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)
