{"id":2508,"date":"2024-01-24T13:00:46","date_gmt":"2024-01-24T13:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2024\/01\/24\/arts-reporting-wildenstein-family-tax-havens-crime-courts\/"},"modified":"2024-10-18T16:46:32","modified_gmt":"2024-10-18T16:46:32","slug":"arts-reporting-wildenstein-family-tax-havens-crime-courts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2024\/01\/24\/arts-reporting-wildenstein-family-tax-havens-crime-courts\/","title":{"rendered":"How an arts reporter unraveled a controversial and opaque family art dynasty"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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Every beat has its own allure. The dramatic stories of crime, criminals and their victims draw reporters to the cops beat. The best science journalists revel in data, discoveries, evidence and the challenges of determining their veracity.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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For more than a decade as a writer and editor, Rachel Corbett<\/a> has mined the world of art for compelling stories. \u201cI\u2019ve always been interested in art,\u201d she told me about her abiding interest in the specialized beat. \u201cMy friends were always artists. Plus, the art world is full of great characters and power struggles: the tradeoffs between artists and collectors, everyone jockeying for money and status.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Rachel Corbett<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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Beat reporters combine their command of the worlds they cover with a keen eye for news pegs that allow them to strike when a story becomes relevant. During the many years Corbett has been writing about the art world, the Wildensteins, a French family \u201clegendary for having built an extraordinary multigenerational art-dealing empire,\u201d fascinated her. When she learned in 2021 that a French court ordered them to go back on trial for an alleged billion-dollar fraud scheme, Corbett realized that the time had come.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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After eight months of international travel, bilingual research and reporting, and writing, editing and fact checking, Corbett\u2019s story about the case appeared in August in The New York Times Magazine. \u201cThe Inheritance Case That Could Unravel an Art Dynasty<\/a><\/strong>\u201d is an intriguing blend of a detective story crossed with an art history class, featuring offshore tax havens, shell companies and trusts, the masters from Vermeer to Picasso, Nazis and a super-wealthy cast of villains and victims.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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To report the story, Corbett flew to Paris after the magazine\u2019s editors bought her pitch and agreed to underwrite her travel expenses and the cost of interpreters. There she connected with the story\u2019s protagonist, a tenacious lawyer named Claude Dumont Beghi. Twenty years earlier, Sylvia Roth Wildenstein, the widow of legendary art dealer Daniel Wildenstein, approached Dumont Beghi for help after the fortune she assumed she would collect disappeared into the hands of Wildensteins\u2019 two sons from a previous marriage. Sylvia died in 2010 without proving her case, but Dumont Beghi never gave up trying to establish that the Wildensteins were guilty of defrauding her and the French tax authorities in a massive criminal scheme.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Precision and persistence marks Corbett\u2019s reporting process. Steeped in art history but with a limited knowledge of French, she brought interpreters  along with her to meetings with the lawyer. To decipher books and a voluminous court record in France, she relied on Google Translate, backed up by native speakers who checked the parts she wanted to use. Her investigation culled documentation from museums in Europe and America. Piercing the veil of the stealth tactics employed by the Wildenstein family of fine art collectors took time and patience to convince people to talk, \u201cgiven the family\u2019s stature and influence in the art world.\u201d In both cases, she said, \u201cthe solutions just came down to spending the extra time \u2014 translating and making call after call.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Most of the narrative traces Dumont Beghi\u2019s journeys around the world and the extraordinary lengths she took to uncover the Wildenstein dynasty\u2019s well-kept secrets cultivated over three generations that evaded tax laws and ex-wives.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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With clarity and grace, Corbett delivers easy-to-digest explanations of the complex system of wills, trusts and the other havens where wealthy art patrons stash fortunes, especially the free port of Geneva, Switzerland. She describes it as  \u201ca prisonlike complex of high-security storage facilities that is said to contain more art than the Louvre.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Corbett admits she\u2019s normally not very organized, relying on  notes spread out through multiple files and notepads. To keep track of this case\u2019s serpentine history through the years, she \u201cdrew up a giant timeline of all the court orders and financial transfers and family milestones.\u201d The result is a mostly chronological structure that keeps the reader on track from the start of Dumont Beghi\u2019s quest for justice to its stunning finish.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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\u201cI felt that it had everything you could hope for in a good narrative: a dynastic drama, a high-stakes court case, a billionaire family torn apart by greed,\u201d Corbett told me. \u201cThe legal saga also provided a clear example for readers about how the art market works, and how it can be manipulated by the ultra-wealthy to hide fortunes and evade taxes.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Corbett, who has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and New York Magazine, among others, is the author of \u201cYou Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin.\u201d<\/a> The book won the 2016 Marfield Prize for nonfiction books about the arts written for a broad audience.<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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In an email annotation for Storyboard, Corbett unspooled the reporting strategies and writing process behind her story and the challenge of making sense of the byzantine world of French law and financial instruments that made the Wildenstein\u2019s fraudulent schemes possible. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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ANNOTATION:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0Storyboard\u2019s questions are in red; Corbett\u2019\u2019s answers in blue. <\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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New York art dealer and collector Guy Wildenstein at a 2016 trial in Paris and failing to pay French taxes of more than $600 million. AP Photo \/ Christophe Ena<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div> \n
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The Inheritance Case That Could Unravel an Art Dynasty<\/h2>\n\n

How a widow\u2019s legal fight against the Wildenstein family of France has threatened their storied collection \u2014 and revealed the underbelly of the global art market.<\/h3>\n\nBy Rachel Corbett
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\nThe New York Times Magazine, August 23, 2023
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\nTwenty years ago<\/strong>, a glamorous platinum-blond widow arrived at the Paris law office of Claude Dumont Beghi in tears. Someone was trying to take her horses \u2014 her \u201cbabies\u201d \u2014 away, and she needed a lawyer to stop them.
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\nShe explained that her late husband was a breeder of champion thoroughbreds. The couple was a familiar sight at the racetracks in Chantilly and Paris: Daniel Wildenstein, gray-suited with a cane in the stands, and Sylvia Roth Wildenstein, a former model with a cigarette dangling from her lips. They first met in 1964, while she was walking couture shows in Paris and he was languishing in a marriage of convenience to a woman from another wealthy Jewish family of art collectors. Daniel, 16 years Sylvia\u2019s senior, already had two grown sons when they met, and he didn\u2019t want more children. So over the next 40 years they spent together, Sylvia cared for the horses as if they were the children she never had. When Daniel died of cancer in 2001, he left her a small stable.
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\nThen, one morning about a year later, Sylvia\u2019s phone rang. It was her horse trainer calling to say that he had spotted something odd in the local racing paper, Paris Turf: The results of Sylvia\u2019s stable were no longer listed under her name. The French journalist Magali Serre\u2019s 2013 book \u201cLes Wildenstein\u201d recounts the scene in great detail: Sylvia ran to fetch her copy and flipped to the page.\u00a0 <\/strong>Sure enough, the stable of \u201cMadame Wildenstein\u201d had been replaced by \u201cDayton Limited,\u201d an Irish company owned by her stepsons. That\u2019s when she called Dumont Beghi. <\/a>The story grabbed my attention from the very start. You used the hallmarks of a suspense novel: colorful characters, a world of immense wealth, and a cheated widow who launches a quest for answers to a mystery. What prompted that approach?<\/span>For some reason, the image I had in my head going in was like a film noir scene \u2014 a tearful woman meeting a detective (or in this case, a lawyer) in the wake of a terrible betrayal. I chose to start here because I felt that the reader could watch the story unfold through the eyes of the lawyer, who was also coming into the situation cold.<\/span><\/span>
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\nTo the lawyer\u2019s surprise, Sylvia showed up to their meeting with no proof of ownership for the horses and no information on her late husband\u2019s estate. \u201cShe didn\u2019t have any \u2014 any \u2014 documents at all,\u201d Dumont Beghi says. Sylvia mentioned that she signed some papers shortly after her husband\u2019s death, but she didn\u2019t know what they said, nor did she have copies. \u201cI put that in the corner of my mind,\u201d Dumont Beghi says.
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\nWhy would a widow draped in diamonds and furs have no records from her wealthy husband\u2019s estate? Dumont Beghi got the feeling there was more going on than a dispute over horses. But she went ahead and gave Sylvia the good news: She could simply decline to transfer the horses to her stepsons. Dumont Beghi sent a letter, halting the transaction.
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\nDumont Beghi recalls an almost instant kinship with Sylvia, who discovered that they were both Scorpios and lived in the same building complex in the posh 16th Arrondissement. <\/a>What were you signaling with the verb \u201crecalls?\u201d<\/span>I\u2019m just telling the story from her perspective 20 years ago, so she\u2019s flashing back.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>After Dumont Beghi saved her horses, Sylvia trusted her completely, and she began to explain to Dumont Beghi the complexity of the situation. Daniel had fallen into a coma for 10 days before he died, and while he was under, his sons, Alec and Guy, showed up at the hospital along with lawyers from Switzerland, the United States and France. She recounted how, a few weeks after the funeral, her driver took her to the family\u2019s 18th-century h\u00f4tel particulier<\/em>, <\/a>Why didn\u2019t you define this French term?<\/span>I think because it\u2019s generally understood among English speakers and it conveys to me a more specific image than a word like \u201cmansion\u201d does.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>which housed an art research center, the Wildenstein Institute. Her stepsons told her she needed to hear something important. They had reviewed their father\u2019s estate and discovered that he died in financial ruin. As his next of kin, Sylvia was about to inherit debts so large they would ruin her too.
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\nSylvia was stunned. She had never heard anything about money troubles from her husband. For 40 years, she had lived with chefs and chauffeurs, in at least five homes on three continents. But what did she know? She never signed the checks. Daniel, intellectual and rigid, ran the business, while Sylvia, who was light and cheerful, played the nurturer in the family. She was known to dote on Alec and Guy\u2019s six children, whom she considered her grandkids. She trusted her stepsons completely, so when they told her that she must renounce her inheritance at once or face \u201ccatastrophe,\u201d she didn\u2019t blink. \u201cI signed all the papers they presented to me. I signed, signed, signed\u201d \u2014 even the ones written in Japanese, she later told Serre. <\/a>Why did you use Serre\u2019s book as a source? Were you able to independently verify Sylvia\u2019s account?<\/span>Because Sylvia died many years ago, secondary sources were the only way to include her direct voice in the piece. Serre, an accomplished journalist and documentary filmmaker in France, had access to Sylvia while she was alive. I independently verified everything I could.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>
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\nThey promised to take care of her financially and even offered to pay her 30,000 euros a month out of their own pockets. Sylvia was grateful. But then, over the next few months, the reality of what she had done set in. Sylvia told Dumont Beghi how movers came to her apartment and took a beloved Pierre Bonnard painting off the wall. Then they came back for the furniture, because, she was told, it belonged to her husband\u2019s business, which was now run by his sons. A letter came notifying her that Daniel\u2019s 69 thoroughbreds were now owned by Guy and Alec\u2019s stable. Her household staff stopped being paid. Soon, her stepsons told her she would have to move from her home on Avenue Montaigne to another apartment. (Alec died in 2008; Guy declined a request for an interview, though a representative answered some questions provided by The Times.)<\/a>What did you have to do in your pitch to win this assignment?<\/span>I sent an overly long initial pitch and then I revised it with the editor\u2019s feedback on narrowing the scope of the narrative. I did some more reporting and went back with an angle that focused specifically on the widow Sylvia Wildenstein, who is the genesis of the current tax case, and her lawyer, Claude Dumont Beghi.<\/span><\/span><\/a>How much reporting and writing did you do before you pitched the story?<\/span>I did maybe two or three interviews before I officially started, to make sure I understood certain key details and also to gauge how much people would be willing to talk. I needed to make sure that at least Dumont Beghi would be on board.<\/span><\/span><\/a>Is it unusual for an editor to work with you on a pitch?<\/span>Usually there are conversations or back-and-forth on the idea before you begin. But his questions about the narrative provoked me to rethink it a bit so I rewrote that part of the pitch, both for him and I assume also for his colleagues.<\/span><\/span><\/a>What role did your editors play throughout the reporting and writing?<\/span>My <\/strong>editor played a big role in thinking through structure with me before I began and throughout the process. He challenged me to write more analytically at times, using my background knowledge about the art market.<\/span><\/span> She stopped receiving invitations to celebrate holidays and birthdays at the family\u2019s ranch in Kenya or their castle in France. Guy shipped back her clothes and belongings from their British Virgin Islands compound, where she had vacationed for years with Daniel and their chef and pastry chef. As Sylvia spoke, two things became increasingly apparent to Dumont Beghi: One, Sylvia had renounced her inheritance. \u201cShe had no freedom.\u201d she says, and \u201cno proof. Not a shred of evidence.\u201d No bank account, no income, no independence. It was as if \u201cshe died at the same time as her husband,\u201d Dumont Beghi says.
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\nThe other thing that struck her was that the Wildensteins were more than merely rich.
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\n\u201cWhen she first came to me, I didn\u2019t know anything about the family,\u201d Dumont Beghi told me when I visited her this past winter at her office in Paris. To my left, a bronze bust of a panther stared from a pedestal at eye level. Behind her glass desk hung a print of a leopard prowling in a tree. <\/a>What kind of notes do you take during an interview?<\/span>Everything I see in the room and any observations I make about a person \u2014 how they look, their mannerisms and what they\u2019re saying, of course. I also keep a running list of topics I want to follow up on.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Dumont Beghi is also the personal attorney for President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, who is widely considered a strongman, and often describes herself as a lone warrior woman in a jungle of male adversaries. She had never heard of the Wildenstein dynasty of art dealers. In fact, outside elite niches of the art world, few had, which was how Daniel wanted it. Dumont Beghi was about to find out why. <\/a>What\u2019s the narrative purpose of this sentence?<\/span>To set up that we\u2019re about to go on a journey with her, and that she\u2019s going to have to go to extraordinary lengths to uncover these very well-kept secrets.<\/span><\/span>
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\nFirst, she drew up a list of known assets, which soon zigzagged into a chart of far-flung bank accounts, trusts and shell corporations. Over the course of several years, she would fly around the world to tax havens and free ports, prying open the armored vaults and anonymous accounts that mask many of the high-end transactions in the $68 billion global art market. <\/a>What do you base that figure on?<\/span>It\u2019s from the Art Basel UBS annual report on the art market, which is seen as one of the more reliable sources in the industry.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Multimillion-dollar paintings can anonymously trade hands without, for example, any of the requisite titles or deeds of real estate transactions or the public disclosures required on Wall Street. She would learn that the inscrutability of the trade has made it a leading conduit for sanction-evading oligarchs and other billionaires looking to launder excess capital. The Wildensteins were not just masters of this system \u2014 they helped pioneer it.
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\nOver 150 years, the family has amassed an art collection estimated to be worth billions by quietly buying up troves of European masterpieces that would be at home in the Louvre or the Vatican, holding their stock for generations and never revealing what they own. When Sylvia realized the magnitude of her stepsons\u2019 deception, she devoted the rest of her life to unraveling the family\u2019s financial machinations, and even left a will asking that Dumont Beghi continue her fight from beyond the grave. <\/a>Were you able to read the will?<\/span>Yes.<\/span><\/span>
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\nSylvia and her lawyer were never able to win the settlement they thought she deserved while she was alive. From the start, in 2004, a judge rejected Dumont Beghi\u2019s attempt to cancel Sylvia\u2019s renunciation of the inheritance; a few years later, a court rejected a subsequent claim that she was entitled to \u20ac450 million worth of art and assets, a figure the judge called \u201cpharaonic.\u201d<\/a>Did you rely on French court records as part of your documentation? If so, how does the process to gain access work, especially compared with the availability of records in this country?<\/span>Yes, and it\u2019s actually not terribly difficult to access some of them, for instance those in the Court of Cassation, which is the court that ordered the Wildenstein retrial.<\/span><\/span><\/a>They were mostly digital, available on the court website, or PDFs that various parties sent me. I was finding out about all kinds of decisions and hearings throughout my reporting so I was acquiring, reading and translating records the whole time. There were a lot of legal challenges over the years, involving a number of Wildenstein family members and their lawyers, trustees and business associates. I spoke to French legal experts about aspects of them that I couldn\u2019t comprehend on my own.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe representative for Guy notes that, early on, Sylvia was awarded approximately \u20ac15 million, based on the value of Daniel\u2019s French estate. \u201cDumont Beghi continued to litigate for several years, seeking to have certain trusts settled by Daniel Wildenstein included in the estate,\u201d the representative says. \u201cDuring this protracted litigation, Dumont Beghi made numerous, unsubstantiated allegations, but the court ultimately ruled against her client.\u201d
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\nNow, more than a decade after Sylvia\u2019s death, their efforts have landed the Wildensteins before France\u2019s highest court. The evidence she and Dumont Beghi brought forth has persuaded prosecutors that the Wildensteins are a criminal enterprise, responsible for operating, as a prosecutor for the state once put it, \u201cthe longest and the most sophisticated tax fraud\u201d in modern French history.
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\nA trial this September will determine if the family and their associates owe a gargantuan tax bill. The last time prosecutors went after the Wildensteins, several years ago, they sought \u20ac866 million \u2014 \u20ac616 million in back taxes and a \u20ac250 million fine, as well as jail time for Guy. The consequences could do more than topple the family\u2019s art empire. The case has provided an unusual view of how the ultrawealthy use the art market to evade taxes, and sometimes worse. Agents raiding Wildenstein vaults have turned up artworks long reported as missing, which fueled speculation that the family may have owned Nazi-looted or otherwise stolen art, and spurred a number of other lawsuits against the family in recent years. Financial distortions have saved the family hundreds of millions of dollars, prosecutors allege, but their treatment of Sylvia could cost them far more \u2014 and perhaps lead to the unraveling of their dynasty.<\/a>How would you describe the purpose of the previous paragraph? Do you consider it the nut graph?<\/span>Yes. I don\u2019t always like obvious nut graphs, but my editor and I felt one was needed here. It sets up what\u2019s at stake for this family and why they\u2019re important to a broader understanding of how the art market aids and abets all kinds of dubious financial dealings.<\/span><\/span><\/a>When you\u2019re working on a story do you consider theme?<\/span>I\u2019ve actually never once thought about that term until now. But, yes, I guess what I just said before reflects my consideration of a theme.<\/span><\/span>
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\nIN ORDER TO PROVE<\/strong>\u00a0that Alec and Guy misled Sylvia about her husband\u2019s estate, Dumont Beghi first needed to know what assets they did report. But because Sylvia had renounced her inheritance, she didn\u2019t even have a right to that information. \u201cEvery deed, every bank statement, every inventory item in the estate and every document related to the succession of Daniel Wildenstein is in the hands of Guy and Alec,\u201d Dumont Beghi says, and they did not intend to turn them over.
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\nDumont Beghi\u2019s first step, then, was to ask a court to nullify the agreement Sylvia signed giving up her inheritance. Only then could she access details about Daniel\u2019s estate. Fortunately, she had a compelling precedent to show the judge. Sylvia wasn\u2019t the first wife the Wildensteins had tried to cut off by pleading poverty: Jocelyne Wildenstein, Alec\u2019s first wife, was similarly cut out of the family\u2019s fortune during her 1999 divorce, with Alec claiming he was an unpaid personal assistant to his father. Documents revealed at court in New York \u2014 where the couple primarily lived \u2014 valued the family\u2019s art collection at about $10 billion. The judge in the case said that Alec\u2019s income statement \u201cinsults the intelligence of the court\u201d; he settled for a rumored $3.8 billion \u2014 which would be the largest divorce settlement in New York history. (Jocelyne denies that the settlement was $3.8 billion but did concede that it was \u201chuge.\u201d)<\/a>How did you access these records?<\/span>I found some in a book by one of the lawyers. That case was also such a media circus that some of it is in previous coverage.<\/span><\/span><\/a>How did you reach Jocelyne and persuade her to talk with you for the story?<\/span>I was only able to reach her by the end, during the fact checking process, but she was very helpful.<\/span><\/span><\/a>How would you describe your interviewing style?<\/span>I don\u2019t really have any strategies. I just try to go in open-minded and listen super carefully for all the potential threads I may want to follow up on.<\/span><\/span>
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\nDumont Beghi argued that if the family was worth billions then, there was reason to doubt that Daniel, who orchestrated the deal between Alec and Jocelyne, died in ruinous debt just two years later. The French court ordered Guy and Alec to hand over the declaration of Daniel\u2019s estate. It included some properties in France, a few cars, paintings and bank accounts, altogether totaling \u20ac42 million. Dumont Beghi didn\u2019t believe that figure was anywhere near the estate\u2019s true value, but still, \u201cIt\u2019s not nothing, for someone who died broke.\u201d And it showed, Dumont Beghi concluded, that Sylvia had renounced her inheritance under false pretenses.
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\nDumont Beghi\u2019s next move was to get her hands on Daniel\u2019s medical records.
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\nShe learned that he spent his final days in an unresponsive, vegetative coma \u2014 and yet apparently signed a contract selling his 69 thoroughbreds (including Sylvia\u2019s) to his sons for a bargain price. In 2005, a court granted Sylvia\u2019s request to nullify her renunciation. It was only the beginning of what Dumont Beghi has called her international \u201ctreasure hunt\u201d for every stashed masterpiece, undeclared property and offshore account left out of Daniel\u2019s estate.
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\nHer next order of business was to locate Sylvia\u2019s beloved Bonnard nude, a gift from Daniel that his sons had removed from her wall. Dumont Beghi knew it was included in a trust that Daniel had set up for his wife in the Bahamas,<\/a>How did she know this?<\/span>It was part of a trust known as the Sylvia Trust, which contained only Bonnard paintings. Dumont Beghi was at some point able to obtain the inventory of that trust and I reviewed it, too.<\/span><\/span> but when she asked the trustee for information about its contents, management and regulations, she received no response.
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\nDumont Beghi decided to do her own research on Daniel\u2019s collection of Bonnards. She learned from his memoir, \u201cMarchands d\u2019Art,\u201d published two years before his death, that he considered their acquisition \u201cthe biggest coup\u201d of his life.\n
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“Nude Washington Feet in a Bathtub” by Pierre Bonnard 1924. The Wildenstein family owned more than 180 Bonnards.<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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\nWhen Bonnard died in 1947, he left behind an enormous estate of some 700 paintings and thousands of drawings. Daniel learned that all of it was set to be inherited by three estranged nieces-in-law of the artist, and it gave him an idea. He approached another Bonnard relative who Daniel believed could also lay claim to the estate and told the man he would pay him $1 million to buy his inheritance rights. Then he armed the man with a \u201cbattalion\u201d of lawyers to fight on his behalf.
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\n\u00a0<\/strong>After more than a decade in court, Daniel walked away with nearly 500 paintings; the nieces were left with just 25. <\/a>How did you learn the inside story of this \u201ccoup?\u201d<\/span>Daniel spoke about it a few years before he died.<\/span><\/span><\/a>Without your making any value judgements and hewing rigorously to the facts, Daniel and his sons come across as, greedy, odious, rapacious, conniving. Were there any libel concerns and if so, how were they addressed?<\/span>I addressed it by making sure everything in the story was as airtight and accurate as humanly possible. This story took nearly a year to report and write and the magazine had three fact checkers assigned to it. There are limits to what I can ever know without being able to speak with the family members themselves, of course, but a representative for them weighed in on some of the factual components.<\/span><\/span>
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\n(Daniel promised them some more to prevent further litigation.) In his memoir, Daniel revealed that he still owned 180 Bonnard paintings \u2014 and not just any Bonnards but \u201cthe most beautiful. The most magnificent.\u201d He added that the great Bonnards were worth between $5 million and $7 million each. (Today they can sell for twice that.) <\/a>How do you determine the current valuation?<\/span>By looking at recent auction data, which provide the only publicly available prices in the art market.<\/span><\/span>
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\nDumont Beghi flew to the Bahamas to find out what other paintings by the artist Daniel may have left for Sylvia. She received a court order to open up the trust and found that Daniel had bequeathed no fewer than 19 Bonnards to her client. Though the trust was nominally in the Bahamas, the Bonnards were being held at the Geneva free port, a prisonlike complex of high-security storage facilities that is said to contain more art than the Louvre.
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\nIndependent of any national jurisdiction, free ports allow traders to ship and store property without paying taxes or customs duties. If a dealer buys a painting in one country, he can ship it to a free port without paying import taxes; then, when he is offered the right price, he can sell it there too, without paying capital gains.<\/a>Can you describe the reporting, writing and revision that enabled you to convey such a clear and concise description of free ports?<\/span>I\u2019ve never seen a free port myself, but I\u2019ve seen pictures and read accounts by people who have, and I spoke to Dumont Beghi about her experience visiting the one in Geneva. The legal language around their tax advantages can be complicated and dry, so I just decided to write a concrete example of how some people use them in order to make it more accessible.<\/span><\/span>
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\nIt has been estimated that $100 billion worth of art and collectibles are held in the Geneva free port alone, to say nothing of those in Zurich, Luxembourg, Singapore, Monaco, Delaware or Beijing.
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\nDumont Beghi flew to the Geneva free port, which is the size of 22 soccer fields, <\/a>This is an effective analogy that helps readers visualize something they’ll likely never see.How did you settle on and compute it? <\/span>It\u2019s actually not my analogy! Others have said it, too.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>along with an appraiser to examine the Bonnards in person. Bonnard is \u201clight,\u201d Daniel wrote of his favorite artist, who is known above all for his radiant use of color. But when Dumont Beghi descended two flights down into the gloomy bunker, she found the paintings locked behind an armored door, including Sylvia\u2019s \u201cPink Nude in the Bath,\u201d its warm glow extinguished in the dark.
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\nAn acquaintance in the art world explained to Dumont Beghi that hundreds, if not thousands, of Wildenstein works are held in museums, but that the labels often identify their owners simply as \u201cprivate collection.\u201d So she wrote to the major museums \u2014 the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Prado \u2014 to ask whether Daniel Wildenstein ever lent or donated works to them. Surprisingly, she says, a few wrote back. The National Gallery in London told her that Daniel lent it valuable paintings by Poussin and Boucher. The Prado had recently bought a Vel\u00e1zquez portrait from Wildenstein & Co Inc. for \u20ac23 million.
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\nThen Dumont Beghi made perhaps the most important stop of her tour: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she stood before a painting she loved, Caravaggio\u2019s late masterpiece \u201cThe Lute Player,\u201d labeled on loan from a \u201cprivate collection.\u201d She searched the New York State Department\u2019s records to see whether Wildenstein & Co. had ever borrowed money using works in its collection as collateral. Dozens of names were listed \u2014 C\u00e9zanne, David, Degas, Manet, Monet, Matisse, Rembrandt, Picasso and Rodin among them. And then there it was: \u201cThe Lute Player,\u201d valued at upward of $100 million.
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\nAt that point she realized, \u201cThe company is titanic.\u201d
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\n“IN MY FAMILY,<\/b>\u00a0we have elevated discretion to the level of muteness,\u201d Daniel wrote in his memoir. <\/a>Here you break from Dumont Beghi\u2019s hunt for answers to the Wildenstein saga. Why did you shift gears?<\/span>I felt that by now we\u2019d want to know more about who these people are that acquired such a monumental art collection and fortune. Dumont Beghi didn\u2019t have much contact with them outside of the courtroom, so we needed to jump out of her perspective to learn on them.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cWe do not speak. We don\u2019t tell. We don\u2019t talk about one another<\/em>.\u201d This code of omert\u00e0 has been the governing principle of the Wildenstein art dynasty since its founding five generations ago. A dealer \u201cis not allowed to talk about his stock,\u201d Daniel said. \u201cWhy? Because it\u2019s the stuff of dreams. Every art dealer must maintain the illusion of the masterpieces he owns or does not own.\u201d Many believed that his grandfather, the founding patriarch Nathan Wildenstein, for example, owned 10 Vermeers; he actually had just one. No one knows today whether the family still owns it, and that question is meaningful to art history. Experts believe Vermeer made about three dozen paintings in his life, and as many as nine could be missing.

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\"Some
Daniel Wildenstein, left, and his son, Alec, in 1965 at the family’s private sculpture garden in an old firehouse in New York.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nA tailor from Alsace, Nathan had no training in art when, in the 1870s, a client asked him to sell some artwork she owned. He \u201choled himself up in the Louvre\u201d for 10 days, according to Daniel, and came out a believer. He sold the art and used the 1,000 francs he earned to buy two more pictures, by the Rococo artists Fran\u00e7ois Boucher and Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, which he resold. At the time, Nathan could afford 17th- and 18th-century French art because no one else wanted it, so he amassed pass\u00e9 \u2014 but to his eye, beautiful \u2014 paintings. He began dressing in embroidered waistcoats and top hats to pitch collectors and critics.
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\nSoon Nathan was selling his taste to Rothschilds and Rockefellers, in Europe and the United States. While Nathan was grooming his young grandson to enter the family business, he took him to see a silent film about a man who wore a hat that everyone initially mocked; by the end of the movie, the whole town was wearing one. Nathan explained to Daniel that this was their family\u2019s calling: \u201cFind the guy\u2019s hat and wear it before the others.\u201d For Nathan, that hat was French art of the 18th century: Fragonard, Watteau, David. These are now among the most famous names in art history, but at the time they were synonymous with the French Revolution and the aristocrats it overthrew \u2014 a period the public wanted to put behind them, especially as they began to embrace the avant-garde era of Impressionism.
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\nIn 1905, Nathan bought an h\u00f4tel particulier<\/em> in the center of Paris to house Wildenstein & Co. He expanded into Renaissance art and Impressionism and, when his son, Georges \u2014 Daniel\u2019s father \u2014 was old enough to join the business, a bit of Modernism. Nathan bought a space down the street for Georges and his friend Paul Rosenberg to set up a small operation. The pair gave two of its floors to Picasso, whom they agreed, in 1918, to pay a generous salary in exchange for first pick of the artist\u2019s works. Georges installed a red telephone in his office that had two direct lines: one connected to Rosenberg, the other to Picasso’s studio.
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\nUpon Nathan\u2019s death in 1934, Georges steered the family into an era of unprecedented prosperity by building an infrastructure around his artists\u2019 markets. He organized exhibitions, edited an art journal and published definitive catalogs of works by artists in his inventory \u2014 Ingres, Fragonard, Chardin. (Daniel would later do the same with Monet, Manet and Gauguin.) The books were well respected and helped market their artists to museums. They also gave the family final say over authentication questions. Today anyone who thinks he or she owns a Monet that\u2019s not in the Wildenstein book needs a nonprofit co-founded by Guy to sign off on it. (When the Wildenstein Institute handled the authentications directly, it developed a reputation<\/a> for being unaccommodating.) <\/a>Why did you use a BBC story to support this assertion?<\/span>There are several examples, but the BBC\u2019s was a particularly thorough examination of a man\u2019s attempt to get Guy to authenticate a Monet that many other experts thought was real.<\/span><\/span>
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\nBut Georges\u2019s ruthless instincts also contributed to the \u201cdark aura,\u201d as one dealer put it, that would come to surround the Wildenstein name. Hitler\u2019s personal curator told an Allied intelligence agent in an interrogation after the war that Georges did brisk business with the Nazis after fleeing to Provence, in the unoccupied zone. Once there, he helped the Germans locate important collections in occupied France in exchange for sparing his own. Profits from his newly \u201caryanized\u201d gallery in Paris were said to be sent to New York, where he had opened a branch. (The representative for Guy denies this.)<\/a>How did you get hold of the copy of the intelligence report and the summary of the interrogation where the Nazi art dealer claimed he worked with Georges?<\/span>From the U.K. National Archives. I also found a lot of related wartime materials related to the Wildensteins at the Getty library in L.A.<\/span><\/span>
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\nOther art-dealing dynasties have since sprung up in the Wildenstein mold. They buy up huge quantities of blue-chip art and store it for years, until they effectively corner their own niches of the market and control the prices. The billionaire Nahmad brothers and their sons, based among London, New York and Monaco, reportedly bought more works by Picasso than any other family in the world (except the Picassos) and, for the most part, have locked them up in the Geneva free port for years while they accumulate value. The Mugrabi family of Pop Art dealer-collectors, led by its patriarch, Jose Mugrabi, and his two sons, have done the same with Andy Warhol, stockpiling some 1,000 works by the artist and keeping prices high by bidding his art up at auction, even if they don\u2019t intend to buy. (The Mugrabi family did not respond to a request for comment.)
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\nThose who complain that the art market today operates more like the stock market often blame these families, who shifted a value system once driven by connoisseurship to one based on the law of scarcity. (\u201cMonet and Picasso are like Microsoft and Coca-Cola,\u201d David Nahmad once said.) Their dominance derives from the fact that they\u2019re family firms, bolstered by internal secrecy, pride and lifetimes of experience. As the Wildensteins proved, families can be structured like corporations, where the profit principle governs even relationships and succession plans. The few people who seem capable of undoing them are themselves. For the Wildensteins, the weight of the family legacy seems to have cracked the younger generations. <\/a>Your story reflects such mastery of the subject matter. What makes it possible to write about about a rarefied world with such confidence?<\/span>I think because I\u2019ve been writing about it for like 15 years. The art market can be a complex, opaque and bizarre system, but it\u2019s also very small, so you see the same machinations and players emerging again and again.<\/span><\/span>
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\nEven though Daniel described Georges as a \u201cbad father,\u201d he parented his own children in similarly severe ways. He enforced his father\u2019s business tactics \u2014 extreme secrecy, consolidation of wealth in the bloodline \u2014 as laws of family life, too. Daniel tried to seclude his two children, Alec and Guy, at home and unmarried, to protect the family from publicity and divorce. They lived as if in another era \u2014 the French 18th century \u2014 with opulent floral d\u00e9cor, heavy drapes and footmen who stood behind their chairs during meals. As children, Guy and Alec commuted to the Lyc\u00e9e Fran\u00e7ais de New York by limousine, and they rarely had a play date. Alec was forbidden to play sports and attend university, Guy was prevented from pursuing acting and both were required to learn their father\u2019s trade. Daniel was particularly strict with Alec, his elder son. \u00a0According to a 1998 Vanity Fair article, he started taking Alec to brothels at age 15 in the hope that he would find prostitutes a satisfying alternative to a wife. When Alec defied his father and married Jocelyne, he did so secretly in Las Vegas with no guests. Eventually, Daniel\u2019s sons and wives and children all lived together in his New York townhouse.
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\nThose who know Daniel have said that he infantilized and humiliated his sons and that they\u2019ve gone on to treat the women in their lives similarly. Guy, Sylvia believed, was jealous of Daniel and took it out on her; Alec blamed Jocelyne for the humiliating headlines generated by their divorce. (The New York Post dubbed her the \u201cBride of Wildenstein\u201d for her apparently extensive plastic surgeries.) Alec, who wore bold pinstripe suits, was the flashier brother; Guy kept a lower profile but played on the Diables Bleus polo team with aristocratic friends, like the future King Charles III, the godfather of his eldest child. <\/a>You paint such a vivid picture of the family dynamics. What did you rely on to report and verify those details?<\/span>It\u2019s an amalgamation from a lot of sources: interviews with people who know the family personally, details from past media reports, interviews the family members themselves gave over the years.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>Colleagues remember that the brothers would sit quietly in meetings. Guy married a Swedish model named Kristina Hansson, who has never appeared in a tabloid. In fact, he once boasted that \u201chardly anyone knows what my wife looks like.\u201d So when Daniel died in 2001, Guy was the clear successor to the family art empire,while Alec took over the horse business.
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\nGuy, who is now 77, is the family\u2019s patriarch and president of Wildenstein & Co. But mounting lawsuits and scandals have begun to drag him down. So far he has avoided any serious consequences \u2014 a fact some critics attribute to well-positioned friends like former President Nicolas Sarkozy or to the fortune at his disposal for defense counsel. But now that the family is on trial, Guy, it seems, may have taken the legacy of silence too far. The Wildenstein policy to preserve confidentiality at any cost may ultimately expose the family\u2019s secrets. <\/a>How do you view this device \u2014 some might call it a cliffhanger \u2014 that draws the reader to keep reading?<\/span>I think it\u2019s the moment where we see how Guy\u2019s personal story led to his present legal situation, so it was a natural transition. But perhaps I did want to nod to the stakes at hand before asking readers to continue on through another section about the legal maneuverings.<\/span><\/span>
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\nIN 2009,<\/strong> after a long string of setbacks, Dumont Beghi had a breakthrough. Over the years she had sent Liouba Wildenstein, Alec\u2019s second wife, multiple summonses for information about the family\u2019s assets. Unsurprisingly, she ignored them. But after Alec died of prostate cancer at age 67 in 2008, Liouba, a former model from Russia, found herself in trouble. According to Serre\u2019s book, Alec owed \u20ac12 million in back taxes, and his father\u2019s estate was still tied up in litigation with Sylvia. Guy offered to lend Liouba the money to help pay his brother\u2019s debt \u2014 all she had to do in return was give him access to a trust Alec had set up for her, supposedly so Guy could reimburse himself later. But after the deal was done, Serre\u2019s book recounts, Guy didn\u2019t pay Liouba the millions he promised. He sent only small, sporadic sums \u2014 not enough to pay her tax bill or to live on. Liouba found herself in a situation much like Sylvia\u2019s: cut out from the family, with no money and no recourse. (The representative for Guy says that he did issue the loan.)
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\nThat\u2019s when Dumont Beghi\u2019s phone rang. Liouba had finally decided to answer her third summons. She told me recently that she felt she had no choice but to take action: \u201cMany women in the family had to fight for their rights,\u201d she said. <\/a>How were you able to reach her?<\/span>I emailed her and corresponded for a while with her lawyer until she agreed to meet with me in Paris.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cThe women want to be respected.\u201d Twenty-four hours later, a lawyer would deliver Dumont Beghi dozens of documents that Liouba had found on Alec\u2019s personal computer \u2014 contracts and letters about the family\u2019s expansive network of offshore trusts \u2014 which would reveal what Dumont Beghi and Sylvia had long believed without being able to definitively prove.
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\nThe documents mapped how the Wildensteins had structured their patrimony, and hidden their wealth, for generations. Daniel\u2019s estate, Dumont Beghi learned, included several hundred artworks \u2014 including the 180 Bonnards, hundreds of 16th- and 17th-century French paintings and dozens of works by old masters including Caravaggio, Vel\u00e1zquez and Fra Angelico. Then there was the real estate: multiple homes and buildings across France and the United States, the 58,000-acre ranch in Kenya and the 18-acre Virgin Islands compound. There was a Gulfstream IV jet, a yacht and the thoroughbred stable, which was registered to multiple intermediaries in England and Ireland. The art was held in shell companies and trusts in tax havens, including two previously unknown entities in the Cayman Islands and Guernsey. These were \u201coperational structures specializing in tax evasion,\u201d Dumont Beghi wrote, which also helped the family shield assets from divorce. (The representative for Guy disputes the accuracy of this recounting of the estate.) <\/a>Given the response from Guy, how did you verify what his estate included?<\/span>A lot of it is in court records, or is verifiable through property records. Some of it is from Dumont Beghi\u2019s investigation, which I double checked as thoroughly as I could. Guy\u2019s rep did not specify which part was inaccurate, nor did he provide any counter information.<\/span><\/span>
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\nAccording to Dumont Beghi, two trusts named Sylvia as a beneficiary, something Sylvia said she was unaware of. Also revealed was a letter from Guy and Alec\u2019s Swiss lawyer seeking to remove Sylvia as beneficiary from one of the trusts. Investigators\u00a0<\/strong>also discovered $250 million in art that Daniel had apparently ordered airlifted out of the United States while he was in his coma. (The representative for Guy denies that this is true, calling it \u201cillogical.\u201d)
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\nDumont Beghi rapidly began to issue new summonses and build an appeal for a review. But time was running out. Sylvia had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which was spreading. She was running out of resources, too. \u201cI have no more money,\u201d Serre recounted her saying. \u201cThis procedure has brought me to my knees.\u201d She had paid more than \u20ac10 million in legal fees over the past eight years and had resorted to pawning her jewelry and relying on help from wealthy friends. In her final interview, she said of her stepsons, \u201cThey robbed me, and now they are waiting for me to die.\u201d
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\nDumont Beghi continued on, believing that Sylvia was entitled to a settlement of $300 million. She filed a new criminal complaint against Guy and the heirs of Alec \u2014 his two children and Liouba \u2014 as well as their business associates, using the new information she had received. To her surprise, this time the government responded. The police raided the Wildenstein Institute and the family\u2019s apartments on a court order to identify any assets that might have been concealed from Sylvia. In the basement, officers discovered vaults filled with hundreds of drawings, paintings and sculptures. Some of the frames were inscribed with swastikas.
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\nOfficers seized about 30 lost works by the likes of Degas and Berthe Morisot. Some had been reported stolen by a Jewish family during the war,<\/a> and others were reported lost by families who had involved Daniel in the management of their estates. (Some of the looted works had been reunited with the family and then entrusted to the Wildensteins; others, according to one heir, were never reunited with the family and first rediscovered in the vault.) Guy pleaded ignorance: He never inspected that vault. And who could prove otherwise? The family took such pains to protect their inventory that no one knows what they really have, perhaps not even them. (A representative for Guy said that all the works stolen from the Jewish family during the war had been first reunited with them and then entrusted to the Wildensteins. Litigation with the family is ongoing.) <\/a>How did you decide where and how many times to include comments from Guy\u2019s representative?<\/span>We didn\u2019t include the rep\u2019s dispute of facts that were verifiably true, but I think we otherwise included every point of contention they raised. This was important since they declined interviews and we did not have much of their side in the story.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>
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\nDumont Beghi\u2019s involvement in the Wildenstein affair officially ended on Nov. 8, 2010, when she called Sylvia for the last time to wish her a happy 77th birthday. Five days later, Sylvia died at home in Paris. She was buried in the Wildenstein tomb next to her husband, but Guy had her maiden name, Roth, etched into the marble tombstone. Without a client, Dumont Beghi\u2019s case was closed for good.
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\nBut the lawsuit was far from over for Guy, as the state picked up where Dumont Beghi left off. She had mapped for the government the global system through which the family moved money among nine companies registered in Ireland, four trusts on three islands, a handful of galleries and real estate companies and bank accounts in at least four countries, possibly depriving the French public of hundreds of millions of euros. <\/a>How was this figure arrived at?<\/span>The prosecutors allege they owe that much in unpaid taxes.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0In addition to the Swiss free port and the Paris vault, they had art in a nuclear bunker in the Catskills, a former fire station in New York and many other far-flung places. \u201cI mean, there are pictures I have never seen that my great-grandfather bought,\u201d Alec told Vanity Fair in 1998.<\/a> They were, he said, \u201cin vaults and crazy places, in back of other things.\u201d
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\nOVER THE NEXT DECADE,<\/strong>\u00a0the Wildenstein tax case wound its way through the French courts. At the same time, public outrage over tax loopholes for the wealthy was growing, and the government passed what is popularly known as the Wildenstein law to crack down on tax evasion via foreign trusts. Still, the family won two controversial acquittals, first in 2017<\/a> and then again in 2018. <\/a>How much writing and revision did it take to compress the events of a decade?<\/span>I probably started with like 1,000 words on those earlier lawsuits and it was just all cut. There were just so many legal cases in the end that we needed to breeze through some of it to keep things moving.<\/span><\/span>
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\nBut then, two years ago, France\u2019s attorney general and tax authorities brought concerns about the decision to acquit the Wildensteins of tax fraud and money laundering to the Court of Cassation,<\/a> France\u2019s highest civil and criminal court. The lead judge in the 2017 case had said that the family displayed a \u201cclear intention\u201d to hide their wealth, but the tribunal let them off because, at the time, foreign trusts fell into a legal gray area. In reopening the case, the Court of Cassation disagreed, saying the lower court \u201cdisregarded\u201d the facts.
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\n\u201cIt\u2019s really uncommon,\u201d Dumont Beghi says of the upcoming retrial. She believes the path to victory will be much tougher for Guy and his co-defendants this time. Prosecutors will argue that the Wildensteins were, in fact, required to report their foreign trusts at the time of Daniel\u2019s death, and later Alec\u2019s. They also contend that the trustees improperly took orders from the family in violation of the rules of irrevocable trusts, which must be independently managed.
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\nThe extreme lengths to which the family went to obscure their wealth led French media to dub them \u201cthe Impressionists of finance.\u201d But in reality many of their practices are commonplace in high levels of the art trade, which a 2020 U.S. Senate subcommittee called the \u201clargest legal, unregulated market.\u201d Unlike financial institutions, art businesses are not expressly subject to the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires firms to verify customers\u2019 identities, report large cash transactions and flag suspicious activity. A study from the U.S. Department of the Treasury last year cited a figure estimating that money laundering and other financial crimes in the art market<\/a> may amount to about $3 billion a year. (Britain and the European Union, however, have implemented anti-money-laundering regulations that require stricter due diligence in art transactions there.)
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\nAccording to a report by Art Basel and UBS, auction houses did about $31 billion in sales last year.<\/a> They say that they know who their clients are, but those may just be the names of art advisers or other intermediaries. And collectors\u2019 insistence on anonymity, long framed as genteel discretion, hasn\u2019t budged. The buyer of the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s $450.3 million \u201cSalvator Mundi,\u201d registered at Christie\u2019s a day before bidding with a $100 million down payment, identifying himself as one of 5,000 princes in Saudi Arabia. A few weeks later, it was revealed that the true buyer was Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman<\/a> \u2014 who was reportedly displaying the painting on his superyacht \u2014 and that a little-known cousin of his bought it as a proxy. It was billed by Christie\u2019s as the \u201clast Leonardo da Vinci painting in private hands,\u201d but it\u2019s only the \u201clast\u201d Leonardo until someone reveals another one, like the Madonna and child the Wildensteins sold in 1999 to an anonymous collector, who is still believed to own it.<\/a>Throughout your story, you write about a complicated subject with great clarity. How much revision was involved? What\u2019s your response when you need to revise?<\/span>I think I had maybe five drafts, starting at 5,000 words and then ending with a little over 7,000. Throwing away work you\u2019ve already done and then redoing it is never fun, but it\u2019s necessary. Each revision definitely made the story better.<\/span><\/span><\/a>What is your writing process?<\/span>I report and gather as much information as I can before writing anything. Then I write a really sloppy first draft. Then I just revise and revise.<\/span><\/span>
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\nFor a business that routinely transacts in secrecy jurisdictions, literally in the dark and underground, scarcity can be manufactured, and value is dictated by whatever someone is willing to pay. \u201cA client\u2019s privacy should be an art dealer\u2019s primary concern,\u201d Daniel wrote, calling it a matter of \u201crespect.\u201d But secrecy is also a core competitive advantage in a profession predicated on insider knowledge \u2014 a model the Wildensteins themselves relied on. The gallery kept a legendarily detailed directory of where every coveted painting in the world was located using intelligence sometimes gathered by spying on rival dealers \u2014 even, one competitor alleged, <\/a>Why is this source anonymous?<\/span>I honestly don\u2019t know! It\u2019s a matter of public record, so it must have been a narrative choice not to name them.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0tapping phones. That system of ultra-insular knowledge and extreme scarcity is why, today, the dealers who bought \u201cSalvator Mundi\u201d for $1,175 at a New Orleans auction house were able to resell it for a reputed $80 million, and then, in the span of five years, see it flipped for $127.5 million to the collector who ultimately sold it to the Saudis for the record-breaking $450 million.
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\nYounger dynasties like the Mugrabis and Nahmads have similarly been accused of strategically obscuring ownership of their assets to shield them from divorce or other legal claims. When a Frenchman accused the Nahmads of possessing a Modigliani painting, once estimated to be worth up to $25 million, that Nazis looted from his grandfather, they said it was owned by a company called International Art Center. A couple years later, the Panama Papers revealed that David Nahmad owns International Art Center, a holding company whose assets are stored in Geneva. (A representative for the Nahmad Collection says the case has \u201cno merit.\u201d)
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\n\u201cMany of these very wealthy families do sort of act like cartels,\u201d says Christopher A. Marinello, a lawyer who recovers lost art. \u201cWe\u2019re still dealing with these Nazi-looted-art cases because the art market hoped they would outlast the heirs.\u201d The Wildensteins, too, he says, have handled \u201cproblematic\u201d pictures, though none that he is currently pursuing are in their possession. Whenever he asks the family for information that might aid in his search for stolen pictures, they take a very long time to respond, he says, and are reluctant to provide information. \u201cThey\u2019re just looking the other way,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s just this unwillingness to lift a finger and do anything.\u201d
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\nI MET DUMONT BEGHI <\/strong>once more in New York, where she had come to visit galleries with her son, an artist and designer. <\/a>How much time did you devote to\u00a0 on-the-ground reporting versus research and reviewing documents? What was the balance?<\/span>Probably 60% interviews and 40% research.<\/span><\/span>
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\nAt a windy table outside Harry Cipriani\u2019s food hall on the Upper West Side, she told me that she plans to attend every day of the Wildenstein trial this fall. It will finally mark the end of the defining case of her career. \u201cIt\u2019s my professional life, it\u2019s my personal life,\u201d she said. \u201cI start something, I finish it. I will go every day. I want to see it through.\u201d
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\nHer long entanglement in the case created legal troubles for her too. Guy Wildenstein sued her for defamation in 2016. A few years later, she was convicted of tax fraud and money laundering for depositing $5.1 million she received from Sylvia in an undisclosed HSBC account in New York. She is currently pursuing a partial appeal and has suggested that the $5.1 million was a \u201ccustomary gift.\u201d (Guy dropped the defamation suit two years ago.)
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\nIn 2012, Dumont Beghi published a book about her seven years on the case, \u201cL\u2019Affaire Wildenstein.\u201d In the opening lines, she describes it as \u201ca story of two women alone facing the establishment,\u201d run by privileged and powerful men like the Wildensteins \u2014 \u201ca universe where women are omitted.\u201d Some have questioned whether Dumont Beghi was really representing her client\u2019s best interests in pursuing the costly, yearslong battle. But regardless of her motives, it\u2019s obvious that the saga has become personal for her. Her eyes welled up when she spoke of Sylvia\u2019s death. \u201cShe wanted the world to know that as a woman she wanted to be respected.\u201d She described tax fraud as a crime that disproportionately deprives women. This is what she and Sylvia were fighting for. \u201cIt may be hard to understand the depth of our relationship,\u201d she told me.
\n
\nWith a potential billion-dollar guillotine hanging over its neck, the house of Wildenstein is in unprecedented peril. Even before this latest legal trouble, its influence waned for years as the market for the historical art it sells declined, and museums are by now fully stocked. As Daniel reached his eighth decade, he started waking up in the mornings asking himself, \u201cHow long are we going to last?\u201d The profession his family dominated for most of the 20th century had been overtaken by a new guard of contemporary-art dealers selling status baubles to Wall Street millionaires. These collectors weren\u2019t interested in Rococo or Neoclassical art; they were spending millions on living stars like Damien Hirst, whose market the advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi has dominated since he bought up vast quantities of the artist\u2019s early work. Daniel tried to get in on the frenzy by forming a joint venture with Pace Gallery in 1993. But its contemporary clients generally didn\u2019t convert to Impressionism or old-master collectors, and vice versa. \u201cIt was a mistake,\u201d Pace\u2019s founder, Arne Glimcher, told me. \u201cI think we did it because we were so flattered.\u201d Pace bought back its shares plus inventory from Guy in 2011.
\n
\nNow the family appears to be liquidating some assets. In 2020, Guy and his wife put their Tudor estate in Millbrook, N.Y., which they spent a reported $50 million renovating, on the market for $20 million. Around the same time, their son, David, and his wife, the jewelry heiress Lucrezia Buccellati Wildenstein, listed their Connecticut equestrian compound for $6.9 million. The Virgin Islands property is up for sale, too, for $48 million. In 2016, while facing his initial tax trial in Paris, Guy listed his Sutton Square townhouse in Manhattan \u2014 Corcoran blurred the paintings on the walls, naturally \u2014 for nearly $40 million, only to finally offer it at a loss in March for $29.5 million. \u201cI see the end of this empire,\u201d the old-masters expert Eric Turquin says. \u201cThe organization is too heavy for a market that has shrunk. The market is one-tenth of what it used to be for 18th-century French art.\u201d
\n
\nSome market insiders have noticed that the family seems to be selling off more art lately, too. Though paintings are often sold at auction anonymously, provenance histories can reveal ownership information. In the past two years or so, \u201cthey sold a lot of paintings at auction, at Christie\u2019s, not under their own name,\u201d says Robert Simon, one of the old-masters dealers who rediscovered \u201cSalvator Mundi.\u201d \u201cBut when they\u2019re cataloged, you can see that they\u2019re shown by Wildenstein in previous shows or were acquired here and there.\u201d He adds, \u201cAnd then they\u2019ve kind of shed their staff as well.\u201d The mass liquidation of assets suggests that the family could be anticipating a large expenditure, like an overdue tax bill.
\n
\nIn 1932, Georges Wildenstein hired the society architect Horace Trumbauer to design the family\u2019s majestic limestone gallery on East 64th Street, with marble floors, gilded wood paneling and lead vaults. \u201cIt was the grandest gallery in New York,\u201d Simon says, recalling the heavy drapes the Wildensteins would pull back to reveal paintings to clients. It\u2019s where they sold one of Raphael\u2019s most treasured Madonnas, Caillebotte\u2019s iconic cityscape \u201cParis Street; Rainy Day\u201d and Cezanne\u2019s largest and most lyrical \u201cBathers.\u201d
\n
\nGuy\u2019s son, David, who is vice president of Wildenstein & Co., has described the building as \u201cthe soul of this company and the soul of this family.\u201d Yet he helped sell it in 2017 for $79.8 million, then the highest price ever paid for a townhouse in New York. The contemporary-art gallery L\u00e9vy Gorvy Dayan has since taken occupancy of the space while Wildenstein & Co. has moved into a 15-story commercial building in Midtown, open by appointment only. \u201cIt\u2019s like an office,\u201d one dealer told me. \u201cA small office.\u201d<\/a>Why did you decide this was where you would end the story?<\/span>The Wildensteins felt to me like a family stuck in a different time. They\u2019re so insular they never really adapted to changes in their industry, or in society. In the end, I felt they\u2019d been left in the past, in the shrinking world they made for themselves. Since the story was told largely chronologically I wanted to end with some idea of what that world looks like now as they\u2019re forced to contend with this lawsuit.<\/span><\/span><\/a>Some writers say they need to know the last line of a story before they begin writing. Are you one of them?<\/span>No, the last line of the story is usually the last line I write. It just emerges \u2014 usually on deadline!<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n* * *
\n
\nA correction was made on<\/em><\/strong> Sept. 1, 2023<\/strong>: An earlier version of this article used an outdated name for the gallery located in a townhouse formerly owned by the Wildenstein family. It is now known as L\u00e9vy Gorvy Dayan, not LGDR.<\/em>
\n
\nA correction was made on<\/em><\/strong>Sept. 22, 2023<\/strong>: An earlier version of the article described incompletely the dispute between the Wildensteins and the family of a Jewish collector whose art was stolen by the Nazis and then discovered in a Wildenstein vault. Some of the artworks were first reunited with the family and then entrusted to the Wildensteins as estate managers; others were never recovered, according to an heir who has ongoing legal disputes with the family. It was not the case that the bulk of the lost artworks had been missing since they were looted in the war. <\/em><\/a>How did this correction come about?<\/span>A representative for the family felt that this passage unfairly implied that ALL of the Nazi-looted works uncovered in the Wildenstein vault were improperly gained, when some of them had first been returned to their rightful owners before they ended up with the Wildensteins. The other ones are still in dispute. While the facts in the story were accurate, the editor felt it was important to explain the story more fully, especially given the nature of the allegations.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n* * *
\n
\nChip Scanlan <\/strong>is an award-winning newspaper reporter who taught writing at The Poynter Institute for 15\u00a0 years. He publishes Chip\u2019s Writing Lessons<\/a> and has two books, \u201dWriters on Writing\u201d and \u201c33 Ways Not To Screw Up Your Journalism.”<\/em>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rachel Corbett hunted back through generations of art deals, international laws and tax havens to explore suspicions about a family’s hidden fortune<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[13],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-2508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-chip-scanlan"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow an arts reporter unraveled a controversial and opaque family art dynasty - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2024\/01\/24\/arts-reporting-wildenstein-family-tax-havens-crime-courts\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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