ROY NEUBERGER, a Wall Street investor who became one of the top modern art collectors in the US, has died aged 107.
Mr Neuberger died on Friday at his home in Manhattan’s Pierre Hotel.
He had survived Wall Street’s three major crises with enough money to build one of the largest private collections of major contemporary masterpieces.
He acquired hundreds of paintings and sculptures by such artists as Milton Avery, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe and others. But he never sold any work by a living artist, believing collectors should buy contemporary art and keep it, while giving the public access.
The works are now scattered at 70 institutions in 24 states – many at the Neuberger Museum of Art located in Purchase, north of New York City.
Mr Neuberger was a consummate New Yorker, having lived in the city for a century after moving from his native Bridgeport, Connecticut. To get closer to the European scene he knew from books, Neuberger moved to Paris in 1924, where he decided to start collecting.
He got to Wall Street in the spring of 1929, as a runner for the brokerage firm Halle Stieglitz.
Betting that the stock market might fall, Neuberger sold short on shares of the most popular stock then, Radio Corp of America, and came out of the stock market crash losing only 15 per cent of his money. After becoming a stockbroker in 1930, he started his own firm with a partner, and also much later survived the crash of 1987. – (AP)