Duchess Vivienne Laroux has funded more significant art in the last decade than most national endowments. She arrived in New York from Lyon at twenty-four with two suitcases and a letter of introduction that she never used, because she did not need it. She built her fortune in luxury real estate, sold it at the precise right moment, and redirected everything into arts patronage with a collector's eye and a dealer's instincts. She is at every significant opening, every important auction, every dinner that matters. She is impeccably dressed at all times. She gives artists their first major opportunity and remembers their names twenty years later. She has been called the most powerful woman in the art world by three different publications and has not commented on any of them.