Final chapter in Marcos art dispute
Along-running dispute came to an end on Sunday at Christie’s impressionist art auction in New York, when two paintings acquired with funds embezzled from taxpayers more than 40 years ago by Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, were sold to benefit the Republic of the Philippines, following a District Court Order in New York.
The first, Claude Monet’s L’église à Vétheuil (1881), had been bought by Marcos from Marlborough Fine Art in 1975 for $138,000 and, by 1985, had been passed on to her personal secretary, Vilma Bautista, for safekeeping. On Sunday, it was estimated at $1.5million and sold for $3.1million (£2.4million). The second, Alfred Sisley’s Langland Bay (1897), had been bought from Marlborough around the same time for $82,000, and passed on to Bautista 10 years later. It was estimated on Sunday at $1million and sold for $1.1million.
A third painting owned by Marcos, of cypress trees in North Africa by Albert Marquet, was being sold yesterday, after this column went to press, with a $90,000 estimate.
The Marcos paintings were discovered at two houses in New York after Bautista sold a Monet water lily painting to a London dealer in 2010 for $32million. However, she failed to declare the sale on her tax returns, and an investigation followed.
The painting was subsequently bought by British hedge-fund manager Alan Howard, who paid the victims’ group $10million to foreclose legal challenges. Bautista started a six-year jail sentence in New York last year, while the 89-year-old Marcos, though absent from court, was sentenced last week to 42 years in jail for fraud in the Philippines.