This is the greatest exhibition of the year. In a lush sanctuary of blues, greens, and wealth hang the œuvres of history’s greatest painters, the jewels of Cartier, Dior, Piaget, and the antique furniture looking to be straight out Napoleon’s bedroom.

These are the things that most don’t even realize exist outside of museums.

Miró, Warhol, miniature Calders, full size Calders. 18th century art that seems to sooner belong in the Louvre, and 13th century pieces that appear hand-picked out of Italy’s greatest collections.

The Biennale des Antiquitaires is a pure delight for the senses as the presence of thousands of fresh roses fills the room to the sound of the turning fountain.

This is a lifestyle, an exercise in rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s wealthiest collectors of material luxury.

Set back further from the art galleries stand les Maisons de la Haute Joallerie. Van Cleef & Arpels, Bulgari, you will overhear, “Yes, that is the largest pillow-cut that currently exists in the world.” Jewelry prices are casually mentioned at “just over half a million”, then “4.7 mil…”.

Half of the visitors come to see an immense amount of history and a vast amount of the world’s most precious cultural materials pulled together at once. The other half come to shop.

Suddenly the Cartier pieces exhibited months earlier in the very same museum as pieces of history are set on the market before your eyes, immediately changing their cultural value to commodity.

Perhaps jewels were always meant for the market. To similarly sell paintings, though, works into which the greatest players in our human history have poured their souls, one must beg a question of artistic morality. Art is pure, and money can be extraordinarily dirty.

Perhaps it would be normal, you start to imagine, to hang a Kandinsky or early Braque cubist piece in your living room. A 14th century Mary sitting primly between two Richters. A book signed “To Picasso, from Braque” on your bookshelf. Monets in the hallway picked up on the last trip to Paris.

The Biennale remains an incredibly special look into a private market, a pool of precious art that is never bound for the public eye. This is what the path of true wealth leads to. Dive in.

Biennale des Antiquaires
Grand Palais
3, avenue du Général Eisenhower
75008 Paris
September 11-21, 2014
Hours: 11 am – 8 pm (open until 11pm Thursday, Sept. 18)

Article & Photos by: Amanda Hinton