"Death of Alan Bond a Reminder of Art’s Attraction to Rogues"
From
Art Market Monitor:
Alan Bond died and his obituaries are a reminder of the way the art
market has attracted out-sized personalities with ambitions that may
exceed their grasps:
Bond’s personal spending was legend. He lavished
expensive gifts on his family, bought an entire village in England and
famously, in November 1987, despite the stock market crash just three
weeks earlier, bought Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Irises for $54
million. Sotheby’s, which sold him the painting, later admitted it had
lent him half the cost, and in 1990 it was sold to the J Paul Getty
Museum in Los Angeles. […]
But the decade that followed was one marked by his unravelling, spending time in and out of both court and prison. […]
In 1996, he was again sentenced to prison, this time
three years for corporate fraud relating the purchase of the the
painting La Promenade by Edouard Manet. His lawyers famously claimed
during court proceedings Bond was suffering memory loss as a result of
depression and brain damage, but his lucidity seemed to miraculously
return in later years.
Obituary: Alan Bond, 1938-2015
