An effervescent global stock market has been uniting buyers and sellers at tippy-top prices of late
An increasingly abstract legal picture is being drawn over $2 billion worth of artwork bought by Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev from Swiss dealer Ives Bouvier, including a Leonardo da Vinci portrait of Christ. Rybolovlev paid Bouvier $127.5 million for the painting; it later emerged that the dealer had paid just $80 million for it not long before. Bouvier’s attorney has called the battle, now entering its third year, a “scorched-earth litigation campaign”; opposing counsel says Bouvier “stands accused of the largest art fraud in history”.
Not all billionaire art pickups end so poorly, of course. An effervescent global stock market has been uniting buyers and sellers at tippy-top prices of late. Here’s the catalogue raisonné.
(This story appears in the 26 May, 2017 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)