Georgina Adam noticed something in an inventory of the works Dimitri Rybolovlev bought from Yves Bouvier, a lost Picasso. We noticed this bit of simple math: Rybolovlev bought 37 works for €1.9bn or an average price of €51m per work of art.
one forgotten painting to emerge in the Bouvier case is Picasso’s “Les Noces de Pierrette” (1905). According to an article in Le Monde, it is one of 37 works of art in the €1.9bn art collection that Rybolovlev bought from Bouvier. The rather washed-out Blue Period painting last appeared in public in Paris in 1989, at the height of the “Japan boom”, and was sold via a telephone link to Tokyo, to Tomonori Tsurumaki, a Japanese developer, for $51.3m. At the time it was the highest price paid for a work of art at auction. The following year, the Japanese bubble burst and the painting was repossessed by the Lake Credit Company and then went to GE Capital — and all trace of it disappeared. Now we know where it ended up.
