AN INTERVIEW WITH BEN LEWIS
by Hayato Uesugi
Hello everyone. This is Hayato Uesugi, a Japanese editor, translator, writer, interviewer, and English and translation lecturer in Tokyo.
With me online today is Ben Lewis, the author of The Last Leonardo―A Masterpiece, A Mystery and The Dirty World of Art.
This epic quest exposes hidden truths about Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, the recently discovered masterpiece that sold for $450 million in 2017 at a Christie’s auction. Ben Lewis carefully discusses whether the picture is the real thing or not. The Last Leonardo which was highly acclaimed by many established media including The Guardian, Sunday Times, Financial Times, The Times, Daily Mail, Irish Times, New York Times, New York Journal of Books, and Kirkus, is finally being released in Japan!
Hello Ben.
――First of all, what most attracted you to the Salvator Mundi? Please tell us about its magnetism.
It’s not a magnetic picture in the sense that, you know, I took a look at it and said, “Oh my god, it’s Leonardo! Epiphany. Da da da da da. This is so incredible! I can feel his spirit!” It’s not like that. It’s not a very good picture and it’s very badly damaged. Some people have reacted to the picture in that way. But if you look at it, its ethereal, ghostly face – we don’t know if it looks like that because that’s how Leonardo painted it, or if it looks like that because it’s been so damaged and worn away over the centuries. It’s a very badly damaged picture and has been very badly restored several times in its life. Perhaps that’s why Christ looks like he’s a kind of ghost, because the corporality of his face has somehow been removed over the centuries.
Some people thought it was magnetic because it casts a spell over them and they feel they’re in the presence of Leonardo. But it wasn’t like that for me when I saw it in 2011 and saw it again in 2017. I am very attracted to suspicious mysteries in the art world. I really am very attracted to things that just somehow aren’t quite right. I like puzzles and I suppose, in that sense, I was magnetically attracted to the Salvator Mundi. Here was a puzzle. Could I, could anyone crack it? Could we crack this da Vinci code? That was the question, in a sense. It’s a very magnetic picture. It asks you the greatest mystery of all. It’s looking at you and saying, “Am I Leonardo?” It was such a great story. It was such a good story. I couldn’t believe my luck when a book commissioned on it before anyone else. I could not believe my luck. I first heard about the painting in 2016 because there was a great story in the New Yorker the Swiss dealer Yves Bouvier and the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev.
Bouvier had sold Rybolovlev $2 billion worth of modernist big-name art masterpieces. Bouvier himself had only paid a billion for all those works or art, so he made about a billion profit in about 10 years. No art dealer has made that kind of money before. It’s just sensational. That would’ve been a good book if I could’ve gotten an interview with Bouvier and Rybolovlev at the time, but I knew I wouldn’t get that.
So the picture, the Salvatore Mundi, was one of pictures that Ives Bouvier sold to Rybolovlev —that’s the connection. And it stuck in my mind. When the picture sold in November 2017 for $450 million, Salvatore Mundi became the world’s most expensive painting. That’s a good subject for a book, isn’t it? What is the story behind the world’s most expensive painting? I started looking online at the Christie’s catalogue and there’s this whole history of the painting—how it had been in the collection of Charles the First, it had all these ups and downs. It had sold for two pounds in 1765 and sold for 45 pounds in 1958. It was basically in the collections of the French kings in the 16th Century. My god, I never, ever read about a painting that had such a roller coaster of a life, that had so many ups and downs. And how it survived all of this. I just thought—what an incredible story. You can tell the whole history of the art market—at least European appreciation of art—through this one painting. That’s why I wrote the book.
――You mentioned in “Afterword” that one of your reasons for writing this book is “the accusations of deception and fraud swirling around the painting.” Could you elaborate?
There was a dark side to the sale and marketing of this picture. I suppose one could accuse the dealers of being, what we call in English, of ‘being economical with the truth.’ In the sense that Robert Simon and his colleagues argue that this Salvator Mundi was in the collection of Charles I because they found it in an old inventory, an old list of all the pictures that Charles I had and here was this Salvator Mundi. It’s called “A Peace of Christ” and this is it. There were two things that were a but suspicious about that. First, there are actually two mentions of pictures of Christ by Leonardo da Vinci in this list of pictures that were owned by Charles I, right? And secondly, all the pictures in Charles I’s collection had a big stamp branded, burned into the backs. “CR” it says.
And there is another Salvator Mundi, I’ve discovered, in a museum in Moscow, but one of Leonardo’s followers. We don’t think it’s by Leonardo today, we think it’s by one of his followers, but 200 years ago people thought it was by Leonardo, and this one has a Charles I stamp on the back. This wasn’t mentioned in any of the publicity material, catalogues or articles or anything to do with the Salvator Mundi by the Salvator Mundi’s supporters—the dealers like Robert Simon or the art historian Martian Kemp, Margret Daliva. It wasn’t mentioned in anything public until I published my book, shortly before I published my book. Until I published this information in an article in the art newspaper in Autumn, 2018, I think I did that. So they seem to be editing the truth, these dealers, and not really saying what they should. Chirstie’s didn’t mention it either when they sold the picture. I thin that’s all a bit fishy. They could be accused, in theory, of an error of omission which, in some jurisdictions, a crime. A civil crime. Other things were a bit odd as well.
Christie’s actually saw this painting in 2005, before Robert Simon bought it. The family selling the picture, the Hendrys, they lived in New Orleans, in Baton Rouge, down in the American South area. An upstanding, ordinary American family. They didn’t know a lot about art. They’d inherited these pictures. The grandfather had died and now the pictures were going to be sold at auction and they wondered what they should do. One young member of the family, a woman who was an artist, said she’d take photos of all of these pictures that we want to sell and send them to Christie’s in New York and see if they want any of them. Christie’s was reasonably interested and came down, they sent a specialist down. She looked at all the pictures and, as they say what they want and what they don’t want. She wanted a few pictures but she passed on the Salvator Mundi.
So this upstanding American family gave the Salvator Mundi to a local auction house, which sold it to Robert Simon and these dealers for $1,000. The family that owned it only got $700. That’s what the family made out of the picture. They only got one chance—that was it. But Christie’s got a second chance. Because this painting—if you read my book you’ll find out—in 2017 the owner of this painting was the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev and he consigned the painting to Christie’s for an auction.
Christie’s auctioned the painting and made around $50 million in fees. So I think it’s difficult. Lots of great art historians have looked at themselves and wondered – that’s not by Leonardo. But it is possible to argue that Christie’s were negligent or they made a mistake that they really shouldn’t have made, and that some kind of compensation is due to the owners. But that’s a difficult case to prove, that’s got to be said. I think that what went on with this picture wasn’t really fair and that’s one of the things I try to explore in my book.
――Please let us know what was most enjoyable and most challenging for you in writing The Last Leonardo?
What was the most enjoyable thing? I mean, I just love writing books. If you know me, in the past I’ve mostly made documentaries but I absolutely love writing books. I was made a visiting fellow of the Warburg Institute in London, which is one of the finest art historical and cultural research centers in the world, and I suppose the most enjoyable thing was cycling into the Warburg every day. And for part of that time I even had my own office. Warburg has got an amazing library and these days I’m the kind of person who likes to sit in libraries reading books. That’s my favorite activity. It’s really difficult to pick what the most enjoyable thing was. I loved every minute of writing this book.
Tracking down—nobody knew who owned the Salvator Mundi in 2005. This picture was owned by some American family, it’s not public knowledge who it was. The dealer who bought the picture for $1,000 admitted who it was. I admit one of the most enjoyable and challenging things for me was to track down this family. To track down the secret owners of the painting in 2005. Then ring up Mr. Hendry and ask him, “Did you know you actually owned a Leonardo, supposedly a Leonardo, and it was sold for $450 million. That’s uncovering information that no one knows about and sharing it with the world. It’s very exciting. Apparently he didn’t know he’d owned a Leonardo and that it sold for $450 million at Christie’s, so that was a bit of a shock for him.
I just loved all the color, all the contrast, the stories to do with this painting. It had been owned by a king who had had his head chopped off, then it ended up in some dirty, dusty basement of some nobleman in the mid-18th Century, if that’s where it was. Or maybe it went to Holland in the mid-17th Century and was sold at an auction in Antwerp. All the different routes that the painting could have taken across the world and through the centuries. All these multiple possible narratives. I love that. The picture in my mind was a kind of character walking through time. So I found that exciting and moving.
――The Last Leonardo is a tremendously enjoyable book. While writing about people’s strong desire for more wealth, possessions, and power in the art field, you try to decide whether the Salvator Mundi is truly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci or not. Indeed, the book is filled with mystery. For me, The Last Leonardo is akin to one of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series or John le Carre’s great works－I translated one of le Carre’s works, Our Kind of Traitor (2010). Could you explain how you think you have developed this style of writing?
The book is written as a thriller because the story is a thriller.
There are a lot of things you need to really make a book worth reading. I could have the thriller—these dealers who bought the picture for $1,000 and 12 years later it was sold for $450 million. How did they do that? How do you turn $1,000 into $450 million? That’s the heist story.
Then there’s Leonardo’s biography and I can weave that in. There was space for revision. People worship Leonardo so there was an opportunity, no matter how talented he was, to make him more of a real person. A second narrative of Leonardo’s biography.
Then there’s a third one, the history of the painting after it was painted. All the different owners, different milieus, different galleries, living rooms and palaces this picture had hung in. And basements. That’s the third narrative.
And the fourth one was the investigation, the question: Is this a Leonardo? That’s such a difficult question to answer. One week writing the book I’m thinking, this is probably a Leonardo. The next week it was, no, this has very little to do with Leonardo. It’s such a strange painting. It’s really, really odd. There was a kind of excitement and changes of mind like a motor with a plus and a minus. Like a magnet in a motor propelling it along. That’s kind of how I wrote the book.
The heist, the thriller, that was the backbone. How do you turn $1,000 into $450 million? What do you have to do? Actually, it’s quite a relevant story because it’s about people’s relationship with the truth. Do you just see what you want to see? What happens when you find an inconvenient fact that doesn’t really fit it? Do you tell people about it or do you sweep it under the carpet? Maybe in your theory of things it doesn’t matter because your little fact is against my argument, but I’ve got a lot of other facts that I prefer so I don’t really have to mention it. There’s all that.
――Why do you think Salvator Mundi was not displayed in the Louvre from October 24 in 2019 to February 24 in 2020? I’m sure many people would like to hear from you about it.
For most of 2019 I thought the Salvator Mundi would be displayed at the Louvre. I mean, after the auction the head of the Louvre said he wanted it and the Louvre let everybody know they’d asked for it several times and they wanted to show it and they asked very politely. It was never really clear whether they’d said, “We want to show it and we promise to put a Leonardo da Vinci label on it,” or whether they’d said, “We want to show it, please. We’d like to show it.” They didn’t really say if they’d attribute it to Leonardo or not. But I just thought—probably these people are going to show it.
I remember being at the Hay Festival, I remember this was June and having my doubts. So June, 2019. But in the second half of the year the Louvre really seemed to be quite keen on the picture. In fact, they produced a who draft of their catalog with the Salvator Mundi in it, crediting the Saudi owners. They studied the picture and it turned out later that the Louvre had actually seen the picture in 2018. The curators of the Louvre, Vincent Delieuvin, the Renaissance curator of the Louvre and Elisabeth Ravaud, the historian, they’d gone to inspect the picture. They’d prepared a book that apparently they were going to publish at the time of the exhibition just about the time of the Salvator Mundi, explaining why they thought the Salvator Mundi was actually an autographed Leonardo da Vinci. Also, the French Parliament passed a special law insuring the picture. Because the Louvre couldn’t insure a picture for $450 million, so the French Parliament had to do it, too.
So it looked like it was going to be in the exhibition, but then it wasn’t. The picture was not in the Louvre and we can be absolutely sure, without having 100% all the evidence, we can be sure why it wasn’t in the Louvre. Meaning, that was because the Louvre asked to borrow the picture, but they never gave a written guarantee that they would put the Leonardo da Vinci label on it. They might have suggested privately and through discourse, emails and this and that. They talked like they wanted to put a Leonardo da Vinci label on it but they actually never said they would put a Leonardo da Vinci label on it.
The owner was not prepared to lend the picture without a cast-iron guarantee that it would have a Leonardo da Vinci label on it. Because otherwise he would suffer the appalling embarrassment; I mean, he paid $450 million for a picture and have it exhibited as “Leonardo da Vinci question mark” or “Leonardo plus assistance” or “workshop” or whatever. That would have been for the Saudi ruler an absolute humiliation. I think what it turned out was, there was actually a battle inside the Louvre itself. Some of the Louvre senior personnel, including the Louvre senior curator, wanted to put the picture in the exhibition and thought it probably was a Leonardo, but others where vehemently opposed and said, “Look, we don’t know if this is a Leonardo, and we cannot display it as a Leonardo in the Louvre. That would compromise our reputation as one of the world’s greatest and most trustworthy museums.” So, the picture was a no-show.
――Martin Kemp, Robert B. Simon, and Margaret Dalivalle finally published Leonardo's Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts about the picture on November 2019. I’d like to hear your opinion about the book, which you mentioned in your revised paperback version of The Last Leonardo: A Masterpiece, a Mystery and the Dirty World of Art. Could you tell about it more?
The problem with Martin Kemp, Robert Simon and Margret Dalivalle’s book is that basically, it’s advocacy. It’s like, here are the reasons we think the Salvator Mundi is a bona fide Leonardo. But that’s not really art history. You’re meant to be more objective than that. Robert Simon found the painting and he sold it and he still thinks somehow that he wasn’t a dealer – that he’s more of a scholar and art historian than a dealer. But this whole book is plagued by sales. The book is basically salesmanship rather than scholarship. That, I think, is a big problem. But they make a good case that the picture is by Leonardo da Vinci. They marshal the facts as best they can.
There’s an Salai inventory. Salai was one of Leonardo’s pupils and a Salvator Mundi crops up in an inventory at Salai’s death in 1525 and they say, “We think that’s the picture.” It could be, but there’s no evidence of it. Salvator Mundi is around at the time. It could’ve been another around in Leonardo’s workshop. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that the book tries to make a case that their picture is the autographed version. The problem is that Leonardo’s studio turned out lots of different versions of the Salvator Mundi and Leonardo’s workshop often produced paintings in series for which there was no original by Leonardo. Robert Simon, Martin Kemp and Margret Dalivalle’s book simply has no proof. It has no serious evidence to offer that their Salvator Mundi is genuinely a picture by Leonardo, as opposed to a painting produced by his workshop and supervised by his assistants.
So I think the Kemp, Simon and Dalivalle book is, if you’ll forgive me, it’s a lot less interesting to read than my book, as you’ll find out. It’s a lot less exciting and it claims to be more scholarly, but actually it doesn’t present you with any more arguments or any better arguments than mine that Salvator Mundi is an a autographed Leonardo. There just isn’t a lot of evidence. There isn’t enough evidence for us to know whether this picture was genuinely painted by Leonardo or was actually painted by one of his assistants, with some supervision and touching up by him.
――You are an award-winning documentary film-maker, author and art critic, who has published great books like this The Last Leonardo as well as Hammer and Tickle: A Cultural History of Communism. You write widely on art for publications such as The Times, The Telegraph, London Evening Standard, The Observer, Prospect, Libération, and Die Welt. I believe you’re one of the most prolific authors and critics in the UK. You are very energetic and have a lot of ideas. Could you let us know about your current projects?
Right now I’ve got a few interesting projects on my table; it’s all a bit confusing. I am finishing off an academic paper about Salvator Mundi called, the papers are from a conference I attended last year, Professor Frank Zöllner’s conference putting Leonardo in context. I’m also involved in a podcast series about crimes and suspicious mysteries from the art world, the art market. So I’m doing for NBC and I’m also advising on a documentary about the Salvator Mundi, so all these little things. I’m trying to find another really good book to write. I’m slightly focused on this world of forgery in Sienna in the first half of the 20th Century, which I find really intriguing. But I have to improve my Italian in order to write that properly.
――I found that your award-winning documentary films include The Beatles, Hippies and Hells Angels: Inside the Crazy World of Apple; Google and the World Brain; Poor Us: An Animated History of Poverty; The Great Contemporary Art Bubble; Art Safari; and Constantin Brancusi: The Monk of Modernism. Could you enlighten us about your documentary film work a little bit?
I have spent a large part of my professional life making documentaries and a lot of them are a bit like the Salvator Mundi book, being investigations of the art world or adventures, you could say, in the art world.
I made a TV series called “Art Safari,” which is available as a DVD. That was 15 years ago, so I was a much younger man. These are little half-hour comedies about famous contemporary artists, including the Japanese artist Takeshi Murakami. I would go on these adventures to meet these artists as sort of a “wide-eyed art geek,” but also as someone who wanted to ask them some quite difficult questions. That was quite a successful series. It was sold to 24 different countries. And then I made a film investigating the art market a few years later called “The Great Contemporary Art Bubble,” which followed the peak of the art market in 2008 until it crashed at the end of 2008. So I started following it from its peak until it crashed. There was a big scoop in that piece about Damian Hirst that made me quite notorious in the art world.
My other films were about a territory I like, where culture, policy and society intersect. It’s art, but it’s not art. It’s about something bigger, it’s about society and culture and politics. I made a film about humor under Communism called “Hammer and Tickle,” about Communist jokes. I later wrote a book on that subject. I also made “Google and the World Brain,” which is about Google’s book-scanning project. It has a Japanese author in it. About how Google thought they were going to create a sort of universal digital library. To scan every book in the world and they didn’t really have to ask the authors of the books for copy write. It was about the internet and these tech giants doing more than they should; being more powerful than they should. Not paying people. Being monopolies. The film was in 2012 and I think I can argue that it was the first critical film about the internet. So I take some pride in that film.
――We heard the news that Saudi Arabia is planning to build a museum for Salvator Mundi. Could you give me more information about that?
I know very little about the sort of museums the Saudis say they’re going to build to house the Salvator Mundi in Saudi Arabia. I mean, they’ve come up with all these plans and huge budgets that get reported in the FT (Financial Times). They say they’re going to spend X billion and build 200 new museums and turn Saudi Arabia into a great cultural destination. Well, when it happens it happens, but it hasn’t happened yet.
One worries that all this talk is just talk designed to get a bit of good publicity in the West. Art, unfortunately today, is often a camouflage for human rights abuses. These regimes say they’re going to spend lots of money on art and they allow a certain kind of “safe art” to happen in their countries. The stuff is censored, but if it says something fairly bland how great humanity, then that’s okay. They have their biennials and their auctions and their private gallery shows, which creates a veneer that the country is becoming more liberal. But actually it’s just a cover, because behind all they’re still arresting human rights activists, Islamic extremists and whoever else they want to, and disrespecting human rights. I think we really have to watch out today for governments that use art in that way, as a sort of political camouflage to disguise what’s really going on.
――I believe even Saudi Arabia and its prince Mohammad bin Salman are going through a very difficult time now, because their lifeline oil is not selling well after the outbreak of COVID-19. Do you think Prince Salman might decide to show Salvator Mundi not only in his country but also all over the world to financially support his country?
I wish Mohammed bin Salman would decide it would be in his interest to show the world the Salvator Mundi, because I’d love to see it again and see how people reacted. But I think that’s pretty unlikely. I think he’s probably going to keep the picture hidden for quite a long time now. No one knows where it is. It hasn’t been seen since November 2017—not in public anyway. The Louvre people saw it in 2018. It was probably kept in a Swiss vault for a while and last year there was some wild rumor that it was on Mohammed bin Salman’s yacht. Maybe, but I never really believed that. I thought it was maybe still in a vault, but it could easily be hanging in one of his palaces now. Perhaps it’s in his bedroom over the bed. You never know.
――Please give us a personal message for your Japanese readers.
I’ve always loved visiting Japan. I have very fond memories of going there when I made this film about Takashi Murakami. I hope I can come back one day. I hope the Japanese readers – you know, you’re a long way away but I hope I’ve written the book in a way that you can all understand and you can all follow the story. If you don’t know anything about art history, or anything about Leonardo da Vinci, you’re going to get this insight in the form of a thriller. You’ll get into the world of the European Old Masters and the European Renaissance. I really hope you enjoy it. I hope you enjoy it so much that I get invited to come and talk about my book, or do something in Japan pretty soon. Because, like many people in Britain I like Japan and I enjoyed my time with Japanese people. Thank you.
――I can’t conclude this interview without showing my appreciation for you sparing your precious time with me for this interview. Thank you very much for allowing me the opportunity to talk with you and to introduce a great author to the Japanese audience.
Thank you very much, Ben.
AN INTERVIEW WITH BEN LEWIS
by Hayato Uesugi
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