The announcement that Sotheby’s was going to auction Velázquez’s The Queen of Isabel de Borbón this February shook the art world. The magnificent work, the first version of a full-length portrait of Philip IV’s wife, had a starting price of 35 million dollars. But the agitation soon turned into disappointment, as the oil painting was withdrawn from the market. “Sotheby’s alleged ‘internal discussions’ by the owner family, but without specifying anything,” explains Héctor San José, a market editor for Ars Magazine.
The family, he says, are the Wildensteins: a saga of antique dealers and collectors originally from Alsace who have reigned in the art world for decades. Despite its legendary secrecy, its stock (because, as San José points out, the Wildensteins “are gallery owners, not collectors”), is dazzling. They are said to own “everything”: from the old masters to Picasso. A look at its website corroborates this: there are works by Bonnard, Cezanne, Degas, Delacroix, Gauguin, Raphael, Renoir and of course, Picasso. In fact, the Spaniard was a protégé of Nathan Wildenstein, the initiator of the saga.
A tailor in his native Alsace, he entered the art business by chance, when in 1870 he acted as an intermediary to sell a client’s works. With that first commission, he purchased two paintings and, in 1905, opened his gallery, Wildenstein.
And the business prospered. How! The Wildenstein family is considered to be the largest fortune amassed in the billion-dollar art market. A fortune that Georges, Nathan’s son, consolidated: an astute young man, capable of detecting Picasso’s genius and paying him a salary in exchange for his works. From buying Impressionist canvases “by the truckload” and creating a network of spies to be the first to know when a good piece came on the market. Georges also began to expand the family’s real estate assets and established a first-class stable of thoroughbreds.
It was he who decided to make the Americas and, in 1932, inaugurated the most sumptuous gallery in New York. There he would move, after the Nazi invasion of France, with his wife, Jeanne, and his son, Daniel. Despite his Jewish origin, accusations of collaborating with the Nazis in art trafficking have dogged the Wildensteins. They categorically deny them.
In New York, as The New York Times reported, Alec and Guy, the sons of Daniel and Martine Kapferer, grew up; a marriage arranged by the domineering Georges, which would end in divorce. Although Daniel always regretted the heavy hand of his father, he raised his children with excessive firmness and secrecy: the two brothers lived practically locked in the family mansion, with nine-meter ceilings. They went to school in a limousine and rarely brought friends home. Alec’s father forbade him from going to university and Guy was also unable to follow his dream of being an actor. There was only one possible destination: the sale and purchase of art, under the most absolute discretion. “In my family, we have raised it to muteness,” Daniel wrote in his memoirs.
Perhaps in response to a cloistered childhood, with a father who decided which brothels he had to frequent, Alec decided to rebel. In 1978 he secretly married the Swiss Jocelyne Périsset, daughter of a shopkeeper. They were married in Las Vegas, a place far removed from the refinement of Wildenstein. Jocelyne became the most striking member of the family: she became famous for her obsession with cosmetic surgery which, over the years, would give her the nickname Cat Woman.
It has been said of the Wildensteins that they were like a tribe, and as such, that is how they lived. Daniel bought a building so that his children and his families could live under the same roof. Thus, Alec and Jocelyne and Guy and his wife (the Swedish model Kristina Hansson), had one floor each, while the six grandchildren lived on another, with the nannies. “I had a great childhood, but, sometimes, dramas spilled over us,” David Wildenstein, son of Guy and Kristina, explained in Tatler, referring to the stormy divorce of his aunt and uncle.
The young man is the godson of King Charles III and manages his family’s real estate portfolio, which is dwindling: while in 2017 they sold the New York gallery for $80 million, the compound in the Virgin Islands, a hunting estate and a castle, among others. The Wildensteins need liquidity: Guy – today the patriarch after the death of his father and his brother – is on trial for tax fraud in France. The fine can reach 750 million euros.
They are also gradually getting rid of their formidable artistic fund, stored in a series of free ports. In part, as Héctor San José explains: “They do it because they are in a less than ideal position: in addition to the open trial in France, there are problems with the US treasury.” The Wildensteins, in short, also cry, although as this expert points out: “They also sell because this is their activity. Even if they did not have financial problems, it would be totally legal: they are gallery owners, not collectors. “It’s part of their business.”
A business, he explains, that is changing. “Someone who dealt with them told me that the buying experience had nothing to do with any other gallery: they didn’t even bother to promote themselves.” Now, they look more like a regular one. “Although discretion, something that goes with the luxury art market, continues,” she points out. If she could interview him: What would she ask Guy Wildenstein? “Can I see his warehouse?” Responds the journalist.
