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A Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn who had agreed to sell a 1932 painting by Pablo Picasso for a record $139-million, has had to withhold it because of an accident.
Wynn was showing the painting called Le Reve, (French for The Dream), to visitors in his office earlier this month at Wynn Las Vegas when he gashed the painting with his right elbow, spokeswoman Denise Randazzo said. Wynn, who is reported to often gesture with his hands when he speaks, has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that affects peripheral vision. The 1932 painting ended up with a hole torn in the canvas, according to an account by screenwriter Nora Ephron, who saw the incident. Ephron recounted in a blog published Monday:
Anyway, while we were eating, Steve and Elaine Wynn stopped by the table. Wynn was in a very good mood because, he told us, he had just sold a Picasso for $139 million. I was surprised he'd sold it, because the Picasso in question was not just any old Picasso but the famous painting Le Reve, which used to hang in the museum at the Bellagio when Wynn owned it, and no question it was Wynn's favorite painting. He'd practically named his new hotel after it, but at some point in the course of construction he'd changed his mind and decided to name the hotel after himself, which, when you think of it, was a good idea, what with the homonym and all. Meanwhile, he named the Cirque de Soleil Show at the Wynn after Le Reve. The buyer of the painting, Wynn told, was a man named Steven Cohen. Everyone seemed to know who Steven Cohen was, a hedge fund billionaire who lived in Connecticut in a house with a fabulous art collection he had just recently amassed. "This is the most money ever paid for a painting," Steve Wynn said. The price was $4 million more than Ronald Lauder had recently paid for a Klimt. Oh, that Klimt. It had set a bar, no question of that, and Wynn was thrilled to have beaten it. He invited us to come see the painting before it moved to Connecticut, never to be seen again by anyone but people who know Steven Cohen. The next day, after an excellent lunch at Chinois in the Forum Mall, which is the eighth wonder of the world, we all trooped back to our hotel to see the painting. We went into Wynn's office, which is just off the casino, past a waiting area with a group of fantastic Warhols, past a secretary's desk with a Matisse over it (a Matisse over a secretary's desk!) (and by the way a Renoir over another secretary's desk!) and into Wynn's office. There, on the wall, were two large Picassos, one of them Le Reve. Steve Wynn launched into a long story about the painting -- he told us that it was a painting of Picasso's mistress, Marie-Therese Walter, that it was extremely erotic, and that if you looked at it carefully (which I did, for the first time, although I'd seen it before at the Bellagio) you could see that the head of Marie-Therese was divided in two sections and that one of them was a penis. This was not a good moment for me vis a vis the painting. In fact, I would have to say that it made me pretty much think I wouldn't pay five dollars for it. Wynn plans to repair the painting. Wynn bought the work for $48.4-million in 1997. The planned sale too art collector Steven Cohen for $139-million, would have been $4-million higher than the $135-million that cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder paid in July for Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I. American art collectors Sally and Victor Ganz, had bought the painting for $7,000 in 1941, the year they were married, and hung it casually in their dining room.
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