Van Gogh's $180m Chestnut Trees Head Sotheby's Sale with a Dark Past

Sotheby's New York will auction twelve rarely seen masterpieces on Wednesday, with Van Gogh's Châtaigniers en fleurs estimated "in the region of $180m" (£136m) — a figure that would beat the artist's current record of $117m by a wide margin.

The sale, titled Legendary, draws its works from the Blaquier-Arhieta collection: paintings acquired mostly in the 1970s by a wealthy Argentinian couple. Sotheby's compares the ensemble to a miniature Courtauld gallery. Alongside the Van Gogh, it includes Monet's vista of the Tuileries, André Derain's fauvist Boats at the Port of Collioure (Lot 2), and Cézanne's Arlequin — a portrait of his son in a red and black diamond-patterned costume whose angularity pushes toward abstraction and, the source notes, must have inspired Picasso's Harlequins.

Old photographs show these canvases hanging in the couple's Buenos Aires apartment — museum-grade pictures in a private home.

Where did the money come from?

The collection was funded by sugar. Carlos Pedro Blaquier headed the Ledesma sugar company, and he was suspected of involvement in the "disappearance" of hundreds of people in the Jujuy region on one July night in 1976, known as the Night of the Blackout. The local electricity, under Ledesma's control, cut out, allowing arrests in darkness. Witnesses described people being carried off in Ledesma's company vans. Survivors testify they were held and tortured on the company's premises.

The Night of the Blackout was one of many atrocities committed across Argentina between 1976 and 1983 by the military dictatorship. According to the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, most of the approximately 400 people seized that night were trade unionists who worked for Ledesma. Up to 55 are still missing, presumed murdered.

Charges finally reached Blaquier in 2012, when he was 85. Prosecutors accused him of "being the main participant in 29 cases of unlawful detention." The case never went to trial. Legal appeals delayed proceedings until his death in 2023, aged 95.

What does Sotheby's say?

The auction house's publicity material makes no mention of the allegations, although all of it is in the public domain. Asked, a Sotheby's spokesperson said: "We are of course aware of the reports concerning Carlos Pedro Blaquier. He was never actually convicted of a crime; in fact, he maintained his innocence throughout, stating he had no knowledge that his company's resources were being used to facilitate illegal activity. Naturally, we defer to the courts and the legal process on matters like this … we do not believe they detract from the quality or significance of the artworks themselves."

That is true as far as it goes: no conviction ever came. It is also true that the trial never happened, and that up to 55 people from that night remain unaccounted for.

Can a Van Gogh fetch $180m without being a famous one?

Quite possibly. Châtaigniers en fleurs depicts a windswept street in Auvers-sur-Oise, where Van Gogh moved in 1890 after leaving the asylum. Look harder, the source observes, and everything is slightly unbalanced — the yellow road, the deep blue sky, the immense tree dwarfing the figures below. A storm is coming. He shot himself a couple of months after finishing the painting.

Predictions also suggest Cézanne's Arlequin may set a record for that artist. The market no longer requires a Van Gogh to be among his most famous works to command nine figures; demand for the artist has widened that far.

So Wednesday's bidding will write the "legend" of the Blaquier-Arhieta collection into auction history, while the alleged crimes of Blaquier and Ledesma stay in the footnotes — and the estimated $180m price tests how little provenance matters when the picture is ravishing enough.