecompte, along with the rest of the world, learned that Wilson had died that same day, at the age of 83. “We were shocked,” Bellavance-Lecompte said. “Obviously, it was very challenging. It took a month or two to understand what was going to happen.”

To his relief, Wilson’s foundation ultimately decided to proceed—and not just for one season, but for three years. And so, from June 26 to 28 (with a V.I.P. preview day on the 25th), NOMAD will finally land in the Hamptons, where collectors who haven’t ventured to editions in places like Switzerland, Italy, or the U.A.E. will have a chance to see what the fair is all about.

The NOMAD Diaspora

Of course, this edition arrives at a crowded moment for design fairs. NOMAD’s formula has since been replicated everywhere from Design Miami.Paris—which debuted in 2023 in an 18th century Left Bank mansion (also a former Lagerfeld home)—to this summer’s inaugural PAD Saint-Tropez, held in a Riviera villa. There’s also Alcova, the independent design platform that has shown in site-specific locations in Milan and Miami, including houses by midcentury masters like Franco Albini and Osvaldo Borsani.

But after nine years and 18 editions, NOMAD has its formula down. And Bellavance-Lecompte, who has become its globe-trotting public face, appears unfazed by imitators or going it alone. His gamble on taking the fair to the Gulf paid off with a surge of attendance (more than 8,000 people showed up), reportedly strong sales, and a 2026 Monocle Design Award for best industry event. “Many people were doubtful about Abu Dhabi,” said Bellavance-Lecompte, who used to run a gallery in Beirut and pushed for the Middle East expansion. “But we’ve already got a waiting list for the next edition [in November].”

Meanwhile, the Hamptons have arguably never seen an art and design fair on this level. The event will feature a hand-picked group of 30 exhibitors—half American and half international, mostly from Europe and the Middle East. The presenters span design, jewelry, and fine art, and will include Gallery FUMI, The Future Perfect, Robilant, Todd Merrill Studio, Leila Heller Gallery, and Maison Gerard. “The [Watermill] Center is so prestigious, it’s a perfect alignment,” said Merrill, a New York dealer who is bringing a 12-foot-tall gilded tree sculpture by Jamaican artist Laura Facey, along with resin paintings by Aurel Basedow and sculpted sofas by John Procario.

The program was conceived as an homage to Wilson—a multidisciplinary dialogue in the spirit of his practice. Each exhibitor will occupy a room on Wilson’s creative campus, a former Western Union research laboratory surrounded by 10 acres of woodland and gardens, conveniently tucked into one of America’s wealthiest summer destinations. Wilson spent decades cultivating a landscape of pebbled paths, lawns, and gardens dotted with his collection of Indonesian megaliths; every summer, he staged his annual benefit on the center’s grounds, filling the plein air stages and woods with body-painted performers and surreal tableaux.

For NOMAD, those outdoor spaces will host site-specific installations and large-scale pieces, including a sound sculpture by Sébastien Léon and works by Emirati artists curated with the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi. There will also be a picnic with a menu by chef Flynn McGarry. (Tickets are free but in limited quantities; best to register now.)

Other highlights include an exhibition of never-before-seen photographs of Wilson’s life and interiors by artist Dominique Nabokov, curated by Parisian architect and designer Sophie Dries, alongside a selection of his furniture, sculpture, and other ephemera curated by the Watermill Center’s Noah Khoshbin. There will also be a private tour of Wilson’s personal apartment, which includes a room he created as an art project for the Louvre and transported to Watermill. Abby Bangser—a former artistic director for Frieze who currently runs the exhibition platform Object & Thing—is also collaborating with Giorgio Armani, one of the fair’s sponsors, on an installation that pairs pieces by contemporary designers with fashion and furniture from the archives of the late Italian couturier.

For Bellavance-Lecompte, the formula NOMAD established in places like St. Moritz proved that chasing the nine-zeros crowd is easier when they’re relaxed and situated—especially when a major urban center is less than a three-hour drive (or a short helicopter ride) away. We’ll see whether the equation translates to this side of the Atlantic. Could Aspen or Palm Beach be next? “I mean, obviously, the U.S. is the number one market for collecting on a global scale,” he said. “That’s where most of the true transactions are happening. I think we have a great expansion plan.”

Thanks, Ingrid. This was great. I’ll be back tomorrow for our Inner Circle edition, where I’ll interview Gagosian’s Kara Vander Weg about her Anselm Kiefer show and the artist’s career. Upgrade your subscription here to join us there.

Looking forward to getting home,

M

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