A woman will helm the Louvre for the first time in its 228-year history cnn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cnn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The new owner of
Montmartre Street Scene (1887) is the Reuben family the property developers Simon and David Reuben. In an extraordinary auction last week at Sotheby’s in Paris, an internet bidder turned out not to have the money for a Van Gogh.
Although the Reuben brothers are Britain’s joint second-richest UK family, worth £16bn (according to
The Sunday Times Rich List), they are discreet and hardly household names. But their life story shows how self-made people can acquire a Van Gogh to hang above their sofa.
Simon and David were born in Mumbai, India, to Jewish parents of Iraqi descent. They came to England as teenagers in the 1950s, with David going into the scrap metal business and Simon into the carpet trade. The brothers later worked together and in the 1990s they made a fortune in the Russian metal market. The two men are now among the world’s leading property developers. They also have a charitable foundation, which last year gave £80m to the University of Ox
A Netflix doc to terrify art collectors apollo-magazine.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from apollo-magazine.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Charm and negligence behind network of master forgeries
Noce has spent five years investigating Ruffini s exploits and is careful to insist that he is innocent until proven guilty.
by Jean-Louis De La Vaissiere
PARIS
(AFP)
.- A French journalist s investigation into the alleged forgery network around art collector Giuliano Ruffini has also criticised the great negligence of art world experts.
The doubts first became public when French police seized a painting owned by the prince of Liechtenstein from an exhibition in Aix-en-Provence in 2016.
The prince had paid seven million euros at auction for the portrait of the goddess Venus by 16th century Italian painter Lucas Cranach, yet tests would soon reveal that the pigments used in the painting dated from the 20th century.