Displaying items by tag: art collector

The Guggenheim family, early Americans who made a fortune in mining, provided its fair share of gossip-column inches in the 20th century. Benjamin Guggenheim, one of 11 children to patriarch Meyer Guggenheim (1828–1905), went down with the Titanic in 1912. He left a widow, Florette Seligman, and three daughters, one of whom would grow up to become the famed art patron Peggy Guggenheim. (Benjamin’s brother Solomon is the man whose name sits atop the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed museum on New York’s Fifth Avenue, which was called both a parking garage and a giant toilet when it debuted. But that’s a whole other story.)

A. Alfred Taubman, the late billionaire developer and former owner of Sotheby’s auction house, was a boundless art collector whose taste spanned every period, genre and medium, from works of antiquity to contemporary art.

In advance of a series of sales of his 500-piece collection — believed to be worth more than $500 million — Sotheby’s has transformed its building inside and out to give a real sense of its depth and scope.

Gallerist and art collector Adam Lindemann is in contract to purchase an estate in Montauk, New York that once belonged to Andy Warhol, according to the New York Post. The seller is J. Crew CEO Mickey Drexler, who purchased the 5.7-acre property for $27 million in 2007 and combined it with a 24-acre horse farm; he's listing the entire compound for $85 million.

But like a savvy collector, Lindemann is only interested in purchasing the six-cottage, oceanfront former Warhol estate, known as Eothen ("from the East").

The descendants of heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim lost their case in a French court Wednesday over her extensive collection of works housed in an 18th century palace on Venice's Grand Canal.

The French branch of the family launched legal action against the New York-based Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, which manages the collection.

The relatives are angry at the way the collection of paintings by artists including Picasso, Miro and Matisse are displayed and have called for it to be restored to its original configuration.

Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev had decided to send off a tough 2014 in New York City. The Monaco-based billionaire had been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons after a Swiss judge awarded his ex-wife Elena $4.5 billion in their seven-year divorce battle. An avid art collector, Rybolovlev decided to spend New Year’s Eve with Sandy Heller, Steve Cohen’s well-known art advisor. As they exchanged war stories, one particular tale made his jaw drop: it was about a beautiful "Nude" by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani that Cohen sold for a juicy $93.5 million to a mystery buyer. What Heller didn’t know was that behind the veil of anonymity stood Rybolovlev, fuming internally on that December 31. Rybolovlev had paid his trusted friend and art broker Yves Bouvier $118 million for the piece, more than $22 million above what he just found out the market value should’ve been, including the fee.

William Louis-Dreyfus, the billionaire businessman and art collector (and father to actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus), is selling his art collection to support a very good cause: the Harlem Children's Zone, an organization that provides support to underprivileged children.

Louis-Dreyfus, who is 82 years old, has spent the past 50 years assembling a massive 3,500-piece collection, which is estimated to be worth between $10 million and $50 million.

Barely a month in office, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) has shelved a plan to turn the former Franklin School downtown into a contemporary art museum and has begun seeking other companies interested in redeveloping the building.

Dani Levinas, a local art collector who was selected a year ago by then-Mayor Vincent C. Gray to turn the crumbling brick building into a home for contemporary art exhibitions, said that despite being told by economic development staff shortly after Bowser took office that the project was being reviewed, he was stunned by the decision.

Of all the things that one could leave behind on a train, a €1 million 13th-century Chinese scroll is probably one of the most excruciating options. Yet, according to the "Telegraph," this is precisely what happened to the art collector Francesco Plateroti.

A few days ago, Plateroti boarded a high-speed train to return to Geneva from Paris, where he had travelled to show the valuable Chinese scroll, entitled "The Banquet of Immortals on the Terrace of Jade," at an art exhibition.

Leighton House, once the London home of Lord Leighton, is mounting its most ambitious exhibition since it opened as a museum in 1900. The permanent collection will go into storage to provide space to display 50 Victorian paintings belonging to the Mexican businessman Juan Antonio Pérez Simón.

Pérez Simón, who has long been in business partnership with the telecommunications tycoon and fellow art collector Carlos Slim, has been buying Victorian art since the 1980s, almost entirely at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

Major art collector and polarizing figure Bert Kreuk has sued Danish-Vietnamese artist and Hugo Boss Prize winner Danh Vo for €898,000 (approximately $1.2 million), according to a report in the Netherland’s RTL Nieuws. Kreuk claims that Vo failed to deliver an artwork for an exhibition of Kreuk’s collection, titled "Transforming the Known," at the Hague’s Gemeentemuseum (Hague Municipal Museum), which closed in September of last year.

That artwork in question reportedly cost Kreuk $350,000.