“I don’t think that anybody thinks I actually operate my company,” Gwyneth Paltrow said.
Ms. Paltrow, an actress and the founder and chief executive of Goop, was draped horizontally over a chair in the living room of her home in Amagansett, N.Y., in late July.“I think people think I’m the figurehead,” she said. “I definitely operate the company, but I’ve never been a person to try to correct public opinion or a misconception. I think it’s a bit of a fruitless exercise.”
She gestured with her hands while she talked and pointed and kicked her shoeless feet for emphasis.
This month, Goop will celebrate its 15th anniversary. And Ms. Paltrow, 51, was feeling reflective, drinking tea and wearing a blue and white striped caftan she bought from a sponsored post on Instagram that had no tag other than a size medium.
Goop started in 2008 with a newsletter she wrote from her home in London, where she was living with her two young children — Apple, who is now 19, and Moses, 17 — and her first husband, the Coldplay singer Chris Martin.
“I had a very small, nice life in North London with my mother, mummy friends and married to a rock star, which came with a set of complications,” she said. “If you’re married to someone who’s a touring musician, you’re home by yourself a lot. And so I was in this little bubble with my kids, and I obviously had not wanted to travel and work and be on a set.”
It had been about a decade since she won the Academy Award for best actress for “Shakespeare in Love.” “Hold on,” she said. “What year was it? I have it in the other room, I’ll go look what it says.” She jogged to an adjoining room to retrieve the Oscar statuette from 1998.
Her Amagansett home has a great deal of security, including a guard dog, a house manager and a room of security cameras. The interior smells aggressively of cedar and is decorated in neutral tones of cream, with a guest bathroom that has Aesop hand soap and a digital scale. Outside there are manicured lawns and a tub filled with flip-flops.
At first, Goop was mostly recommendations. “I always felt like I got the biggest buzz out of, ‘I have the answer to your question,’” she said. “‘There’s a great reflexology place around the corner.’”
Now the company has 170 employees, Ms. Paltrow estimated, and encompasses a whole constellation of healthy-ish, wellness-flavored brands. There is the newsletter; a podcast with more than 100 million downloads; a line of beauty products called Goop Beauty; clothing — G. Label by Goop — made of soft fabrics in neutral shades; Goop Wellness, which sells vitamins and sexual aids; two shows on Netflix; five stores; a takeout chain in Southern California called Goop Kitchen; In Goop Health, a franchise of wellness summits; and a cruise that was the subject of a cover story for Harper’s Magazine.
Its anniversary products and services will include a two-bedroom Goop villa to stay in at the Colony Hotel in Palm Beach, Fla., complete with Goop products in the bathrooms and decorated with Goop x Fromental wallpaper; a $2,500 limited-edition Lobmeyr crystal vase, designed in collaboration with the FoundRae jewelers; and products like Goopglow Microderm Instant Glow Exfoliator in commemorative packaging.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Goop is an irreplaceable provocateur in the cause for good” is a line from one of its own news releases. But whether that is true beyond its customers and fans remains to be seen. The brand is responsible for candles called This Smells Like My Vagina and This Smells Like My Orgasm. Her 2014 post on her divorce from Mr. Martin brought the phrase “conscious uncoupling” to the world.
“If history has shown me anything, it’s that I’m always looking back, going, ‘Wow, that was an interesting thing to experiment with,’” she said.
Earlier this year, Ms. Paltrow was roundly mocked online for a filmed interview in which she talked about intermittent fasting and her seemingly stringent diet.
“About the bone broth? Oh my God,” Ms. Paltrow said. “Was I aware? Apple was like, ‘Mom, you’re on TikTok.’” Ms. Paltrow said she eats three meals a day and has a broad range of what she considers healthy foods.
“I think a European croissant is a superfood, by the way,” she said. “Today I had a peanut butter smoothie. And for lunch we had a chopped Italian chicken salad.” (She married the producer Brad Falchuk in 2018.)
Even if Ms. Paltrow has not had a starring role since “Proof” in 2005, she is still an actress who the Puck News writer Lauren Sherman wrote, “can convincingly sell anything.”
“I was just getting dressed and going to a pretty intense experience every day,” Ms. Paltrow said. “And the sartorial outcome was so weird to me. That whole thing was pretty weird. I don’t know that I’ve even processed it. It was something I felt like I survived. Sometimes in my life it takes me a long time to look back and process something and understand something.”
Ms. Paltrow has posted sponsored online content for a posture corrector. Last year she publicly supported the Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, a wealthy real estate developer and former Republican who changed his party affiliation before entering the race. “I think I’m open-minded about everybody,” she said. “I love to hear what people have to say.”
“It was very interesting to hear his point of view,” she said. “Since then he’s said some things that I think are tricky, let’s put it that way.” (Later, a representative for Ms. Paltrow called me to express concerns that her political views would be a focus of this article and said that she is more of an “independent thinker.”)
As an entrepreneur, Ms. Paltrow may have more power to wield than she ever did when she was acting regularly. “I’ve thought about it in terms of my lived experience of being an actor who was told to be here at this time, to wear that and to stand there and to do it again,” she said. “So, you never feel on a movie set that you have power. It was hard for me to do what I’m told, but I also never had any desire to be a director or be behind the scenes in that industry at all. I feel like I was always tugging a little at the constraints of it.”
Her friend Brit Morin, the founder of the e-commerce site Brit + Co, said Ms. Paltrow’s cultural impact through Goop was different. “Although the win-loss rate of movies and start-ups is similar, the difference is there are outsize returns in venture capital in start-ups,” said Ms. Morin, whose site sometimes features Goop products. “You can get a 1,000 times return on investment, and a box office has never seen that. Entertaining is a short-term way to influence someone. She’s created products people have in their homes, are using on their faces, wearing, eating.”
Goop declined to give The Times revenue or income figures and would not say if it is profitable.
Ms. Paltrow has been the chief executive of Goop since 2017. “In terms of learning the lessons of how to be a leader, it took me a long time because I was learning on the job,” she said. “Especially on the people front. If you don’t come up through a corporate culture, it’s really hard to understand how to manage people and how to set good boundaries.”
She did not cite specific examples. But one increasingly high-profile former employee comes to mind: Elise Loehnen, who left the company in 2020 and wrote “On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good,” a New York Times best seller.
In August, Ms. Loehnen spoke to The Times about her departure from Goop. “My interests were moving out of this idea of self-optimization,” she said. “I think what happens in the wellness world is this desire for control and certainty.”
Exactly what Goop’s strategy is for long-term growth, or an exit in the form of an acquisition or an I.P.O., remains to be seen. “If Gwyneth and team want to build the business with the scale and margin structure to be a large stand-alone as a public company or as part of a business, we are supportive,” said Tony Florence, of New Enterprise Associates, which has invested in the company.
Dana Settle of Greycroft, another fund that has invested in Goop, said, “I would love for her to take this company public and have her do it as the C.E.O., but it’s her life.”
Ms. Paltrow would say only: “The burden of taking money, I took that responsibility probably too seriously. And it was hard to be the person who was both trying to grow, but also being very conservative with company funding. I was kicking the horse and pulling on the reins at the same time. But I’m so grateful now when I look back that it’s taken its time to evolve into what it is and that we didn’t have this crazy meteoric rise.”
Goop’s beauty brands, which make up 60 percent of its sales, are competing in a crowded market that includes a spate of celebrity brands. “We have so many other brands that are sort of like us now,” she said. “I feel good about it. Competition is what keeps everybody honest.” In September 2018 Goop settled a false-advertising lawsuitbrought by district attorneys in California.
Even her ex-fiancé Brad Pitt has his own line of skin-care products, called Le Domaine Skincare. He sent her some. “It’s good,” she said. “Yeah, it’s really beautiful.”
Don’t expect a tell-all memoir anytime soon. “You don’t want to index too much into the sort of love-affair part and expose people for that, so I don’t know,” Ms. Paltrow said, adding, “Don’t put me on truth serum.”
She talked about her future in a manner that doesn’t seem to involve Goop. The company has been approached for possible acquisitions, she said, but she has never felt it was the right time.
“I don’t think I can have this job forever,” she said. “I think it would be nice to return my investors’ money, and I really want to do that. That’s important to me.”
As for a life post-Goop, she wants to embrace what she calls her “crone” years, “this very real sort of sweetness that I’m starting to feel about the back part of life.” She wants to cook, be in her garden and become a grandmother. “It can reveal itself, “ she said.
She did remember one thing. “I mean, I did say to my mom” — the actress Blythe Danner — “that I would do a play when I sell the company.” With Ms. Danner or solo? Broadway or a one-woman show?
“She just says I have to, and I have to keep my promise to her.”
Kris Kristofferson, 87, Faces ‘Final Days’: Getting His Ducks in a Row ‘to Make Things Easier for His Family’.
By Aaron Johnson
RadarOnlineFollow
Kris Kristofferson has put his 550-acre California ranch on the market for $17.2 million, with friends saying the 87-year-old country music icon is facing his final days, RadarOnline.com has learned.
The father of eight, who is worth an estimated $50 million, and his third wife, Lisa Meyers , 66, live on Hawaii’s Maui in the town of Hana, which narrowly escaped the recent deadly wildfires , spilled a pal. It was later revealed his memory loss was due to Lyme disease. MEGA
The Blade vampire killer was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2013, but later, doctors concluded his memory loss and other symptoms were due to Lyme disease. Medication helped the Why Me singer, but he still retired from music in 2021.
“Kris didn’t feel he was up to touring anymore,” one pal revealed. “Now, he just wants to make things easier for his family by turning his holdings into cash that will go to them when he’s gone.”
Friends said Kristofferson’s continued to slow down in his older years.
RadarOnline.com has reached out to Kristofferson’s rep for comment. Kris retired from music in 2021. MEGA
Years ago, Kristofferson and some of his closest pals opened up about his health struggles and misdiagnosis.
The A Star is Born actor struggled with memory issues, which he was told stemmed from Alzheimer’s disease. However, he later learned that his symptoms were caused by a tick-borne illness.
Lyme disease sometimes mimics Alzheimer’s with dementia-like symptoms, as reported by Closer Weekly .
“For the past six or seven years, there was this slow realization that he was becoming forgetful. It was apparent,” one of his pals stated years ago.
However, once doctors ruled out Alzheimer’s, everything changed.
“Kris is as sharp as he’s been in the past 20 years because of his treatments,” another friend told Closer in 2016. “His wife, Lisa, and his eight children see a different Kris now. It really is a modern-day medical miracle.” The movie star recently put his beloved California home on the market. MEGA
His wife also addressed his health, telling Rolling Stone that his debilitating memory loss was due to being hit in the head repeatedly while playing sports like boxing, football, and rugby when he was younger.
According to the outlet, his memory issues got so bad that “some days, Kristofferson couldn’t even remember what he was doing from one moment to the next.”
“He was taking all these medications for things he doesn’t have, and they all have side effects,” Lisa said. He wants his family to be taken care of when he goes, says friends. MEGA
She also pinpointed the exact timeframe she believed the star contracted the infection.
She told Rolling Stone that Kristofferson most likely got it from a tick while crawling in the Vermont forest while filming the 2006 film Disappearances.
A concept gaining momentum in cardiology over the past 25 years: that inflammation is a key culprit in atherosclerosis.
By Ron Winslow
The drug colchicine has been used for more than 2,000 years to treat the fiery joint-pain ailment called gout. It also is a remedy for a genetic disorder called familial Mediterranean fever, and for pericarditis, an inflammation of the sac around the heart.
Now colchicine may be set for a surprising new role. In June, the Food and Drug Administration approved a new low-dose version of the drug as the first-ever medicine to treat cardiovascular inflammation, marking a new approach for heart-attack prevention.
Several things could limit the adoption of colchicine by cardiologists, at least at first, including side-effect concerns and the emergence of several other new options for reducing the risk of heart attacks. But the drug’s approval provides fresh validation for a concept that has been gaining momentum in cardiology over the past 25 years—that inflammation is a key culprit in atherosclerosis, the artery-clogging disease, and that treating it can reduce the risk of a heart attack.
The bedrock strategy for heart-attack prevention has long been lowering LDL cholesterol with drugs called statins. Adding low-dose colchicine—which in one study reduced cardiovascular risk by 31% in patients already treated with statins and other preventive medicines—would enable doctors to simultaneously hit two biological targets that cause heart attacks.
“This is about combining therapies” that are both effective ways to reduce risk, says Dr. Paul Ridker, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston. “They’re not in conflict, they’re synergistic.”
Ridker is a scientific adviser to Agepha Pharma, the company that owns the rights to market 0.5-milligram colchicine for cardiovascular-risk reduction, but wasn’t involved in the studies that led to the drug’s approval.
Making it personal
More broadly, colchicine is now part of a burgeoning arsenal of medicines that will enable cardiologists to personalize treatment as they seek to maximize heart protection for their high-risk patients beyond that achieved with statins.
For example, new drugs that treat diabetes and obesity, two major risk factors for cardiovascular disease, are among medicines doctors say could play an important role in reducing heart risk. Nonstatin drugs that lower cholesterol are also in the mix.
“The pivot here is to precision cardiology as opposed to one-size-fits-all cardiology,” says Dr. Richard Kovacs, a professor at Indiana University, Bloomington, and chief medical officer of the American College of Cardiology. Instead of routinely doubling down on cholesterol-lowering for most patients already taking statins, “we need to tailor treatment to the individual risk factors of the patient.”
The baseline strategy for high-risk patients won’t change, doctors say: statins, blood-pressure control, and aspirin or anti-platelet drugs to prevent clots. Add to that quitting smoking, a healthy diet and regular exercise.
“After that, it’s personalized approaches,” says Dr. Michael Blaha, director of clinical research at Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease, Baltimore.
He envisions a scenario in which doctors consider inflammatory risk—which can be measured with a high-sensitivity test for a marker called C-reactive protein—cholesterol levels and diabetes and weight status to determine what’s driving a patient’s risk and then prescribe a drug best targeted to address that risk.
“Preventive cardiology is undergoing a renaissance,” he says. “We can do more than ever for our patients who have high risk.”
Like Ridker, Blaha is a scientific adviser to Agepha Pharma but wasn’t involved in the studies that led to the drug’s approval.
Hurdles to clear
Colchicine is cheap and safe and would be an effective option for many patients, study data indicate. But it faces challenges carrying the banner for a potentially important shift in medical practice. Diarrhea is associated with much higher doses typically used to treat gout flares and could make doctors hesitant, though researchers said it wasn’t a big issue with the once-a-day low dose tested in the heart-related trials. Updated treatment guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association gave colchicine a weak endorsement.
Another hurdle: lack of pharmaceutical companies marketing muscle to get the word out to clinicians and patients. The FDA gave approval for the drug to Agepha Pharma, a tiny family-owned company based in Dubai that has neither a sales force nor a presence in the U.S. market. It hasn’t been able to find a partner to co-promote the drug, which it calls Lodoco.
The potential market for an anti-inflammatory agent to reduce heart risk is huge. Data from clinical trials indicate that about half of patients with atherosclerosis have elevated levels of an inflammatory marker called C-reactive protein, or CRP, despite being on intensive statin therapy. Such patients are significantly more likely to suffer a heart attack or other cardiovascular event than those with low CRP and low LDL.
Colchicine “is the first practical option we have now” for these patients, Kovacs says. Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk is among several companies with new anti-inflammatory drugs in development to reduce heart risk.
Anti-Inflammatory Trial
In a randomized trial, roughly 5,500 patients with chronic coronary disease were divided into two equal groups; one received 0.5 mg of colchicine once daily, the other a placebo. The results showed a reduction in cardiovascular incidents, including heart attacks, for the patients taking colchicine.
Establishing a link
Inflammation is a normal part of the immune system’s response to injury and generally subsides once its healing work is done. But when the walls of the coronary arteries are under constant assault—from LDL cholesterol or, say, the effects of smoking or dietary fat—the inflammation that comes with the immune system’s response doesn’t subside. It becomes a chronic part of a process that causes accumulation of fatty deposits in the artery walls called plaques, which can rupture and cause heart attacks. Cholesterol can also crystallize in atherosclerosis, further provoking an immune-system response.
As research brought the link between inflammation in the coronary arteries and the risk of heart attacks into focus, the question was, would a drug that targeted inflammation lower that risk?
The answer came in a 10,061-patient study called Cantos, published in 2017 and led by Ridker, that tested canakinumab, an antibody from Novartis that targets an inflammatory immune-system protein called interleukin 1 beta. In patients with elevated CRP already on statin therapy, those treated with canakinumab had a 15% reduction in major cardiovascular events compared with those on a placebo, even though the drug had no effect on LDL cholesterol.
Dr. Steven Nissen, chief academic officer at the Heart Institute, Cleveland Clinic, who wasn’t involved in the study, says the result was “a landmark” because it was the first to show that inhibiting inflammation could reduce cardiovascular risk without lowering cholesterol.
“The more you look and the deeper you look, you have to believe that inflammation matters,” he says.
.
But canakinumab was already on the market under the brand name Ilaris for several rare diseases at a price that would be prohibitive for use as a preventive therapy. The drug also sharply reduced new cases of lung cancer, but led to a slightly higher number of fatal infections, compared with a placebo. Novartis ultimately decided against pursuing an FDA indication for heart-risk reduction for the drug, leaving cardiologists with a proven new target but no drug to use against it.
Enter colchicine. Its path to FDA approval began in a hospital ward in Western Australia in 2006, where Dr. Mark Nidorf, a cardiologist at the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research, in Perth, was treating a patient with severe pericarditis. He gave him a single dose of colchicine.
“The next day he just felt fantastic,” Nidorf says. He wondered if a drug that had such a rapid impact on pericarditis might be useful against atherosclerosis by treating arterial inflammation.
He recruited a group of his own patients who were on statins and had high CRP levels and randomly allocated them to take colchicine or no colchicine. A month later, CRP levels of those given the drug had come down “quite dramatically,” Nidorf says.
Nidorf was also struck by research describing the role of cholesterol crystals in cardiovascular inflammation. Colchicine treats gout pain, which is caused by a similar biology—uric-acid crystals that attack the joints.
On that basis, he and his colleagues launched—without drug-company funding—a four-year pilot study called Lodoco that recruited some 500 patients from his own practice, using a commonly available 0.5 milligram dose of colchicine.
The results, which Nidorf presented at an American Heart Association conference in 2012, were so encouraging that the Australian team, together with colleagues in the Netherlands, mounted a major randomized double-blind study, called Lodoco2. They enrolled 5,522 patients with stable cardiovascular disease.
About the same time, researchers in Canada mounted their own colchicine study, called Colcot. It enrolled 4,745 patients to test whether colchicine added to statin therapy would reduce recurrent events in patients who had suffered a heart attack within the previous 30 days.
The positive canakinumab results came out in 2017, part way through Lodoco2. “We were thrilled,” Nidorf says. Colchicine works differently, but hits canakinumab’s main target, providing optimism that the Lodoco2 trial would be positive too.
Sure enough, Lodoco2’s 31% relative reduction in cardiovascular events was reported in 2020. A few months earlier, the Colcot study found a 23% reduction in risk. In absolute terms. Colchicine prevented 2.5 to 3 heart attacks or other events for every 100 patients treated.
Agepha Pharma, which had acquired rights to market 0.5-milligram colchicine for cardiovascular-risk reduction from an Australian company, used the data to make its case for FDA approval.
The company launched the drug in the U.S. earlier this month at a list price of $99 a month. It is still negotiating arrangements with insurers, but plans to make it available at no charge to anyone who can’t afford it. Lacking a sales force or a budget for television marketing, it began promoting the drug to cardiologists online last week.
“We’re a small company trying to do big things for patients,” says Antonia Riel-Köllmann, Agepha’s managing director.
A tough market
Colchicine faces a challenging market. Other potential candidates for risk reduction beyond statins include Wegovy, from Novo Nordisk, and other so-called GLP-1 agonists that treat obesity and diabetes, as well as another class of diabetes drugs known as SGLT2 inhibitors. Full details on their risks and benefits in heart prevention aren’t yet known.
Amgen’s Repatha and Regeneron’s Praluent, drugs known as PCSK9 inhibitors, and bempedoic acid, marketed as Nexletol by Esperion Therapeutics, are other options. They are nonstatins that achieved modest additional reductions in LDL and heart risk in clinical studies when added to intensive statin treatment.
At $99 a month, Lodoco is much cheaper than drugs such as Wegovy, which lists for more than $1,600 a month at a Walgreens drugstore (before insurance coverage or discounts), or a PCSK9 inhibitor such as Repatha, which runs about $650 a month. Studies suggest the relative reduction in heart risk achieved with Lodoco is at least as large as with any of the other options.
Caveats and hesitation
Ridker and other cardiologists familiar with the drug say doctors may take it slow in prescribing it. The drug “is not for everybody,” Ridker says. It shouldn’t be given to patients with kidney or liver disease, for instance.
The approved once-a-day 0.5-milligram dose is slightly lower than 0.6-milligram generic colchicine already on the U.S. market and may mitigate kidney risks associated with the higher dose. But there are other reasons cardiologists may take time to get used to colchicine before adopting it as a regular option for their patients.
One is the history of other anti-inflammatory treatments. The painkiller Vioxx, once viewed as a potential candidate to curb cardiovascular inflammation, was pulled from the market in 2004 after it was found to have caused heart attacks and death from heart attacks. And soon after canakinumab’s success in reducing coronary events was reported, Ridker presented data from another study showing methotrexate, a generic drug for treating the inflammatory disorder rheumatoid arthritis, failed to curtail heart risk.
The updated treatment guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, issued in July, acknowledged inflammation’s role in the development of atherosclerosis for the first time. But the guidelines stopped short of recommending colchicine, saying only that “it may be considered” as an option to reduce “recurrent” cardiovascular events. Citing among other reasons potential interactions with other drugs and a slight increase in non-heart-related deaths, the guidelines say use of colchicine should be limited to patients at very high risk “until further data become available.”
Cleveland Clinic’s Nissen, who has been prescribing the 0.6-milligram dose for selected patients, says he’ll likely give one of the two versions (depending on price) to more patients in the wake of FDA approval.
“I think it is going to have a role to play, but it’s going to come after we’ve done other things we can do,” he says.
Indiana University’s Kovacs cautions that high-risk patients already on several medicines may resist adding another, especially one that while potentially reducing a serious risk, doesn’t make them feel better, a challenge facing many preventive drugs.
Dr. Roger Blumenthal, director of the Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease at Hopkins, says given the lukewarm advice from the new guidelines, he’ll likely urge patients to work harder on healthy lifestyle changes—quitting smoking, weight loss and exercise all lower inflammation—before prescribing the drug.
With growing interest in Wegovy and other obesity drugs, colchicine “is going to enter a crowded space,” Hopkins’s Blaha says. “But it will be a unique drug—the only anti-inflammatory drug approved for heart disease.”
Ron Winslow is a writer in North Conway, N.H. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
Bob Ross’s YouTube videos have turned my girlfriend Magda into a gifted artist. The following story, in the art publication called HyperAllergic, reminds us of all the joy he shared with others.—LWH
Bob Ross’s First On-Air Painting Could Fetch Nearly $10M
“A Walk in the Woods” (1983) was the first of 1,000 artworks created during the artist’s The Joy of Painting television show that ran on PBS for 11 years
Bob Ross – A Walk in the Woods (Season 1 Episode 1)
Bob Ross, “A Walk in the Woods” (1983), oil on canvas, 24 x 18 inches (all images courtesy Modern Artifact)

Wake up, happy little tree-huggers! Bob Ross’s first on-air landscape from the beloved The Joy of Painting television series is up for auction in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with an estimated valuation of $9.85M through the Modern Artifact Gallery. “A Walk in the Woods” (1983), a wet-on-wet oil painting of trees surrounding rain puddles from the first episode of the series, marked the beginning of the show’s 11-year run on PBS, underscoring Ross’s motto that anyone can paint.
The permed painter, who died in 1995, continues to hold the title as one of the world’s favorite art instructors not just for his quick and approachable teaching guides for lush landscape art, but also for his gentle and encouraging demeanor that emphasized the enjoyment of art-making over the final result.
Born and raised in Florida, Ross joined the military at 18 after a brief stint with carpentry was cut short and was transferred to a base just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1963. Ross cited exposure to the Alaskan wilderness as well as access to painting classes through the United Service Organization club as the fire-starter of his art practice, and spoke about painting as an escape from the military prior to his retirement in 1981, when he was able to dedicate his life to teaching others to paint.

Based in Minneapolis, Modern Artifact only recently acquired “A Walk in the Woods” before putting out feelers on the market. The gallery, which has acquired, authenticated, and sold rare works by Bob Ross before, is “in no hurry to sell the painting,” a spokesperson confirmed, but it’s accepting offers with no slated end date for the sale.
The Joy of Painting, which ran on PBS from 1983 to 1994, was made up of 403 30-minute episodes full of Ross’s quintessential optimism and love of nature infused into accessible lessons for deceptively achievable alla prima oil paintings. One of Ross’s most-quoted mantras was that there were no mistakes but “only happy accidents,” assuaging people’s anxieties about messing up or not positioning things correctly. Ross’s soft but motivational TV mannerisms were also bolstered by appearances from his rescued pocket squirrels, Bobette, Peapod, and Peapod Jr., among other woodland friends.
“Bob Ross has surpassed Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso as the internet’s most searched for artist according to data from Google Analytics,” Modern Artifact owner Ryan Nelson said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic. “It’s an incredibly impressive feat, especially considering that there is virtually no official marketing and his original paintings are nearly impossible to find.”

Bob Ross was known to sign off on his paintings in separated letters with red paint only.
Ross regained popularity in the age of the internet in 2015 after the streaming site Twitch hosted an eight-day marathon screening the entirety of The Joy of Painting to millions of viewers, and the entire series became available on YouTube. Many found comfort and inspiration in Ross’s instruction and personality during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as well.
While Ross made approximately 1,000 paintings for his television series, that figure was merely a drop in the bucket across his entire practice which spans over 30,000 pieces of art. It’s remarkably difficult to come by an original Bob Ross painting on the market, though, as the New York Times reported that a large portion of them are squirreled away at the Bob Ross Inc. headquarters in Virginia, and Ross donated a good chunk of the rest to the Smithsonian Institution and PBS. The woman who handed over “A Walk in the Woods” to Modern Artifact actually won the painting during a PBS auction in 1983.
“It’s a truly irreplicable, one-of-a-kind painting,” Nelson remarked. “While the gallery is accepting offers to purchase ‘A Walk in the Woods,’ they would prefer to share it with a museum or traveling exhibit to allow as many people as possible to view such an exciting work of art.”
Family Behind Bob Ross Inc. Responds to Unflattering Documentary Depiction
The reclusive socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein, aka the “Catwomen” because of her extensive plastic surgery, lives near us in Miami Beach. She was married to Alec Wildenstein from 1978 to 1999. When she got divorced, she received a $100 million annual settlement. She explains that her late husband’s family cut her off and now she has nothing.
This has been confirmed by the people she is close to at Temple Emanu-El where she worships. I have seen her sitting with a male companion in the rear of the synagogue. She often wears large sunglasses to camouflage her identity. It’s difficult to believe that after such a lavish life style that she has nothing left but my sources tell me shelives modestly.
After reading the following article I do believe that she sought refuge from all the turmoil by constantly trying to improve her looks. The end results, for both finances and beauty, were not exactly what she envisioned.
Photo illustration by Joan Wong
The Inheritance Case That Could Unravel an Art Dynasty
How a widow’s legal fight against the Wildenstein family of France has threatened their storied collection — and revealed the underbelly of the global art market.
By Rachel Corbett
Twenty years ago, a glamorous platinum-blond widow arrived at the Paris law office of Claude Dumont Beghi in tears. Someone was trying to take her horses — her “babies” — away, and she needed a lawyer to stop them.
She explained that her late husband was a breeder of champion thoroughbreds. The couple was a familiar sight at the racetracks in Chantilly and Paris: Daniel Wildenstein, gray-suited with a cane in the stands, and Sylvia Roth Wildenstein, a former model with a cigarette dangling from her lips. They first met in 1964, while she was walking couture shows in Paris and he was languishing in a marriage of convenience to a woman from another wealthy Jewish family of art collectors. Daniel, 16 years Sylvia’s senior, already had two grown sons when they met, and he didn’t want more children. So over the next 40 years they spent together, Sylvia cared for the horses as if they were the children she never had. When Daniel died of cancer in 2001, he left her a small stable.
Then, one morning about a year later, Sylvia’s phone rang. It was her horse trainer calling to say that he had spotted something odd in the local racing paper, Paris Turf: The results of Sylvia’s stable were no longer listed under her name. The French journalist Magali Serre’s 2013 book “Les Wildenstein” recounts the scene in great detail: Sylvia ran to fetch her copy and flipped to the page. Sure enough, the stable of “Madame Wildenstein” had been replaced by “Dayton Limited,” an Irish company owned by her stepsons. That’s when she called Dumont Beghi.
To the lawyer’s surprise, Sylvia showed up to their meeting with no proof of ownership for the horses and no information on her late husband’s estate. “She didn’t have any — any — documents at all,” Dumont Beghi says. Sylvia mentioned that she signed some papers shortly after her husband’s death, but she didn’t know what they said, nor did she have copies. “I put that in the corner of my mind,” Dumont Beghi says.
Why would a widow draped in diamonds and furs have no records from her wealthy husband’s estate? Dumont Beghi got the feeling there was more going on than a dispute over horses. But she went ahead and gave Sylvia the good news: She could simply decline to transfer the horses to her stepsons. Dumont Beghi sent a letter, halting the transaction.
Dumont Beghi recalls an almost instant kinship with Sylvia, who discovered that they were both Scorpios and lived in the same building complex in the posh 16th Arrondissement. After Dumont Beghi saved her horses, Sylvia trusted her completely, and she began to explain to Dumont Beghi the complexity of the situation. Daniel had fallen into a coma for 10 days before he died, and while he was under, his sons, Alec and Guy, showed up at the hospital along with lawyers from Switzerland, the United States and France. She recounted how, a few weeks after the funeral, her driver took her to the family’s 18th-century hôtel particulier, which housed an art research center, the Wildenstein Institute. Her stepsons told her she needed to hear something important. They had reviewed their father’s estate and discovered that he died in financial ruin. As his next of kin, Sylvia was about to inherit debts so large they would ruin her too.
Sylvia Roth Wildenstein and Daniel Wildenstein in 2001.
Sylvia was stunned. She had never heard anything about money troubles from her husband. For 40 years, she had lived with chefs and chauffeurs, in at least five homes on three continents. But what did she know? She never signed the checks. Daniel, intellectual and rigid, ran the business, while Sylvia, who was light and cheerful, played the nurturer in the family. She was known to dote on Alec and Guy’s six children, whom she considered her grandkids. She trusted her stepsons completely, so when they told her that she must renounce her inheritance at once or face “catastrophe,” she didn’t blink. “I signed all the papers they presented to me. I signed, signed, signed” — even the ones written in Japanese, she later told Serre. They promised to take care of her financially and even offered to pay her 30,000 euros a month out of their own pockets. Sylvia was grateful.
But then, over the next few months, the reality of what she had done set in. Sylvia told Dumont Beghi how movers came to her apartment and took a beloved Pierre Bonnard painting off the wall. Then they came back for the furniture, because, she was told, it belonged to her husband’s business, which was now run by his sons. A letter came notifying her that Daniel’s 69 thoroughbreds were now owned by Guy and Alec’s stable. Her household staff stopped being paid. Soon, her stepsons told her she would have to move from her home on Avenue Montaigne to another apartment. (Alec died in 2008; Guy declined a request for an interview, though a representative answered some questions provided by The Times.)
She stopped receiving invitations to celebrate holidays and birthdays at the family’s ranch in Kenya or their castle in France. Guy shipped back her clothes and belongings from their British Virgin Islands compound, where she had vacationed for years with Daniel and their chef and pastry chef. As Sylvia spoke, two things became increasingly apparent to Dumont Beghi: One, Sylvia had renounced her inheritance. “She had no freedom.” she says, and “no proof. Not a shred of evidence.” No bank account, no income, no independence. It was as if “she died at the same time as her husband,” Dumont Beghi says.
The other thing that struck her was that the Wildensteins were more than merely rich.
“When she first came to me, I didn’t know anything about the family,” Dumont Beghi told me when I visited her this past winter at her office in Paris. To my left, a bronze bust of a panther stared from a pedestal at eye level. Behind her glass desk hung a print of a leopard prowling in a tree. Dumont Beghi is also the personal attorney for President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, who is widely considered a strongman, and often describes herself as a lone warrior woman in a jungle of male adversaries. She had never heard of the Wildenstein dynasty of art dealers. In fact, outside elite niches of the art world, few had, which was how Daniel wanted it. Dumont Beghi was about to find out why.
First, she drew up a list of known assets, which soon zigzagged into a chart of far-flung bank accounts, trusts and shell corporations. Over the course of several years, she would fly around the world to tax havens and free ports, prying open the armored vaults and anonymous accounts that mask many of the high-end transactions in the $68 billion global art market. Multimillion-dollar paintings can anonymously trade hands without, for example, any of the requisite titles or deeds of real estate transactions or the public disclosures required on Wall Street. She would learn that the inscrutability of the trade has made it a leading conduit for sanction-evading oligarchs and other billionaires looking to launder excess capital. The Wildensteins were not just masters of this system — they helped pioneer it.
Over 150 years, the family has amassed an art collection estimated to be worth billions by quietly buying up troves of European masterpieces that would be at home in the Louvre or the Vatican, holding their stock for generations and never revealing what they own. When Sylvia realized the magnitude of her stepsons’ deception, she devoted the rest of her life to unraveling the family’s financial machinations, and even left a will asking that Dumont Beghi continue her fight from beyond the grave.
Sylvia and her lawyer were never able to win the settlement they thought she deserved while she was alive. From the start, in 2004, a judge rejected Dumont Beghi’s attempt to cancel Sylvia’s renunciation of the inheritance; a few years later, a court rejected a subsequent claim that she was entitled to €450 million worth of art and assets, a figure the judge called “pharaonic.” The representative for Guy notes that, early on, Sylvia was awarded approximately €15 million, based on the value of Daniel’s French estate. “Dumont Beghi continued to litigate for several years, seeking to have certain trusts settled by Daniel Wildenstein included in the estate,” the representative says. “During this protracted litigation, Dumont Beghi made numerous, unsubstantiated allegations, but the court ultimately ruled against her client.”
Now, more than a decade after Sylvia’s death, their efforts have landed the Wildensteins before France’s highest court. The evidence she and Dumont Beghi brought forth has persuaded prosecutors that the Wildensteins are a criminal enterprise, responsible for operating, as a prosecutor for the state once put it, “the longest and the most sophisticated tax fraud” in modern French history.
Image
A trial this September will determine if the family and their associates owe a gargantuan tax bill. The last time prosecutors went after the Wildensteins, several years ago, they sought €866 million — €616 million in back taxes and a €250 million fine, as well as jail time for Guy. The consequences could do more than topple the family’s art empire. The case has provided an unusual view of how the ultrawealthy use the art market to evade taxes, and sometimes worse. Agents raiding Wildenstein vaults have turned up artworks long reported as missing, which fueled speculation that the family may have owned Nazi-looted or otherwise stolen art, and spurred a number of other lawsuits against the family in recent years. Financial distortions have saved the family hundreds of millions of dollars, prosecutors allege, but their treatment of Sylvia could cost them far more — and perhaps lead to the unraveling of their dynasty.
In order to prove that Alec and Guy misled Sylvia about her husband’s estate, Dumont Beghi first needed to know what assets they did report. But because Sylvia had renounced her inheritance, she didn’t even have a right to that information. “Every deed, every bank statement, every inventory item in the estate and every document related to the succession of Daniel Wildenstein is in the hands of Guy and Alec,” Dumont Beghi says, and they did not intend to turn them over.
Dumont Beghi’s first step, then, was to ask a court to nullify the agreement Sylvia signed giving up her inheritance. Only then could she access details about Daniel’s estate. Fortunately, she had a compelling precedent to show the judge. Sylvia wasn’t the first wife the Wildensteins had tried to cut off by pleading poverty: Jocelyne Wildenstein, Alec’s first wife, was similarly cut out of the family’s fortune during her 1999 divorce, with Alec claiming he was an unpaid personal assistant to his father. Documents revealed at court in New York — where the couple primarily lived — valued the family’s art collection at about $10 billion. The judge in the case said that Alec’s income statement “insults the intelligence of the court”; he settled for a rumored $3.8 billion — which would be the largest divorce settlement in New York history. (Jocelyne denies that the settlement was $3.8 billion but did concede that it was “huge.”)
Dumont Beghi argued that if the family was worth billions then, there was reason to doubt that Daniel, who orchestrated the deal between Alec and Jocelyne, died in ruinous debt just two years later. The French court ordered Guy and Alec to hand over the declaration of Daniel’s estate. It included some properties in France, a few cars, paintings and bank accounts, altogether totaling €42 million. Dumont Beghi didn’t believe that figure was anywhere near the estate’s true value, but still, “It’s not nothing, for someone who died broke.” And it showed, Dumont Beghi concluded, that Sylvia had renounced her inheritance under false pretenses.
Dumont Beghi’s next move was to get her hands on Daniel’s medical records. She learned that he spent his final days in an unresponsive, vegetative coma — and yet apparently signed a contract selling his 69 thoroughbreds (including Sylvia’s) to his sons for a bargain price. In 2005, a court granted Sylvia’s request to nullify her renunciation. It was only the beginning of what Dumont Beghi has called her international “treasure hunt” for every stashed masterpiece, undeclared property and offshore account left out of Daniel’s estate.
Her next order of business was to locate Sylvia’s beloved Bonnard nude, a gift from Daniel that his sons had removed from her wall. Dumont Beghi knew it was included in a trust that Daniel had set up for his wife in the Bahamas, but when she asked the trustee for information about its contents, management and regulations, she received no response.
Dumont Beghi decided to do her own research on Daniel’s collection of Bonnards. She learned from his memoir, “Marchands d’Art,” published two years before his death, that he considered their acquisition “the biggest coup” of his life. When Bonnard died in 1947, he left behind an enormous estate of some 700 paintings and thousands of drawings. Daniel learned that all of it was set to be inherited by three estranged nieces-in-law of the artist, and it gave him an idea. He approached another Bonnard relative who Daniel believed could also lay claim to the estate and told the man he would pay him $1 million to buy his inheritance rights. Then he armed the man with a “battalion” of lawyers to fight on his behalf.
After more than a decade in court, Daniel walked away with nearly 500 paintings; the nieces were left with just 25. (Daniel promised them some more to prevent further litigation.) In his memoir, Daniel revealed that he still owned 180 Bonnard paintings — and not just any Bonnards but “the most beautiful. The most magnificent.” He added that the great Bonnards were worth between $5 million and $7 million each. (Today they can sell for twice that.)
Dumont Beghi flew to the Bahamas to find out what other paintings by the artist Daniel may have left for Sylvia. She received a court order to open up the trust and found that Daniel had bequeathed no fewer than 19 Bonnards to her client. Though the trust was nominally in the Bahamas, the Bonnards were being held at the Geneva free port, a prisonlike complex of high-security storage facilities that is said to contain more art than the Louvre.
Independent of any national jurisdiction, free ports allow traders to ship and store property without paying taxes or customs duties. If a dealer buys a painting in one country, he can ship it to a free port without paying import taxes; then, when he is offered the right price, he can sell it there too, without paying capital gains. It has been estimated that $100 billion worth of art and collectibles are held in the Geneva free port alone, to say nothing of those in Zurich, Luxembourg, Singapore, Monaco, Delaware or Beijing.
Dumont Beghi flew to the Geneva free port, which is the size of 22 soccer fields, along with an appraiser to examine the Bonnards in person. Bonnard is “light,” Daniel wrote of his favorite artist, who is known above all for his radiant use of color. But when Dumont Beghi descended two flights down into the gloomy bunker, she found the paintings locked behind an armored door, including Sylvia’s “Pink Nude in the Bath,” its warm glow extinguished in the dark.
An acquaintance in the art world explained to Dumont Beghi that hundreds, if not thousands, of Wildenstein works are held in museums, but that the labels often identify their owners simply as “private collection.” So she wrote to the major museums — the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Prado — to ask whether Daniel Wildenstein ever lent or donated works to them. Surprisingly, she says, a few wrote back. The National Gallery in London told her that Daniel lent it valuable paintings by Poussin and Boucher. The Prado had recently bought a Velázquez portrait from Wildenstein & Co Inc. for €23 million.
Then Dumont Beghi made perhaps the most important stop of her tour: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she stood before a painting she loved, Caravaggio’s late masterpiece “The Lute Player,” labeled on loan from a “private collection.” She searched the New York State Department’s records to see whether Wildenstein & Co. had ever borrowed money using works in its collection as collateral. Dozens of names were listed — Cézanne, David, Degas, Manet, Monet, Matisse, Rembrandt, Picasso and Rodin among them. And then there it was: “The Lute Player,” valued at upward of $100 million.
At that point she realized, “The company is titanic.”
.
“In my family, we have elevated discretion to the level of muteness,” Daniel wrote in his memoir. “We do not speak. We don’t tell. We don’t talk about one another.”
This code of omertà has been the governing principle of the Wildenstein art dynasty since its founding five generations ago. A dealer “is not allowed to talk about his stock,” Daniel said. “Why? Because it’s the stuff of dreams. Every art dealer must maintain the illusion of the masterpieces he owns or does not own.” Many believed that his grandfather, the founding patriarch Nathan Wildenstein, for example, owned 10 Vermeers; he actually had just one. No one knows today whether the family still owns it, and that question is meaningful to art history. Experts believe Vermeer made about three dozen paintings in his life, and as many as nine could be missing.
A tailor from Alsace, Nathan had no training in art when, in the 1870s, a client asked him to sell some artwork she owned. He “holed himself up in the Louvre” for 10 days, according to Daniel, and came out a believer. He sold the art and used the 1,000 francs he earned to buy two more pictures, by the Rococo artists François Boucher and Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, which he resold. At the time, Nathan could afford 17th- and 18th-century French art because no one else wanted it, so he amassed passé — but to his eye, beautiful — paintings. He began dressing in embroidered waistcoats and top hats to pitch collectors and critics.
Soon Nathan was selling his taste to Rothschilds and Rockefellers, in Europe and the United States. While Nathan was grooming his young grandson to enter the family business, he took him to see a silent film about a man who wore a hat that everyone initially mocked; by the end of the movie, the whole town was wearing one. Nathan explained to Daniel that this was their family’s calling: “Find the guy’s hat and wear it before the others.” For Nathan, that hat was French art of the 18th century: Fragonard, Watteau, David. These are now among the most famous names in art history, but at the time they were synonymous with the French Revolution and the aristocrats it overthrew — a period the public wanted to put behind them, especially as they began to embrace the avant-garde era of Impressionism.
In 1905, Nathan bought an hôtel particulier in the center of Paris to house Wildenstein & Co. He expanded into Renaissance art and Impressionism and, when his son, Georges — Daniel’s father — was old enough to join the business, a bit of Modernism. Nathan bought a space down the street for Georges and his friend Paul Rosenberg to set up a small operation. The pair gave two of its floors to Picasso, whom they agreed, in 1918, to pay a generous salary in exchange for first pick of the artist’s works. Georges installed a red telephone in his office that had two direct lines: one connected to Rosenberg, the other to Picasso’s studio.
Upon Nathan’s death in 1934, Georges steered the family into an era of unprecedented prosperity by building an infrastructure around his artists’ markets. He organized exhibitions, edited an art journal and published definitive catalogs of works by artists in his inventory — Ingres, Fragonard, Chardin. (Daniel would later do the same with Monet, Manet and Gauguin.) The books were well respected and helped market their artists to museums. They also gave the family final say over authentication questions. Today anyone who thinks he or she owns a Monet that’s not in the Wildenstein book needs a nonprofit co-founded by Guy to sign off on it. (When the Wildenstein Institute handled the authentications directly, it developed a reputation for being unaccommodating.)
But Georges’s ruthless instincts also contributed to the “dark aura,” as one dealer put it, that would come to surround the Wildenstein name. Hitler’s personal curator told an Allied intelligence agent in an interrogation after the war that Georges did brisk business with the Nazis after fleeing to Provence, in the unoccupied zone. Once there, he helped the Germans locate important collections in occupied France in exchange for sparing his own. Profits from his newly “aryanized” gallery in Paris were said to be sent to New York, where he had opened a branch. (The representative for Guy denies this.)
Other art-dealing dynasties have since sprung up in the Wildenstein mold. They buy up huge quantities of blue-chip art and store it for years, until they effectively corner their own niches of the market and control the prices. The billionaire Nahmad brothers and their sons, based among London, New York and Monaco, reportedly bought more works by Picasso than any other family in the world (except the Picassos) and, for the most part, have locked them up in the Geneva free port for years while they accumulate value. The Mugrabi family of Pop Art dealer-collectors, led by its patriarch, Jose Mugrabi, and his two sons, have done the same with Andy Warhol, stockpiling some 1,000 works by the artist and keeping prices high by bidding his art up at auction, even if they don’t intend to buy. (The Mugrabi family did not respond to a request for comment.)
Those who complain that the art market today operates more like the stock market often blame these families, who shifted a value system once driven by connoisseurship to one based on the law of scarcity. (“Monet and Picasso are like Microsoft and Coca-Cola,” David Nahmad once said.) Their dominance derives from the fact that they’re family firms, bolstered by internal secrecy, pride and lifetimes of experience. As the Wildensteins proved, families can be structured like corporations, where the profit principle governs even relationships and succession plans. The few people who seem capable of undoing them are themselves. For the Wildensteins, the weight of the family legacy seems to have cracked the younger generations.
Even though Daniel described Georges as a “bad father,” he parented his own children in similarly severe ways. He enforced his father’s business tactics — extreme secrecy, consolidation of wealth in the bloodline — as laws of family life, too. Daniel tried to seclude his two children, Alec and Guy, at home and unmarried, to protect the family from publicity and divorce. They lived as if in another era — the French 18th century — with opulent floral décor, heavy drapes and footmen who stood behind their chairs during meals. As children, Guy and Alec commuted to the Lycée Français de New York by limousine, and they rarely had a play date. Alec was forbidden to play sports and attend university, Guy was prevented from pursuing acting and both were required to learn their father’s trade. Daniel was particularly strict with Alec, his elder son. According to a 1998 Vanity Fair article, he started taking Alec to brothels at age 15 in the hope that he would find prostitutes a satisfying alternative to a wife. When Alec defied his father and married Jocelyne, he did so secretly in Las Vegas with no guests. Eventually, Daniel’s sons and wives and children all lived together in his New York townhouse.
Those who know Daniel have said that he infantilized and humiliated his sons and that they’ve gone on to treat the women in their lives similarly. Guy, Sylvia believed, was jealous of Daniel and took it out on her; Alec blamed Jocelyne for the humiliating headlines generated by their divorce. (The New York Post dubbed her the “Bride of Wildenstein” for her apparently extensive plastic surgeries.) Alec, who wore bold pinstripe suits, was the flashier brother; Guy kept a lower profile but played on the Diables Bleus polo team with aristocratic friends, like the future King Charles III, the godfather of his eldest child. Colleagues remember that the brothers would sit quietly in meetings. Guy married a Swedish model named Kristina Hansson, who has never appeared in a tabloid. In fact, he once boasted that “hardly anyone knows what my wife looks like.” So when Daniel died in 2001, Guy was the clear successor to the family art empire, while Alec took over the horse business.
Guy, who is now 77, is the family’s patriarch and president of Wildenstein & Co. But mounting lawsuits and scandals have begun to drag him down. So far he has avoided any serious consequences — a fact some critics attribute to well-positioned friends like former President Nicolas Sarkozy or to the fortune at his disposal for defense counsel. But now that the family is on trial, Guy, it seems, may have taken the legacy of silence too far. The Wildenstein policy to preserve confidentiality at any cost may ultimately expose the family’s secrets.
In 2009, after a long string of setbacks, Dumont Beghi had a breakthrough. Over the years she had sent Liouba Wildenstein, Alec’s second wife, multiple summonses for information about the family’s assets. Unsurprisingly, she ignored them. But after Alec died of prostate cancer at age 67 in 2008, Liouba, a former model from Russia, found herself in trouble. According to Serre’s book, Alec owed €12 million in back taxes, and his father’s estate was still tied up in litigation with Sylvia. Guy offered to lend Liouba the money to help pay his brother’s debt — all she had to do in return was give him access to a trust Alec had set up for her, supposedly so Guy could reimburse himself later. But after the deal was done, Serre’s book recounts, Guy didn’t pay Liouba the millions he promised. He sent only small, sporadic sums — not enough to pay her tax bill or to live on. Liouba found herself in a situation much like Sylvia’s: cut out from the family, with no money and no recourse. (The representative for Guy says that he did issue the loan.)
That’s when Dumont Beghi’s phone rang. Liouba had finally decided to answer her third summons. She told me recently that she felt she had no choice but to take action: “Many women in the family had to fight for their rights,” she said. “The women want to be respected.” Twenty-four hours later, a lawyer would deliver Dumont Beghi dozens of documents that Liouba had found on Alec’s personal computer — contracts and letters about the family’s expansive network of offshore trusts — which would reveal what Dumont Beghi and Sylvia had long believed without being able to definitively prove.
.
The documents mapped how the Wildensteins had structured their patrimony, and hidden their wealth, for generations. Daniel’s estate, Dumont Beghi learned, included several hundred artworks — including the 180 Bonnards, hundreds of 16th- and 17th-century French paintings and dozens of works by old masters including Caravaggio, Velázquez and Fra Angelico. Then there was the real estate: multiple homes and buildings across France and the United States, the 58,000-acre ranch in Kenya and the 18-acre Virgin Islands compound. There was a Gulfstream IV jet, a yacht and the thoroughbred stable, which was registered to multiple intermediaries in England and Ireland. The art was held in shell companies and trusts in tax havens, including two previously unknown entities in the Cayman Islands and Guernsey. These were “operational structures specializing in tax evasion,” Dumont Beghi wrote, which also helped the family shield assets from divorce. (The representative for Guy disputes the accuracy of this recounting of the estate.)
According to Dumont Beghi, two trusts named Sylvia as a beneficiary, something Sylvia said she was unaware of. Also revealed was a letter from Guy and Alec’s Swiss lawyer seeking to remove Sylvia as beneficiary from one of the trusts. Investigators also discovered $250 million in art that Daniel had apparently ordered airlifted out of the United States while he was in his coma. (The representative for Guy denies that this is true, calling it “illogical.”)
Dumont Beghi rapidly began to issue new summonses and build an appeal for a review. But time was running out. Sylvia had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which was spreading. She was running out of resources, too. “I have no more money,” Serre recounted her saying. “This procedure has brought me to my knees.” She had paid more than €10 million in legal fees over the past eight years and had resorted to pawning her jewelry and relying on help from wealthy friends. In her final interview, she said of her stepsons, “They robbed me, and now they are waiting for me to die.”
Dumont Beghi continued on, believing that Sylvia was entitled to a settlement of $300 million. She filed a new criminal complaint against Guy and the heirs of Alec — his two children and Liouba — as well as their business associates, using the new information she had received. To her surprise, this time the government responded. The police raided the Wildenstein Institute and the family’s apartments on a court order to identify any assets that might have been concealed from Sylvia. In the basement, officers discovered vaults filled with hundreds of drawings, paintings and sculptures. Some of the frames were inscribed with swastikas.
Officers seized about 30 lost works by the likes of Degas and Berthe Morisot. Some had been reported stolen by a Jewish family during the war, and others were reported lost by families who had involved Daniel in the management of their estates. Guy pleaded ignorance: He never inspected that vault. And who could prove otherwise? The family took such pains to protect their inventory that no one knows what they really have, perhaps not even them. (The Wildensteins were cleared in one of the lost-painting suits; Guy has said that the Morisot may have been put there as a result of an oversight.)
Dumont Beghi’s involvement in the Wildenstein affair officially ended on Nov. 8, 2010, when she called Sylvia for the last time to wish her a happy 77th birthday. Five days later, Sylvia died at home in Paris. She was buried in the Wildenstein tomb next to her husband, but Guy had her maiden name, Roth, etched into the marble tombstone. Without a client, Dumont Beghi’s case was closed for good.
But the lawsuit was far from over for Guy, as the state picked up where Dumont Beghi left off. She had mapped for the government the global system through which the family moved money among nine companies registered in Ireland, four trusts on three islands, a handful of galleries and real estate companies and bank accounts in at least four countries, possibly depriving the French public of hundreds of millions of euros. In addition to the Swiss free port and the Paris vault, they had art in a nuclear bunker in the Catskills, a former fire station in New York and many other far-flung places. “I mean, there are pictures I have never seen that my great-grandfather bought,” Alec told Vanity Fair in 1998. They were, he said, “in vaults and crazy places, in back of other things.”
Over the next decade, the Wildenstein tax case wound its way through the French courts. At the same time, public outrage over tax loopholes for the wealthy was growing, and the government passed what is popularly known as the Wildenstein law to crack down on tax evasion via foreign trusts. Still, the family won two controversial acquittals, first in 2017 and then again in 2018.
But then, two years ago, France’s attorney general and tax authorities brought concerns about the decision to acquit the Wildensteins of tax fraud and money laundering to the Court of Cassation, France’s highest civil and criminal court. The lead judge in the 2017 case had said that the family displayed a “clear intention” to hide their wealth, but the tribunal let them off because, at the time, foreign trusts fell into a legal gray area. In reopening the case, the Court of Cassation disagreed, saying the lower court “disregarded” the facts.
“It’s really uncommon,” Dumont Beghi says of the upcoming retrial. She believes the path to victory will be much tougher for Guy and his co-defendants this time. Prosecutors will argue that the Wildensteins were, in fact, required to report their foreign trusts at the time of Daniel’s death, and later Alec’s. They also contend that the trustees improperly took orders from the family in violation of the rules of irrevocable trusts, which must be independently managed.
The extreme lengths to which the family went to obscure their wealth led French media to dub them “the Impressionists of finance.” But in reality many of their practices are commonplace in high levels of the art trade, which a 2020 U.S. Senate subcommittee called the “largest legal, unregulated market.” Unlike financial institutions, art businesses are not expressly subject to the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires firms to verify customers’ identities, report large cash transactions and flag suspicious activity. A study from the U.S. Department of the Treasury last year cited a figure estimating that money laundering and other financial crimes in the art market may amount to about $3 billion a year. (Britain and the European Union, however, have implemented anti-money-laundering regulations that require stricter due diligence in art transactions there.)
According to a report by Art Basel and UBS, auction houses did about $31 billion in sales last year. They say that they know who their clients are, but those may just be the names of art advisers or other intermediaries. And collectors’ insistence on anonymity, long framed as genteel discretion, hasn’t budged. The buyer of the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, Leonardo da Vinci’s $450.3 million “Salvator Mundi,” registered at Christie’s a day before bidding with a $100 million down payment, identifying himself as one of 5,000 princes in Saudi Arabia. A few weeks later, it was revealed that the true buyer was Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — who was reportedly displaying the painting on his superyacht — and that a little-known cousin of his bought it as a proxy. It was billed by Christie’s as the “last Leonardo da Vinci painting in private hands,” but it’s only the “last” Leonardo until someone reveals another one, like the Madonna and child the Wildensteins sold in 1999 to an anonymous collector, who is still believed to own it.
For a business that routinely transacts in secrecy jurisdictions, literally in the dark and underground, scarcity can be manufactured, and value is dictated by whatever someone is willing to pay. “A client’s privacy should be an art dealer’s primary concern,” Daniel wrote, calling it a matter of “respect.” But secrecy is also a core competitive advantage in a profession predicated on insider knowledge — a model the Wildensteins themselves relied on. The gallery kept a legendarily detailed directory of where every coveted painting in the world was located using intelligence sometimes gathered by spying on rival dealers — even, one competitor alleged, tapping phones. That system of ultra-insular knowledge and extreme scarcity is why, today, the dealers who bought “Salvator Mundi” for $1,175 at a New Orleans auction house were able to resell it for a reputed $80 million, and then, in the span of five years, see it flipped for $127.5 million to the collector who ultimately sold it to the Saudis for the record-breaking $450 million.
Younger dynasties like the Mugrabis and Nahmads have similarly been accused of strategically obscuring ownership of their assets to shield them from divorce or other legal claims. When a Frenchman accused the Nahmads of possessing a Modigliani painting, once estimated to be worth up to $25 million, that Nazis looted from his grandfather, they said it was owned by a company called International Art Center. A couple years later, the Panama Papers revealed that David Nahmad owns International Art Center, a holding company whose assets are stored in Geneva. (A representative for the Nahmad Collection says the case has “no merit.”)
“Many of these very wealthy families do sort of act like cartels,” says Christopher A. Marinello, a lawyer who recovers lost art. “We’re still dealing with these Nazi-looted-art cases because the art market hoped they would outlast the heirs.” The Wildensteins, too, he says, have handled “problematic” pictures, though none that he is currently pursuing are in their possession. Whenever he asks the family for information that might aid in his search for stolen pictures, they take a very long time to respond, he says, and are reluctant to provide information. “They’re just looking the other way,” he says. “It’s just this unwillingness to lift a finger and do anything.”
I met Dumont Beghi once more in New York, where she had come to visit galleries with her son, an artist and designer. At a windy table outside Harry Cipriani’s food hall on the Upper West Side, she told me that she plans to attend every day of the Wildenstein trial this fall. It will finally mark the end of the defining case of her career. “It’s my professional life, it’s my personal life,” she said. “I start something, I finish it. I will go every day. I want to see it through.”
Her long entanglement in the case created legal troubles for her too. Guy Wildenstein sued her for defamation in 2016. A few years later, she was convicted of tax fraud and money laundering for depositing $5.1 million she received from Sylvia in an undisclosed HSBC account in New York. She is currently pursuing a partial appeal and has suggested that the $5.1 million was a “customary gift.” (Guy dropped the defamation suit two years ago.)
In 2012, Dumont Beghi published a book about her seven years on the case, “L’Affaire Wildenstein.” In the opening lines, she describes it as “a story of two women alone facing the establishment,” run by privileged and powerful men like the Wildensteins — “a universe where women are omitted.” Some have questioned whether Dumont Beghi was really representing her client’s best interests in pursuing the costly, yearslong battle. But regardless of her motives, it’s obvious that the saga has become personal for her. Her eyes welled up when she spoke of Sylvia’s death. “She wanted the world to know that as a woman she wanted to be respected.” She described tax fraud as a crime that disproportionately deprives women. This is what she and Sylvia were fighting for. “It may be hard to understand the depth of our relationship,” she told me.
With a potential billion-dollar guillotine hanging over its neck, the house of Wildenstein is in unprecedented peril. Even before this latest legal trouble, its influence waned for years as the market for the historical art it sells declined, and museums are by now fully stocked. As Daniel reached his eighth decade, he started waking up in the mornings asking himself, “How long are we going to last?” The profession his family dominated for most of the 20th century had been overtaken by a new guard of contemporary-art dealers selling status baubles to Wall Street millionaires. These collectors weren’t interested in Rococo or Neoclassical art; they were spending millions on living stars like Damien Hirst, whose market the advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi has dominated since he bought up vast quantities of the artist’s early work. Daniel tried to get in on the frenzy by forming a joint venture with Pace Gallery in 1993. But its contemporary clients generally didn’t convert to Impressionism or old-master collectors, and vice versa. “It was a mistake,” Pace’s founder, Arne Glimcher, told me. “I think we did it because we were so flattered.” Pace bought back its shares plus inventory from Guy in 2011.
“I see the end of this empire,” the old-masters expert Eric Turquin says. “The organization is too heavy for a market that has shrunk.”
Now the family appears to be liquidating some assets. In 2020, Guy and his wife put their Tudor estate in Millbrook, N.Y., which they spent a reported $50 million renovating, on the market for $20 million. Around the same time, their son, David, and his wife, the jewelry heiress Lucrezia Buccellati Wildenstein, listed their Connecticut equestrian compound for $6.9 million. The Virgin Islands property is up for sale, too, for $48 million. In 2016, while facing his initial tax trial in Paris, Guy listed his Sutton Square townhouse in Manhattan — Corcoran blurred the paintings on the walls, naturally — for nearly $40 million, only to finally offer it at a loss in March for $29.5 million. “I see the end of this empire,” the old-masters expert Eric Turquin says. “The organization is too heavy for a market that has shrunk. The market is one-tenth of what it used to be for 18th-century French art.”
Some market insiders have noticed that the family seems to be selling off more art lately, too. Though paintings are often sold at auction anonymously, provenance histories can reveal ownership information. In the past two years or so, “they sold a lot of paintings at auction, at Christie’s, not under their own name,” says Robert Simon, one of the old-masters dealers who rediscovered “Salvator Mundi.” “But when they’re cataloged, you can see that they’re shown by Wildenstein in previous shows or were acquired here and there.” He adds, “And then they’ve kind of shed their staff as well.” The mass liquidation of assets suggests that the family could be anticipating a large expenditure, like an overdue tax bill.
In 1932, Georges Wildenstein hired the society architect Horace Trumbauer to design the family’s majestic limestone gallery on East 64th Street, with marble floors, gilded wood paneling and lead vaults. “It was the grandest gallery in New York,” Simon says, recalling the heavy drapes the Wildensteins would pull back to reveal paintings to clients. It’s where they sold one of Raphael’s most treasured Madonnas, Caillebotte’s iconic cityscape “Paris Street; Rainy Day” and Cezanne’s largest and most lyrical “Bathers.”
Guy’s son, David, who is vice president of Wildenstein & Co., has described the building as “the soul of this company and the soul of this family.” Yet he helped sell it in 2017 for $79.8 million, then the highest price ever paid for a townhouse in New York. The contemporary-art gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan has since taken occupancy of the space while Wildenstein & Co. has moved into a 15-story commercial building in Midtown, open by appointment only. “It’s like an office,” one dealer told me. “A small office.”
We met @DanielaGomezPaz at the recent Mindy Solomon Gallery Opening. Not only did we love her creations but we loved her attitude. But of course. She lives in my hometown of Jamaica, Queens. Her energy lifted us high into the Jewish New Year.
About Daniela….. Utilizing various kinds of organic and synthetic fibers and objects, Daniela Gómez Paz crafts intersections between weaving, drawing, painting, assemblage, and sculpture. Born in Cali, Colombia, she immigrated to Queens, New York. Her pursued path in the arts and background in pedagogy led her to facilitate a wide range of programs with children, youth, seniors and families in schools, museums, and community centers.
She acquired a Double Degree: BFA [Printmaking/Painting] & BA [Art History] from SUNY Purchase School of Art and Design and a MAT [Masters in Art Teaching] from Queens College. Recently, she graduated with an MFA from Yale School of Art and is a lecturer at SUNY Purchase.
Eliot, Mindy, Daniela My art advisor and dear friend Teresa Enriquez with Daniela and EliotOmar Lopez-Chahoud, artistic director and curator of Untitled Art during Art Basel
In 2015, Ruth Steinik Greenberg, Howard Greenberg, Eliot and I toured the country of Colombia. We actually spent time at Plaza Botero, Medellín, Colombia, home to 23 voluptuous sculptures. I always loved Botero. I took all of the following photos. RIP
🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺
🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺
Visiting Alex Nuñez at her studio in Liberty City. She has some amazing projects in the works. That’s a monster piece behind us. Mesmerizing !!!
Flying soon? Airplane turbulence may be worse than usual. Here’s why
Taking a flight this winter? You may need to brace for a bumpier journey than usual, as a climate phenomenon could be cranking up the turbulence.
That’s because we’re in an El Niño year — and it may even end up being a historically strong El Niño winter. El Niño doesn’t just affect droughts, heat waves and hurricane season — new research suggests it could also impact how much turbulence planes experience in the air.
Paul Williams, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading, presented his research on the subject during a meeting of the American Meteorological Society earlier this year.
CAT is one type of turbulence you might experience while flying. It happens when skies look clear — there are no major storms — but the plane shakes anyway. It’s caused by curves in the jet stream (air currents that circle around the planet), pilot Stuart Walker explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Along those curves there are pockets of wind shear, or a sudden change in the wind’s direction or speed.
As those winds suddenly hit the plane from one side or another, they can cause the plane to rock, Walker said.
This is where El Niño comes in. Williams found that during El Niño years, there were more wind shear anomalies over the United States, Mexico, Southeast Asia and Australia. In La Niña years, the opposite was true — there was weaker wind shear.
In his talk, Williams cited a paper that observed the largest spike in pilots reporting turbulence occurred in the winter of 1997-1998 — one of the strongest El Niño winters ever recorded.
After crunching the numbers, Williams found “when there’s a strong El Niño event, there is 50% more moderate-or-greater CAT over large parts of the U.S. and the North Atlantic. And when there’s a strong La Niña event, there’s about 50% less moderate-or-greater CAT than normal.”
The only place that didn’t see a connection between El Niño and more wind shear was Europe, Williams said.
What does this mean for your next flight, now that El Niño is ramping up toward its peak? The research doesn’t make it possible to predict exactly when or where pilots will see more turbulence, but it does give an idea of how much turbulence they may encounter over the course of a season.
Plus, clear-air turbulence isn’t anything new — even if research suggests it’s happening more frequently. (Another bit of Williams’ research published in 2019 also found that global warming has been leading to increased air turbulence.) Pilots know how to handle CAT when they come across it.
“The good news about clear-air turbulence, though, is it typically does not last but a couple thousand feet. So if we just descend a couple thousand or climb a couple thousand, we can usually fly out of some of that rough air,” Walker said.
If you experience an especially bumpy ride this winter, you can buckle up, take a deep breath, and probably blame El Niño.
Yesterday was my work anniversary. September 9, 1966. 57 years of working and playing hard. I have been home all this week with a cold that won’t quit. Yet, technology allows me to follow my determinations. My mother made me go out and find a job in my teens because I was such a lousy college student. If a teacher was engaging I did very well. Unfortunately, there weren’t too many of them. I actually went o Queen’s College at twilight. I got a job for the next eight years with WWD and HFD in Greenwich Village, and the whole world changed for me. Then I moved on to CES Publishing where I met Eliot. Three years after that, Eliot and I started HWH PR. Many of the folks we hired were smarter than me but I had the big personality and passion. I knew how to make things happen, or maybe I never stop trying. Thank you Mom. You never made demands except for this one. This is a list of business people who made me look good in “my early years” when I was just struggling. If I forgot someone remind me in comments. My nose is congested and my eyes are tearing but here goes: Bernie Lett, Frank Tricarico, Aaron Neretin, Manning Greenberg, Eric Schneider, Abe Zimmerman, (Bob Dylan’s father) Hibbing, Minnesota, Richard Ekstract, Cathy Ciccolella, S. David Feir, Warren Zorek, Len Marks, John Hollands, Harry Elias, Norman Olson, Harry Fox, Maurice de Hond, Frank O’Connell, Marty Homlish, Rob Reis, Barbara Wruck, Jerry Rubin, ,and a few Republicans who voted for Trump. I refuse to mention their names unless they admit they made a terrible mistake. You know who you are. Thank you.
DigiDame 