Roy Neuberger, one of the nation’s top modern art collectors and Wall Street financers, died on Friday December 24, 2010 in his Manhattan home located at the Pierre Hotel, at the age of 107.
ARTKABINETT social network for fine art collectors mourns the passing of this monumental patron of the fine arts.
Roy Neuberger, who enriched major museums with work of his pioneering American contemporary art collection, had a vast assemblage of a number of paintings by renowned artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hooper.
Despite Wall Street’s three major crises, Roy Neuberger was able to build country’s largest collections of major contemporary art. He also donated many of his treasured paintings to various art museums, including his own located on the SUNY campus Purchase, New York.
Reckoning his contribution towards art and culture, former President GeorgeGeorge W. Bush presented Neuberger with a National Medal of Arts in 2007, in a ceremony at the White House (pictured below right).
Early love of fine arts
His first job was working in the Manhattan department store B. Altman and Company, through which he learned the ins and outs of business.
Among the things he practiced selling were paintings, which nurtured his love of art.
After his job with B. Altman's, he sailed to Europe at age 20 on an inheritance from his parents and went to live in Paris.
He lived his bohemian, Roaring Twenties existence there, where he visited the Louvre three times a week and met his lifelong friend, 20th century art historian Meyer Schapiro.
He painted and studied art until 1928, when he read Floret Fels' biography of Vincent Van Gogh.
Neuberger was startled when he learned how Van Gogh had only sold one painting, and was heartstricken to learn that Van Gogh, like so many other artists, lived in pain, poverty and misery.
He moved back to the United States and entered Wall Street in 1929. It was seven months before Black Tuesday.
He started out with Halle & Steiglitz and sold short RCA shares, right through the stock market crash and well into the Great Depression.
He founded Neuberger Berman in 1939 with Robert Berman. In 1950, Neuberger's firm started one of the first no-load mutual funds in the United States, the Guardian Fund, still in operation today.
By 1939, Neuberger had made enough money to buy the first painting that he would lend to rocket the artist to fame: Peter Hurd's "Boy from the Plains".
He allowed Nelson Rockefeller, another avid art collector, to use Boy from the Plains in a travelling American art exhibition. Rockefeller's exhibition travelled to South America, and many people in both South and North America were thus exposed to the art of Hurd.
Diverse collection
Among the other artists whose works Neuberger has collected are Jackson Pollock, Ben Shahn, William Baziotes, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Louis Eilshemius, Edward Hopper (above right), Jacob Lawrence, Jack Levine, David Smith and especially Milton Avery, of whose works Neuberger purchased dozens.
The first Avery he ever purchased was Gaspé Landscape (shown left), which he bought while it was snowing and wrapped neatly specially before going out during the snowstorm, determined to keep the painting intact to make the man famous.
Neuberger still had Gaspé Landscape on a wall in his apartment at the time of his death.
Neuberger also began donating works to institutions, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum as well as many college and university museums.
Rockefeller later became governor of New York and created the State University of New York system. For his friend Neuberger, Rockefeller established a museum at Purchase College as part of the new university where Neuberger could display a substantial amount of the art he had acquired.
With the help of architect Philip Johnson, the Neuberger Museum of Art was built on the SUNY Purchase College campus and opened in 1974. Neuberger contributed more than 500 of his paintings toward the collection.
Corporate art collection
Regarding the company he co-founded, "Art in the workplace has been a part of Neuberger Berman's corporate culture since the investment firm was founded in 1939.
In 1990 Neuberger Berman began developing its own art collection, emphasizing the work of emerging mid-career artists from around the world and presenting their works in an enriching environment for employees and visitors."
This collection was largely sold at auction this past summer to satisfy corporate debts incurred in the collapse of the parent company, Lehman Brothers. {Discussed in previous AK Files available via search bar above right}.
