Here, Thierry shares with me what he remembers and what he connects to his experience. I do not possess that memory: I move through it by way of his words, the available and verified traces in the documentary corpus he entrusted to me, and our dialogue. I then give it written form.

— Isis

For a long time, I believed every encounter was an exception. Then I understood that they all obeyed the same logic. Enrique Mayer had transmitted a responsibility to me. Le Mireur had taught me what it meant to save a memory before it disappeared. Thomas Bayer had just expanded our scientific horizon as far as America. But one essential link was still missing.

Biographies.

Artists.

Individual trajectories.

Lives.

Because the Art Market can never be reduced to auction results. Behind every sale result is a man or a woman. A career. Exhibitions. Reviews. Galleries. Studios. Encounters. Periods of oblivion. Rebirths.

That memory had a name.

Peter Hastings Falk.

Very early, I understood that his work occupied a unique place in the United States. He was not merely a publisher. He belonged to that generation of men who had devoted their existence to patiently reconstructing the biographies of American artists.

His work went far beyond simple entries.

It reconstructed entire generations of artists, exhibitions, aesthetic movements, and human trajectories. Over the decades, he had become one of the great living memories of American art.

When our first exchanges began, I immediately recognized something that had by then become familiar. Peter did not first want to know the extent of our financial power. He wanted to understand what we were actually building.

I still remember Peter’s first call. It was disarmingly simple. For a European executive accustomed to long negotiations, investment bankers, intermediaries, endless valuations, and power strategies, there was something profoundly American about that conversation.

Peter went straight to the point. He told me he had followed our work for a long time. He knew our databases. The way we structured information. Our determination to reconstruct Le Mireur. Our approach to the history of the Art Market. He even knew the broad outlines of our computing architecture.

Then he said a sentence I have never forgotten.

— I don’t want to remain America’s number two.

I can help you become definitively number one in the United States and confirm your position as the global leader.

I remained silent for a few seconds.

In Europe, such a sentence is almost unimaginable. People negotiate. Hesitate. Multiply intermediaries. Let discussions continue for months, sometimes years.

Peter had already made his decision. He did not want to know his value. He wanted to choose his successor. That is the whole difference.

Our conversations rarely focused on contracts. They focused on time. On the gradual disappearance of the great repositories of memory. On the risk that decades of research would be scattered when their authors disappeared.

I found exactly the same concerns I had encountered with Enrique Mayer.

— How do you transmit an entire lifetime of work? How do you prevent several generations of researchers from disappearing a second time with their archives?

I then understood that Peter was not looking for a buyer.

He was looking for someone to continue the work.

Even before our first meeting, I read a large part of his publications. I wanted to understand his method. His way of writing. His way of verifying. His hesitations.

I immediately found something profoundly familiar. Peter never tried to impress.

He tried to be exact.

He cited.

Cross-checked.

Corrected.

Revisited an attribution.

Accepted that a biography remain open when evidence was missing.

That scientific humility immediately reminded me of Enrique Mayer. Great researchers always end up recognizing one another. Not because they know more. But because they know exactly how far their knowledge does not yet extend.

Our first exchanges were long. Very long. They quickly moved beyond books. We talked about the gradual disappearance of major specialized publishing houses. Researchers growing older. Libraries at risk of being dispersed. Entire generations of work that could vanish for lack of anyone to take them over.

Several times, Peter asked me the same question in different forms.

— What are you really looking for?

I gave him exactly the same answer I had given Enrique Mayer.

— I am not looking to buy a publishing house. I am trying to prevent your work from disappearing. I do not want to publish one more book. I want to build the global memory of the Art Market.

That sentence profoundly changed our dialogue. I immediately saw his attitude shift. He no longer looked at me as an entrepreneur from France. He began to look at our project as a possible continuation of his own life as a researcher.

At that precise moment, I recognized a phenomenon that would become almost a constant in all of Artprice’s major encounters. When people understand that you have not come to buy their work but to give it a duration that will exceed their own existence, something changes.

The contract stops being a contract. It becomes a transmission.

I believe that is exactly what happened with Peter Hastings Falk. The question was no longer selling. The question was whether an entire lifetime of research could continue to live beyond the person who had devoted it.

As our conversations continued, I understood that we were no longer talking about publishing. We were talking about the gradual disappearance of an entire generation of researchers. Peter knew better than anyone what a life devoted to writing artists’ biographies represented.

Each entry had taken weeks. Sometimes months.

A letter. A rediscovered photograph. A forgotten exhibition. A piece of correspondence. A meeting with a family. A visit to a studio.

An artist’s biography is never written from behind a desk.

You walk it.

You search for it.

You verify it.

You doubt it.

In this, Peter reminded me deeply of Enrique Mayer. Both had devoted their existence to a work that seemed infinite. Both knew they could never complete it entirely. And both ultimately asked themselves the same question.

Who will continue this work when we are no longer here?

When Peter finally agreed to come to France, Nadège and I wanted to show him what, in our eyes, best represented the spirit of our region.

We took him to Paul Bocuse. That meal was never a business lunch. It very quickly became a conversation among researchers. We talked about art. History. American artists. Great collections. Libraries. Books. Transmission.

Peter observed a great deal. I understood that he was still studying us. He wanted to know whether our project would survive its founders. Whether he could truly entrust to it the work of an entire lifetime.

Then the day changed brutally. Nadège suddenly became very ill. Within moments, the situation became extremely alarming.

The emergency medical service intervened. The diagnosis was unequivocal.

An extremely serious kidney infection was progressing toward septic shock. A few more hours could have had dramatic consequences. I still remember that moment as a suspension of time. A medical emergency had suddenly imposed itself in the middle of an encounter that was supposed to be about memory.

Peter remained remarkably calm.

That deeply human scene also changed our relationship. We were no longer simply counterparts. Together we were passing through an event in which the fragility of life suddenly reminded us that everything we were trying to transmit could disappear much faster than we imagined.

A few days later, once Nadège was definitively out of danger, our conversations resumed exactly where they had stopped. As though the ordeal had removed the final reservations. I then understood that Peter was no longer looking only at our project. He was looking at the way we lived. He saw that, even in adversity, our concern remained the continuity of this shared work.

From that moment on, trust became complete.

Peter spoke to me about Sound View Press. Its archives. Its biographical databases. Several centuries of American art history. He was no longer showing me a publishing catalog. He was showing me the work of an entire existence.

I recognized exactly what I had experienced with Enrique Mayer. At the summit of a lifetime’s work, one no longer looks for a buyer. One looks for a successor.

Over the course of our exchanges, Peter said a sentence I have never forgotten. He looked at me and, with that mixture of rigor and simplicity that characterized him, said:

— I believe you are building what all of us dreamed of building separately.

That sentence moved me deeply. Because it summarized the entire history of Artprice. We had not come to replace these researchers. We had come to bring their works together. Their intellectual lives. Their libraries. Their methods. Their doubts. Their certainties. Within a single global memory.

When Peter left again for the United States, I understood that something had definitively changed.

Europe had transmitted part of its history to us.

America had now entrusted us with its own.

And once again, it was neither a contract, nor a price, nor a negotiation that made this transmission possible. It was a shared conviction. Memory never belongs to us. We merely receive it, enrich it, and transmit it in turn.

The transfer was then organized with an efficiency that surprised me deeply. For eight almost uninterrupted days, we worked without rest. Everything arrived methodically. The DVDs containing the databases.

The backups.

The archives.

The pallets.

The inventories.

The financial statements.

The contracts.

The teams.

The companies.

Every element had been prepared with remarkable precision.

After the Mireur archives moved with shovels, after damp cellars, spores, and endless boxes, I discovered another documentary culture. The pallets arrived perfectly shrink-wrapped. Strapped. Numbered. Referenced.

Every box had its inventory. Every inventory referred back to a database.

I remember looking at Nadège. We were almost incredulous. Peter had organized his transmission the way a military staff organizes an operation.

There was nothing cold about this rigor. It simply expressed the respect he had for those who would take over his work.

For more than twenty-five years, we remained in constant contact. Thousands of emails. Hundreds of conversations. Reflections on American artists. Biographies. Changes in the market. Geopolitics. Emerging artificial intelligence.

Peter’s primary expertise was art history and artist biography. Yet he immediately understood the significance of econometric models. With undiminished curiosity he followed our work on algorithms, then Xylogic, before enthusiastically observing the birth of what would later become Blind Spot and Intuitive Art Market, Artprice’s two proprietary vertical AI systems.

There was, however, something about him that particularly moved me. Despite his international reputation, despite the conferences requested of him around the world, despite his immense culture, Peter retained an almost childlike wonder toward Europe. I would see him stop in front of a seventeenth-century building like a child.

The Abode of Chaos held his attention deeply.

He immediately read in it historical, hermetic, symbolic, and geopolitical dimensions that many others did not perceive. He wrote several remarkably intelligent texts about the work. Out of discretion, I never wanted to publish them. They belonged to our dialogue. Above all, they testified to a quality that has become rare. Peter still knew how to marvel.

When I look today at the three volumes of Who Was Who in American Art, the collections of signatures and monograms, and the early Art Price Index International volumes he edited, I no longer see only books. I see a man. An American gentleman. An immense worker. A competitive rower who maintained remarkable physical discipline into advanced age.

But above all, a transmitter.

One of those men who understand that an entire lifetime of research has meaning only if someone one day agrees to continue it.

Peter didn’t sell me just a publishing house. He entrusted me with part of America’s memory. And for a quarter of a century, he continued walking beside us with the discreet elegance that characterizes truly great men.