Yves Bouvier is either one of the world’s sharpest operators or a man with a death wish. In 2013, on behalf of exiled Russian oligarch, Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Swiss agent purchased the painting, Salvator Mundi, allegedly by Leonardo da Vinci, for US$75 million. He then passed it on to his client for US$127.5 million. The US$50 million mark-up was only the boldest of the colossal commissions Bouvier had charged Rybolovlev over the previous decade, a total that exceeded a billion dollars.
When the Russian learned the true price of the Salvator Mundi from an article in the New York Times he launched a massive lawsuit against Bouvier, who was arrested in 2015; allowed out on €10 million bail, and is still fighting in the courts today. His argument, essentially, is that he did nothing illegal.
The lawsuit has effectively stalled Bouvier’s booming art handling and storage business, which took advantage of the freeport system to provide secure storage for works of art for high value clients. The freeports, usually found at airports, are a limbo devoid of taxes and red tape, where assets may be parked with seeming impunity before being laundered. The fact that this was Bouvier’s legitimate business, and the difficulty of actually convicting him of fraud, reveals an international art market in which the highest peaks are veiled in the darkest of clouds.
This startling tale has already been told at length in The New Yorker, but it’s not the highlight of the story of the disputed Leonardo. You’ll probably the remember the headlines when the painting was sold for a world record price of US$450 million at Christies, New York, in November, 2017. The new owner, if not the actual buyer, turns out to be Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the unofficial supreme ruler of Saudi Arabia, whose reputation has never quite recovered from the murder and dismemberment of journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.
All this and more is detailed in Andreas Koefoed’s absorbing documentary, The Lost Leonardo. It’s a portrait of the art market that will leave outsiders gasping. Although I’ve spent much of my professional life in this milieu I was still amazed by some of the material in this film. The story unfolds in the manner of a real-life mystery such as The Staircase, in which each new discovery makes us think: “He did it!” Then, “He didn’t do it!” and so on.
In this case we alternate between believing the painting is by Leonardo, and a range of other possibilities. Is it a fake? A hoax? A false attribution? Or – most likely – a work so skilfully recreated in the conservator’s studio that it’s no longer possible to determine Leonardo’s input with any certainty, if indeed he played any part at all.
Right or wrong, the career of the Salvator Mundi represents the greatest escalation in value in the history of art. In 2005 it was bought for US$1,175 by two US dealers who thought they detected some potential in this dark, decrepit canvas. One of them, Alexander Parish, has specialised in finding misattributed and overlooked works by recognised masters. His partner, Robert Simon, peddles old masters to select clients.
They consign the work to leading conservator, Dianne Modestini, and this is where the story catches fire. As she works on the painting, Modestini begins to feel more and more convinced it’s a genuine Leonardo da Vinci. The clincher, for her, is a subtle twist of the lip also found in the Mona Lisa. She sees this as an utterly distinctive trademark.
What’s so convincing is not this little twist of the lip but Modestini’s sincerity, and the quasi-religious certainty she feels in the attribution. When the picture is shown to Luke Syson, then curator of Italian Paintings before 1500 at the National Gallery, London, he assembles a group of experts who largely agree that there’s evidence of Leonardo’s hand.
While scholars such as Syson, and Oxford professor, Martin Kemp, are positive about the attribution, Koefoed inserts dissenting voices in the form of New York art critic Jerry Saltz, who claims it’s not even a good painting, let alone a Leonardo; and collector, Kenny Schachter, who has his own disturbing take on the machinations of the art world.
Despite a more-than-respectable body of expert opinion that attributes the work to Leonardo, the picture proves hard to sell. It’s not until Yves Bouvier steps in, with access to Ryobolovev’s bottomless coffers, that the deal is done. The rest is not quite history, as there are further mysteries in store, some of them yet to be resolved.
With the experts still divided it’s impossible for Koefoed to establish definitively that the Salvator Mundi is or is not by Leonardo. Instead, he has given us the next best thing: a mass of conflicting evidence and opinion that reveals the threads of greed, avarice, egotism and insecurity that come together in cases of attribution in which vast sums of money and towering reputations are at stake.
Ask anyone to name a famous painting and the most likely answer is The Mona Lisa. Ask them to name an artist and Leonardo da Vinci will be high on most lists. Over the past century, or at least since Jackie Kennedy sweet-talked André Malraux into sending the Mona Lisa on tour to the United States in 1963, Leonardo has been an icon of popular culture. He is the archetypal “genius”, notorious for rarely finishing a painting. The final apotheosis came with the success of the idiotical pulp novel, The Da Vinci Code, which drew hundreds of thousands of new visitors to the Louvre.
Finding an unknown Leonardo masterpiece (or even a minorpiece), is like winning the lottery or striking gold in your backyard. It’s the kind of thing art dealers, professors, curators, conservators and collectors dream about – and dreams can influence judgement. When an expert affirms an attribution this is turn will supercharge the market for a work, adding millions to the price tag.
Here the door opens to two obvious problems. Firstly, the temptation of corrupt and misleading attributions, such as those practised by Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen, who found that a painting was worth considerably more to rich American collectors when it was attibuted to Bellini, rather than “School of Bellini” or “Follower of Bellini”. It’s a sleight of hand that hangs on the almighty reputation of the connoisseur who does the authenticating.
The second issue is purely psychological. Every expert wants to be proven right, and hates being contradicted. Every expert knows how few paintings we have by masters such as Leonardo or Vermeer, and longs for the day when a lost masterpiece will miraculously re-emerge. This sense of anticipation made scholars uniquely vulnerable to Han Van Meegeren’s fake Vermeers that fooled the Dutch connoisseurs and Nazi art looters during the Second World War. When we look at them today, it seems scarcely possible that anybody could attribute these works to Vermeer.
Today, the Salvator Mundi is believed to hang in Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s luxury yacht – a suitably decadent location for a supremely decadent purchase. The jury is still out as to whether it is the ultimate status symbol or the most expensive dud ever sold to a rich, naive collector. The Louvre seems to have come out cautiously in favour of authenticity but only a few weeks ago the Prado took a more conservative approach, saying the work was “attributed to, or authorised or supervised” by Leonardo.
Somewhere between Jerry Saltz’s theatrical scorn and Dianne Modestini’s sincerity, this is probably the best we can do. The amount of restoration involved will always make it difficult to establish the truth. The price it brought at auction will ensure that powerful forces are forever working to defeat any scholarly scepticism. The final impression one takes away from this documentary is of a world in which there is simply too much money floating around, being serviced by an art market staffed with prostitutes, mercenaries and opportunists. The Salvator Mundi may not be the indisputable masterpiece that its Saudi owner wants it to be, but it will go down in history as one of the great commodity sales of all time.
The Lost Leonardo
Directed by Andreas Koefoed
Written by Andreas Dalsgaard, Christan Kirk Muff, Andreas Koefoed
Starring: Jerry Saltz, Martin Kemp, Dianne Dwyer Modestini, Yves Bouvier, Luke Syson, Georgina Adam, Bruce Lamarche, Alexandra Bregman, Robert Simon, Alexander Parish, Kenny Schachter
Denmark/France, rated PG, 100 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 11 December, 2021