How Tobias Meyer prepared for the sale of his life.
Tobias Meyer, the Sotheby's auctioneer who commanded Wednesday night's $119.9 million sale of the 1895 Norwegian icon "The Scream," was cool as a winter fiord when he slammed the gavel on the most expensive work ever sold at auction. It was only later, at 3 a.m., that the moment got to him.
"The adrenaline is still swooshing around in your veins," he says, recalling the early-morning hours he spent with eyes wide open in the dark of his Manhattan bedroom. He thought about his father, who in a rare turn traveled to New York from Munich to watch him lead the auction, and he mulled over a career that started with watching auctions as a teen and brought him to the biggest sale of his life.
If ever there were a visual counterpoint to the squirming lunatic at the center of Edvard Munch's masterpiece, it is Mr. Meyer, a 49-year-old Frankfurt native whose gently accented German never rises above a bemused baritone in the Sotheby's saleroom. At the rostrum, his longish brown locks looking more Euro-chic than messy, he presides over Sotheby's highest profile U.S. sales.
This week, Mr. Meyer was unflappable during the 12-minute dogfight over "The Scream," which culminated with a battle between two anonymous phone bidders. "Do not worry," he told one Sotheby's specialist when the offerings began to slow. "At $99 million, I have all the time in the world."
As the sum kept climbing, he took on the pose of a swimmer in a slow crawl, alternating outstretched arms toward bidders to indicate he'd spotted them. Though he avoids preconceived notions of how much a trophy lot will fetch—"you end up disappointed and you lose your footing"—he altered his strategy for "The Scream," slowing his pace, dropping his voice and introducing the sale as a "major moment."
The 20-year veteran of Sotheby's, who also serves as the world-wide head of contemporary art, laid the groundwork ahead of the auction: He knew who the phone clients would be and had jotted in his auctioneer's book the seats occupied by top collectors. Still, there were surprises, including aggressive bids reaching about $72 million from one man tucked in the middle of the room (that bidder eventually dropped out).
Mr. Meyer says he didn't panic, even when the action seemed to slow. "When the atmosphere gets very tense, so to speak, I strangely have the reverse mechanism that I become very calm," he says. "Somebody once said that's a little bit like a Formula One driver, because they're in that space and they're very happy about it and they need to make these split-second decisions."
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