`The Book` Might Also Be Available For Sale
The Michael Jackson painting `The Book`by Australian artist Brett-Livingstone Strong might also be available for sale.
According to a New York Times article the owners say they are trying to sell it amid the renewed interest after his death.
The artist Brett-Livingstone Strong was a friend of Michael Jackson and shared his taste for fantastical style of life and dress.
The 50-by-40-inch painting done in 1990 depicts Michael Jackson dressed in red velvet holding a journal of thoughts and sketches. It has touches of Vermeer, as that was one of Michael Jackson’s favorite painters, Mr. Strong said.
The painting was sold in 1990 for $2.1 million. It is now owned by two toy inventors, Marty Abrams and John Gentilly, who received the painting in 1992 from a Japanese businessman who had bought it to make good on a debt he owed the inventors.
They never displayed it in their own homes though.
“It’s so expensive that the insurance was too expensive. I have prints for $600. I might have a sketch for $1,000. But to put a $2 million painting in the middle of all that would be a little bit overwhelming.”
They were inspired to bring the painting out of storage after Michael Jackson’s death in June, in part because Mr. Abrams saw a news story about a sketch portrait of Michael Jackson by Andy Warhol that was being put up for auction.
The current owners of the original painting have received calls from as far away as Dubai after Michael Jackson’s death from people who knew they owned the painting.
“If someone came with a legitimate offer, I’d probably sell it,” said Mr. Abrams, who lives in Great Neck. He tried selling it when he first took possession of it in 1992, but couldn’t find any good offers. “I couldn’t get anyone at that time interested in the painting. I put it in storage for 17 years, and it has been there for 17 years.
Up to this point we’ve been very skittish." They have reached out to Phillips De Pury auction house to get an assessment. “I am not an art expert. I don’t understand the art market. We have no idea what it’s worth. Is it worth $1 million? Is it worth $10 million?”
Currently, the painting is being displayed at the Dancy-Power Automotive at Lenox Avenue and West 129th in Harlem (USA).
A limited, autographed set of lithographs had been created based on “The Book.” Around 375 of them were numbered.
Mr. Strong and Michael Jackson formed an art business partnership, the Jackson-Strong Alliance, around 1989 and 1990 to display their art work, which included this portrait.
The two were brainstorming how to raise money for charity when Mr. Strong mentioned that a Japanese businessman, Hiromichi Saeki, had offered millions of dollars for a portrait of Mr. Jackson. Mr. Jackson said he would sit for it if the buyer agreed to pay a world record — ultimately $2.1 million, then reported as the highest amount ever paid for a living person. “Sometime later he told me he would have made $5 million for it,” Mr. Strong said. The businessman later went bankrupt and gave the painting to Mr. Abrams.
Mr. Strong still has a number of drawings done by Michael Jackson as part of the partnership.
“These drawings are really interesting. Some of the are really fantastic. They have been in a drawer for 17 years.”
He is hoping to hold an exhibit of the art.
Source: MJFC / The New York Times