Blouin finally sells penthouse pad for $23.7M
THE Red Queen has a deal.
Louise T. Blouin, who owns Blouin-Artinfo, Art + Auction and Modern Painters, has finally sold off her 4,551-square-foot West Village penthouse apartment.
She pocketed $23.7 million for the spacious pad, according to spokeswoman Melanie A. Bonvicino.
Anne Prosser of Halstead-Douglas Elliman represented Blouin in the sale, which once had an asking price as high as $60 million before being marked down to $35 million in 2014 and then to $29.95 million at the end of 2016.
Over the years, Blouin also listed the four-bedroom, four-bath duplex — with an 1,800-square-foot wraparound terrace and spectacular views of the Hudson — as a $60,000-a-month rental.
Martha Stewart and Christie Brinkley were once neighbors.
Blouin still has a compound on tony Gin Lane in East Hampton but is said to be spending most of her time in Europe.
Heat’s on Bob
The Advance Publications board meets on Wednesday — and that has elicited plenty of worries that changes are coming to Condé Nast in 2018.
After a tough 2017, Condé Nast CEO Bob Sauerberg will present on what he expects the year ahead to hold for the glitzy publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and other titles.
Hearing the pitch will be family members, including Steven Newhouse, head of AdvanceNet, Jonathan Newhouse, CEO of Condé Nast International, and Donald Newhouse, the patriarch of the family, who runs the newspaper side of the empire.
Sauerberg is under pressure to turn things around with a “transformation plan.” The recent budget process was designed to shave $100 million in costs next year.
At Condé, the past year saw the departure of former No. 2 executive Jim Norton, whose ad sales revamp did not reverse the overall ad declines, and the promotion of Pamela Drucker Mann into the No. 2 slot.
The quarterly meeting will be the first since the death of S.I. Newhouse Jr. on Oct. 1.
The newspapers across the Advance empire, which include the Staten Island Advance and the StarLedger in Newark, NJ, just underwent another cost-cutting consolidation of back-shop operations in recent weeks.
Condé Nast operations will be very much the center of attention at the board meeting, sources said. One big open question is who will succeed Cindi Leive as editor- inchief of Glamour. Interviews were still being conducted last week and no clear leading candidate has emerged, sources said.
A Condé Nast spokeswoman declined to comment.
Wintour’s toast
Anna Wintour, the editor-inchief of Vogue and artistic director of Condé Nast, had a few humorous remarks at the farewell to Graydon Carter at Balthazar last week — dismissing at least for the moment talk of tension between the longestserving editors in the Condé universe.
Carter has already turned over the reins of Vanity Fair to new editor Radhika Jones, who started on Dec. 11 and will herself be fêted by Wintour at a dinner on Thursday.
Wintour recalled the long-running feud that Carter has with Donald Trump, who was tagged as “short fingered vulgarian” by Spy in the 1980s when Carter was its editor.
“It is inevitable, I suppose, that two men of such improbable hair should find each other and battle,” she said. “But I would guess neither imagined this argument would make its way to the White House.
“The irony, of course, is that there’s very little to argue about,” she said. “Only one of these leaders has gone from success to success, carried by his intelligence, his style, and his ability to juggle a huge amount in his capable, extremely long-fingered hands.”
It was a long night. One insider said that there were up to 40 toasts to Carter — although Wintour’s distinguished itself as one of the lon- gest. Others were as short as 10 seconds.
Late on Loeb
Here’s what happens when institutional memory walks out the door. Marshall Loeb, one of the titans of the magazine world, who worked for 38 years at Time Inc. — where he labored at Time magazine and was the top editor on Money and Fortune during some of their best years — passed away on Dec. 9 at age 88. For three days, there was no mention of his passing from Time Inc. The New York Times posted his obituary online on Dec. 11 and had it in the print edition Dec. 12. The Post mentioned m his passing in the Dec. 12 print edition as well. Time Inc. Chief Content Officer Alan Murray finally got around to eulogizing one of the most venerable editors in Time’s history late on Dec. 12. “Marshall Loeb was a true visionary,” Murray said. “His accomplishments advancing the world of business journalism are unparalleled and his talented leadership at Fortune, Money and Time helped pave the way for the great success they see today.”