Tag: 1mdb

In other Warhol Jackie at the center of legal dispute news, if the latest developments in the Libbie Mugrabi dispute with the art lending firm Art Capital Group are confusing, we can go back to Page Six’s report last February.

That is when Mugrabi handed out wanted posters in front of ACG’s office, claiming they’d stolen her Warhol. ACG hadn’t filed a defamation lawsuit yet, so they were still talking to the press. Combined with the exhibits filed in their lawsuit [NYC County Supreme Court, 654058/2024] explained that Mugrabi had sought a 12-month, $3 million loan at at least 11.25%, plus a 2.25% referral fee to one of those guys up there—all booked up front, so she’d net $2.595m—against a Basquiat she said was worth $30 million.

Because she didn’t have the $12,500 processing fee required by the term sheet she signed, ACG suggested she use the Warhol as security against the expenses she agreed to, like shipping, research, insurance, storage, etc. And that is how they came to have custody of both the Basquiat and the Warhol, even though, by February 2024, it had become clear to ACG that they couldn’t find anyone to hold the Basquiat loan.

I think any of us would be understandably pissed if we were charged $12,500, or $27,000 or $97,000 and counting for a loan someone couldn’t deliver. Even if the reason they couldn’t make the loan was because of all the other legal claims and disputes being made against us by all sorts of creditors and mortgage holders and former household employees.

All of this is deeply uninteresting, though, especially compared to the absolute buck wild marvel of someone named Mugrabi having only one Warhol. And what, then, is that Warhol? As the Wanted poster teases, it is a blue, 20 x 16-inch, Jackie from 1964. And Libbie told Page Six her ex-father-in-law Jose had purchased it “at Christie’s seven years ago” for $869,000.

Some part of that might be true. About seven years before February 2024, Christie’s sold at least three nearly identical blue 1964 Jackie paintings. All have the same scant info and direct provenance: “Andy Warhol Works from a Private Collection” acquired directly from the artist, no date given. The first, in a morning sale on 16 November 2016, sold for $703,500 against a $700k-1m estimate. On 18 May 2017, another one sold for $595,500 against an estimate of just $400-600k. Then in an evening sale in Hong Kong on 27 May, the last sold for HKD5.954, or $764,000, against a roughly $400-600k estimate.

Barring the possibility of a fourth Jackie sold privately, to the world’s biggest Warhol trader, for 15-60% more, and based on the trace of black along the upper right edge, I think Libbie’s Jackie was the cheapest one, from 18 May.

Lmao how did I only just realize that this is the same screen Warhol used for the round gold Jackie from the Jho Low/Swizz Beatz/US Marshalls sale situation?

1MDB Warhol Round Jackie
2009: Have You Seen Me? The Find The Warhols Project
On Second Thought, Don’t Find The Warhols
2012: So Appropriate: Find The Warhols At House of Switzerland

“As we stand enraptured by the stunning resplendency of Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Yellow and Blue) we bear witness to what can only be described as an unequivocal masterpiece of twentieth-century art history.”

I still contend that the auction catalogue essay is an underappreciated genre of art writing, and the 4,000-word lot essay for Sotheby’s 2015 sale of this prime Rothko feels worth a read. Especially so because Artnet reports that the auction house is selling the painting again this fall. And so we will have another essay with which we can index the way these classical Ab Ex artworks are positioned, and how their sellers, at least, imagine them to be understood.

In 2015 that meant namechecking everyone from Giotto to Niezstche and evoking the physical experience of standing in front of the painting in the most intense language you can muster. This manifestation is quoted after the jump, if you can handle it.

As for how the buyers understood things, we must piece together our own conclusions. Untitled (Yellow and Blue) is one of nine Rothko paintings Bunny and Paul Mellon acquired from Marlborough Gallery beginning in 1970, immediately after the artist’s death, and so right in the thick of the fiduciary malfeasance that prompted Rothko’s children to sue.

This and at least seven other Mellon Rothkos were promptly included in the National Gallery’s first show of modern art, in 1973.

Here it is, installed in the dinner organized by Bunny Mellon, above tables full of Betty Parsons sculptures, which were for sale.

Some time between Paul’s death in 1999 and 2006, when it was shown at the Palazzo Grassi, Bunny, by then in her nineties and rushing to spend several hundred million dollars before she died, sold the painting to François Pinault.

In June 2013, Pinault sold it through his auction house, Christie’s, along with a Fontana, to Eric Tan, a cutout for Jho Low, the Malaysian money launderer. [According to the Feds, the $79.5 million invoice was $36m for the Fontana, and so $43m for the Rothko.] In October 2013, Tan gifted the works, along with a $3 million Calder, to Low, with three copy & pasted “gift letters.”

[Because legal filings are another underappreciated genre of art writing, the excerpts of the gift letters included in the US Justice Dept’s 2020 forfeiture filing against other laundered artworks, a Warhol and a Monet, are also after the jump.]

In April 2014 Low borrowed $107 million from Sotheby’s Financial Services, pledging up to $285 million in artworks as collateral, including the Rothko, then he instructed them to sell artworks until the loan was repaid. Sotheby’s put the Rothko in their May 2015 Modern/Contemporary sale, where it was purchased by Russian oiligarch Farkhad Akhmedov for $46.5 million as part of his attempt to conceal $600 million while divorcing his wife Tatiana Akhmedova.

Tatiana was awarded title to the Rothko, other art, a yacht, and an apartment, in 2016, but some of the assets had been secretly transferred to the feuding couple’s son, and in 2020, she was still suing to receive them. When Sotheby’s publishes the updated provenance, perhaps we’ll know if Tatiana is the present seller. Artnet says the consignment was only just arranged, which may be why Sotheby’s pushed back their Hong Kong sale. But if you need to convert eight figures in a somewhat portable but rather traceable masterpiece, November 8 is your lucky day.

Continue reading “An Infinite, Unbreakable Cycle of Buying and Selling”