WANNA BUY A PICASSO?

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Author: Ross, Lillian

MANHUNT DEPT.

Last month at Sotheby's, Picasso's "Dora Maar with Cat" was purchased for ninety-five million dollars by an unidentified Russian man. The art world and the press immediately started speculating about the buyer's identity, and within a few days the Post announced that the mystery man was Roustam Tariko, a forty-four-year-old Russian banking and vodka tycoon. Tariko insists that the Post has the wrong guy. "Not me," he said last week, on the telephone from Miami, where he was attending a business conference. "Art dealers want Russian money, are now calling, calling, asking me to buy paintings. Forbes just named me most eligible billionaire bachelor in world. Everybody now after Russians. But I do not invest in paintings. Some of the people who do--in real estate, in oil, in fertilizer--are boring, boring, boring."

Tariko said that he read about the Sotheby's auction on his computer, while he was in his plane, a Boeing Business Jet ("Same plane developed for Jack Welch"), en route from Moscow to address an American Express conference in Santa Barbara. "They know I brought credit cards to Russia," he said. "I tell them how Russian consumers want credit. People discovering new things, new restaurants, new music. I want to bring iPod to Russia. Then I get calls about Picasso auction. One caller tells me congratulations for buying Picasso as great P.R. move. Italian aristocrat with big gallery in London calls to sell me paintings. So I escape in my Boeing Business Jet, converted, with expensive everything. I live mostly in my plane. I go and go and go in freedom.

"Russians have money," he went on. "Art dealers from all over world are now asking me to buy Picassos, other Impressionists. I prefer Renaissance, Caravaggio. But I do not buy them. I'd rather invest in my freedom, rather than in my walls."

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE)

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By Lillian Ross