LI toymaker selling Jackson portrait on eBay
A young "Dorian Gray" portrait of Michael Jackson owned by a Long Island toy inventor is up for auction online.
The eBay auction of the 50-by-40-inch painting by Australian artist Brett-Livingstone Strong was to be launched last night, according to the portrait's owner, Marty Abrams, and his son Kenneth.
"The Book," purported to be the only painting for which the King of Pop ever posed, depicts Jackson at his Neverland Ranch in California, wearing a red velvet jacket. Tinkerbell hovers above.
"With the positive response to his music and the movie about him after his death, we thought it was a good time to sell it and for the world to see it," Marty Abrams of Kings Point told The Associated Press. Abrams acquired the painting with partner John Gentilly in 1992 from Japanese businessman Hiromichi Saeki as payment on a debt.
For more than 17 years, Abrams kept the painting in storage in New Jersey. Following Jackson's sudden death last June, it went on display briefly at Harlem's Dancy-Power Automotive showroom.
"We kept it in storage because it didn't look like Michael anymore," Kenneth Abrams told Newsday in a phone interview from California. "It was a 'Dorian Gray' portrait," he said, referring to the Oscar Wilde novel about a character whose portrait ages rather than himself - until he dies. "Now it's like looking at the Michael we all remember."
The painting was sold to Saeki for $2.1 million in 1990, shortly after its completion. Marty Abrams said the painting was appraised by Belgo Fine Art Appraisal and Restoration at $5.3 million in 2000. The minimum starting bid for the auction, scheduled to end April 17, is $2.75 million.
For now, the painting is hanging in Marty Abrams' home in Kings Point.
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