Multi-Billion Pound Art Row

Works by the great Impressionists, hidden in bank vaults for four generations, could come into public view as a result of a feud within one of the world's leading art collecting families. Alec and Guy Wildenstein, whose father Daniel died four years ago, will challenge a French court ruling in favour of their 71-year-old stepmother Sylvia to break up the huge private collection, believed to include Renoirs, Monets and Manets. The Wildensteins have an art collection worth an estimated €10 billion (£6.6bn). The brothers' legal move, due to be heard in the French appeal court on 21 June, comes in the wake of an earlier ruling that Mrs Wildenstein should receive a share of the estate because Alec, now 64, and Guy, 60, misled her into signing away her inheritance rights. Mrs Wildenstein claims to be penniless, and her lawyers insist that the private collection will have to be broken up and sold in order to settle the inheritance claims. The Wildenstein empire was founded by cloth merchant Nathan Wildenstein in 1875. His maxim was 'never buy a painting you cannot afford to hold on to'. By the time he died in 1934, he had amassed a considerable collection which he passed on to his son, Georges, a specialist in Impressionist art and a patron of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. In 1940, Georges left for the US with his son Daniel and grandchild Alec. Daniel's second son, Guy, was born in the US in 1945. For the full story - click the title Irish Art