Robert Mnuchin, the Wall Avenue pioneer who turned certainly one of New York’s most revered artwork sellers and a fixture at blue-chip auctions, died on Friday at his dwelling in Bridgewater, Connecticut. He was 92. His dying, first reported by the New York Times, was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Lisa Hedley Wick.
Mnuchin was uncommon in having two lengthy and extremely profitable careers. At Goldman Sachs, he was a central determine within the rise of block buying and selling within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, serving to construct the agency’s institutional equities enterprise below managing associate Gustave Levy. By 1978, the Wall Avenue Journal described him as “the acknowledged dean of block merchants,” rivaled solely by Salomon Brothers’ Michael Bloomberg. His talent on the buying and selling ground—an encyclopedic recall of patrons and sellers, an intuition for stress and timing—made him a legend contained in the agency. He turned a associate in 1967, co-headed buying and selling and arbitrage by 1976, and joined the agency’s highly effective administration committee in 1980. He retired in 1990.
That very same set of instincts—aggressive, analytic, and deeply interpersonal—animated his second act. After a long time on Wall Avenue, Mnuchin did one thing that stunned even shut mates: he left finance to open a gallery. It was not a transfer financiers of his stature usually made. As he later advised ARTnews, it “took a lot of courage” to step away from the Goldman machine and take a look at whether or not his success got here from his personal skills or the establishment behind him. “I wished to see what I may do by myself,” he recalled. And since no museum would rent somebody and not using a formal artwork background, “the one different was to start out my very own gallery, which is what I did.”
He and his spouse, Adriana, transformed a part of their East 78th Avenue townhouse into C&M Arts (partnering with James Corcoran) in 1992, later partnering, with Dominique Levy in L&M Arts. He would set up Mnuchin Gallery, on his personal, in 2013. From the beginning, the gallery had a transparent identification: rigorous, museum-quality exhibitions specializing in the pillars of postwar American artwork—Pollock, Rothko, Kline, de Kooning—in addition to main displays of Alexander Calder, Donald Judd, Jeff Koons, Frank Stella, Philip Guston, Sam Gilliam, Ed Clark, and David Hammons. He staged eight exhibitions dedicated to Willem de Kooning alone, calling the artist “Picasso-esque” for the breadth of his distinct durations.
Mnuchin’s ardour for exhibitions—and his conviction that artwork must be lived with—formed each his gallery and his personal gathering. “The explanation to purchase artwork is since you adore it, you adore it, you adore it,” he advised the New York Instances in 2013. He disliked the time period “assortment,” insisting that he and his spouse saved the whole lot they purchased of their dwelling, by no means in storage.
He turned equally recognized for his presence within the public sale room. At night gross sales, he was a peaceful however relentless bidder—generally shouting out costs or leaping forward in increments to safe a piece. In 2019, sporting a cream-colored jacket and armed with a flip cellphone, he set a file for a residing artist when he positioned the successful $91.1 million bid for Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986), performing on behalf of an nameless shopper broadly believed to be hedge fund supervisor Steven A. Cohen. His bidding type—affected person, unshowy, decisive—made him a recognizable determine even for many who didn’t know his lengthy résumé.
Although he was the daddy of Steven Mnuchin, the previous Treasury secretary, Robert Mnuchin largely averted politics and was described by colleagues as modest, disciplined, and deeply dedicated to artwork. Pals and art-world friends usually famous his integrity: Amy Cappellazzo, the previous Sotheby’s chairman, as soon as referred to as him “one of many straightest shooters within the enterprise.”
Robert Elliott Mnuchin was born on September 5, 1933, in Manhattan. His father, Leon A. Mnuchin, was a lawyer and longtime director at a number of retail firms. The household collected works by Franz Kline and Mark Rothko—and, as he favored to notice, as soon as owned a solid Matisse. He grew up on Central Park West earlier than the household moved to Scarsdale. He attended Scarsdale Excessive Faculty, graduated from Yale in 1955, and served briefly within the Military earlier than becoming a member of Goldman Sachs.
Mnuchin married Elaine Terner in 1957; they’d two sons, Steven and Alan. After their divorce, he married Adriana Graber, with whom he had a daughter, Valerie. Along with his spouse, daughter, and sons, he’s survived by his stepchildren Lisa Hedley Wick and Bradley Abelow.
Mnuchin labored properly into his later years, whilst he confronted mobility challenges. He skipped Artwork Basel in Basel for the primary time in 20 years in 2019, however continued to stay on the gallery’s exhibitions and for main gross sales. “I like what I do,” he mentioned within the 2021 ARTnews interview. “I’d be misplaced with out it.”
