want her,” Marc Mayer says, his eyes locked on a Chinese ceramic figure maybe two feet high. Her chubby face is telltale. For him, she’s also irresistible. “You can spot a Tang a mile away,” he says, putting on his reading glasses, leaning in for a closer look. “Oh, wow,” he says, and that’s all he says. The fifty-four-year-old director of the National Gallery of Canada is smitten.

Like all lovers, he goes through phases. At the moment, he is deeply into collecting bugs for his living room shelves, but during another stretch he was most obsessed with seventeenth-century Chinese ceramics. He loved the objects themselves, thought they were beautiful, but in some ways he was more intrigued by how they were made. He became crazed with the notion of process. “Generations of craftsmen,” he remembers thinking, “trying to figure out the chemistry between the flames, the object, and the humidity — so that the glaze they put on this pot is the red they were looking for.”

Today Mayer’s own search has brought him to tefaf Maastricht, the European fine art fair held annually in this medieval river town in the Netherlands, just over the non-border from Belgium. He has dressed up for the occasion, tucking in a white shirt and knotting a striped tie, but he still looks a bit ragged. His grey suit is wrinkled in the back, and he’s fighting jet lag and a terrible cold. He was up most of the night after yesterday’s flights from Ottawa to London to Brussels, listening to German opera to quiet his head, and he’s spent this morning wracked by sneezing fits. But minutes ago, when he joined the murmuring line to enter the fair the day before it opens officially (favoured private and public collectors are given first dibs), he began to crackle with energy. “Here we go,” he said when the doors opened at noon. He didn’t take a moment to plot his course or run his finger over a map. He just went, to his left as it happened, and now he’s found her.

His eyes are inches from hers. His love looks dramatic, his hands on his face, his glasses torn off and thrown back on. “I get nervous when someone calls me passionate,” he says. “That’s a code word for ‘weirdo.’”

Passionate remains the right word. Last week, during a tour of the National Gallery, he decided to check whether the card next to a painting by the Canadian-born minimalist Agnes Martin had been changed as he’d requested. It had identified her as American, and... uh-oh. “I am going to have to kill somebody,” Mayer said through his teeth. “She was born in Macklin, Saskatchewan; she came to the Mackenzie River every year, well into her seventies, to ride the rapids. She’s Canadian! She moved to the United States and became a famous artist there, but for this to say she’s American and not indicate that she was born here and became one of the greatest Canadian artists in our history makes me insane.”

Exorcised, he visibly deflated. Now, an ocean and a week away, it takes only a little longer for his shoulders to slump. He knows that sometimes his passion isn’t enough. “We just don’t collect this stuff,” he says of the Tang. “I don’t have an expert.” For virtually every purchase he makes, he relies on the counsel of his team of twenty-five curators, each chasing a personal obsession with the Italian Renaissance or German Modernism. No one on his staff is paid to share his daydreams about Chinese pottery.

Even if one were, though, Mayer has spotted another obstacle to ownership. Unlike most of the dealers, this one has put price tags on nearly every object on display — 15,000 euros for a delicate bowl, 32,000 euros for a tiny figurine — but when Mayer looks at the card next to his find, Pottery figure of a court lady, 618–906, there’s no price listed.

“You know what that means,” he says. “Too much for you, buddy.”

Mayer’s annual acquisitions budget is $8 million. Today at tefaf Maastricht, art valued at an estimated $2.7 billion is on display. The math isn’t difficult, except that it is. Among the thousands of people crowding the aisles between the 260 dealer displays, there are a couple of art knobs — the one in the pink scarf who has written “Geronimo Who?” on his jacket with what looks like bird shit; the nonce who tucked his pinstripe pants into knee-high riding boots — but mostly there is money. Mayer isn’t up against other institutional collectors from New York and London and Madrid (although he is); he’s up against these wealthy Europeans, in their beautiful hand-tailored suits, and an art market that’s still breaking records. “We need a Kandinsky,” he says at one point, “but a crappy one starts at $9 million, so we’re not going to be buying one anytime soon.”

He spots a 1929 Picabia instead. “Isn’t that something?” he says of the giant canvas jumbled with women and birds, overwhelmingly, wonderfully blue. After a short elucidation on its critical place in art history, he steels himself to ask about the price. “I’m guessing it’s around two million euros,” he says.

More like 4.3.

He walks away, looking back at the painting over his shoulder. “It’s not like shopping,” he says. “You suffer over this stuff.” He looks stricken; his sneezes amplify. He’s feeling sorry for himself. But the painful memories of his Chinese lady and his Picabia are erased soon enough.

It’s mounted at eye height. Not big, but anchored inside a heavy black frame. A drawing, in red and white chalk, on faded blue paper. Mayer asks the dealer how much he wants for it. “Two hundred thousand,” the dealer says in a thick Barcelonan accent.

“That’s not bad,” Mayer says, throwing his glasses back on, and with them returns the crackle.

he dealer, in a crafty bit of target marketing, had emailed Mayer an image of the piece in advance of the fair, although apparently something was lost in the translation. Mayer thought the Spaniard possessed drawings of Italian nobleman Giulio Contarini, the subject of a prize of the National Gallery’s collection, a bust by the Venetian sculptor Alessandro Vittoria, from 1576. But this illustration, a profile of Contarini’s great, unmistakable head — see the hook in his nose, the coils of his beard — is in fact one of fifteen drawings of the bust itself, sketched by another Venetian, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, around 1740. It takes a moment for Mayer to shift his thinking, but he makes the adjustment. He likes the sense of validation the drawing offers: if Tiepolo’s fine eye saw something in Vittoria’s work, then good on the gallery for seeing it, too.

“It’s very strong, yes?” the dealer says. Mayer nods. The dealer adds that the fair’s organizers have chosen to spotlight the piece in their advertising and literature; it has been blown up banner size all over the building. Validation squared. Mayer nods again.

Still, he wrestles.

Mayer calls himself “a big game hunter.” He has built a reputation for bold, even daring acquisitions during a career that has seen him rise quickly through the curatorial ranks, from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, to the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, to the Brooklyn Museum, to the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. And since his arrival at the National Gallery in January 2009, he has advocated buying fewer, more extraordinary objects — a concession to both the lack of available space and the need for sparks. “Anything that brings bodies is good,” he says.

Chalk on paper won’t bring bodies. Nor will it draw gasps or stir souls, nor garner headlines, good or bad. If Mayer buys the drawing, it would be an academic, logical acquisition, an interesting footnote to an essay already written. It would be a little — gasp — boring. But he understands that most of his purchases, especially of European Old Masters, are meant to fill the blanks in the gallery’s narrative, something more like maintenance than construction. “I wasn’t hired for my good taste,” he says. “I was hired for my objectivity. There’s such a thing as love at first sight, absolutely, but I have to buy with my head, not with my heart.” This drawing is all head.

Mayer’s last purchase, not so much. He first saw it as a drawing, too, in Roxy Paine’s barn in upstate New York two years ago. He was director of the Musée at the time; he had just bought one of the American artist’s sculptures, a riff on his well-known wall installations of lifelike mushrooms. Then Mayer saw a rendering of what looked like a silver tree stripped of its branches, rising high into the sky. He asked what it was. “That’s One Hundred Foot Line,” Paine replied. Mayer felt something go pop in his chest.

He called Paine’s dealer, James Cohan in New York, and asked if the sculpture was spoken for. It was not.

How much?

Too much for you, buddy.

But Mayer couldn’t shake the Line. One of Paine’s stainless steel trees appeared for a time on the roof of the Met in New York, to great acclaim; another was snapped up by a Russian oligarch. Mayer tended to the bruises on his heart. Then he got the job in Ottawa. One day, he was sitting in the National Gallery’s cafeteria, looking out the soaring windows at the vast lawn that stretches between the building and Nepean Point and the river beyond. “There was just all this grass,” Mayer remembers. He imagined filling the grass with sculptures: towering sculptures, incredible sculptures, sculptures turned monuments that would become part of the city’s and the country’s fabric, the way Louise Bourgeois’s giant spider so beautifully echoed its surroundings out front.

Then he remembered: One Hundred Foot Line.