The Sunday Read: ‘The Inheritance Case That Could Unravel an Art Dynasty’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2023

⏱️ 57 minutes

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Summary

Twenty years ago, a glamorous platinum-blond widow arrived at the Paris law office of Claude Dumont Beghi in tears. Someone was trying to take her horses — her “babies” — away, and she needed a lawyer to stop them. She explained that her late husband had been a breeder of champion thoroughbreds. The couple was a familiar sight at the racetracks in Chantilly and Paris: Daniel Wildenstein, gray-suited with a cane in the stands, and Sylvia Roth Wildenstein, a former model with a cigarette dangling from her lips. They first met in 1964, while she was walking couture shows in Paris and he was languishing in a marriage of convenience to a woman from another wealthy Jewish family of art collectors. Daniel, 16 years Sylvia’s senior, already had two grown sons when they met, and he didn’t want more children. So over the next 40 years they spent together, Sylvia cared for the horses as if they were the children she never had. When Daniel died of cancer in 2001, he left her a small stable. Then, one morning about a year later, Sylvia’s phone rang. It was her horse trainer calling to say that he had spotted something odd in the local racing paper, Paris Turf: The results of Sylvia’s stable were no longer listed under her name. The French journalist Magali Serre’s 2013 book “Les Wildenstein” recounts the scene in great detail: Sylvia ran to fetch her copy and flipped to the page. Sure enough, the stable of “Madame Wildenstein” had been replaced by “Dayton Limited,” an Irish company owned by her stepsons.

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0:00.0	My name is Rachel Corbett. I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine, and I've written
0:11.5	for a long time about the art world. It's a world of very little oversight and transparency,
0:18.1	where some of the greatest masterpieces in history are traded among the super wealthy
0:22.7	and then locked away in underground bunkers. Unless you're intimately familiar with this
0:28.2	world, you might not know there's one family that's cast a sort of shadow over the industry
0:34.2	for decades. Five generations of famously secretive figures who invented, in a way, many of
0:41.3	the systems by which the art market works to this day. This week's Sunday read is a story
0:47.7	I wrote for the magazine about that family, the Wildensteins of New York and France. It's
0:54.0	to look at how the art world can aid in a bettax evasion and money laundering for very
0:59.0	high net worth people, oligarchs, billionaires, and allegedly this one family who have managed
1:06.5	to accumulate enormous wealth by quietly buying up huge swathes of masterpieces and holding
1:12.9	them in tax havens. Paintings by Monet, Cézanne, Gogan, stashed away in freeports that
1:19.8	look like prisons full of unimaginable amounts of art. This is a story of tax evasion on a billion
1:27.2	dollar scale potentially, and it's culminating in an explosive trial this month before France's
1:33.5	highest court. So the Wildenstein dynasty of art dealers dates back to the 1870s, but this
1:41.6	particular story starts in 2001 with the death of Sylvia Wildenstein's husband, Daniel. Daniel
1:49.4	at this point in time is the patriarch of this empire, and when he dies, his two sons, Sylvia's
1:55.7	step-sons, tells Sylvia that actually he died in ruin, and she was going to be financially ruined,
2:02.2	too, unless she renounced her inheritance. Sylvia's been with her husband and step-sons for 40 years,
2:09.8	she fully trusts them, so she signs the documents they give her, even the ones that are in Japanese.
2:16.1	And then, suddenly, a painting on her wall disappears. She stops being invited to the family
2:23.3	vacation homes. Her step-sons tell her she has to move apartments. Everything she's taken for granted
	...

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