De Pury, holding daughter Diane Delphine, and wife Michaela at a private viewing of Linda McCartney’s Life in Photographs.
His romance with Neumeister, his second wife, came as a surprise to both of them. They’d been working together closely for eight years, “and I’d matched him up with girlfriends,” she said, when one day in Moscow, he recalled, “I suddenly looked at her with totally different eyes. Then we thought we’d be very adult about it as if nothing happened. And then every time I saw Michaela, it would start again, until I realized that the person I loved had been in front of me all this time.”
“I was afraid, but I married him because I thought even if it’s for 10 days, it’s worth it,” said Michaela, 41, a tall, angular blonde from a Munich auctioneering family who holds a doctorate in art history. Her wedding present to her husband was the artist duo Elmgreen and Dragset’s Second Marriage (2008), two sinks with their pipes tied. Until the de Purys announced their marriage via e-mail, not even their personal assistants knew about the relationship. “The last thing I ever thought I’d do is marry again,” said de Pury, whose love life was the talk of the art world in 2003 after he installed as CEO—and later was believed to have forced out—his then-girlfriend, millionaire publisher Louise MacBain. “And then starting a family again,” added de Pury, who has four grown children. “It’s a wonderful time.”
Along with their 10-month-old daughter, Diane Delphine—to whom her mother speaks in German and her father in French—the couple now live in London’s Mayfair, where their upstairs neighbors include Rupert and Wendi Murdoch. But the de Purys are rarely home for long, and though they plan to fill their apartment with “a completely funky mix,” said Michaela—ranging from a Gothic Madonna and a Franz West table to “a lot of cutting-edge art”—“everything is pretty much in bubble wrap on the floor.” (De Pury’s skateboard collection is relegated to his London office.) As have many of their friends, Alexander Gilkes, a young Phillips auctioneer groomed by de Pury, called them “a formidable force,” and added: “It’s 24-hour art with them. Simon’s the perfect door opener, and Michaela’s the perfect door closer.”
“It’s a kind of traveling circus, and we pitch a tent where we can,” de Pury told me in June, when we met in Zurich en route to the home of Maja Hoffmann, the Swiss über collector whose annual kickoff party for Art Basel is a much coveted invitation. De Pury was to officiate at the night’s charity auction to benefit Zurich’s Kunsthalle. He and Michaela had just arrived from Berlin via billionaire Nicolas Berggruen’s plane, and the next morning would fly to Windsor Castle in time to see a friend installed as a Knight of the Garter by the Queen and assorted Royals, among them Kate Middleton, the newly minted Duchess of Cambridge. As they led me through Hoffmann’s glass-encased home, a Marcel Breuer gem, and across its sprawling lakeside lawn, some of it tented for dinner, they worked the high-wattage crowd, unable to move two paces without bumping into the likes of Larry Gagosian, John Baldessari, Elizabeth Peyton, Jay Jopling, and the recently reconciled Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour.
