Picasso Watch: Steve Wynn Accidentally Damages “Le Reve”
PICASSO, Pablo (Espagne, 1881-1973)
Las Vegas Review-Journal: NORM: Wynn accidentally damages Picasso
Pablo Picasso’s “dream” painting has turned into a $139 million nightmare for Steve Wynn.
In an accident witnessed by a group that included Barbara Walters and screenwriters Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi, Wynn accidentally poked a hole in Picasso’s 74-year-old painting, “Le Reve,” French for “The Dream.”
A day earlier, Wynn had finalized a record $139 million deal for the painting of Picasso’s mistress, Wynn told The New Yorker magazine
The accident occurred as a gesturing Wynn, who suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that affects peripheral vision, struck the painting with his right elbow, leaving a hole the size of a silver dollar in the left forearm of Marie-Theresa Walter, Picasso’s 21-year-old mistress.
“Oh shit, look what I’ve done,” Wynn said, according to Ephron, who gave her account in a blog published on Monday.
Wynn paid $48.4 million for the Picasso in 1997 and had agreed to sell it to art collector Steven Cohen. The $139 million would have been $4 million higher than the previous high for a work of art, according to The New Yorker.
Cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder paid $135 million in July for Gustav Klimt’s 1907 portrait “Adele Bloch-Bauer I.”
Wynn plans to restore “Le Reve” and keep it.
Sellers remorse or a genuine accident?
Flap bets the former rather than the latter.