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How the Oligarchs Live with Art and Objects

January 15, 2014 by Marion Maneker

Blavatnik London Home

Connie Bruck profiles Leonid Blavatnik in the New Yorker pithily capturing the place art and objects occupy in his social life:

Blavatnik, at fifty-six years old, has a high forehead, full cheeks, wide-set gray eyes, and an owlish expression that moves easily from warmth to suspicion. His fortune has been estimated at nearly eighteen billion dollars. He owns a mansion on Kensington Palace Gardens, which he bought, in 2004, for forty-one million pounds. Since renovated, it has thirteen bedrooms, a cinema, an indoor-outdoor swimming pool, and armored-glass windows—a display of grandeur that makes the nearby Russian Embassy look like a humble dacha. The British publisher Lord George Weidenfeld, a close friend, told me that Blavatnik has been “systematically collecting very good art recently—contemporary art, and also a Modigliani, one of the best I’ve seen.” Not long ago, Blavatnik showed a guest one of his acquisitions, an Enigma encryption device that the British captured from a German submarine in 1941. As the guest admired the machine, Blavatnik warned, “Don’t touch it! It cost a lot of money!” Another friend described one of Blavatnik’s lavish parties: “Rupert Murdoch was going out as I came in. There were Argentinean tango dancers, and great music performers, and young, scantily clad Russian girls playing tennis.” The friend told Blavatnik, “This is nineteen-twenties Gatsby!” Later, the friend recalls saying, “ ‘Len, you really should save some money.’ And he said, ‘But I have so much!’ He thinks he is living modestly.”

Connie Bruck: Can Leonard Blavatnik Become a Respectable Oligarch? (New Yorker)

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