The frustrated artlover spent long afternoons visiting museums, galleries and artist's studios, dealing in the odd painting by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
Another well-known billionaire artlover was in the de Pury crowd last night: Laurence Graff, the London jeweler, who has set auction records of his own.
This can make it problematic to attend a modern art museum with me, a task my wife, a genuine and sophisticated artlover, approaches with a mixture of caution and bravado.