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Billionare buys art collection
LONDON (AP)
An art collection belonging to the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich has been sold to a Russian billionaire for substantially more than $40 million, Sotheby’s auction house said Monday.
Alisher Usmanov, one of Russia’s richest men, said he bought the trove of Russian artworks in order to return them to their homeland.
Usmanov, who recently bought a nearly 15 percent stake in London’s Arsenal soccer team for $150 million, said he intends to hand the collection over to the state Sotheby’s did not disclose the sale price, but said it was “substantially higher” than the top pre-auction estimate of $40 million.
Rostropovich, who died in April at age 80, was considered one of the finest cellists of the 20th century, and was a staunch opponent of Soviet-era repression.
He fled the Soviet Union in the early 1970s after sheltering the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, settling in Paris with his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya.
The couple amassed one of the world’s finest private collections of Russian art, including glassware, porcelain and works by leading painters such as Ilya Repin and Boris Grigoriev.
