The Wildenstein affair has taken another turn with Guy Wildenstein spending 36 hours in police custody in Paris while being questioned over the discovery of missing artworks in the Wildenstein vault. The head of the art dealing family told police that there has never been an inventory of the Wildenstein vault which is why some works got misplaced there. But that doesn’t wash with the nonagenarian Suzanne Reinach:
“I don’t know how many missing works of art there are — I have never spoken to Guy Wildenstein,” Ms. Reinach said in a halting voice, adding emphatically in an old French expression, “He certainly has gall.”
A frail, white-haired woman and former gallery owner, she is mostly confined to a wheelchair. For her and her great nephew, Alexandre Bronstein, the enduring mystery is how at least 20 of her artworks — among them sculptures by the 20th-century Italian artist Rembrandt Bugatti and a Eugène Delacroix tiger pastel — were found in the Wildenstein vault.
Hervé Temime, a lawyer for Mr. Wildenstein, said in an interview that the case has provoked a lot of inaccurate information, but that one basic fact is that the vault at the institute “never had an inventory, and that’s unfortunate because if there had been one, we never would have had this affair.”
French Art Dealers Spends Time in Detention in Case of Missing Artworks (New York Times)
