Masterpiece was hanging above an elderly French woman's hot plate
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
This Telegraph article has more details: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/10706025/Th...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rare-roman-mosaic-...
Edit: The official PR from Louvre has a bit more info: "For this exceptional purchase, the Louvre is using part of the revenue generated by the Louvre Abu Dhabi brand license - the Société des Amis du Louvre contributing the final million euros that made the acquisition possible."
The French antiques law doesn't allow expropriation of French art owners, only temporary export bans and right of first refusal for any purchase. So the only way it got sold for less than the auction price is if the owner separately negotiated a lower price for the Louvre, but that would be against their own interests, since they'd either get the 24M from the art dealers or from Louvre.
Do they pay the price including the substantial auction house fees?
[0]: https://curiousaboutart.com/business-of-art/list-of-freeport...
It’s a good thing for the people who will be able to see it, either now or in the future, and for the people who will be able to study it. It’s not great when works of art end up buried in archives, but it’s a disgrace when they end up in private collections, never to be seen again.
The buyer don’t lose anything. They can throw a tantrum because they don’t get their nice picture and it’s really too sad. It’s a bad thing for the people who built a business exfiltrating artistic pieces out of their country, but fuck them. It’s difficult to feel bad for the guy who got only €24M instead of €26M, honestly.
If you think it's a good thing that government can swoop in and take something they didn't earn via bidding for. You need to get your head on straight because there are many things you or your friends might possess that may look mighty fine to some government guy in the future and you want strong property rights to protect you.
Also, it's intensely weird to say a government should be able to export ban and right of first refusal anything as foolish as art. What's next? Export ban and right of first refusal on all tinder dates about to be consumated? It's utterly bizarre. If you want something and it's for sale, pay for it at the auction where you have the chance to get it, just like everyone else.
On the contrary, the final price being (a bit) lowered (theoretically) is a good thing for society, and by society I mean the taxpayers. The Louvre is partially funded using public money.
I haven’t seen a complete study of where and how that painting moved since it was done, but there are plenty of possibilities that don’t involve anything dodgy.
As far as I understand the law allows any significant art piece in France to be deemed a National Treasure. Think of it more as an important asset for the country rather than something that was made in France or by a French person.
In French the definition is that it is important to the national "patrimoine", which is the same word used to refer to someone's assets/estate.
Even inside Romance languages, false friends exist, so I wouldn’t assume the meanings are exactly the same in Spanish and French. (Obligado vs. Obrigado, for the classic Spanish Portuguese example)
That's correct. But as a translator, that's a word I wouldn't even consider to use as a translation for patrimonio or similar. Almost no English speaker would understand me. At the very best that person would consider my translation as very idiosyncratic or quirky.
> Even inside Romance languages, false friends exist,
Also correct, but in this case the cognates have almost equivalent meanings. See, for example: https://dictionary.reverso.net/french-spanish/patrimoine
That’s it. There is very little French artistry. The French masters came a bit later and have their own museum which I wish to visit one day.
Doesn’t matter _how_ it only matters that the French pay attention. Italy doesn’t need one painting, the entire country is stunning and financially speaking “suffering” from tourism. I mean it is a huge source of income, but they lost the “locals quality of life” balance with tourism long time ago.
And I'm not totally sure, but I would bet that a lot of early medieval Christian art is French? I mean the Carolingians / Merovingians must have left something no?
And if the Louvre doesn't have impressionist art I would be totally disappointed? You're probably talking about the tennis court museum (edit: Jeu de paume museum, not far from the Louvre), but still? I think the problem is that the Louvre is so big than you're gonna miss stuff.
In terms of French art, the hall of 19th century French paintings is impressive, and interesting as you can clearly see which paintings are in the guidebook as "must see"- there is usually a huge crowd around Liberty Leading the People (the painting you mention), a somewhat smaller one around The Raft of the Medusa, and paintings like the huge and spectacular Coronation of Napoleon on the opposite wall or the powerful The Lictors Bring Brutus the Bodies of his Sons further along are essentially ignored.
The painting is from ~1280, and it's currently 2023, which is less than 800 years later, so Italy by definition can't have been founded 1100 years after the painting. (Can't have been... couldn't have been... can't wouldn't have been? What is the past-in-the-future perfect tense?)
Thanks grandma!
Thanks to the family wise choice to call an appraiser and the appraiser's good eye for art.
btw is it normal for families to call appraisers? Or was it likely grandma had lots of nice antique things. Or maybe was wealthy (mentioning a "hot plate" indicates probably not).
In France, yes. They aren't art specialists, but it helps with dividing the estate.
Well, sorry to say but no, it is not "normal" in the sense every family does this - something only seen for rich people or those who have problems dividing wealth
It’s something a notary require to execute the deceased’s will, you cannot not do it in general. You need it also for houses and buildings, in which case an assessment from an estate agent is usually enough.
When my mother passed away, my sister contacted a firm to handle the estate sale. They had several people who appraised things. How qualified were they? It varied. The guys who appraised the jewelry and antique furniture were spot on; but, the one who looked at all the Asian stuff seemed clueless. (Since they were getting a percentage, you'd think they'd try to be accurate.)
It read to me like they were (rightly!) concerned she was disposing of things she didn't want any more inappropriately, without recognising what she had - she couldn't remember where it came from. If they didn't know either, then fair enough and good call I think. Local auctioneer would be a pretty reasonable/cheap starting point (but decent chance of recognising when to consult a specialist) if there's no particular reason to think there's anything very valuable I would think.
Because it's grandma who found the art piece and not her grandkids and because grandma live in France [1], grandkids shall see approximately six millions EUR (divided by the number of grandkids) of the 20 millions EUR this would sell for.
Inheritance taxes above 1.8m in France are 45%. Grandma to kids: 55%. Kids to grandkids: another 55%.
I mean, three kids getting 2m each is nice but let's not kid ourselves here: it's the state that can thank grandma as over two generations they'll be taking 14 millions EUR out of 20 millions EUR.
And grandma is not free to do what she wants with the money: should she decide to give the money, the donation would be taxed at inheritance rate (45%: which I'm sure komrades find totally cromulent and probably even not enough).
(which shall greatly help a state-owned entity like the Louvre museum to acquire the masterpiece btw)
Uncle Sam (well, it's french cousin): "Thanks grandma!" indeed.
[1] I live in a country which has zero inheritance taxes and zero taxes when donating money and zero taxes on capital gains (if you held things like stocks/art pieces/collectible cars or whatever really besides real estate for more than six months). Income tax goes as high as 42% though but after you've paid your income tax, your money is yours and you basically do what the fuck you want with it.
It’s much more fair to tax inheritance, which is something you get just by chance, compared to income, which is something you have to work for. Low inheritance tax also leads to wealth concentration over generations, and worse inequality. This is compounded because rich people get a lot of their wealth from capital gains, which usually are not taxed as income, so income tax is in effect a tax on the middle class.
I don’t know enough about Estonia to comment on how well it works, but without more detail it sounds really bad.
What is "fair" is subjective. Inheritance is only by chance if you consider family ties to have zero value. Building something over generations, for example a company or a farm, becomes difficult with high inheritance tax.
Well, no. The family in which you are born is effectively random. You don’t do anything to be born from your parents. Family ties have quite a lot of value, but material profit from them is not something you deserve as an individual, in the sense that it’s not something you get from your own efforts or qualities.
> Building something over generations, for example a company or a farm, becomes difficult with high inheritance tax.
That is the red herring we see when politicians want to manipulate the middle class into supporting something that is actually harmful to them. Inheritance tax is progressive like income tax. We can have a system that optimises for medium-size companies and businesses but limits the emergence of larger ones. When we talk about wealth accumulation that is harmful to society, we talk about tens of millions and up. Think multinational companies, not local farms.
Sure, the story of the family farm or company that gets built over generation is nice. But these kinds are threatened by larger competitors that have more leverage, power, political connections (and so public subsidies), and tools to undercut them, not inheritance tax. They would be much better without these huge mega-farms we incentivise and that are impoverishing them. Same for small businesses in a different setting. A family business needs to be quite big to be threatened by inheritance taxes. But it just have to exist to be threatened by the huge companies that insufficient wealth redistribution helps thriving.
I've seen some screwed up ideas on what "random" means before, but... c'mon.
It's not random in any meaningful sense of the word. There are some uncomfortable truths that must be dealt with here, but to hide from them by saying that some arbitrary individual might've been born to a different family requires purely decadent levels of denialism.
> We can have a system that optimises for medium-size companies and businesses
We can't. Because even the tiniest businesses and farms are already multimillionaire levels. Medium-sized are far larger still. If you set these taxes to avoid harming those, the thresholds for taxes to be applicable would be so bizarrely high that we'd all laugh and shake our heads.
Inheritance taxes are tools designed to teach the middle class to not bother trying, because the lifetime it would take to accumulate enough wealth to set the grandkids up to do well will see it all taken by the state. They're harmful to the middle class, and not the billionaires.
The billionaires are still young enough to find some place or mechanism to avoid the inheritance tax. They're beyond it. It's the lesser folk that can't avoid it. But I guess it's not all bad, even if your great-grandchildren have crippling levels of student debt, at least they can sleep well at night knowing that it helped purchase JDAM bombs for Sudanese weddings.
> Inheritance tax is progressive like income tax. ... > Think multinational companies, not local farms. ... > A family business needs to be quite big to be threatened by inheritance taxes.
Depends on which country you're referring to. In Sweden before 2005 inheritance tax was a flat 30 % for any inheritance above $60k. Which meant that children would need to pay a lot of money in taxes just to keep the house they grew up in after their parents passed away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
Belgium tops that list at 79.5 % but even in the USA it can reach 51.6 %.
In 1975 the author Astrid Lindgren famously had a marginal rate of 102 % on her income tax in Sweden, so the more money she earned the less she had left after taxes...
http://ianangell.com/blog-entries/the-pomperipossa-effect/pa...
Yup in Belgium income rate can be as high as 50% (down from more than that but the max income rate is now "only" 505) but moreover if you're self-employed (without a company), you have in addition to these 50%, social taxes of 20%... Effectively putting you as high as 70%. So it's not as high as 79.5% anymore (I think the Wikipedia article is incorrect) but 69% sure.
And then on the 31% you manage to save, everything you buy has 21% VAT tax and if you still manage to save money, you'll have to pay at least 30% tax if you make any capital gains (more if they decide to add your capital gains to your income and for that the process is entirely arbitrary and anybody who says the contrary has no idea what it's talking about).
People have to understand I left my home country which was literally the one topping that Wikipedia link you gave about the most taxing countries in the world.
Fun story: one day a local IRS man came to my place and literally told me, after opening the "file" they had on me: "Had I opened your file before coming, I'd have realized there was no money to take" (because I had filed my taxes correctly). This made me stick to my stomach.
Then I googled the dude's name and, in addition to being an IRS agent, he was also on local voting lists, to be a local politicians, cumulating IRS agent pay and local politician job (of course on a socialist list).
So (quite a while ago now) I just gave Belgium the middle finger and left.
Country ranks 6th in the list of most happy country in the world (Switzerland is 4th).
Why would people want a revolution?
It is socially oriented in the way that the middle class pay for the poor (which is great, I pay my share and am not complaining about that), but apparently national solidarity stops being a factor once you’re rich enough.
America has enormous inequality but the society is fluid and vast majority of rich are first-generation rich and a good (but not too big) chunk of them even come from poor families. Europe has little inequality comparatively but on a flip side, it effectively has a caste system. Only people who break through it are foreigners who already arrived with cash.
Much, much, much better for everybody.
Money is nice but passed a certain point, the real problems are rarely solved with more money.
Health insurance is a social tax. There are other social taxes: pension tax, unemployment tax etc. Mostly these are fixed rate taxes (i.e. the tax rate is not income dependent). In some countries there is an upper bound on income that is taxed by social tax.
The Danish social security system is financed primarily through ordinary tax revenue and only very limited social security contributions for employees and employers.
Public healthcare is one of the best in the world. I pay my social security taxes, which benefit everybody (including me).
Given that the first 100k are not taxed and that there are three kids, only about 14 millions will be taxed at the 45% rate, not 20.
Note that we are talking about each kid making 6,67M€ (four centuries of minimum wage, three centuries of median wage).
If they earned their money through their labour instead of through their birth, they would actually be taxed more (IR + CSG + CRDS).
As for the grandkids, there are a bazillion ways to reduce the tax bill: life insurance is not inheritance-taxed, you can donate money to your kids before your death (about 300k€ per kid every 15 years before it’s taxed - if there are three kids, three grandkids per kid and everyone does a little tax planning you can give 9 grands kids * 300k€ * say give them money at 0, 15, 30, 45 and 60 yo that’s 13,5M€ originally from the grandma that won’t even count as inheritance, etc.).
Yes but the "progressivity" is harsh. Anything over 500 K per kid is already at 30% of taxation and anything over 1.7m is at 45%.
Also for one grandma, the n for the number of kids tends to not tend towards infinity but more towards something like 2.
So although you're right that it's not 45% on 20 m EUR (actual painting seems to be worth a bit more than that but it's to simply) but it's close. Because with two kids and the 100 K EUR excluded, you're still quickly at insane brackets rates.
For one kid I have the actual rate (I now did the computation) at 43% (instead of 45%) and for two kids I have the actual rate at 41.6%.
I understand that you're technically right to talk about n kids but it's a bit disingenuous to talk about "progressivity" of the tax rate when the effective tax rate is likely going to be 41.6% or 43% instead of the 45% I took as a shortcut.
And at 90 years old sadly the inheritance planning ain't going to be very effective. Even her kids are likely already 65 to 70 y/o, so their own inheritance planning won't allow many donation every 15 years.
It's still very much:
(french IRS): "Thank you grandma!".
My personal theory about this high inheritance tax is that it's real purpose is to keep people in a slave-like state in respect to big corporations and the state itself. Having too many people escape the rat race and thus having time to think for themselves or freedom to go elsewhere is seen as a real danger for those in power.
I think the issue is that French inheritance taxation has both a very high facial rate and massive amounts of exemptions / loopholes. People that think they can grok the fiscal system in a few minutes look at the high nominal rates , not the loopholes.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150123-7-masterpieces-...
"The Louvre will display the newly acquired artwork along with Cimabue’s Maestà at an exhibition opening next spring."
How many years did this woman remain 90 years old? That's the real mystery in all this.