MGM MIRAGE sells three paintings for $10.7 million

Friday, Nov. 10, 2000 | 11:43 a.m.

Las Vegas-based MGM MIRAGE sold three of the four paintings it put up for auction Thursday in New York, one at a record price. Thursday's auctions grossed $10.7 million for MGM MIRAGE, funds that will be used to reduce company debt.

The paintings are from MGM MIRAGE's Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas. Its creator, Steve Wynn, has been one of the biggest buyers at auction for himself and for the Bellagio for five years. But in March he agreed to the sale of Mirage Resorts Inc. to MGM Grand Inc., and since then MGM MIRAGE has been selling its art holdings.

The New York Times reported that among the best of the paintings auctioned Thursday night at Sotheby's was Modigliani's 1916 portrait of the art dealer Paul Guillaume, which Wynn bought at Christie's in 1996 for $3.4 million. Thursday night it was estimated at $3.5 million to $5 million; it sold to an unidentified telephone bidder for $4.6 million.

A second Bellagio painting, Berthe Morisot's "Cache-Cache," fetched $4.4 million, a record for that artist. Mirage Resorts had bought the painting last year for $3.9 million, a record at that time.

A second Modigliani painting, "Landscape South of France," sold for $1.7 million, the middle of its $1.5 million to $2 million.

Renoir's "Essai Garden at Algiers" (1881), which Wynn bought from Acquavella Galleries in Manhattan last year, failed to sell.

It was estimated at $4.5 million to $6 million, but bidding stopped at $4 million.

MGM MIRAGE President and Chief Financial Officer Jim Murren said the company plans to sell art at one final auction at Christie's in January. That auction will include what is perhaps the company's most famous painting, Rembrandt's "Portrait of a Man." Prior to the takeover of Mirage Resorts by MGM Grand, the painting had hung in Wynn's office.