How do I even begin to relay the grandness and magnitude of this story? For starters, this is one of my favorite things I’ve read (articles, books, tweets) in recent memory. It begins with a distraught widow hiring a lawyer to stop someone from taking away her horses, a relationship which reveals an unthinkable betrayal and sparks a series of events explaining the vast fortune of the Wildenstein family—a family that isn’t just a giant player in the secretive underground world of art collecting, “they helped pioneer it.” (Picasso was given two floors in one of the family’s buildings in 1918 in exchange for a first look at his work.)
The sprawling epic spans three centuries and includes jaw-dropping deceits, inconceivable amounts of money, free ports, tax havens, multiple “compounds” spread across the world, the Rockefellers, Nazis, two children (Guy and Alec Wildenstein) who weren’t allowed play dates, and a father (Daniel Wildenstein) who took them to brothels when they were teens, in hopes they’d be happy with prostitutes instead of wives—to avoid pricey things like prenups and divorces. And a lawyer at the center of it, Claude Dumont Beghi, trying to unravel it all.
Not only is it a remarkable story, but it’s also a remarkable piece of reporting by Rachel Corbett. And, frankly, it makes Succession look like the Roy family was fighting over ownership of a family coffee shop. Except the Wildenstein fight is all true. (And not over yet.) —Lauren Tousignant