The Florists’ Transworld Delivery company’s hopes of dispersing its corporate art collection discreetly in Paris in November 1974 were dashed by a 43-year-old man wielding a squirt gun loaded with purple paint. That man, British artist Malcolm Morley, transformed FTD’s auction into a Dadaist theater piece and ensured that the painting of his that he chose to attack, “Buckingham Palace With First Prize,” would rise in value, though most of the collectors in the audience were too giddy or gobsmacked to realize it.

It all started when FTD sought to sell 100 flower-themed works that it had commissioned from leading contemporary artists, including Morley, who delivered “Buckingham Palace” in 1970. The British painter depicted the royal residence with tulips and puckishly attached a red winner’s ribbon to the lower left corner of the canvas. The ribbon “annoyed the hell out of people,” Morley says, “especially other artists, because it looked like it was given by an outside source.”

Morley only heard about the Paris auction, which was held at the Palais Galliera, because he happened to be in town that month with an exhibit of his own. Miffed that FTD had chosen a low-profile approach instead of a better-publicized sale in New York or London, he devised a Pythonesque plan that he dubbed “A Night at the Auction” in homage to the Marx Brothers’ 1935 comedy, “A Night at the Opera.” He selected a costume that he describes as a “headwaiter suit with tails” and completed the look with a red sash emblazoned with the words “Ambassador of Art.” He enlisted confederates to create diversions and film the proceedings, and he informed about a dozen collectors at a dinner party on the eve of the sale that he would write the word “faux” on the canvas with purple paint. “I swore them to secrecy, knowing it would get back to the auction house,” he says. “I wanted to see what (the auctioneers) would do. And I am English—we tell people we’re going to bomb them before we do it.”

Auction officials shielded the art with a transparent sheet of plastic, but they were helpless against the absurdist onslaught that Morley’s team unleashed. When the auctioneer ann-ounced Lot 86, the “Buckingham Palace” painting, a violinist began to play, Morley left his seat and strode up the center aisle, and the camera crew, which had been waiting at the back of the room, followed him. (Sadly, an acquaintance Morley hired to edit the footage absconded with it, but photographs of the caper survive.) A Hungarian journalist stood on a chair and narrated the action in French, and a pregnant woman distracted security guards by offering bonbons. Morley proclaimed to the audience, “This place is a laundry, and they’re cleaning dirty money with my art,” a phrase that he says he chose because “It’s a really good thing to say, don’t you think?”

Dissuaded from his original plan by the plastic covering the painting, Morley nailed the water gun to it instead. The spell of bafflement cast by his friends held long enough for Morley to secure the toy to the painting’s upper right corner—an impressive feat, considering that his target was moving (auction staff began carrying the painting offstage before he was done), he was suffering from a cracked rib and he had to deflect several security guards who tried to stop him.

Morley literally eighty-sixed the sale; officials abandoned the 100-lot auction with 14 paintings unplaced. “I did it, it happened and I was very pleased with the end result,” he says, adding, “I knew I was turning the painting into something more valuable. No one saw that except the art dealer.” The dealer Morley references, who he prefers not to name, was the only person in the audience who saw opportunity in the chaos and negotiated to acquire the unsold paintings. (In his 1996 book “True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World,” Anthony Haden-Guest identifies the purchaser as Swedish dealer Bo Alveryd and claims he paid a quarter of a million dollars for the 14 works.) To the chagrin of the bidders who were less quick on the draw, Morley’s prediction proved correct. “Buckingham Palace With First Prize” last sold at Christie’s in London in February 2004—with the water gun still triumphantly nailed in place—for $627,218, which Morley, now 77 and affiliated with Manhattan’s Sperone Westwater gallery, cheerfully deems “confirmation of something or other.”