The secretive, powerhouse Wildenstein family is making headlines again, and it’s not good news.
Police reportedly seized 30 works of art from the Wildenstein Institute in January after Yves Rouart, the cousin of Anne-Marie Rouart, a descendant of Manet, charged that some of them belong to him. The paintings are worth millions, and include works by Manet, Degas and Morisot. Guy Wildenstein is the target of this investigation.
Mr. Rouart is his cousin Anne-Marie’s heir, and claims the works — which hung in Ms. Rouart’s swank apartment in Neuilly, a suburb of Paris — were bequeathed, along with the other furnishings, to him. Before she died, in the mid-90s, Ms. Rouart had bequeathed the rest of her collection to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, whose treasurer was Mr. Wildenstein. She was also a good friend of his father, Daniel Wildenstein, who died in 2001 and was reputed to have been the world’s largest private collector at one time.
All this comes from several newspaper reports, including one in London’s Daily Telegraph.
The gossip is all the more juicy because Guy Wildenstein is a friend of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, a co-founder of his party. He was recently honored by Sarkozy.
According to the Telegraph:
Mr Rouart has filed for charges against “persons unknown” for “concealment of theft”. Guy Wildenstein’s lawyers declined to comment.
Other works seized by police also included bronzes of animals by Rembrandt Bugatti and two sketches by Edgar Degas. These allegedly belonged to Joseph Reinach, a major art collector who had many works expropriated by the Nazis during the Second World War.
Mr Reinach’s heir, Alexandre Bronstein, has filed for charges against persons unknown for “theft and concealment”.
Worse,
Guy Wildenstein is under investigation over allegations by his stepmother, Sylvia, who died two months ago, that they failed to declare the true extent of their estate.
One of the works in dispute is The Lute Player, a £69 million painting by Caravaggio, sitting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York under the title “from a private collection”.
That paragraph refers to Daniel’s widow — his second wife — who last year sued the Sarkozy administration alledging that certain works of art, some of which belong to her, were transferred to trusts, keeping them out of both her reach and that of tax authorities. Here’s a link to the Telegraph article that explains that mess.