A bitter row between art experts has erupted in the pages of the London Review of Books (LRB) over the Salvator Mundi, a previously unknown painting, that was first shown in the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition before going on to sell for a record $450.3m (£342.1m).
The dispute centres on an unwritten rule that public collections should avoid showing pictures that are available for sale and a statement by Robert Simon, one of its then owners, says that it was “not for sale” when its National Gallery unveiling was announced.
He has reiterated that claim in a LRB letter following a challenge within a damning critique of the painting by British art historian Charles Hope in the journal.
On Wednesday, another British art historian, Ben Lewis, is publishing his own LRB letter, releasing what he describes as “nuclear” proof that the picture had been offered for sale between 2009 and 2010 to various museums and other collectors worldwide shortly before its display at the National Gallery.
It has led him to suggest that, virtually the only time that it was not for sale, was the brief period it was in the National Gallery show, which ran from November 2011 to February 2012.
Lewis, author of The Last Leonardo, an acclaimed book on the Salvator Mundi, is now revealing an “extraordinary untold chapter” about this painting.
In his LRB letter, he refers to a “testimony” emailed to him by a dealer who states that he attempted to sell the Salvator Mundi for the then owners, that he was asked “to find a buyer outside of the USA”, given “a written exclusive contract for one year” and that “Simon was aware of this contract as I was directly in touch with him over the year”.
He adds that the dealer supposedly assembled two large dossiers of documents and “talked to the Louvre, Hermitage, Vatican, Berlin Gemäldegalerie and Qatar to see if anyone would take the Salvator Mundi”.
Michael Daley, director of ArtWatch UK, described Lewis’s latest correspondence as “explosive”: “For the National Gallery, this is deadly serious. Lewis has got proof that the then owners were trying to sell it all along. The gallery put it on show as a Leonardo, when entirely unpublished and with owners who wouldn’t identify themselves.”
The National Gallery said: “When the gallery considers a painting for a loan exhibition which is owned by a dealer or known to be for sale, the gallery will weigh up the advantage to the exhibition in including it: the benefit to the public in seeing the work and its contribution to the argument and scholarship of the exhibition as a whole; the work should be included solely on its own merits. The argument for the inclusion of a dealer’s work will usually be presented in the exhibition catalogue.”
Simon told the Guardian: “I believe the dealer you cite had proposed to offer the painting to a single museum with which he claimed to have a special relationship, but I was unaware of the offerings to the other institutions you mention, nor can I recall the existence of a ‘written exclusive contract for one year’ with him. In connection with the initial offering I shared information about the painting with him – both on the phone and via email – although I never met the man.”
