Billionaire pokes hole in world's most expensive painting

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Los Angeles (dpa) - Billionaire casino owner Steve Wynn has made the artistic blunder of the century.

He accidentally poked a hole in the Picasso painting La Reve (The Dream), which he had just agreed to sell to hedge fund magnate Steve Cohen for 139 million dollars, according to US media reports Wednesday.

The incident occurred several weeks ago at Wynn's office in his luxurious Las Vegas hotel where he was showing off the painting one last time before shipping it to Cohen.

The private sale would have made the painting the most expensive ever, beating the 135 million dollars paid in June by cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder for Gustav Klimt's Adele Bloch-Bauer I.

But after explaining the history of the 1932 painting of Picasso's mistress Marie-Therese Walter, Wynn accidentally poked the canvas with his elbow, tearing the fabric and punching a finger-sized hole in the picture.

"Smack in the middle ... was a black hole the size of a silver dollar," reported film-maker Nora Ephron, who was one of those present at the viewing. "'Oh shit,' he said. 'Look what I've done. Thank goodness it was me.'"

Ephron, who related the incident in her blog on the Huffington Post Web site (www.huffingtonpost.com), noted that Wynn has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that damages peripheral vision and which caused him to misjudge his distance from the painting.

Wynn however was not too upset and appeared in good spirits later in the day. "My feeling was, it's a picture, it's my picture, we'll fix it. Nobody got sick or died. It's a picture. It took Picasso five hours to paint it," Wynn told the New Yorker magazine.

Following the damage Wynn cancelled the sale until the extent of the damage could be ascertained. But while the painting is to be fully restored Wynn's wife Elaine interpreted the incident as a sign that they should keep the artwork.

"I consider this whole thing to be a sign of fate," she told Wynn, according to The New Yorker. "Please don't sell the picture."