Designer auction jam deliberate says Berge from Marrakech Morocco
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The longtime partner of late designer Yves
Saint Laurent said Tuesday his criticism of China’s human rights record
prompted a Chinese buyer to sabotage an auction of two disputed bronze
fountainheads.
Pierre Berge also said he would be happy to keep the bronzes if the buyer doesn’t pay up.
The bronzes, heads of a rabbit and a rat, were looted from a summer
palace outside Beijing in 1860. A century later, Saint Laurent and
Berge bought them from a French gallery.
Last week, the pieces went on auction at Christie’s in Paris as part
of Saint Laurent’s estate — but China’s government complained, and said
it wants the bronzes back. Berge refused, saying China should improve
its human rights record first.
Legal efforts to halt the auction failed. A Chinese art collector
made the winning bid, but admitted Monday that the bid was bogus and
said he wouldn’t pay the $36 million.
“It’s definitely a maneuver targeting the positions I have taken
vis-a-vis human rights in China and Tibet,” Berge told The Associated
Press by telephone from Marrakech, Morocco.
Berge said he must now send a letter to the Chinese buyer — auction house owner Cai Mingchao — who has up to a month to respond.
And if he doesn’t pay “I have no problem keeping them,” Berge said.
Asked whether he thought the buyer was acting privately or on behalf
of the Chinese government, he said, “I can’t say. Both are totally
possible.”
China and other countries such as Greece and Egypt are trying to recover cultural objects plundered in war or stolen.
The Chinese bronzes disappeared when French and British forces
sacked and burned the imperial Summer Palace outside Beijing in 1860 at
the end of the second Opium War. Chinese view the devastation of the
palace as a national humiliation.
