Millionaire can’t protect his art from his elbow

PICASSO’S famed Dream painting turned into a nightmare for Las Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn when he accidentally gave the multimillion dollar canvas an elbow.

Wynn had just finalised a $139 million (€111m) sale to another collector of his painting, called Le Rêve (The Dream), when he poked a finger-sized hole in the artwork while showing it to friends at his Las Vegas office a couple of weeks ago. Mr Wynn’s office has only now confirmed the story.

Director and screenwriter Nora Ephron, who witnessed and related the incident in her blog on the Huffington Post website (www.huffingtonpost.com), said Mr Wynn had raised his hand to show the group something about Picasso’s 1932 portrait of his mistress Marie-Therese Walter.

“At that moment, his elbow crashed backward right through the canvas. There was a terrible noise,” Ms Ephron wrote, noting that Mr Wynn — who often gestures with his hands when he speaks — has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that damages peripheral vision.

“Smack in the middle ... was a black hole the size of a silver dollar. ‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘Look what I’ve done. Thank goodness it was me.’”

Mr Wynn’s office yesterday confirmed the story, an account of which also appeared in this week’s New Yorker. Both accounts said he had decided to release the buyer from the sale agreement and to repair and keep the painting himself.

Mr Wynn, a millionaire casino developer and art collector, developed The Mirage and Bellagio resorts in Las Vegas in the 1990s, which spearheaded a profusion of luxury hotels and casinos on the Las Vegas Strip.

Wynn bought the work for $48.4m (€38.64m) in 1997. He had agreed to sell the painting to art collector Steven Cohen for $139m, which would have been $4m (€3.19m) higher than the $135m (€107.82m) that cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder paid in July for Gustav Klimt’s 1907 portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I.