Masterpieces haunted by brutal past could send records tumbling at Sotheby’s

Twelve rarely seen masterpieces glowing with life and beauty will go on sale at Sotheby’s in New York on Wednesday.

The collection, which resembles a miniature Courtauld gallery, includes Van Gogh’s towering chestnut tree, Monet’s shimmering vista of the Tuileries and Paul Cézanne’s Arlequin, a portrait of his son in a red and black diamond-patterned costume whose angularity pushes into abstraction and must have inspired Picasso’s Harlequins.

Sotheby’s has titled its auction Legendary because the Blaquier-Arrieta collection from which these canvases come is regarded as so tasteful and high class. The paintings, acquired by a wealthy Argentinian couple mostly in the 1970s, are what you would expect to see in a museum, not their Buenos Aires apartment as old photos show. What a shame they are stained by allegations of abduction and murder.

The Blaquier-Arrieta collection was funded by sugar, but this is not about the history of sugar and enslavement in the Americas. Carlos Pedro Blaquier, the head of the Ledesma sugar company, was suspected of being involved in the “disappearance” of hundreds of people in the Jujuy region one July night in 1976, known as the Night of the Blackout. The local electricity, which was under Ledesma’s control, cut out, allowing arrests to be made in darkness. Witnesses described people being carried off in Ledesma’s company vans. Survivors testify they were held and tortured on the company’s premises.

It was one of the many atrocities carried out across Argentina between 1976 and 1983 by the military dictatorship. On the Night of the Blackout, according to the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, most of the approximately 400 people seized were trade unionists who worked for Blaquier’s Ledesma sugar company. Up to 55 are still missing, presumed murdered.

Blaquier was 85 when charges were finally brought against him in 2012, long after the dictatorship’s fall. He was accused of “being the main participant in 29 cases of unlawful detention”. But it never went to trial because legal appeals delayed proceedings until his death in 2023 aged 95.

But this is about beauty, right? Well, beauty and money. It is predicted that Van Gogh’s Châtaigniers en fleurs and Cézanne’s Arlequin may sell for record prices for both artists: the Van Gogh was estimated “in the region of $180m” (£136m), Sotheby’s said. That would soundly beat the record for one of his works, which is $117m. Could it really make that, given it is not one of his most famous paintings?

The answer is quite possibly. This captivatingly melancholic masterpiece depicts a voluptuous, flowing, windswept street in Auvers-sur-Oise, where he moved to in 1890 after leaving the asylum. But when you look harder, everything is slightly unbalanced and out of kilter, from the yellow road and deep blue sky to the immense tree that dwarfs people below it. A storm is coming. He would shoot himself a couple of months after finishing this painting.

A Van Gogh no longer has to be one of his most famous to sell for megabucks. He is so universally idolised that even his socks would sell for millions - and Châtaigniers en Fleurs really is ravishing.

The blood spilt in the Night of the Blackout haunts this sale. Sotheby’s ignores the troubling side of the story in its publicity material, despite it all being in the public domain.

“We are of course aware of the reports concerning Carlos Pedro Blaquier,” said a Sotheby’s spokesperson. “He was never actually convicted of a crime; in fact, he maintained his innocence throughout, stating he had no knowledge that his company’s resources were being used to facilitate illegal activity. Naturally, we defer to the courts and the legal process on matters like this … we do not believe they detract from the quality or significance of the artworks themselves.”

And so this auction will write the “legend” of the Blaquier-Arrieta collection into the history books, while the alleged crimes of Blaquier and the Ledesma sugar company slip into footnotes. This is about visibility. I can see the bright reds, blues, greens and yellows in André Derain’s fauvist masterpiece Boats at the Port of Collioure (Lot 2). But I can’t see the up to 55 people taken away that night in 1976 who have never been found. They are gone, disappeared. Let the bidding commence.