Vivendi to Sell Art, Ex-CEO’s Duplex

PARIS — Vivendi Universal plans to sell its 2,500-piece art collection, which includes works by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro, and the New York apartment of former Chief Executive Jean-Marie Messier.

The sale of the art and the 5,300-square-foot apartment Vivendi bought for $17.5 million last year is a small part of the company’s plan to shed assets worth $11.7 billion by 2004. Other assets slated for sale include corporate jets, an Airbus and a Paris soccer club, new CEO Jean-Rene Fourtou said.

Messier, who was forced out in July, still occupies the apartment at 515 Park Ave. in Manhattan. He will pay rent for the rest of the year until the duplex is sold, Chief Financial Officer Jacques Espinasse told reporters after speaking to a French parliamentary commission.

“I need to clean Vivendi up,” Fourtou told the commission. “We’ve inherited a lot of assets from Seagram and a lot of assets from the Generale des Eaux,” the French water company from which Vivendi evolved.

Vivendi acquired the art collection when Messier bought Seagram Co. in December 2000.

The apartment probably would rent for about $40,000 a month and sell for about $20 million, said Patricia Burnham, president of P.S. Burnham Inc., a Manhattan property brokerage. “Very rarely do we get something like this in terms of its quality and prestige coming on the market,” she said.