Former Tate Director Chris Dercon Urges Saudi Arabia to Lend ‘Salvator Mundi’, Which Remains MIA, to the Louvre

Chris Dercon, the former director of
Tate Modern who now heads the French museum organization Réunion des
Musées Nationaux–Grand Palais, is urging the “owner or owners” of the infamous
painting Salvator
Mundi to lend it to the
Louvre for the museum’s current Leonardo da Vinci
blockbuster. 

“To have the painting in the
exhibition in the Louvre would have been a win-win situation for
all parties involved. I am sad… but the doors are still open,”
Dercon said, as reported
by Agency France
Presse “There is still a way
to share this work not only with the specialists but also with the
public.”

Dercon was speaking at Saudi
Arabia’s “Davos in the Desert” conference, organized by crown
prince Mohammed bin Salman, the purported buyer of
the $450 million painting. Representatives at the Louvre in Paris and
Abu Dhabi remain tight-lipped about the whereabouts of the work and
the status of any loan request. 

The Louvre’s show celebrating
the 500th anniversary of
Leonardo’s death opened
October 24. The Salvator
Mundi was conspicuously
absent, despite the continued hopes of curators, who had even gone
so far as to prepare two copies of the exhibition catalogue—one
with the world’s most expensive painting, and one without.
Instead, a copy of the
composition, attributed
to Leonardo’s studio, hangs on its own. 

The painting was
sold to much
fanfare at Christie’s
New York in November 2017, but the details of the deal are still
shrouded in mystery. Initial reports identified
Saudi prince Badr bin Abdullah as the buyer, but it was almost
immediately alleged that
he had been acting on behalf of Bin Salman. Adding to the intrigue,
the Louvre Abu Dhabi
then claimed to be the
painting’s owner, suggesting Salvator Mundi had been donated to Abu Dhabi’s department of
culture and tourism. (Artnet News’s Kenny Schachter
reported in June that
the painting was being housed on Bin Salman’s yacht.) 

Salvator Mundi
has not been
seen since the fateful
auction and it failed to
appear at a planned
exhibition at the Louvre Abu
Dhabi in fall 2018.

Several Leonardo authorities have
since come forward to
contest the work’s attribution to the Renaissance master, leading to
speculation that
the Louvre would have credited the painting not to the artist, but to his
studio. It’s possible that the owners of the Salvator Mundi are refusing to lend it to the Louvre unless it
is identified as an autograph Leonardo. 

 “Leonardo da Vinci” is
on view at the Louvre, Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France, October
24, 2019–February 4, 2020.

The post Former Tate Director Chris Dercon Urges Saudi Arabia to
Lend ‘Salvator Mundi’, Which Remains MIA, to the Louvre
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