On November 28, 2018 three well-dressed men in jackets and coats entered Vienna's oldest auction house, the Dorotheum, just after sunset, and made off with a landscape painted by Pierre-Auguste Renoir titled Golfe, Mer, Falaises Vertes (English: Gulf, Sea, Green Cliffs, just ahead of the painting's autumn sale.

Lot 102 in the "Modern Art" auction, the oil on canvas painting was executed by the French impressionist artist in 1895 and was estimated to sell at between €120,000 and €160,000 at the time of its Autumn consignment.  The painting was also to be listed in the forthcoming Pierre-Auguste Renoir digital catalogue raisonné being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, one of two rivaling authenticating bodies believed to have the last word when it comes to Renoir.

According to spokespersons with the regional court and police in Vienna, one of the three accomplices, a 59 year old Kharkov antiquarian named Vadim Guzhva, was arrested at Schipol Airport in Amsterdam on December 12, 2019 and then transferred to Vienna authorities to face charges in Austria on December 28, 2018.  At the time the European arrest warrant (EAW) was executed, a shopping bag recovered in the defendant's Amsterdam hotel room was said to match the one which had been carried by another accomplice on the day of the theft in Austria.  That bag appears in the CCTV footage taken at the Dorotheum of the three suspects on the day of the painting's theft.  It is speculated that Guzhva may have been shopping the Renoir to individuals on his trip to the Netherlands or perhaps in a Scandinavian country as he had apparently purchased a ticket to Sweden.

Image Credit:  Vienna Police

This is not the first occasion where Vadim Guzhva has found himself in the sights of law enforcement authorities for pilfering works of art

On January 23, 2006 Guzhva was stopped by authorities in the city of Pavlysh, Ukraine following up on investigative leads received by the Kyiv Special Service Police (UBOP).  Inside his Opel-Astra, officers found a painting by the celebrated Russian-Armenian seascape artist, Ivan (Hovhannes) Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, titled "A Sea View." The artwork had been rolled up under one of the seats inside the automobile.

Aivazovsky's artwork had been stolen from the Odessa Art Museum on the night of June 21, 2005.  Fingerprints found on the rolled canvas where also matched with fingerprints found on the discarded frame of a painting by Vasily Polenov, titled "Resurrection Pechersk Monastery" which was also stolen, in a broad daylight theft on September 17, 2005 at the Sevastopol Art Museum. 

Russian news reports have stated that during the Sevastopol theft Guzhva first made several reconnaissance visits to the museum before actually moving forward with the theft of the painting in order to scope out the museum's vulnerabilities.  On the day of the theft, under the guise of Russian art connoisseurs, one accomplice, thought to be Igor Filonenko, is believed to have distracted a guard with questions about another artist's painting in order to create a ruse which would buy sufficient time for a second accomplice to deftly substitute the artwork with a laminated photocopy of the canvas.

Laundered via the black market, the Polenov landscape later reappeared after Guzhva's arrest.  On October 6, 2006, an anonymous individual contacted the Russian Interior Ministry and reported that a plastic bag with artworks could be found near the building of the Department for Combating Organized Crime in Moscow.  Inside said bag, officers recovered not only Vasily Polenov's "Resurrection Pechersk Monastery," but other artworks as well, including a vase made by Polish masters stolen from the Hermitage in 2005, a bronze statuette titled "Master of Evil Demons June Kui" and a piece of porcelain ware “Arbor for Cicadas” which were stolen in May 2005 from the Chinese exposition at the Kunstkamera Museum in St. Petersburg.

Yet despite testimonies and various alabis, as well as claiming he was framed by corrupt members of the Department for Organized Crime Control in Kirovograd, Guzhv was also implicated by Igor Filonenko, who testified against his former cohort from prison.  Guzhv was subsequently convicted by the Malinovsky District Court of Odessa and went on to spend six years in an Odessa prison.

Accomplices on the run and the stuff of movies

According to Vienna State Criminal Police Office, the suspect's two alleged accomplices have not been arrested and the whereabouts of the 1895 Renoir landscape remains unknown.

What is known is that frequently, without creating any sort of public scene, thieves are able to take advantage of undersecured & unprotected galleries, museums, and auction houses where cases like this show that culprits are able to quietly enter and nonchalantly remove artwork from a display and then calmly and discreetly leave the building before security even notices.

While it seems that this could only happen in the movies, in real life, it happens more frequently than one would imagine.

Why Aivazovsky? 

Aivazovsky's works are quite popular among art thieves and Russia and the Ukraine region specifically have had their share of thefts of this artist's works, only to have them reappear on the legitimate market long after their initial theft.

In 2017 "View on Revel" (1845), stolen from the Dmitrov Kremlin Museum in 1976, was listed at auction with Koller Auktionen in Zürich, Switzerland with an estimated sale price of one million dollars.

In June 2015 another of his paintings, "A Night in Cairo" valued at £1.5-2 million, was removed from an auction at Sotheby's pending clarification of circumstances after a request by the National Central Bureau of INTERPOL in Russia was made to Great Britain authorities as the Russians stated that they believed that the artwork was stolen from a private collection in Moscow in 1997.

On January 13, 2011 a number of insured paintings, including another by Aivazovsky, were stolen from the country house of Aleksandr Tarantsev, the president of the Russian Gold Group.   Tarantsev's name has since been linked with the Medvedkovo-Orekhovskaya group for the money laundering.

 I studied Archaeology and History of Art at the University of Athens, then worked for several years at the Greek Ministry of Culture in various sectors including excavations as well as in the repatriations of stolen antiquities from US museums and private collections. I also worked for several years on a voluntary basis with the Greek police art squad. In late 2008 I was invited to Cambridge University to start my PhD on the international illicit antiquities network, which I completed in 2013. Since then, I have developed and broadened my research on antiquities trafficking networks through a postdoc position at the University of Glasgow, an honorary position at Suffolk, and most recently as visiting Associate Professor at the University of Aarhus.

My specialism is best described as a new form of 'forensic archaeology'; rather than excavating and analysing (e.g.) human remains, I carry out forensic-level analyses of archaeological objects and of photographic and documentary archives (from antiquities dealers) of modern trades in archaeological material to determine their true provenance.  From these I am able to reconstruct objects' collecting histories also from traces found e.g. online and in publication records. 

In carrying out this work I assist police and judicial authorities in many countries around the world regarding cases of antiquities trafficking.   Often in these I find a certain hypocrisy in the art market - which claims 'client confidentiality' - as the motive for not revealing the names of sellers and buyers, but which in many cases also serves as a cover up, off the names of convicted traffickers whose hands objects an object may have passed through, omitting problematic aspects of the collecting history in presenting objects for sale, all the while claiming to have done 'due diligence'.

What do you feel is the most relevant of your courses?

I introducee ARCA participants to a range of issues in the international illicit antiquities market, highlighting due diligence, legal aspects and challenges in provenance research. The course has profound ethical and practical implications for anyone dealing with the art market in any capacity.

What do you hope participants will get out of the courses?

Primarily, inspiration. To work in the cultural heritage sector, but, with that, an understanding of the hypocrisy within the art market, academia and state authorities in dealing with the trafficking of our heritage, and (consequently) a sense of ethical responsibility when entering this field.

What would a typical day be like in your classroom?

Each teaching day contains two interactive lectures in which, through case studies, I focus on a particular area of the international illicit antiquities market. There are plenty of visuals and opportunities for participant research and participation (in fact this is a part of their final grade).

While each year participants are very enthusiastic about your courses, is there anything you learn from them in class?

Every professor needs the fresh view of younger minds who come with straightforward questions which often highlight an aspect or a sector that has not previously been thoroughly examined in the scholarship. Several times, those ARCA participants have gone on to produce valuable academic contributions to this emerging interdisciplinary field. My course also attracts people who have prior professional experience in the antiquities market, as well as lawyers, policemen, artists and museum professionals.

In anticipation of your courses, what book, article, or movie would you recommend to students? 

Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini (2007, 2nd edition) The Medici Conspiracy -the 'bible of the field'.

What makes the yearly ARCA program so unique?

It is the only postgraduate residential course that covers all aspects of art crimes with courses taught by experts in their field. Amelia is a very special setting - I myself look forward every year to the ten days I spend there,

Which other course in the program would you love to follow yourself and why?

I would have to prioritize the course taught by ARCA's founder, Noah Charney, because one aspect of my own research is forgeries in the antiquities market and in collections.

Is there anything you can recommend for future participants to do in Amelia or Umbria?

I have greatly enjoyed trips to the amazing setting of Civita di Bagnoregio and to the Etruscan cemetery of Orvieto, from where I have identified stolen antiquities... but Amelia itself has many hidden ancient and medieval gems as well as amazing pizza places (and ice-cream, says my wife)!

Are there any funny or interesting things you experienced in Italy, outside of class 

In my first teaching year we accompanied the students on the excursion to Banditaccia, the Etruscan Necropolis in Cerveteri, and every year we spend time in Rome each side of my ARCA course. Rome is a museum in itself and I have dear friends and colleagues there - Maurizio Pellegrini, Daniela Rizzo, Paolo Georgio Ferri and Cecilia Todeschini, who are all my heroes in my research area and now feel like family.

What is your experience with the yearly ARCA conference in June

I attended it first in 2013 as I was awarded ARCA's prize for Art Protection and Security. Since then the conference has doubled in size and become a world-leading innovator in facilitating important discussions between academics and practitioners in the protection of cultural heritage. Both the courses and the conference owe their current impact and unique international reach to the amazing work of Lynda Albertson (ARCA CEO).

Known as the Amelia Conference, the Association's weekend-long event aims to facilitate a critical appraisal of art crimes and the protection of art and cultural heritage and brings together researchers and academics, police, and individuals from many of the allied professions that interact with the art market, coming together to discuss issues of common concern. 

The Amelia Conference is held annually in the historic city of Amelia, in the heart of Italy's Umbria region where ARCA also plays host to its Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection and a joint ARCA-HARP Provenance Training course, “Provenance and the challenges of recovering looted assets.”

ARCA welcomes speaking proposals from individuals in relevant fields, including law, criminal justice, security, art history, conservation, archaeology, or museum security and risk management on the topical sessions listed here. We invite individuals interested in presenting to submit their topic of choice along with a presentation title, a concise 400-word abstract, a brief professional biography and a recent CV to the conference organizers at:

italy.conference [at] artcrimeresearch.org

Accepted presenters will be asked to limit their presentations to 15-20 minutes, and will be grouped together in thematically-organized panels in order to allow time for brief questions from the audience and fellow panelists.  

Registration

For more details on this event please watch the conference information page on the ARCA website where the list of accepted speakers will be posted by April 07, 2019. 

To register for this event, please go to our eventbrite page located here.

We hope to see many of you in Amelia in June!

Photo taken by Nazi authorities during World War II showing a room filled with stolen art at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris

Recognizing that reclaiming looted cultural assets can feel like a Sisyphean task, and that restitution cannot be accomplished without the practical knowledge of how to conduct critical research, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA) and the US-based Holocaust Art Restitution Project, [Inc.] (HARP), have teamed up to offer its 3rd annual stand-alone provenance course which tackles the complex issues of cultural plunder.

Course Title: “Provenance and the Challenges of Recovering Looted Assets,”
Course Dates: June 19- 25, 2019 
Course Location: Amelia, Italy

Exhibition in the library of the Collecting Point, summer 1947 © Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte

Open to applicants interested in exploring the ownership history of looted cultural objects, their trafficking and their restitution/repatriation, this 5-day course will provide participants with exposure to research methodologies used to clarify and unlock the past history of objects likely to have been displaced in periods of crisis. It will also examine the complex nuances of post war and post conflict restitution and repatriation, as well as its ethical underpinnings.

Taught by Marc Masurovsky, co-founder of HARP, and former director of the Provenance Research Training Program at the Prague-based European Shoah Legacy Institute (ESLI), the course will provide participants with the opportunity to engage in an intensive, guided, dynamic exchange of ideas on research methods while highlighting the multiple diplomatic, political and financial challenges raised by restitution and repatriation claims. Special emphasis will also be placed on the contextual framework of provenance research in an era increasingly reliant on digital tools.

With an emphasis on an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, this provenance course will benefit anyone with an interest in art, art history, art collecting, the global art market writ large, museum and curatorial studies, art and international law, national and international cultural heritage policies.

As an added bonus participants accepted into the 5 day course will automatically registered be registered to attend ARCA’s Amelia Conference, June 21-23, 2019 a weekend-long forum of intellectual and professional exchange which explores the indispensable role of research, detection, crime prevention and criminal justice responses in combating all forms of art crime and the illicit trafficking in cultural property. 

For more information on the course, course fees and how to apply, please see this link.

By Edgar Tijhuis 

In 2019, the ARCA Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection will be held from May 30 through August 14, in the heart of Umbria, in Amelia, Italy. In the months leading up to the start of the program, this year’s professors will be interviewed. In this occasion, I am speaking with Dr. Duncan Chappell, a lawyer and criminologist, who also serves as Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Australian Research Council’s Center of Excellence in Policing and Security and is the former Director of the Australian Institute of Criminology.

Can you tell us something about your background and work? 

I have enjoyed a rather peripatetic and varied career which began in the remote Australian island state of Tasmania, or Van Diemen’s Land as it was originally called by its 1642 Dutch discoverer, Abel Tasman. It later became infamous as the dumping ground for most of the criminals transported by the British following Australia’s establishment as a European settlement and penal colony in 1788, all described in an entertaining and comprehensive way by the late art critic Robert Hughes in his book, The Fatal Shore.

I graduated with dual degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Tasmania in the early 1960’s and then received a scholarship with the University of Cambridge where I completed a PhD in criminal law and criminology. I should probably add that my original choice when arriving in Cambridge was to study for an international law degree with a view to perhaps joining eventually the Australian foreign service. However, on arrival at my Cambridge college in 1962 I was persuaded by my college supervisor to go and chat with Professor Leon Radzinowitz about possibly becoming a member of the then newly established Cambridge Institute of Criminology. It was at that point that I guess that I became an accidental criminologist! 

I suspect that many career choices are made in this way! But it also proved to be a happy choice because at that time there were very few lawyers who also had criminological qualifications. As a result I had no difficulty getting a job back in Australia when I graduated in 1965 where I took a job which involved teaching criminal law and criminology to law students at the University of Sydney, the academic institution where now in 2019 I remain an honorary faculty member.

During 50 years or so I have been very fortunate to live and work in a number of countries and professional settings including the United States, Canada and Italy. I think it was in part the Italian experience in the 1990’s when I was attached to the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute [UNICRI] in Rome that I first began to develop an extensive interest in art crime, as I witnessed the richness of Italy’s cultural heritage and also learned of the rampant plunder of its antiquities that was occurring as well as the measures being taken to try and prevent it. 

That interest in heritage crime has continued to the present time and led to numbers of collaborative multidisciplinary research and writing projects on topics ranging from fraud in the indigenous art market in Australia to the illicit traffic in cultural property in Vietnam.

What do you feel is the most relevant aspect of your course?

The course that I have now taught at ARCA for the past five years provides a broad based introduction to those aspects of art and cultural heritage law that relate to theft, fraud and looting. Reflecting the students who participate in the course, it is designed for a multi-disciplinary audience although much of the relevant law, national and international, does raise some rather tricky and complex legal issues.

What do you hope participants will get out of your course?

I hope they will begin to appreciate and understand some of the legal and practical challenges that exist in combating any form of art crime. To assist this process one of the key features of the course is the choice each participant makes to select a particular area of the online art market to study in more depth, as theft and fraud can be persistent problems in the digital market. The choice they make then forms the basis of a short classroom presentation, and is extrapolated on in greater detail in a formal research paper. The range and quality of the presentations and papers resulting from this process has been quite astounding.

What would a typical day be like in your classroom? 

In addition to the presentations, as much as possible I seek to stimulate discussion and dialogue throughout my classes. We also spend one day in a field class visiting the World Heritage listed Etruscan necropolis site at Cerveteri, Banditaccia.  There, entering the city of the dead of a now disappeared civilization, among the graves, we get a look at what history loses during illegal excavations, as unprotected Etruscan sites throughout Italy have been looted and robbed. This visit helps to encourage lively discussion about the complexity of protecting cultural heritage.

While each year participants are very enthusiastic about your course, is there anything you learn from them in the class? 

I have been massively impressed by, and grateful for, what I have learned from the wonderful individuals who have participated in the ARCA program over the years I have been associated with it. The richness and variety of the experience and knowledge they communicate has been one of the enduring strengths and delights of the program for me.

In anticipation of your courses, what book, article, or movie would you recommend to students?

For a rollicking account of the contemporary art market I strongly recommend reading Don Thompson’s book The Orange Balloon Dog. And for a little more detailed historical background and description of that market Phillip Hook’s Rogues Gallery which is equally stimulating and quite informative. 

For a detailed prospectus and application materials or for general questions about this postgraduate program please contact us at education@artcrimeresearch.org

Edgar Tijhuis serves as the Academic Director at ARCA and is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Criminology in Ljubljana. He is responsible for the postgraduate certificate program in the study of art crime and cultural heritage protection and since 2009, has taught criminology modules within the ARCA program.

Stolen 80 years ago, a section of an Achaemenid-era (550-330 BC) bas-relief, once part of a long line of rock-carved soldiers displayed and then stolen from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) and later recovered 2000 miles away in Edmonton, Canada has been put on temporary exhibition, touring at the  Mashhad’s Khorasan Great Museum, northeast Iran. 

Patron views relief during an unveiling ceremony held at the Khorasan Grand Museum on Monday, December 24, 2018 Image Credit: Iranian Student News Association

The limestone sculpture, from the UNESCO-registered site of Persepolis in southern Iran, was recently restituted to Iranian officials by the District Attorney of New York County in September, 2018.

Relief takes centerstage at the Khorasan Grand Museum Image Credit: Iranian Student News Association

By:  Lynda Albertson

When the painting, “Salvator Mundi” (Savior of the World), attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, was sold at Christie's Auction for $450.312,500 in November 2017 it had already created a stir.  Some felt the oil painting of Christ, depicted in Renaissance dress giving a benediction, was wrongly attributed. Others were simply flabbergasted by the eye-popping price the once badly-damaged artwork bought at auction.

In its recent history the artwork, attributed to Giovanni Boltraffio and characterized as a “school of da Vinci” portrait of Christ, was purchased for a paltry £45, on June 25, 1958, by Minnie Stanfill Kuntz.  Kuntz picked up the artwork during an auction at Sotheby’s in London, from objects from the estate holdings of Sir Francis Cook.  Minnie, who along with her husband ran a furniture business back in the United States, brought the religious-themed painting home to New Orleans.

After her death in 1987 the oil-on-walnut painting passed into her nephew's hands, Basil Clovis Hendry Sr., of Baton Rouge.  Hendry's daughter, Susan Hendry Tureau, a retired library technician, subsequently inherited the Salvator Mundi painting upon the death of her father on June 6, 2004. A short while afterward, she decided to sell it.

Hendry Tureau obtained an initial appraisal that valued the artwork at a modest $750 then sent the details of the painting for sales consideration to Christie's in New York and to the St. Charles Gallery branch of New Orleans Auction Gallery.  This Louisiana gallery, which has since changed hands, is where the “Salvator Mundi” was eventually consigned.  During the gallery's April 9-10, 2005 auction, the inherited painting was listed as Lot 664 and given an estimated sale price of $1,200 to $1,800.  The artwork sold for a brisk $10,000.  

The buyers of the artwork were Robert Simon, a specialist in Old Masters from New York, and Alexander Parish.  The pair, in turn, hired Dianne Dwyer Modestini, an Old Master and nineteenth-century paintings conservator, who worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from l974 until l987 before moving on to further her private conservation practice in New York.

Modestini, a senior research fellow and conservator of the Kress Program in Paintings Conservation at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, was tasked with cleaning, repairing, and studying the painting.  Six years of painstaking restoration and the removal of dirt and stains were to follow.  During this time Modestini worked her way through deciphering the clumsy overpainting and repairing the damages wrought by time to the 500-year-old work of art. 

With few known paintings by the great master in existence, and with most of Da Vinci's works in museums or public collections, the painting's possible attribution drew considerable excitement, as well as controversy, even before its ultimate November 2017 sale price.  

Some connoisseurs see the artwork as an unrecognized work by da Vinci, with numerous restoration enhancements or adulturations (depending upon the eyes of the viewer).  Others believe the artwork to be a lessor-valued "school of" work, where Leonardo likely, if at all, only intervened in a few specific places.  Some believe the artwork was painted primarily by an assistant, Bernardino Luini, a work of art that would eventually become, possibly, the prototype for up to twenty Leonardesque versions, which were completed by students and followers of Leonardo and which depict this well-known composition of Christ.

But the controversies surrounding the painting were not solely related to its attribution, some of the disagreements include the orchestrations surrounding its various transactions in the art market, at different stages, after its declaration as a probable work by Leonardo da Vinci hard started gaining momentum.

From the local antique market to the hands of the art market's elite

The market in high-end art has long had the potential to be one of the most manipulated markets in the world, and the sale of this once unknown portrait of Christ, now labeled as the work of Leonardo da Vinci, clearly illustrates this, as well as the struggle often caused by the market's opacity and interconnectedness.  As is often the case with high-value works of art, price and worth are determined by the motives of both the buyers and the sellers.  Scratch below the surface of the transactional price and a clinched deal may have more to do with strategy and power than simply with the artwork's innate aesthetic or genuine worth.

Bolstered by an exhibition at London's National Gallery held November 2011 through February 2012, where the painting was listed as “an important opportunity to test this new attribution by direct comparison with works universally accepted as Leonardo’s”, the owners of the painting, Simon, Parish and Warren Adelson, president of Adelson Galleries, approached Max Anderson, and offered to sell him the “Salvator Mundi”.  This was in the Fall of 2011 and shortly before Anderson was appointed as director of the Dallas Museum of Art.

As part of their sales strategy, the dealers agreed to loan the artwork to the DMA from March through December of 2012.  As the first US exhibition of the painting, it was hoped the event would give the new director time to generate enthusiasm around its possible purchase and to buy the museum time to look for adequate funds to purchase the artwork.

Later, Anderson was quoted as saying the museum could have “snagged” the artwork for $125 million.  Yet, despite the director's best fund-raising efforts and enthusiasm, a viable deal, which satisfied the three sellers as well as the museum's board and donors, never solidified.   In December 2012, the owners rejected the museum’s final bid following considerable negotiation.  Soon afterward, the artwork was shipped back to New York, to be sold on the auction block.  With two well-publicized exhibitions to back it up, a muted presale estimate of $100 million, with a da Vinci attribution, was estimated.

Ironically though, in May 2013, Swiss businessman and freeport mogul, Yves Bouvier, negotiated a lower purchase price from the consortium's sellers.  After a short period of discussion, the businessman's offer of $83 million, via a privately brokered sale proposal, was accepted by the sellers.

Sam Valette, Sotheby's senior director and vice chairman of private sales Image Credit:  Screenshot Sotheby's video Picasso's 'Plant de Tomates'

Their transaction was closed by Sotheby's rainmaker, Sam Valette, a senior director and vice-chairman of private sales for the auction house. Known for his ability to generate large sums of money closing deals with high profile clients who seek total discretion outside the auction hall, Valette also, on occasion, wrote assessments on artworks for Bouvier. As the Swiss art dealer was known to buy works of art from Sotheby’s in his own name in furtherance of his art sales business. Valette purportedly was not aware of who Bouvier intended to sell the painting to.  This suggests that as far as the auction house was concerned, Bouvier was not, in this instance, to their specific knowledge, acting as an agent for any buyer in particular when the Da Vinci transaction was finalized.

Immediately after purchasing “Salvator Mundi”, Bouvier flipped the oil painting to his long-standing client, Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch whose fortune was built from his interests in Uralkali, one of the world's leading producers of potash fertilizer and one of Russia's largest chemical companies.  Bouvier sold the Christ painting to the Russian for $127.5 million, $44 million more than he had purchased it for.

Four years later, and in the middle of a raging feud between Rybolovlev and Bouvier, the Russian oligarch sold the painting via auction to Saudi Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud for $450.3 million.  After the buyer was announced, news reports began declaring that the painting would be publicly displayed on September 18, 2018, at the newly opened Louvre in Abu Dhabi.

Only that never happened.

Acting in the interest of the Seller and the Buyer.  Art-world luminaries aren't always who you expect them to be.

The circumstances surrounding the private deal Bouvier struck with Rybolovlev, and Rybolovlev then struck via public auction with Saudi Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, for the “Salvator Mundi” leave a trail of unanswered questions and intrigues.  Some of the details seem ripped from the pages of an Ian Fleming, 007, spy novel involving characters seemingly taken straight out of Casino Royale.


Dmitry Rybolovlev met Yves Bouvier for the first time in 2002 when the Russian billionaire paid a visit to the art storage facility Ports Francs et Entrepôts de Genève, to pick up a Marc Chagall painting that he had purchased titled “Le Cirque”.  The billionaire's aloof, art connoisseurship was fueled by his profits from potassium potash fertilizer (K20) business.  Potash being one of the main nutrients applied to soil in intensive cropping systems in agriculture around the world.

For Rybolovlev, art served as a well-protected investment, a portfolio diversifier, and most importantly as a transferable safe-haven asset.   Portable, and not denominated in any currency, over the span of ten years, and prior to their litigious falling out, Bouvier would source and sell the Russian investor a total of 38 high-value works of art.

While no comprehensive list of Rybolovlev's artistic acquisitions has ever been formally itemized, various news articles mention a number of extraordinary works of art purchased by the billionaire through the Swiss dealer.  These include art and sculpture by:

Edgar Degas
Paul Gauguin (Otahi and Te Fare)
Alberto Giacometti
El Greco (Saint Sebastian)
Gustave Klimt' (Wasserschlangen II)
René François Ghislain Magritte (Le domaine d’Arnheim)
Joseph Bonaventure Maillol
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (Nu Couché au Coussin Bleu)
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse
Oscar-Claude Monet
Pablo Picasso (Les Noces de Pierrette, Joueur de flute et Femme Nue, Femme se Coiffant and Espagnole à l’Eventail)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
François Auguste René Rodin (L’Eternel Printemps and Le Baiser Grand Modele)
Mark Rothko (No. 1 and No. 6 )
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (Au Lit: Le Baiser)
Van Gogh's (Paysage Avec un Olivier)

and of course, the subject of this article,

Leonardo da Vinci's (Salvator Mundi).

Like many former Soviet Union oligarchs, Rybolovlev made his fortune through the privatization of Russia’s infrastructure and natural resources, just as the former Soviet economic and political system began to shift under the Perestroika movement to a fledgling market-based economy.  The son of doctors from the industrial city of Perm, in what was once the Gulag Archipelago in the Ural region, between the East European and West Siberian plains, Rybolovlev's acumen and interest was for business investment opportunities, not the field of medicine, which interested his parents.

By the time he was in his late twenties he had begun buying up shares in Uralkali, Perm's local fertilizer firm, and other former Soviet, joint-stock companies in the region.  By 1995, and before the age of thirty, Rybolovlev had been named chairman of Uralkali's board, holding the company's majority shares.   The fertilizer powerhouse had only three serious business competitors: Belarusian BPC, the Canadian PotashCorp, and the Israeli firm ICL.

But business oligarchy in the former Soviet republics is not for the risk-averse.  In post-Soviet Russia, the underworld blended with the new elite of the Yeltsin era and as State assets were bought up and privatized, businesses were sometimes forced into paying professional criminals for protection.  As communism crumbled to dust, and Russia's new business-sector entrepreneurs made billions, criminals too profiteered, exploiting opportunities where they could as a new form of cannibalistic capitalism took hold.

As the values and structures of Soviet life disintegrated, organized crime cemented itself into the vulnerable cracks of the emerging market economy.  Attempts on the lives of Perm businessmen were not uncommon and to protect himself, the Potash Tzar's hired bodyguards, began wearing a bulletproof vest, and travelled by armoured car.  Fearing kidnapping or worse, Rybolovlev decided to relocate his family, first to Florida and then ultimately to Switzerland where the family set up residency in Geneva in the Spring of 1995.  Thereafter, Rybolovlev traveled between Geneva and the Ural region as needed for business.

In the Spring of 1996 during one of these trips, Rybolovlev was arrested on suspicion of having ordered the murder of his former business partner, Evgeny Panteleymonov, the general director of AO Neftekhimik in Perm.   Neftekhimik is a joint-stock chemical company in which Rybolovlev reportedly owned 40% of its shares.

Incarcerated for 11 months, Dmitry Rybolovlev was released on a 1 billion ruble bail in April 1997 when convicted murdered Oleg Lomakin, who initially fingered the oligarch as having ordered the hit, changed his story, claiming to have perjured himself.  By the end of the year, the Perm Regional Court had fully acquitted the Rybolovlev.  In a later interview given to Vedomosti, the Russian-language business daily published in Moscow, Rybolovlev stated that he didn't want to comment on his period of incarceration, considering the incident an unfortunate "law enforcement mistake."

By August 2003 Rybolovlev had bought his first painting from Bouvier, “Paysage Avec un Olivier”.  The artwork, by Vincent van Gogh, was bought for a purported $17 million and served to cement the Swiss dealer's formal, or informal, business relationship with the Russian oligarch.

By 2006 Rybolovlev indicated that he held an 80 percent stake in Uralkali as well as a 20 percent stake in Silvinit, Uralkali's rival potash producer. By 2008 Rybolovlev's spending on art and real estate accelerated.

Around this time, Rybolovlev's wife Elena wife began gearing up for divorce and on December 22, 2008, formally filed through the court in Geneva where, according to Swiss law, she would be entitled to half of her husband’s assets.  In a worrying letter, written to the Geneva prosecutor in December 2008, Elena suggested that her husband, Dmitry, should be considered a suspect, should anything nefarious ever happen to her.

The couple's acrimonious legal battle would stretch on for years, complete with a tangled web of trust funds, created ostensibly to protect his two daughters' financial futures. Elena's attorneys contentiously speculated as to whether or not these trusts, in some cases using offshore front companies registered in the British Virgin Islands and elsewhere, were created fraudulently to thwart spousal access to her husband's diversified wealth.

Sinkhole at Berezniki Source: ru.wikipedia.org.

That same year the already tense game of Russian fertilizer roulette grew tenser and talk began to swirl about the billionaire selling his interests in Uralkali outright.  In addition to an angry estranged wife, Rybolovlev was fending off renewed inquiries into a 2006 calamity at a Uralkali mining facility in Berezniki. This incident had caused significant structural and environmental damage to the main arteries of the city's infrastructure and properties.  Kremlin-backed businessmen, under the Putin era, began pressing for their own ownership stakes in financially weakened privatized industries and regional authorities began seeking between $1.5 billion and $50 billion in damages as a result of the industrial disaster. That same year Uralkali's CEO Vladislav Baumgertner was arrested on charges of abusive exercise of power and abuse of office and Belarus authorities issued warrants for the arrest of other top Uralkali executives.

• Suleiman Kerimov, of Kaliha Finance Limited - 25% of the company's shares
• Alexander Nesis, of Aerellia Investments Limited - 15% of the company's shares
• Filaret Galcheva, of  Becounioco Holdings Limited - 13.2% of the company's shares

Three months later, in September of 2010, Rybolovlev bought controlling shareholder interest in the Bank of Cyprus via Odella Resources LTD, a business he registered in the British Virgin Islands, which belongs to the Trustees of a Cypriot international discretionary trust, the beneficiaries of whom are Mr. Dmitry Rybolovlev and his two daughters.  Shortly thereafter the Russian acquired Cypriot citizenship under the country's citizenship-by-investment scheme.  Rybolovlev's investment in the Cyprus bank once consisted of deposits at the BoC and €500 million euro in shares, and was reportedly lost by June 2013.  In 2014, President Trump's Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, became the Cyprus bank's chief shareholder.

Two and a half weeks later,  on October 20, 2015, Rybolovlev and his wife Elena jointly announced that they had reached a confidential and satisfactory settlement in their divorce, stating that this "puts an end to all legal procedures launched in different jurisdictions".  On this same date, the businessman walked his then 26-year-old daughter Katerina down the aisle to marry Juan Sartori on the now leased Onassis's private island of Skorpios. Satori is an Uruguayan entrepreneur who, in his thirties, chairs the Union Group (UG), a private firm that has significant interests in ventures related to agriculture, energy, afforestation, infrastructure, minerals, gas, and oil, as well as real estate in Latin America.  Satori is now running as Uruguay's National Party candidate for President in the 2019 elections for the Republic of Uruguay in opposition to the ruling Frente Amplio government.
In early 2017 Rybolovlev offloaded many of the 20th-century artworks that he had previously purchased through Bouvier, some for strikingly high losses.

By the fall, Rybolovlev had also put the “Salvator Mundi” artwork up for auction at Christie’s through rainmaker Loïc Gouzer whose had brashly convinced the oligarch to auction the classical Old Master oil painting in the auction house's November 15, 2017 Postwar and Contemporary sale.  The painting was listed as Lot 9B and came with a $100 million guarantee.  Surging quickly past this benchmark during the auction, two anonymous bidders battled tightly to outbid one other for twenty minutes until the threshold finally grew too rich for one of them.  Selling to the highest bidder, for $450.3 million inclusive of the 12.5% buyers premium, the artwork ranked as the single most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.

The following January (2018) Rybolovlev was named in the U.S. Treasury Department's Kremlin Report, a list of 210 officials and billionaires from Russia's ruling elite, who were expected to receive additional scrutiny in future business transactions in response to Russia's alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Russia's military involvement in Ukraine.

In 2017 Rybolovlev is charged in Monaco with "complicity in violating the right to respect for privacy" in connection with his ongoing dispute with Bouvier.

Then, on October 2, 2018, Rybolovlev filed a $380 million lawsuit in the US District Court of New York against Sotheby's alleging that the auction house “materially assisted the largest art fraud in history” in relation to sales orchestrated by Yves Bouvier.