“Leonardo is an artist who’s been in dialog with every
artist who’s followed him—think Warhol, think Jean-Michel Basquiat—and as such,
his work is absolutely timeless,” said Loic Gouzer, co-chairman of postwar and
contemporary art at Christie’s, during an October 10 announcement of the
inclusion of Leonardo’s stunning and evocative Salvator Mundi (1500) in its
evening sale of postwar and contemporary art in New York on November 15. “As
you may know, at Christie’s we like to push boundaries. We like to disrupt
things a bit.”
And disrupt they did Wednesday night at their Rockefeller
Center headquarters. At 7:45 P.M., after a 20-minute bidding war, the
rare-oil-on-panel (catalogue Lot 9B) was hammered in at $400 (Euros 338) million by
auctioneer and global president of Christie’s Jussi Pylkkänen, more than
quadrupling its unpublished presale estimate of $100 (Euros 84.66) million and easily
surpassing the previous record for a work of art sold at auction, set by Pablo
Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) (1955), which sold for $179.4 (Euros 151.55) million at the same house in May of 2015. Salvator Mundi headed to the block
with the comfortable backing of a third-party financial guarantee.
The take home price: $450,312,500 (Euros 386.312.500) with an added buyer’s
premium. The buyer was a telephone bidder on the line with Alex Rotter,
chairman of the postwar and contemporary art department at the house.
Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World) has been hailed as one
of the great rediscoveries of the 21st-century—coming to light in 2005 after
having been long-obscured by heavy restoration and eventual mis-attribution.
Thought to have been commissioned by King Louis XII of France and his wife,
Anne of Brittany, the work is one of fewer than 20 known paintings by the
artist to have survived to this day and the only one remaining in private hands.
It came to the block with no shortage of controversy. The
painting was consigned to Christie’s by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev,
who acquired it in 2014 for a reported $127.5 (Euros 107)million from Yves Bouvier, his
longtime art advisor and president of Natural Le Coultre, which operates Geneva
Freeport. Only months before it seems, Bouvier had bought the work for a
seemingly cheap $80 (Euros 67.75) million from a consortium of dealers (and investors) led by
Robert Simon, through a private sale brokered by Sotheby’s. It was Simon who in
2005 had spotted the work in a regional auction in Louisiana, snapping it up
sans attribution for less than $10,000 (Euros 8.466). Over the course of six years, the
painting was painstakingly cleaned, restored, and scrutinized by Leonardo
experts, who accepted it as authentic in 2011.
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