Last week, after the New York Times reported that David Geffen had sold Jackson Pollock’s “No. 5, 1948” to the financier David Martinez for $140 million, in a deal brokered by Sotheby’s Tobias Meyer, the news quickly circled the globe. (If true, it would set a new record for a price paid for a painting.) By early this week, however, Mr. Martinez had denied making such a purchase, telling Josh Baer, who writes the art-industry newsletter called the Baer Faxt: “I did not buy the Jackson Pollock painting.”

Because buyers and sellers of bigticket art guard their anonymity so fiercely, it’s rare that the public gets word –– accurate or not –– about deals like this, and the combination of the numbers involved and Mr. Martinez’s denial made the situation all the more intriguing. What might have happened?

Mr. Geffen’s office confirmed to The New York Sun that the painting was sold, but would not specify to whom or for how much. Mr. Martinez’s lawyers, Shearman and Sterling LLP, issued a statement, which read in part: “[C]ontrary to recent articles in the press identifying him as the buyer of a painting by Jackson Pollock, entitled ‘Number 5, 1948,’ neither Mr. Martinez nor any related party of Mr. Martinez owns the painting or has any right to acquire the painting from David Geffen or any other party who has acquired it or may acquire it in the future.”

(The statement concluded slightly incongruously by noting that “David Martinez was born in Mexico, but is a naturalized British citizen” –– perhaps in response to references to him in the articles as “the Mexican financier David Martinez.”)

Some speculated this week that Mr. Martinez, upset at being outed, pulled out of a deal to buy the painting. Mr. Martinez, who has been in the news in the past for another major purchase –– a two-floor pad in the Time Warner Center for which he paid $54.7 million –– is said to be as private as he is wealthy. And the statement from his lawyers didn’t make clear whether he had ever negotiated for the painting.

Another possibility, of course, is that the buyer was someone else from the beginning. The director of Art Ventures International, art consultant Avi Spira, said he doubted that Mr. Martinez had withdrawn from any deal because of publicity.”From what I’ve heard, I don’t think that’s what occurred here,” he said.

Anonymity is the norm in the art world. If you look at the top-10 list for this week’s big auction sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, for instance, there isn’t a single individual buyer named. “Buyers and sellers are obsessed about privacy,” another art consultant — Abigail Asher, of Guggenheim Asher Associates — said. “We often go through very lengthy confidentially agreements that then get put into our sale agreements.”

Some buyers can remain anonymous forever. Ms. Asher noted, for instance, that the Russian buyer who picked up Picasso’s “Dora Maar au Chat” for a cool $95 million at Sotheby’s this spring has eluded discovery, despite the best efforts of the press to unveil him.

Ms. Asher said that in America, over the long term, most buyers of major pictures are revealed. Guests see the painting in their house; word gets around. But “it doesn’t tend to leak out right when the sale takes place,” she said.

Which raises the interesting question of whether Mr. Geffen, who declined to comment for the Times story, might have wanted news of the deal to get out. Mr. Geffen sold two other paintings recently, a Jasper Johns and a de Kooning, amid speculation that he is considering purchasing the Los Angeles Times.

In any case, Mr. Spira said: “I think we will know soon who the purchaser is soon. Artworks are visible objects.”