Divorce can be a nasty thing especially if you are a Wall Street billionaires. Here is a story of Bill & Sue Gross whom Forbes reports has a net worth of $2.5 billion. When couple decided to split there was one thing they did had to decide who will keep and that was Picasso's famous Le Repos painting.
Pablo Picasso, Le Repos, 1932, a highlight of Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art evening sale. Courtesy of Sotheby's
The painting was created in 1932 and features Marie-Thérèse Walter, a 17-year-old French model whom Picasso began a relationship with when he was 45 and still living with his first wife, Olga Khokhlova, and their five-year-old son. Picasso's affair with Walter started in 1930. In 1935, when Khokhlova found out about the relationship, Walter was living in an apartment near the family. In 1936, Walter had a daughter with Picasso, whom she brought along when she moved into a 17th-century château in Normandy.
Sue & Bill Gross flipped the coin and Sue won. But Sue didn't even need to win the bet, because Sue already taken and sold the painting before and replaced it with a fake. Picasso's Le Repos painting features thick black lines outlining the profile and hands of Walter, whose skin is a mix of violets and white, against a green and red backdrop. It was easy to Sue to copy. Bill found out about this when he told Sue he will arrange to transfer the painting from house to another and Sue answered, "It wasn't necessary".
Back in 2015, Bill told an investor that his wife, aka "the artist in the family," "likes to paint replicas of some of the famous pieces, using an overhead projector to copy the outlines and then just sort of fill in the spaces."
The paining made it's way to Sotheby's and will be put up for an auction.
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