The Woman to See

It was 10 a.m., hours to go yet, and nervous anticipation was already building throughout the exhibition spaces. For the past two weeks, the famed New York auction house Christie’s had opened its galleries each morning for public viewings of prized works of art that would be sold during its 2026 spring sales season. The star attractions of the sales, two dazzling collections belonging to two of the art world’s most influential figures, had been drawing overflow crowds eager to view rarely displayed works from such luminaries as Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși, Mark Rothko, and Roy Lichtenstein. And now, on a Monday in the middle of May, the day on which they would all be sold had at last arrived.

"These walls, in the last two weeks they have seen everyone from celebrities to the wealthiest individuals in the world,” said Gabriela Palmieri, who after a long career at Sotheby’s, Christie’s rival auction house, is today one of the industry’s most sought-after art advisors. “From Jeff Bezos to George Economou, they’ve all been here.”

It had been a hectic stretch for Palmieri, who at that very moment had at least one client already wandering Christie’s meticulously choreographed, museum-like galleries, with another set to arrive from Israel at any moment. Over the two weeks of the spring sales, she was also overseeing three complex art installations, volunteering as an auctioneer at a charity event, and participating in a panel event on the Latin American art market organized by the Aspen Institute and El Museo del Barrio. And through it all, she was finalizing her strategy for that night’s auction, at which she would be bidding for clients on a few works, though she declined to reveal precisely which ones. “I just came from some acupuncture,” she told me, laughing, “I’m trying to balance my chi.”

In a blue pantsuit and colorful blouse, her iPhone glowing constantly with text notifications, she spoke rapidly, her sentences often stretching to include narrations of the texts she kept receiving from clients, employees, and colleagues. The art world is notoriously secretive, with collectors for the most part insisting on anonymity. It is also notoriously competitive, with everyone trying to figure out who is up to what. For this reason, Palmieri enters clients in her phone using code names, making it harder for anyone peeking at her screen during auctions to figure out who she’s bidding for, or whether she’s bidding at all. Her clientele is rumored to include a number of highly regarded collectors but, of course, she wouldn’t say much about that. How many clients does she have? “That’s an interesting question,” she said without ever quite answering it.

Palmieri is the daughter of the visionary Latin jazz composer and pianist Eddie Palmieri, who passed away in 2025, but she has created a professional identity that is entirely her own. “There are few people in the art world who are as strategic as she is,” said Alma Luxembourg, Palmieri’s onetime colleague at Sotheby’s who today runs the Luxembourg + Co. galleries in New York and London. “A lot of art experts are very much specialized in seeing the details and nuances within a specific artist’s market. Gabby has the ability to both know the detail and to think about the larger picture.”

While at Sotheby’s, Palmieri rose to become the first-ever Latina auctioneer at a major auction house, and by the time she left the company in 2016, she held the position of chairman, contemporary art Americas. “She knows art history better than any advisor, and as much as any museum curator,” said Lisa Dennison, formerly the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and today a Sotheby’s executive. Just as crucial to her success, Dennison said, is Palmieri’s wit, love of fun, and cosmopolitan sophistication. “It’s a job where glamour is important, and she has that glamour—let’s call it more of an aura. Her clients adore her, so much that they give her gifts. She has the best handbag collection in probably all of New York City, because her clients give her the best bags. I’m quite envious.”

Leading me through the Christie’s galleries in the hours before the auctions, Palmieri nodded at a tall man in jeans and a sport jacket who was admiring the 1964 Roy Lichtenstein painting Anxious Girl. (It would go on to sell for $46 million that night.) “That’s David Lenhardt over there,” she said. “He’s the ex-CEO of PetSmart.”

Lenhardt, seeing Palmieri, immediately greeted her with a warm hug. He told me that he’s been working with Palmieri since 2006, when he first became interested in art and she was still at Sotheby’s. When she founded Palmieri Fine Art in 2018 to help collectors with the buying, selling, transporting, installing, and storing of art, Lenhardt came along as a client. “I consider her a friend first,” he said. Though Lenhardt had no intention of bidding on any of the art that night—“let’s be clear, at these prices, none of this stuff is going anywhere near my collection”—he’d flown in from Arizona just to be able to see it. The works being auctioned were from the personal collections of the late S.I. Newhouse, the former chairman of the Conde Nast magazine empire, and the late Agnes Gund, the longtime president of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Because their artworks had remained primarily in private residences, rather than in public spaces, the Christie’s viewing represented a rare and fleeting opportunity to see them. “Some of them, like the Jackson Pollock, the Brâncuși, they’re works that just aren’t around,” Lenhardt said. “So, for me, this is not about acquisition, it’s about the fact that you can get this close to them and learn. And having Gabby teach you about them is a joy.”

Palmieri regarded the Pollock in question, the 1948 drip painting Number 7A (it would sell for $181 million a few hours later), and explained how its ownership had transferred through the years from the influential photographer and artist Herbert Matter to the collectors John and Kimiko Powers to the disgraced former Sotheby’s owner A. Alfred Taubman, who at last sold the painting to Newhouse in 2000 for more than $30 million in the wake of Taubman’s conviction related to a price-fixing scandal involving Sotheby’s and Christie’s. We continued on through the galleries, passing masterpiece after masterpiece as Palmieri shared a seemingly endless knowledge of the provenance, style, and historical significance of each. In time we arrived at a small room where another of the collection’s prize works was on display.

“This is the girl. This is her,” Palmieri said, pointing to Danaïde, Brâncuși’s bronze sculpture of a sparsely featured woman’s head. “This sculpture was 1913, the birth of modern sculpture,” Palmieri explained. “Go take a look, because this is seismic.” (Bidders quite agreed, as the work would sell that night for $107.6 million.)

Outside the rarefied world of art collecting, what Gabriela Palmieri is perhaps best known for is being the daughter of Eddie Palmieri. She describes her father as a supportive and loving man who could sometimes become overly focused on his music and career. Palmieri, the youngest of five children, was born on Long Island. When she was seven, her father overhauled his orchestra and moved the family to Puerto Rico. She attended private school alongside the children of diplomats and business executives until the seventh grade, when the family returned to New York, settling in the Forest Hills section of Queens.

“My father, honestly, it was always chaos,” she recalled. “Whether Celia Cruz was over and we were picking out her wigs, or Tito Puente was around, it was a big life, music blaring, and I’m like, ‘I have to study!’” Palmieri said her father was constantly on the road, often joined by her mother, Iraida, who passed away in 2014. Who looked after the kids while her parents were traveling? “It was like Maggie Simpson, I was changing my own diaper,” she replied, laughing. “They say the youngest is babied—I was the anti-babied. I was fiercely independent. I was always lost in my books. I used books and studying to block out the chaos. But at the same time, my mother really wanted us to be good students, get good grades, and get a good job.”

Palmieri attended Dominican Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Manhattan that sends graduates to top universities. Looking to avoid calculus during her senior year, she wound up in an art history class. “That changed my life,” she recalled. “I could look at history and the history of civilizations through pictures and through storytelling.” After enrolling at BC in 1993, she set out to study political science. Before long, though, she realized her academic passions were leading her elsewhere. “I would go to Bapst Library,” she said, “and I would get lost in pictures and history and understanding where art and power and politics converged in such a fascinating way.” But when she told her mother that she’d decided to major in art history, the reaction was hardly enthusiastic. “She was horrified,” Palmieri said. “What are you going to do with art history? This isn’t what we sent you to BC for.”

Palmieri stuck with the major—and with the BC crew team—while excelling at Boston College. “We both had Professor Claude Cernuschi,” recalled Nicolai Frahm ’97, who also went on to become an art advisor. “She was so smart, and she remembered every line in every book.” Also graduating in the class of 1997 was Palmieri’s husband, Scott Harford, though the couple wouldn’t connect until three years later, in a New York restaurant. After BC, Palmieri earned a full academic scholarship to the University of Chicago, where she enrolled in the art history PhD program. That proved a disappointment, however. “It was all theory,” she explained. “I just wanted more of that excitement that art gave me that I wasn’t getting in the classroom.” She stayed for a year and a half, earning her master’s degree, then took a leave and moved back to New York when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. She eventually decided not to resume her studies. 

Having completed our tour of the Christie’s galleries, Palmieri led me back to the building’s lobby, which was abuzz with excitement for the night’s auctions. Leaning against the front desk, wearing earbuds and typing furiously into his phone, was Max Carter, a Christie’s executive who is the son of the former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. Seeing Palmieri, Carter smiled and put away his phone. In 2024, they’d collaborated on what would become one of the signature deals of Palmieri’s career as an art advisor.

That year, Palmieri learned that a René Magritte painting from the Belgian surrealist’s L’empire des lumières series was going to be auctioned at Christie’s. The Magritte market was red-hot, and Christie’s auction of the painting was expected to fetch $100 million or more. Palmieri recognized an opportunity for a client whose family had for decades owned a gouache of the same painting, a version Magritte had done on paper rather than canvas. Palmieri calculated that her client’s gouache might never be more valuable than it was in that moment, and together they decided to sell it at the same auction as the canvas version.

Ahead of the auction, Carter called Palmieri with the rather staggering news that a Christie’s client had offered a guaranteed $10 million for the gouache. Auction guarantees are a tricky business. They provide security to people who are selling their works, assuring them of a minimum amount they will receive, but they also have the potential to suppress overall bidding. Accepting a guarantee, in other words, carries the risk of restricting how much an artwork will bring back when it’s auctioned. Still, Palmieri and her client were tempted. The Magritte market may have been roaring, but the $10 million guarantee was astounding. Palmieri solicited opinions from Magritte specialists that she trusted. “I’m calling the Magritte mafia, all of the surrealists, bending their spoons in a corner,” she told me. “I’m like, ‘What do we think this thing is worth?’ They’re like, ‘Everyone’s talking about it—this thing is gonna go big, but $10 million already is crazy.’”

“At the start of the process, we knew that we didn’t want a guarantee,” Palmieri continued. “And then, finally, the guarantee became a number where saying no is like, ‘I’m gambling with someone else’s fate, someone else’s money.’” Still, she was confident that the market would support an even higher value for the painting, especially because she believed that bidders at the auction who lost out on the canvas version would turn their attention to the gouache. Palmieri and her client decided to reject the guarantee and go to auction “naked.” This decision carried risk for Christie’s, too, since the auction house stood to make less money in commissions if the painting didn’t sell for at least the level of the guarantee, but Carter gave Palmieri his full support.

“So,” Palmieri said, nodding at Carter and laughing, “we decided we were going to Thelma-and-Louise it off the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge if it didn’t hit the guarantee at auction.”

“I can’t remember who was Thelma and who was Louise,” Carter said. “I was your junior partner…so I guess I was Louise.”

When the gouache was finally auctioned, the bidding soared past $10 million and kept climbing until it appeared to stall out at $14 million. “And then at $14 million,” Palmieri recalled, “new bidder! It ends up hammering at $16 million and change.” With the typical auction fees tacked on, the final price was $18.8 million. “My client was ready to pass out,” Palmieri said.

Carter marveled at the expertise and conviction required to say no to the $10 million guarantee. “The client trusted her and they were right to,” he said. “You only make a decision like that if you’ve been in this market a long time, if you know what you’re doing, and you understand how this all works. Gabby did that.”

“We did that,” Palmieri said.

“OK, we did that,” Carter replied. He told me that Palmieri’s collection of talents stands out in a crowded industry. “If she didn’t want to do this, she could be a museum curator or teach,” he said. “And look, not everyone who has her knowledge also has her great charisma, or her wit and humor.”

What the Magritte sale reveals as much as anything is Palmieri’s willingness to accept risk when she believes the circumstances favor her. Setting out on her own after leaving Sotheby’s, for instance, rather than taking a high-paying job at another auction house, was quite a gamble. I asked her about the compensation she left behind as an auction house executive to instead start Palmieri Fine Art. “Well over seven figures, comfortably, every year,” she said. “I just had this confidence that I could do even better. I had standing offers to go to galleries, to go to auction houses. But I think the best advice for anyone is, bet on yourself.”

Another bet on herself that paid off was sticking with art history rather than choosing a different major that others might have imagined as more sensible or offering greater financial reward. Palmieri encouraged Boston College students to follow their passions when charting their academic and career paths. That, she said, has always been her approach. “I think I have my father’s love for what I do, and that was his superpower,” she said. “He so loved his music. But where my father was like freestyle, my mother was about building blocks of stability as best she could within that kind of whirling vortex of energy and dynamism. I recognize this at fifty-one years young: I am a combination of both of them.”

As I prepared to leave, Palmieri stopped for just a moment to take in the many artworks that surrounded her, works that after that night would be packed up to join the collections of their new owners. “I’m going to be so sad,” she said. “I’ve been here every day for the past two weeks, and this is the last time to see these works.” ◽