Tuesday, September 5, 2017

( $450 Million Leonardo Da Vinci Painting disappeared at Auction ) Patcnews Sept 5, 2017 The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network Reports $450 Million Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Has Gone Missing at Auction © All Copyrights Reserved By Patcnews



Leonardo da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3 Million, Shattering Auction Highs And It Has Gone Missing Why ???

A Leonardo Da Vinci painting that sold for a record $450 million at auction is heading to the new Louvre in Abu Dhabi, according to the museum. The painting, dubbed Salvator Mundi or Savior of the World, depicts Jesus Christ. It was sold for $450.3 at auction, and the enormous price tag makes it the highest auction price for any piece of art. Despite massive interest in the auction, mystery still surrounds who actually purchased the painting. 
The New York Times reports that it was purchased by Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Sau, a Saudi prince. USA TODAY has reached out to Christie's for comment; meanwhile,  
The Today Show, citing reports that investment firms had purchased the painting in hopes of putting on display, said the auction house would not confirm whether the museum purchased the painting or someone else.
The artwork was commissioned by Louis XII of France, but later disappeared. It re-emerged in the 1950s, but was written off as a copy and sold for £45 or $60, according to Today Show. It was later purchased by art dealers, restored and eventually sold to Russian businessman Dmitry Rybolovlev for $127.5 million.
The Louvre Abu Dhabi tweeted that the painting would be featured in the museum.

Leonardo da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3 Million, Shattering Auction Highs

The last moments of the historic bidding war for Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi.”Published On CreditCreditImage by Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times After 19 minutes of dueling, with four bidders on the telephone and one in the room, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” sold on Wednesday night for $450.3 million with fees, shattering the high for any work of art sold at auction. It far surpassed Picasso’s “Women of Algiers,” which fetched $179.4 million at Christie’s in May 2015. The buyer was not immediately disclosed.
There were gasps throughout the sale, as the bids climbed by tens of millions up to $225 million, by fives up to $260 million, and then by twos. As the bidding slowed, and a buyer pondered the next multi-million-dollar increment, Jussi Pylkkanen, the auctioneer, said, “It’s an historic moment; we’ll wait.” Toward the end, Alex Rotter, Christie’s co-chairman of postwar and contemporary art, who represented a buyer on the phone, made two big jumps to shake off one last rival bid from Francois de Poortere, Christie’s head of old master paintings.



That $450 Million Leonardo? It’s No Mona Lisa.

By Robin Pogrebin and Scott Reyburn
Sept 5, 2017

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You can’t put a price on beauty; you can put a price on a name. When the National Gallery in London exhibited a painting of Christ in 2011 as a heretofore lost work by Leonardo da Vinci, the surprise in art historical circles was exceeded only by the salivating of dealers and auctioneers.
The painting, “Salvator Mundi,” is the only Leonardo in private hands, and was brought to market by the family trust of Dmitry E. Rybolovlev, the Russian billionaire entangled in an epic multinational lawsuit with his former dealer, Yves Bouvier. On Wednesday night, at Christie’s postwar and contemporary sale (in which it was incongruously included to reach bidders beyond Renaissance connoisseurs), the Leonardo sold for a shocking $450.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction. Worth it? Well, what are you buying: the painting or the brand?

The painting, when purchased at an estate sale in 2005 for less than $10,000, was initially considered a copy of a lost Leonardo, completed around 1500 and once in the collection of Charles I of England. Over time, its wood surface became cracked and chafed, and it had been crudely overpainted, as an image in the sale catalog shows. Cleaned by the conservator Dianne Dwyer Modestini, the painting now appears in some limbo state between its original form and an exacting, though partially imagined, rehabilitation.

A detail of the Leonardo da Vinci Painting. CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times.

You can’t put a price on beauty; you can put a price on a name. When the National Gallery in London exhibited a painting of Christ in 2011 as a heretofore lost work by Leonardo da Vinci, the surprise in art historical circles was exceeded only by the salivating of dealers and auctioneers.
The painting, “Salvator Mundi,” is the only Leonardo in private hands, and was brought to market by the family trust of Dmitry E. Rybolovlev, the Russian billionaire entangled in an epic multinational lawsuit with his former dealer, Yves Bouvier. On Wednesday night, at Christie’s postwar and contemporary sale (in which it was incongruously included to reach bidders beyond Renaissance connoisseurs), the Leonardo sold for a shocking $450.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction. Worth it? Well, what are you buying: the painting or the brand?
 
The painting, when purchased at an estate sale in 2005 for less than $10,000, was initially considered a copy of a lost Leonardo, completed around 1500 and once in the collection of Charles I of England. Over time, its wood surface became cracked and chafed, and it had been crudely overpainted, as an image in the sale catalog shows. Cleaned by the conservator Dianne Dwyer Modestini, the painting now appears in some limbo state between its original form and an exacting, though partially imagined, rehabilitation.

Authentication is a serious but subjective business. I’m not the man to affirm or reject its attribution; it is accepted as a Leonardo by many serious scholars, though not all. I can say, however, what I felt I was looking at when I took my place among the crowds who’d queued an hour or more to behold and endlessly photograph “Salvator Mundi”: a proficient but not especially distinguished religious picture from turn-of-the-16th-century Lombardy, put through a wringer of restorations.
Its most engaging passages are in the embroidered blue gown that Christ wears. The robe’s folds are supple and sinuous, and the trim, zigzagged with an elaborate and unbroken knotting pattern, has a mathematical intricacy that gives this Christian painting a surprising Islamic touch. (Technical analysis confirms that Leonardo used pure lapis lazuli for the robe, rather than cheaper azurite.)

The orb that Christ holds in his left hand, symbolizing his dominion over all creation, is not as showy as Dan Brown devotees might like, but its watery coloring, glossy edges and dimpled bottom do the trick well enough. His curly hair, especially the lower tresses framing Christ’s neckline, has a certain corkscrew adeptness, though it’s not as proficient as the similarly kinky locks of Leonardo’s recently restored “St. John the Baptist,” at the Louvre in Paris, or Botticelli’s slightly earlier “Portrait of a Lady,” at the Städel in Frankfurt.
Yet there’s a meekness and monotony to “Salvator Mundi” that can’t be redeemed by these marginally engaging details. The savior of the world appears in this painting as a soft, spumy cipher. His eyes are blank. His chin, flecked with stubble, recedes into shadow. The raised right hand is stiffer and less sensate than John the Baptist’s, and overlit relative to his shaded cheeks and mouth.

 And unlike other Leonardo portraits — “St. John the Baptist” and the Mona Lisa, or the alluring “Lady With an Ermine,” or “La Belle Ferronnière,” recently shipped from the Louvre to Abu Dhabi — here the subject appears head-on, flattened into the picture frame like a medieval icon painting. Other sophisticated paintings from around 1500, such as Albrecht Dürer’s Christifying self-portrait in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, made use of such frontal orientation. But where Dürer’s self-portrait as Christ radiates authority, “Salvator Mundi” retires into itself. This Jesus, far from saving the world, might struggle to save himself a seat on a crosstown bus.

Of course, the painting’s place within the history of northern Italian art was not at hand in the sale room on Wednesday, nor did it trouble the thousands of visitors who saw it in New York, London or Hong Kong. Displayed in a darkened gallery under spotlights, framed by a pair of security guards wearing funereal black, the Leonardo was presented almost as a holy relic — and Christie’s marketing department rolled out the superlatives alongside, sending the painting on a world tour and hyping it with the rather sacrilegious nickname of “the male Mona Lisa.”
The fantasy of individual genius was on offer, a fantasy more seductive and enduring than any in Western art. It can infuse even the driest of pictures with the illusion of greatness, and price tags this bloated, too, can imbue workaday art with new weight. But reputations rise and fall, attributions are assigned and reconsidered, and money — well, money can’t buy you everything. When its new owner gazes at “Salvator Mundi” over the mantelpiece (or, more likely, visits it in a climate-controlled, tax-free storage facility) he or she may have cause to reflect on the Gospel of Luke.
“Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled,” intones the man in the $450 million picture. “But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation.”





This Topic  On this Version At This Article Appears on , of the New York edition with the headline: A Blockbuster Painting Is No ‘Mona Lisa’





After 19 minutes of dueling, with four bidders on the telephone and one in the room, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” sold on Wednesday night for $450.3 million with fees, shattering the high for any work of art sold at auction. It far surpassed Picasso’s “Women of Algiers,” which fetched $179.4 million at Christie’s in May 2015. The buyer was not immediately disclosed.
There were gasps throughout the sale, as the bids climbed by tens of millions up to $225 million, by fives up to $260 million, and then by twos. As the bidding slowed, and a buyer pondered the next multi-million-dollar increment, Jussi Pylkkanen, the auctioneer, said, “It’s an historic moment; we’ll wait.”
Toward the end, Alex Rotter, Christie’s co-chairman of postwar and contemporary art, who represented a buyer on the phone, made two big jumps to shake off one last rival bid from Francois de Poortere, Christie’s head of old master paintings.
The price is all the more remarkable at a time when the old masters market is contracting, because of limited supply and collectors’ penchant for contemporary art.
The last moments of the historic bidding war for Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi.”Published OnCreditCreditImage by Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times


And to critics, the astronomical sale attests to something else — the degree to which salesmanship has come to drive and dominate the conversation about art and its value. Some art experts pointed to the painting’s damaged condition and its questionable authenticity.
“This was a thumping epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship and reality,” said Todd Levin, a New York art adviser.






The painting ‘Salvator Mundi’ by Leonardo da Vinci at Christie’s.CreditDrew Angerer/Getty Images


Christie’s marketing campaign was perhaps unprecedented in the art world; it was the first time the auction house went so far as to enlist an outside agency to advertise the work. Christie’s also released a video that included top executives pitching the painting to Hong Kong clients as “the holy grail of our business” and likening it to “the discovery of a new planet.” Christie’s called the work “the Last da Vinci,” the only known painting by the Renaissance master still in a private collection (some 15 others are in museums).
“It’s been a brilliant marketing campaign,” said Alan Hobart, director of the Pyms Gallery in London, who has acquired museum-quality artworks across a range of historical periods for the British businessman and collector Graham Kirkham. “This is going to be the future.”






There was a palpable air of anticipation at Christie’s Rockefeller Center headquarters as the art market’s major players filed into the sales room. The capacity crowd included top dealers like Larry Gagosian, David Zwirner and Marc Payot of Hauser & Wirth. Major collectors had traveled here for the sale, among them Eli Broad and Michael Ovitz from Los Angeles; Martin Margulies from Miami; and Stefan Edlis from Chicago. Christie’s had produced special red paddles for those bidding on the Leonardo, and many of its specialists taking bids on the phone wore elegant black.
Earlier, 27,000 people had lined up at pre-auction viewings in Hong Kong, London, San Francisco and New York to glimpse the painting of Christ as “Savior of the World.” Members of the public — indeed, even many cognoscenti — cared little if at all whether the painting might have been executed in part by studio assistants; whether Leonardo had actually made the work himself; or how much of the canvas had been repainted and restored. They just wanted to see a masterwork that dates from about 1500 and was rediscovered in 2005.
“There is extraordinary consensus it is by Leonardo,” said Nicholas Hall, the former co-chairman of old master paintings at Christie’s, who now runs his own Manhattan gallery. “This is the most important old master painting to have been sold at auction in my lifetime.”
That is the kind of name-brand appeal that Christie’s was presumably banking on by placing the painting in its high-profile contemporary art sale, rather than in its less sexy annual old master auction, where it technically belongs. To some extent, the auction house succeeded with the painting even before the sale, having secured a guaranteed $100 million bid from an unidentified third party. It is the 12th artwork to break the $100 million mark at auction, and a new high for any old master at auction, surpassing Rubens’s “Massacre of the Innocents,” which sold for $76.7 million in 2002 (or more than $105 million, adjusted for inflation).
But many art experts argue that Christie’s used marketing window dressing to mask the baggage that comes with the Leonardo, from its compromised condition to its complicated buying history and said that the auction house put the artwork in a contemporary sale to circumvent the scrutiny of old masters experts, many of whom have questioned the painting’s authenticity and condition.
“The composition doesn’t come from Leonardo,” said Jacques Franck, a Paris-based art historian and Leonardo specialist. “He preferred twisted movement. It’s a good studio work with a little Leonardo at best, and it’s very damaged.”


“It’s been called ‘the male Mona Lisa,’” he said, “but it doesn’t look like it at all.” Mr. Franck said he has examined the Mona Lisa out of its frame five times.
Luke Syson, curator of the 2011 National Gallery exhibition in London that featured the painting, said in his catalog essay that “the picture has suffered.” While both hands are well preserved, he said, the painting was “aggressively over cleaned,” resulting in abrasion of the whole surface, “especially in the face and hair of Christ.”
Christie’s maintains that it was upfront about the much-restored, damaged condition of the oil-on-panel, which shows Christ with his right hand raised in blessing and his left holding a crystal orb.
But Christie’s was also slow to release an official condition report and its authenticity warranty on the Leonardo runs out in five years, as it does on all lots bought at its auctions, according to the small print in the back of its sale catalog.
The auction house has also played down the painting’s volatile sales history.
The artwork has been the subject of legal disputes and amassed a price history that ranges from less than $10,000 in 2005, when it was spotted at an estate auction, to $200 million when it was first offered for sale by a consortium of three dealers in 2012. But no institution besides the Dallas Museum of Art, which in 2012 made an undisclosed offer on the painting, showed public interest in buying it. Finally, in 2013, Sotheby’s sold it privately for $80 million to Yves Bouvier, a Swiss art dealer and businessman. Soon afterward, he sold it for $127.5 million, to the family trust of the Russian billionaire collector Dmitry E. Rybolovlev. Mr. Rybolovlev’s family trust was the seller on Wednesday night.
There was speculation that Liu Yiqian, a Chinese billionaire and co-founder with his wife of the Long Museum in Shanghai, may have been among the bidders. In recent years, the former taxi-driver-turned-power collector has become known for his splashy, record-breaking art purchases, including an Amedeo Modigliani nude painting for $170.4 million at a Christie’s auction in 2015. But in a message sent to a reporter via WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, Mr. Liu said he was not among the bidders for the Leonardo.
On Thursday morning, soon after the final sale was announced, Mr. Liu posted a message on his WeChat social media feed. “Da Vinci’s Savior sold for 400 million USD, congratulations to the buyer,” he wrote. “Feeling kind of defeated right now.”




Correction: Was Before
An earlier version of this article misstated the given name of Christie’s head of old master paintings. He is Francois de Poortere, not Francis.


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