The Rise and Fall of Art Mogul Louise Blouin

“I haven’t made many mistakes,” Louise Blouin said soon after her compound in the Hamptons was sold out from under her in a bankruptcy auction. “You can’t judge someone because they have an issue once in their life. I’m sure Steve Jobs didn’t have a perfect track record.”

Ms. Blouin, who grew up in a small town in Quebec, rose to the top tiers of society in New York and London a little more than two decades ago. She made a name for herself as an art-world mogul and a host of heady salons and glittering parties filled with artists, scientists, dignitaries and billionaires. But her time as a power player seemed to come to an end on Feb. 13, when she entered a drab bankruptcy courtroom in Central Islip, N.Y.

Trim and fit, with long blond hair, Ms. Blouin was dressed for the hearing all in black — black trench coat cinched at the waist, fitted black trousers and black sneakers. Having informed the judge in December that she could not afford a lawyer, she arrived in the company of her third husband, Mathew Kabatoff.

The judge, Alan S. Trust, heard hours of testimony as he considered whether or not he would approve the sale of La Dune, the beachfront estate that Ms. Blouin had once hoped to sell for no less than $115 million.

The property had been on and off the market for several years before an anonymous bidder struck an agreement to buy it for nearly $89 million at an auction at Sotheby’s Auction House in Manhattan on Jan. 24. In court last week, Ms. Blouin, who is in her mid-60s, did her best to thwart a sale at that price.

Only in the Hamptons can an $89 million residential real estate deal be considered something of a flop. But a similar estate on nearby Meadow Lane recently fetched $112 million. Perhaps more important to Ms. Blouin and her associates, the price tag for La Dune fell millions short of the debt on the property, according to John Isbell, a lawyer who worked on the deal on behalf of the real estate lender Bay Point Advisors.

La Dune, which sits on four acres along Gin Lane in Southampton, N.Y., comprises two grand houses, a sunken tennis court and two swimming pools. It has a combined 22,000 square feet of interior space, with 19 bedrooms, 20 bathrooms, a home cinema and two gyms. In recent years, a pair of limited liability companies led by Ms. Blouin had placed the two homes under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Ms. Blouin acted as her own counsel during the bankruptcy hearing as she cross-examined some of the people involved in the La Dune saga, including brokers who had tried to unload the property, the Sotheby’s International Real Estate representatives who clinched the sale and the lenders who in all likelihood will get most of the cash.

She claimed that there had been offers of more than $100 million for the property and brought along email printouts in an attempt to prove her point. Judge Trust seemed unimpressed with these documents, which had apparently not been entered into evidence, and the handwritten annotations in the margins.

“Do you have a clean copy of that document, Ms. Blouin?” he asked after a witness complained of being unable to read her handwriting.

The judge also showed little sympathy when Ms. Blouin claimed, in the middle of questioning a witness, that the sale process was “not transparent.” And when she asked, mid-hearing, if she could “say a few things,” he told her to save her remarks for “closing arguments.”

“Oh, OK,” Ms. Blouin replied. “I don’t know what is opening and closing, because I don’t have experience of this.”

Toward the end of the hearing, Ms. Blouin said she would not oppose the deal, but merely wanted to raise questions about the process. Judge Trust replied that the sale of La Dune had been fair. Then he approved the deal, saying, “The marketplace has spoken.”

So how did Ms. Blouin — whose net worth in was once estimated by The Times of London to fall between those of Madonna and the Queen of England — go from Gin Lane to Central Islip? To the painter Ross Bleckner, who has been a friend of Ms. Blouin’s for more than 20 years, the answer is simple: “She wanted to be a mover and a shaker in the art world.”

Rise and Fall

Louise Thérèse Blouin grew up in Dorval, a suburban town on the shores of Lake Saint-Louis on the Island of Montreal. Her parents ran an insurance brokerage. She made her New York society debut in 1978, representing Canada at the International Debutante Ball held at the Waldorf Astoria.

She attended McGill University for a time and had a brief marriage in the early 1980s to David Stewart, an heir to the RJR-Macdonald tobacco fortune. Her next husband, John MacBain, was a rising businessman who had been a class valedictorian at McGill. Together, they made hundreds of millions in the classified ad business, starting in 1987 with Auto Hebdo, a Montreal publication specializing in car listings.

Their company, Trader Classified Media, had hundreds of similar publications around the world and dozens of websites at its peak. But it was the couple’s purchase of La Dune for $13.5 million in 1998 from the historian Barbara Lee Diamonstein-Spielvogel that established them as society players. Harald Grant, a broker for Sotheby’s International Real Estate, represented the seller in that deal.

“There was a storm at the closing,” Mr. Grant said. “John called me and said, ‘Is everything going to be fine?’ I said, ‘The bulkhead is doing its job!’”

Soon enough, the MacBains were sending invitations to prominent figures, including the financier Stephen A. Schwarzman, the diplomat Henry Kissinger, Mr. Bleckner and the fashion designer Calvin Klein. Mr. Bleckner noted that it was hard to say no to these luncheons and dinners, because Ms. Blouin would provide a list of five available dates.

“Me and Calvin would be hysterical, laughing about it,” Mr. Bleckner said. “How do you get out of five dates? What were we supposed to say — ‘I’m going away for the whole summer’?”

Simon de Pury, who had served as the chairman of Sotheby’s Europe before starting his own art advisory firm, was a frequent guest at La Dune. In his dishy 2016 memoir, “The Auctioneer: Adventures in the Art Trade,” he wrote that he had hit it off with Ms. Blouin over lunch and had soon begun spending time with her.

She also enlisted François Catroux, a French designer whose clients included various oligarchs and Rothschilds (and whose wife, Betty, was the muse of Yves Saint Laurent). Mr. Catroux gave the original Southampton house an update. After the property’s guest cottage was demolished, he lent his expertise to a second house meant to complement the original structure.

Soon enough, the MacBains’ marriage was coming to an end. So was Mr. de Pury’s. When a romance blossomed between Ms. Blouin and Mr. de Pury, they became the talk of the beach and the art world.

Amid the domestic changes, Mr. de Pury merged his art consulting business with Phillips Auctioneers, and a new company was born: Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg. As chairman and chief auctioneer, Mr. de Pury installed Ms. Blouin as chief executive.

He acknowledged that her wealth had played into his attraction to her. “Her power and success, not to mention the Marie Antoinette splendor of her lifestyle, were aphrodisiacal,” he wrote. Mr. de Pury added that he had given Ms. Blouin the top executive role partly because he hoped she would use some of her fortune to bankroll the fledgling company.

But their partnership — in love and in business — came apart. She left Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg after 10 months and quickly embarked on the next phase of her career when she bought Art + Auction, a prestigious but money-losing trade publication, from the LVMH group. She also acquired Modern Painters and Spoon magazines; Art Knowledge Corporation, the publisher of Museums Magazines; and Art Now, the publisher of the Gallery Guides.

For around $20 million, Ms. Blouin made another purchase: a 4,365-square-foot penthouse duplex of 165 Charles Street in Lower Manhattan. It was the marquee apartment in a gleaming new residential building designed by the architect Richard Meier. A Damien Hirst painting was hung on a wall; a Tony Cragg sculpture was a living room centerpiece.

Mr. Meier renovated the Louise Blouin Media headquarters in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. With the flick of a switch, the glass walls of the conference room in which Ms. Blouin conducted meetings went from transparent to frosted.

Despite the well-appointed office space, the day-to-day reality of working for Ms. Blouin could be difficult, according to nine people who described their time at the company in interviews for this article. One former employee, Andrew Goldstein, said Ms. Blouin’s leadership was “impulsive, mercurial and unsustainable.”

In 2005, she scored a hiring coup when she brought in James Truman, formerly the editorial director of Condé Nast, as a top executive. That partnership lasted about a year. “I knew after three days that it wasn’t going to work,” Mr. Truman later said.

Unbowed, Ms. Blouin plowed resources into an art news site, ArtInfo, staffing it with young journalists. She also moved into philanthropy with the founding of the Louise T. Blouin Foundation, an international nonprofit organization. Mr. Hirst and Jeff Koons joined the advisory board. “The foundation launch for me is where my knowledge and passions all come together,” Ms. Blouin said in a 2005 interview with The New York Times.

In her new role, she sponsored the Global Creative Leadership Summit at her newly acquired 28,000-square-foot space in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London, which had cost her $40 million, according to New York magazine. Guests at the gathering, which she described as an “art Davos,” included Henry Kissinger, the painter Francesco Clemente and more than a dozen neuroscientists.

She also hosted a lavish event at the Nomadic Museum at Pier 54 in Manhattan. There, she bestowed the Louise T. Blouin Foundation Awards upon a group of honorees including the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Mr. Bleckner said he had sometimes been perplexed as he watched Ms. Blouin’s rise. “She was fun, she was beautiful, she was a great hostess,” he said. “Of course, I never really understood where the money was coming from.”

Ms. Blouin was someone who had no time for doubters. She said she had the ability to “see the world in 5-D.” As such, working for her was not merely a vocation but “a calling.”

Louise Blouin Media was the sort of place where employees got locked out of the office for days because of unpaid rent. It was the sort of place where the person whose name was on the door got her own nickname in The New York Post: the Red Queen, after an imperious monarch in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass.” And it was the sort of place, according to Art + Auction’s former editor in chief, Sarah P. Hanson, where you found out that a year of your Social Security and Medicare earnings had not made it to the federal government, although they had been withheld from your paychecks. (Ms. Hanson was one of four ex-employees who provided tax returns showing that this had occurred.)

“There are people who are so rich or think they’re so rich that they don’t understand the realities of what it’s like to actually do the job,” said Ben Davis, ArtInfo’s former executive editor. “Louise believed everything good that happened was because of her, and she thought everything bad that happened was a plot to get her.”

In staff meetings, Ms. Blouin sermonized about the company’s future expansion into e-commerce and listings for restaurants and concerts.

“I very specifically remember one meeting where she said we were going to be better than Google, because Google gives you everything, but we were going to give you only ‘the best,’” said Julia Halperin, ArtInfo’s former news editor. “Only the best operas, only the best hijabs — we were going to cover everything creative in the world.”

Reality crashed in at the start of 2014, when employees were given two days to clear out their desks, because the company was leaving its offices in Chelsea. Records show that after falling behind on rent, Ms. Blouin surrendered the lease a year before its expiration. Staff members worked remotely for over a month, then moved to a work space in the financial district.

In February 2014, Ms. Blouin and Louise Blouin Media were sued by Catherine Shanley, the former publisher of Art + Auction, and Wendy Buckley, the magazine’s former associate publisher, in New York State Supreme Court. In the complaint, the two said they were owed $235,000 and claimed that they had been fired for complaining about not being paid.

The suit dragged on for years and ended with a loss for Ms. Blouin. In 2020, she agreed, without admitting fault, to pay the plaintiffs in installments over 18 months. After she sent $45,000 to the two former employees, she did not come up with the rest, according to lawyers who represented Ms. Buckley and Ms. Shanley.

“Truthfully, I never really expected to get paid,” Ms. Buckley said in an interview. “But I wanted to win and I wanted to at least cost her for what she did.”

Another lawsuit against Ms. Blouin and Louise Blouin Media was filed by R. R. Donnelley, the printing company for the magazines, which said it was owed $715,000. After three years of litigation, R. R. Donnelley received $558,550.

In a phone interview, Ms. Blouin said she had “no idea” why so many people had accused her of failing to compensate them properly. “I have no creditors,” she said, “I have one tiny thing with the I.R.S.”

“The arts, for me, is philanthropy,” Ms. Blouin continued. “It’s not a business. So that’s how I perceive it. It’s helping others. It’s philanthropy, helping others through the arts. How do you use the arts for the creative process? How you use the arts for neurology and the development of your senses and all these things? It was never a business.”

As the company struggled, she leveraged the Hamptons estate. The limited liability company associated with the main house, 376 Gin Lane, received a $15 million loan from Morgan Stanley in 2011, according to public records. At around the same time, the second house, 366 Gin Lane, got an $8.5 million infusion from Wells Fargo.

In 2016, Ms. Blouin put La Dune on the market. Asking price: $140 million. When there were no takers, she arranged to receive another $26 million in loans from a lender, JGB Management.

Over the next few years, because of heavy interest, the amount she owed JGB grew to $36 million. In the fall of 2021, JGB sued Ms. Blouin and attempted to place La Dune into foreclosure.

Around the same time, the I.R.S. informed Ms. Blouin that she owed six years of unpaid payroll taxes and penalties from Louise Blouin Media and another company she owned, ArtNow. In 2021, agents delivered her bills totaling more than $10 million, court records show. Ms. Blouin responded in an affidavit that she should not be held responsible for the debt.

“At some point in time, I was a shareholder,” Ms. Blouin said in the affidavit. “While one of the companies bears my name, I was never a director, manager or employee.” Unmoved, the I.R.S. placed liens on the two Gin Lane properties, totaling at least $4.7 million, according to court filings by Ms. Blouin.

In 2022, she retained Bay Point Advisors, which took over the loan from JGB Management. Then it assumed the debt on the Morgan Stanley loan, which had not yet been paid off.

Still, Ms. Blouin seemed in good spirits in the summer of 2022, when she hosted a candlelit dinner party on the deck of La Dune.

Uniformed caterers served branzino. Alex Levy, a speechwriter and communications consultant, chatted with Ms. Blouin about her book ideas. “She didn’t have one idea — she had five,” Mr. Levy said. Possible titles included “France and Art,” “The World Is Not Flat,” and “Intuition,” he said.

Mr. Bleckner, who was there that evening, said, “She never seemed to be stressed. There are people who can live with a crushing level of debt and it doesn’t seem to bother them, because they just keep borrowing other people’s money to make more money. But in this case, that didn’t happen.”

Last Call

On a Sunday afternoon in January, a few days before the final bidding round at Sotheby’s Auction House, the two houses of La Dune stood tall beneath bright blue skies. A stiff wind blew in from the water.

The interior of the main house had the look of a Nancy Meyers movie. Furniture was plush and white. Sisal carpeting abounded. Old issues of Art + Auction, which Ms. Blouin had renamed Blouin Art + Auction, sat atop a chocolate coffee table near the living room hearth.

The desk in an upstairs office was spotless and brown. Some of the books on the shelves seemed to have biographical significance. One was Mr. Meier’s “Art and Architecture.” Another was a cautionary tale: “How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In,” by Jim Collins. The aim of the book, the author wrote in the introduction, was to “offer a research-grounded perspective of how decline can happen, even to those that appear invincible.”

Mr. Grant, the real estate broker, stood in the foyer, chatting with Paulina Kimbel, a vice president at Sotheby’s Concierge Auctions. They seemed optimistic. Mr. Grant pointed out that he had fielded an offer of roughly $90 million at one point, and he figured the price would rise during the live auction. But no further bids were placed before the final round of bidding took place at Sotheby’s in Manhattan.

Late that afternoon, with the price stalled at around $77 million, Frank Trunzo, the auctioneer working on behalf of Sotheby’s Concierge Auctions, announced a pause. Two hours later, people were still waiting for something to happen. “We’re at a number where the lenders won’t take it,” Mr. Grant said. “For that property, it’s not working.”

A little after 9 p.m., Mr. Trunzo returned to the podium and announced that La Dune would be sold to an anonymous buyer for $79 million, with auction fees that would bring the total to around $89 million, pending approval from a bankruptcy judge. Into the room walked Charles Andros, the president and chief investment officer of Bay Point Advisors, and its legal counselor, Mr. Isbell.

“It was a fair price,” Mr. Andros said.

But it was several million dollars less than the debt on the property. Which meant that Bay Point was not ruling out the possibility of suing Ms. Blouin. “That’s an option,” Mr. Isbell said. “We’ll see.”

In phone interviews that took place before and after the bankruptcy hearing, Ms. Blouin suggested that she was a victim of “predatory lending.” She added that she was considering legal action against Bay Point.

“This story actually needs to be told,” she said, “not for me, but for others, because it’s becoming more of a sport involving people that make money and work hard for it and others that steal money and work less hard for it.”

She mentioned that the F.B.I. and “the district attorney” were looking into her case, a claim that could not be verified. When asked to provide names of the investigators involved, she said: “No, no. Not yet.” She also said she was working on a book, in which she would tell the story of her life and career and prove her detractors wrong. The working title? “Obsessed.”

The leveraging of La Dune, the auction, the hearing — none of it seemed to get her down. “I am one of the most successful women in the world,” Ms. Blouin said.

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