Red Man One by Jean-Michel Basquiat
The United States Department of Justice will be auctioning off several works of art confiscated as a result of the 1MDB scandal.
Nearly a decade after the 1MDB scandal first broke, developments continue to emerge from one of the largest corruption cases in history. For those unfamiliar, the 1MDB scandal involved prominent Malaysian politicians and businesspeople, including former Prime Minister Najib Razak, who embezzled billions of dollars from the country’s sovereign wealth fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). The fallout resulted in investigations in several countries, including Malaysia, the United States, Britain, Switzerland, Australia, and several others. The highest estimates, those given by Swiss investigators, place the amount of stolen money at $7 billion. Buying assets such as real estate and art was one of the most common ways to hide this money. And investigators are still in the process of confiscating these assets. The last time I wrote about this was a little over a year ago, when the Department of Justice confiscated a Picasso drawing previously owned by 1MDB’s former general counsel Jasmine Loo Ai Swan. And now, several seized works of art connected to the scandal will be auctioned off by the US Marshal Service through a small auction house in Texas.
The confiscated artworks include two pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, one by Pablo Picasso, and one by Diane Arbus. Bidding opened online on July 16th and is set to close on September 4th. Each lot has only received one or two bids in advance thus far, yet already these four pieces are set to make millions of dollars. The most valuable of the four 1MDB works is the Basquiat painting Red Man One, created in 1982 from acrylic paint and oilstick, along with paper and a variety of objects laid down on canvas in a collage. The work was previously sold at a contemporary evening sale at Sotheby’s in New York for $3.55 million w/p. So far, only one potential buyer has submitted a bid for $2,975,000. The other Basquiat, a 1982 crayon drawing called Self-Portrait, has received two bids, bringing the current price as of August 1st up to $852.5K. The Picasso is a 1939 oil painting called Tête de taureau et broc, which has received one bid of $850K. And finally, the Diane Arbus photograph, Child with a Toy Hand Grenade, dates to 1962. It’s received the most bids so far, bringing the current price to $4.4K, far below the auction average for her work. However, there’s still over a month to go before the lots close. The proceeds from the auction will be added to the nearly $1.5 billion the United States has returned to Malaysia.