American artist Chris Coles has been wandering Bangkok’s streets by night for years, hypnotised like a deer in the headlights by the giddy, gaudy neon signage, and then going home to his lower-Sukhumvit studio to paint it from seared, still-hot memory. It’s a wonder his vision isn’t completely burned out.

Except in those occasional moments when Coles isn’t in a rolling rage against Donald Trump, his gaze does tend to glaze, but his vision is just fine. He sees Bangkok after dark better than anyone around, and that includes the native street hawkers and hawkeyed ladies who share this town’s shadows.

Coles was able to give his retinas a rest on a recent visit home to the relaxing shores of Maine (habitat of many deer – and also lobsters, as Bangkok diners know). But the Atlantic had its own variation on frantic for Coles, because he was also trying to mount a show in New York City.

The presentation in the Big Apple would have entailed his portraits of that Trump fellow and his bobbing and weaving band of White House advisers, a rogue’s gallery that Coles has been gleefully sharing on Facebook the past year.

Alas, the New York show didn’t work out, amazingly enough for a place that seems to hate Trump, its hometown boy, more than any other US constituency. Still, a lot of folks in Thailand (maybe even General Prayut, who’s met some of those Washingtonians) would love to see the politicians’ paintings too, and maybe someday.

For now, in the Big Mango, we have an entirely different selection of Coles’ work to enjoy until mid-December, and a lot of it too – more than 50 pieces in all – in the exhibition “Bangkok Neon” at Check Inn 99, a roomy and always fun restaurant-cabaret on Sukhumvit Soi 33.

Just opened last Thursday, the exhibition is a glowering beast of a sight. And although Tracey Emin would be in her element there (pun explicitly intended), it’s not all feverish tubular lettering. There are portraits in this one as well, and the farang faces are quite familiar to those who follow expat literature and music.

Check Inn’s congenial Australian proprietor Chris Catto-Smith has obliged with a battery of blacklights to make the fluorescent paintings pop, the better to mimic the jarring effect that neon triggers in the dusk. The club, taking over the digs formerly known as Christie’s (in homage to the auction house), proves a highly accommodating venue for displaying art, but more on that in a moment.

Coles prides himself on the rough, seemingly hasty brushwork and jaunty composition that characterised the early-20th-century German Expressionism he admires so much, and it’s a style that lends itself perfectly to depictions of Bangkok after sundown, in the figures, the settings they haunt and the electrified gaslight that illuminates them.

His human subjects, or at least those who’ve known they were posing for him, often comment (amused but approvingly) on their jarring blue hair or green complexions, but of course that’s entirely the result of the unnatural lighting that enfolded them when Coles’ eyes snapped the shutter.

And now for a lesson in neon:

Neon, which is indeed a variant on the Greek for “new”, has been glowing in the urban darkness since 1898, when British chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers ignited a rapid (figurative) explosion of gas discoveries. But nitrogen, oxygen, argon and krypton, they agreed, don’t look particularly sexy when you turn off the lights.

Ramsay chilled a lungful of air until it liquefied, then warmed it and captured the gases boiling off. Once he’d bottled krypton, he was left with a gas that glowed brilliant redorange under a rudimentary spectrometer – “a sight to dwell upon and never forget”, Travers said. (They discovered xenon next, but they just went, “Meh.”)

Until 1902, the problem with pouring neon into light bulbs was its scarcity. Industrial-scale manufacture solved that, and by 1910 it was being shovelled into sealed tubes, although homeowners found the colour a bit garish for domestic purposes. It took another two years before its utility in advertising signs made neon a success, and it played a central role in the combustion of America’s “century of progress”.

By the 1960s, Thailand was hotwiring its own century of success and neon was lighting up the nightlife, but in recent years the Golden Age of Red-Orange (and all the other colours that neon was trained to generate) has dimmed.

Try telling that to the first-time tourist on Soi Cowboy or Pattaya’s Walking Street, but the fact is that a great many neon signs in Bangkok have been pulled down and, despite their often-ornate artistry, they’re being heartlessly discarded.

Soi 33, where Check Inn 99 occupies the old Christie’s, became known as Soi Dead Artists because of all the clubs there named after famous painters – Degas, Goya, Renoir, Picasso, Dali et al. Those places all had memorable neon signs forging their patron artists’ signatures, but both the clubs and the signs are almost all gone now.

Fortunately, our resident master of noir visuals, Chris Coles, has long been on a self-appointed mission to document the Bangkok night, and he’s dutifully recorded the signage that pulled in the punters.

(His effort to “bottle” the Bangkok night is a one-man undertaking, he points out with almost comical dismay – with the sole exception of Peter Klashorst, whose preferred turf is Phnom Penh. There were “hundreds of artists” on the job in old Paris and Berlin. But the contemporary Bangkok night “has” to be documented, Coles insists, because it too is “unique in the history of the world”.)

Vibrating across the walls and onto the mezzanine at Check Inn 99 are faithful renditions of the tubular beacons that once beckoned outside Thermae and Q Bar, memorable fun-palaces on Patpong and Cowboy and in Nana Plaza, even the steamy massage emporiums of Phetchaburi Road.

Coles has a wonderful story behind every one, if you get the chance to ask him, but he’s particularly pleased with this show because, thanks to the sizeable dimensions of the new Check Inn and the large and diverse crowd it attracts most nights, his signs have undergone a transformation.

“The paintings are no longer just ‘of’ the Bangkok night,” he says. “They’re now ‘in’ the Bangkok night, part of the Bangkok night, embedded in the Bangkok night.”

Coles does dream of having his work in a museum, but he’d perhaps love for this particular collection to stay where it is permanently. It could be part of the daily power supply that electrifies Check Inn, with its rotating roster of musicians led by the rousing singer Cherry backed by the band Earth and the all-day-Sunday jazz and blues sessions.

Catto-Smith seems amenable to the idea – a couple of Coles paintings have always been a cherished part of the decor there, even at its historic original incarnation at the northern end of Sukhumvit. But Coles has already had a purchase bid that would see most of the neon paintings carted off elsewhere.

It can only be hoped that the collection remains intact and reappears on public display, so that it can continue being part of this warm and inviting Bangkok night.

– “Bangkok Neon”, an exhibition of Chris Coles’ paintings, continues into December at Check Inn 99 on Sukhumvit Soi 33.

The sale price far exceeded the estimate of between 100,000 and 150,000 euros, Osenat auction house said.

The leaf was one of six cut from the crown ahead of the 1804 coronation, because the monarch considered it too heavy.

The goldsmith Martin Guillaume Biennais gave the spare leaves to each of his daughters – with the auctioned gold carving having been passed through the family to present day.

A leaf which was worn during the coronation but was later detached from the crown sold in the 1980s for 80,000 francs.

Around 400 works dedicated to the French emperor were sold at Sunday’s auction, including a decorated box engraved with gold flowers, also made by Biennais, which belonged to Napoleon’s wife Empress Josephine which sold for 150,000 euros – three times more than expected.

The inagural Bangkok Art Biennale scheduled for a year from now had global lustre attached to it this week when a string of big names were announced as participants.

The ambitious art extravaganza will showcase the works of Yugoslav Marina Abramovic, Chinese-Frenchman Huang Yong Ping, South Korean Choi Jeong Hwa, Indonesian Heri Dono and Japanese Yoshitomo Nara, along with Thailand’s own Sakarin Krue-On.

Professor Apinan Poshyananda, artistic director of the Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB) 2018, on Thursday at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre revealed the first 15 names from an anticipated list of 70 artists who will participate.

BAB artistic director Apinan Poshyananda, right, visits Wat Arun with Huang Yong Ping, left, who will mount an installation at Wat Pho. Photo courtesy of BAB 2018

Apinan and his team of curators from across Southeast Asia have asked the 15 artists to explore the theme “Beyond Bliss”. The results will be displayed at various venues around town from October 19, 2018, to February 3, 2019.

Private firms Thai Bev, Central Group, the operator of Central Embassy, and Siam Piwat – which operates Siam Discovery, Siam Centre and Siam Paragon – have invested Bt150 million for the first three biennials in a bid to promote contemporary art, Thai culture and tourism.

The Bangkok Metropolitan Administration and Tourism Authority of Thailand are also backing the festival, which will be touted as part of “Amazing Thailand Tourism Year 2018”.

More than 70 foreign and Thai artists will show their work in the city’s art centre, galleries and department stores, as well as in unconventional locales such as Lumpini Park.

“The artists will create site-specific works for the Unesco World Heritage sites Wat Pho and Wat Prayoon and the popular tourist destination Wat Arun,” Apinan noted.

“They’re free to interpret the theme of ‘Beyond Bliss’ as they wish. Their work might reflect a cheerful, blissful moment or it could even be critical of developments around the world.”

His team includes Professor Patrick Flores of the University of the Philippines, Adele Tan of the National Gallery Singapore, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre director Luckana Kunavichayanont and Sansern Milindasuta of Bangkok University.

The team is in consultation with prominent figures at leading institutions such as Japan’s Mori Art Museum, London’s Saatchi Gallery and South Korea’s Sonja Art Centre.

“With such an experienced team, we expect to see a lot more big-name artists joining BAB 2018,” Apinan said.

Apinan introduces Thai participants Sakarin Krueon, second right, and Sanitas Pradittasnee, far right. Photo courtesy of BAB 2018

Huang Yong Ping will be returning to Thailand to create an installation at Wat Pho. Thai artists Sakarin Krue-On and Sanitas Pradittasnee will also be mounting works there.

Next Tuesday (November 28), South Korean Choi Jeong Hwa will be in Bangkok visiting the site where he plans to erect an artwork and also giving a talk at the Culture Centre.

Marina Abramovic specialises in the relationships that form between performer and audience. Photo courtesy of BAB 2018

At a later date, the renowned and controversial performance artist Marina Abramovic will begin making arrangements for Thai artists to participate in BAB projects under the auspices of her eponymous institute.

Other artists named in the initial batch of participants include new-wave collectives AES+F from Russia and Art Labor from Vietnam, the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset, Frenchwoman Sara Favriau, Turkey’s Canan, Singaporean Ho Tzu Nyen, and Thais Chumpon Apisuk and Kawita Vatanajyankur.

THAILAND’S LONGEST running English-language theatre group, Bangkok Community Theatre (BCT), has been prolific this year, even managing to set the record for number of productions. Its “Circle Mirror Transformation” wrapped just two weeks ago and now BCT is back, ready to launch a new production of “A Christmas Carol”.

Says director of this production Michael J Allman: “A theatre company was thriving in a farming community. When the artistic director was asked why they were doing so well in this setting he said, ‘I think it’s because we understand each other. We both know that you plant a seed and see what happens. Sometimes you have a great crop and sometimes, the crop is not so good, but you keep on planting’. This year BCT is having a great crop.”

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (Naomi Bactol) shows Scrooge (Ethan Oulton) what his life will be like if he does not change his ways. 

BCT veteran and producer of this new production Don Harrelson adds: “‘A Christmas Carol’ was staged in 2007 at the AUA auditorium with a cast of 23. It was a big production and very successful for the BCT. I both directed and produced that show. This year’s production is very different.”

Allman nods his agreement, explaining: “I wanted to do a version that stuck close to the original story. Sometimes we get the feeling that Christmas has become far too commercial and that we see Scrooge and the rest of the characters every time we turn around. It can feel a bit cliched and hackneyed.

“For me ‘A Christmas Carol’ is about our community and how we treat our ‘fellow passengers to the grave’ as Dickens puts it. I feel we all carry a spark of the divine in us. This is a story about how one man, whose light is hidden under layers of fear and grief, is helped by spirits and his friends to re-ignite that spark and to see that light in the world around him.

Mr and Mrs Fezziwig (Mark Peterson and Hannah Davis) enjoy their Christmas party. 

“I found a script that was written for six actors and a musician. I like working with a cast between six and 10 people—[big] enough so that the actors don’t have a huge amount of lines to learn, but small enough that they can get comfortable with their fellow actors’ working methods,” Allman continues.

“Ethan Oulton plays Scrooge and the other five actors – Naomi Bactol, Mark Peterson, Peter Dee, Hannah Davis and Rebecca Shatford – play all the other characters and voice the narration. Nearly the entire script is taken from the original story in a style very much like Paul Sills’ ‘Story Theatre’, with the actors acting out the narration as they speak it.”

“The actors have brought so many ideas to the process and have really entered into the spirit of the show. The setting is minimal, leaving a lot to the imagination, but we hope there is still enough to make it interesting to the audience.”

BCT is back at Creative Industries again, after “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” a few months ago, and Allman says: “We really do have a wonderful relationship with Creative Industries. Much of that has to do with Don who’s worked with them on many shows.”

“It seems to be the right size for the productions we’ve been doing, has a great store of equipment and is in a good location. I like to use the space with the audience on three sides, but it’s great that other directors can choose to do proscenium-style productions there as well.”

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

BCT’s “A Christmas Carol” is at Creative Industries, on the second floor of M Theatre on New Phetchaburi Road between Thonglor and Ekamai on December 1, 2, 8 and 9 at 7.30pm, with a 2pm matinee on Saturdays.

The play is in English and recommended for audiences 10 years old or above.

Tickets are Bt800, available now at http://www.BangkokCommunityTheatre.com or by email Info@BangkokCommunityTheatre.com.

THANKS in part to the short distance between the two countries, I had been able to attend every single edition of the Esplanade—Theatres on the Bay’s annual dance festival since its inception in 2006.

But following two aborted landings, two refuellings in Batam, Indonesia and the lack of communication between a Thai Airways pilot and Changi Airport, my flight to the recent da:ns festival took a total of seven hours. As a result, I missed “Dance Clinic”, a highly anticipated new work by Singapore’s Choy Ka Fai in which Thailand’s Pichet Klunchun participated. A few days later, I made sure my da:ns streak continued by returning to watch the Southeast Asia premiere of Bordeaux-born and Los Angeles-based choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s company LA Dance Project.

I watched this company for the first time at the Edinburgh International Festival 2013 when it had only seven dancers. Today it has a few more and is also more diverse. That was one year after Millepied moved to the City of Angels and co-founded this company. The company’s mission “to promote new collaborative work by emerging and established artists, and to revisit influential multidisciplinary dance collaborations from the past” was as evident then in the Scottish capital as it was here in the island state.

Millepied’s “Hearts and Arrows” closed out the evening./Photo: Esplanade Theatres on the Bay

The programme started with three duets by Martha Graham, which had never been presented together. This was followed by Millepied’s 2006 duet “Closer”, set to Philip Glass’s familiar “Mad Rush”, and the two offered a nice pairing to begin the evening. The mood and tone changed but not completely, with 2013 group piece “Murder Ballades”, featuring choreography and costume design by Justin Peck, New York City Ballet’s resident choreographer, which give the company a chance to show their technical range.

After an intermission, the company performed what was meant to be the highlight – Millepied’s 2014 work “Hearts and Arrows”, for which he was commissioned by a jewellery company. With the stage stripped bare to show the lighting rigs and set to Glass’s “String Quartet No 3”, the often angular movements looked too title-literal and sponsor-loyal.

All in all, it was a pleasant evening but one that lacked surprises as whoever chose this quadruple bill probably underestimated the sophistication of the dance audience in this region.

Los Angeles was never known as a dance city and LA Dance Project’s busy touring schedule and the rising attention they’re getting is proving otherwise. That said, the audience might also want to see more input of other California or US-based artists. Otherwise, the Project could easily be based in Europe.

COMING UP THIS WEEKEND

The late Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa’s internationally renowned production of “Macbeth” will be at the Esplanade Theatre from Thursday to Saturday.

Tickets are from SG$28 to $128 (SG$40 and 50 for students and seniors), available at http://www.Sistic.com.sg.

Find out more at http://www.Esplanade.com/events/2017/macbeth.

IT ALL began by accident. After hurting his wrist, artist Oilhack started mixing paints, oil and soap in a bowl – experiments that eventually morphed into brightly coloured moving seascapes in a collaboration with fellow Frenchman Thomas Blanchard that Apple used to promote its iPhone X.

In their US debut, the pair, who form the WeAreColorful collaborative, are bringing an immersive experience – filling the main gallery space at Artechouse, a Washington venue marrying art, science and technology, with 270-degree projections of their liquid mixtures.

Varying hues, ranging from deep blues to hot pink and sparkling gold, ripple across a surface, spill onto geometric shapes and drop dramatically on flowers like milk or heavy smoke to the beat of a dreamy electronic soundtrack from Leonardo Villiger.

The “Kingdom of Colours” exhibition revives those ancient hippie light shows of liquid projections./AFP

The shapes seem huge in the projections, towering far above visitors, but Oilhack and Blanchard in fact worked on tiny surfaces sometimes no larger than five centimetres, shooting with powerful 100mm macro lenses.

“What we film, you can hold it in the palm of your hand,” Blanchard says. “A lot of people thought we were filming in swimming pools and said, ‘What’s with all this waste?’”

Hours of mixing acrylic paint, glycerophtalic oil-based paint, liquid soap, bleach and canola oil were distilled into a 15-minute sequence.

The oil’s reaction to the paint forms small beads that come undone in what the artists describe as “explosions”.

“It’s very ephemeral,” says Oilhack. “It opens up like lace. When the music picks up, that’s when we show the explosions.”

Artists Thomas Blanchard, left, and Oilhack turn on and tune in./AFP

In one portion of the video, marbles and prisms dramatically shift very slowly while colours spew out onto them.

To create the effect, the artists used strings that are attached to stones to suspend small wooden shapes measuring just a few millimetres, then injected liquids into the space. The resulting projections are very soothing.

“For a few minutes, we forget our problems,” says Blanchard, who gave the rights to one of his videos to an Australian children’s hospital, where staff said it calmed the sick children.

“It’s therapeutic.”

The artists hail from the city of Lyon, the French creative centre that also served as home base to Adrien M & Claire B (Adrien Mondot and Claire Bardainne), who created the interactive abstract landscapes for Artechouse’s inaugural June-September show.

Artechouse co-founder Sandro Kereselidze calls technology a “fresh, new form of art”.

“Is it performance? Is it fine art? It’s like the Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’.”

To take the psychedelic experience to another level, evening visitors can virtually augment their drinks at the bar in the mezzanine, which overlooks the projections and the guests experiencing them below, lounging on benches and comfy grey poufs.

Cocktails topped with an edible wafer come alive with the venue’s phone app, showing smoke or bubbles of colour lifting out of the glass.

The persistent fascination for Kafka’s style and for his mysterious characters provides plenty of room for interpretation. In a natural and rational way, Kafka combines obscure and surreal scenarios with the real world, a motif which today is used in a variety of literary and cinematic formats.

The festival poses the question of how choreography, physical movements, installations, sculpture and visual art interact to address animalism, gender and identity, folding and unfolding material or bodies. Conceived as a multidisciplinary approach, the festival focuses on the relationship between material and choreographic design, perception and literature interpretation, design of inner and outer space of the human body and interaction and participation between different media

Yoko Seyama is participating in the Unfolding Kafka Festival for the second time. This year, the Berlin-based Japanese artist presents, for the first time in Southeast Asia, an art installation where light folds and unfolds to continuously modify the surrounding space in various hues. Her clever use of physics principles transformed into an artwork gives light a somehow more tangible quality.

“Red Peter” will be presented for the second time in Thailand, but in a new version in collaboration with Yoko Seyama and her art installation, Saiyah #2.3 on Saturday. At the beginning of 2016, Jitti Chompee was invited for a residency project supported by Kylian Foundation and Korzo Theatre in The Hague to create a new piece: “Red Peter”. Inspired by Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy”, Red Peter presents Chompee’s exploration of freedom through his artistic choices in breaking the boundaries between the traditional and the contemporary. Following the 2016 premiere’s great success in the Netherlands, “Red Peter” was performed in Vietnam at the Ho Chi Minh International Dance Festival 2016, again in the Netherlands at Cadance Festival 2017 and in South Korea at the Changmu Performing Arts Festival 2017.

Roni Chadash is an independent artist, based in Tel Aviv, who is making her first trip to Southeast Asia with the support of the Israeli Embassy in Thailand. She’ll premiere two works on Friday. “NO-Body”, first created as an art video, blurs the line between the genre of art installation and dance performance.

Also on Friday, Hiroaki Umeda will present “Duo”, showing how sound design, media and dancing can mingle into an intense contemporary performance.

The Head of the Filmmuseum Muenchen (Collections), Stefan Droessler, will give lecture “Kafka Goes to the Movies” on Saturday, talking about Kafka’s world and reality through excerpts of rare selected reconditioned silent films, with excerpts of his diaries, pictures from the places he lived in and cinemas he visited and clips of the movies he saw in the beginning of the 20th century. The lecture will be conducted in English.

Find out more at http://www.UnfoldingKafkaFestival.com or Facebook.com/events/1494761490559783/.

Developed from Wee’s recent artist-in-residency at Singapore’s Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), the installation comprises two dozen cloth panels printed over with photographic images, arranged in the shape of a tall maze. This labyrinth recalls the dark rooms and other lurid dimensions of queer cruising, as well as a theatrical experience of barriers and walls. Playing up the eroticised pursuit of signs and misdirection, sexual ‘orientation’ in Wee’s installation becomes a literal search for direction in the cities he’s intimate with.

Photographic images printed on chiffon and polyester silk are pushed to the edge of illegible abstraction, provoking questions of recognition and misrecognition in our navigation of queer spaces.

Wee is an artist and a writer working between architecture, art, photography and poetry. A graduate of Harvard University, the New School New York and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Programme, he directs Grey Projects in Singapore, an artists’ space, library and residency programme. An editor for the poetry journal Softblow, his writings have appeared in multiple anthologies, including Best Singaporean Short Stories 2016. He is a Singapore Art Museum Voters Prize Winner.

H Gallery Bangkok is at 201 Sathorn Soi 12 and opens daily from 10am to 6pm except Tuesdays.

For more information, call (085) 021 5508.

Professor Apinan Poshyananda, artistic director of Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB) 2018, on Thursday announced the first 15 of 70 artists participating at the BAB at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC).

Apinan with his curatorial team from across Asean selected the 15 artists to explore their talents in the theme of “Beyond Bliss”. They will display their artworks around town from October 19, 2018 to February 3, 2019.

ThaiBev, along with Bangkok shopping centres including Siam Discovery, Siam Centre, Siam Paragon and Central Embassy have spent Bt150 million on the first Biennale. The organisers aim for it to continue for three editions.

Over 70 international and Thai artists will show their works in the art centre, galleries, department stores and unconventional art spaces such as Lumpini Park, Wat Pho, Wat Arun and Wat Prayoon.

Chinese-French artist Huang Yong Ping returned to Thailand again for creating new installation in Wat Pho. Yesterday He also gave a lecture at BACC.

Besides four big names who have been working Apinan for decades, other artists include new wave artist collectives AES+F from Russia, Art Labor from Vietnam, and duo Elmgreen & Dragset from Denmark and Norway. Also represented witll be French artist Sara Favriau, Turkish artist namely Canan and Singaporean Ho Tzu Nyen, along with Thais Chumpon Apisuk, Kawita Vatanajyankur and Sanitas Pradittasnee.

Sanitas Pradittasnee

BAB will be part of the “Amazing Thailand Tourism Year 2018” campaign from the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

The whopping price dwarfed the previous record for the most expensive piece of art sold at auction, set at $179.4 million for Pablo Picasso’s “The Women of Algiers (Version O)” by Christie’s in 2015.

The auction house says “Salvator Mundi” or “Savior of the World” is one of fewer than 20 Da Vinci paintings in existence that are generally accepted as from the Renaissance master’s own hand.

All other known paintings by Da Vinci are held in museum or institutional collections.

Dated back by the auction house to around 1500, the oil on panel sold after 18 minutes of frenzied bidding in a historic sale, the star lot of the November art season in the US financial capital.

Whoops and applause rippled through the showroom as the bids quickly escalated into unchartered territory, led by rivals on the telephone.

“An historic moment here. We’ll wait,” said auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen in a brief pause in bidding at $300 million.

He eventually hammered the painting at $450 million. The final price came to $450.3 million including the buyer’s premium.

The price throws shade at its Russian billionaire seller, who has sued a Swiss art dealer in Monaco for allegedly swindling him into parting with $127.5 million for the work in 2013.

Dmitry Rybolovlev, the boss of soccer club AS Monaco, accuses Yves Bouvier of conning him out of hundreds of million dollars by overcharging him on a string of deals, and pocketing the difference.

“Salvator Mundi” at been at the heart of that court battle.

Bouvier bought the work at Sotheby’s for $80 million in 2013. He resold it within days to the Russian tycoon, for $127.5 million, netting a $47.5 million profit. Bouvier denies any wrongdoing.

The work was exhibited at The National Gallery in London in 2011, after years of research trying to document its authenticity after it was found, mistaken for a copy, in a regional US auction in 2005.

Before that it had disappeared for years, previously fetching a mere 45 pounds ($60 in today’s money) in 1958 as a believed copy.

Christie’s said pre-sale that the painting’s rarity was difficult to overstate. For years it was presumed to have been destroyed, emerging only in 2005 when it was purchased from a US estate.

“For auction specialists, this is pretty much the Holy Grail,” Loic Gouzer, co-chairman of Christie’s Americas postwar and contemporary art department, has said. “It doesn’t really get better than that.”