Abramovich’s Treasure: Artistic Collection Worth Nearly One Billion Dollars Revealed

Russian tycoon Roman Abramovich and his ex-wife Dasha Zhukova amassed as many as 367 artworks during their marriage, with a total value of nearly one billion dollars making it the most impressive and, of course, the most valuable private collection in the world.

According to documents from the Cypriot company MeritServus obtained by The Guardian and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the collection is managed by the company Seline-Invest, which, the investigation revealed, is owned by Abramovich’s Ermis Trust Settlement foundation. The total value of the artworks is estimated at 963 million dollars and includes works by the greatest modern artists such as Picasso, Monet, Freud, and Hockney.

For instance, a masterpiece like ‘Triptych, 1976’ by Francis Bacon was purchased for as much as 86.3 million dollars, which is also the highest price achieved by an artwork from the post-war period, while for ‘Benefits Supervisor Sleeping’ in 2010, they paid 33.6 million dollars, making Lucian Freud the most expensive living painter at that time.

– You could fill a museum with that astonishing collection – said Andrew Renton, a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, to The Guardian.

Cunning Move

Abramovich and Zhukova were married from 2008 to 2017 and during that period accumulated artworks, making them prominent figures in the world of collecting. The collection was stored in South London, and the couple occasionally lent them to galleries while ensuring that their ownership was not revealed.

The Guardian’s investigation showed that Abramovich did everything to prevent the artworks from being seized weeks before Putin’s invasion of Russia.

The couple, in fact, divided the collection into two equal parts in their divorce proceedings, and in February 2022, the majority ownership, or 51 percent, was transferred to Zhukova. In this way, Abramovich managed to retain the right to possess the collection since assets owned by sanctioned Russian oligarchs were being seized.

Zhukova is one of the favorite figures in the global art scene, sitting at the helm of several well-known galleries. Since she acquired American citizenship through her second marriage, sanctions did not apply to her, and she publicly condemned Putin’s aggression.

Abramovich, on the other hand, has been sanctioned by the United Kingdom, and besides ownership in the football club Chelsea, his other assets, such as a superyacht worth 700 million dollars, have been frozen, where, it is believed, part of the artworks was also displayed. He is also prohibited from doing business in the UK. Since the documents obtained by The Guardian and OCCRP cover the period up to 2022, it is unknown where the billion-dollar collection is currently located.