Robert Mnuchin, the Wall Avenue pioneer who grew to become certainly one of New York’s most revered artwork sellers and a fixture at blue-chip auctions, died on Friday at his house in Bridgewater, Connecticut. He was 92. His dying, first reported by the New York Instances, 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 ability on the buying and selling flooring—an encyclopedic recall of patrons and sellers, an intuition for strain and timing—made him a legend contained in the agency. He grew to become 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 many years on Wall Avenue, Mnuchin did one thing that stunned even shut buddies: he left finance to open a gallery. It was not a transfer financiers of his stature sometimes made. As he later advised ARTnews, it “took a number of braveness” to step away from the Goldman machine and check 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 with out a formal artwork background, “the one various was to begin 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 shows 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 needs to be lived with—formed each his gallery and his personal amassing. “The explanation to purchase artwork is since you like it, you like it, you like it,” he advised the New York Instances in 2013. He disliked the time period “assortment,” insisting that he and his spouse saved every thing they purchased of their house, by no means in storage.
He grew to become equally identified for his presence within the public sale room. At night gross sales, he was a peaceful however relentless bidder—typically shouting out costs or leaping forward in increments to safe a piece. In 2019, carrying a cream-colored jacket and armed with a flip cellphone, he set a document for a residing artist when he positioned the profitable $91.1 million bid for Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986), appearing on behalf of an nameless consumer extensively believed to be hedge fund supervisor Steven A. Cohen. His bidding model—affected person, unshowy, decisive—made him a recognizable determine even for individuals 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. Buddies and art-world friends typically famous his integrity: Amy Cappellazzo, the previous Sotheby’s chairman, as soon as known 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 appreciated 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 nicely 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 stated within the 2021 ARTnews interview. “I’d be misplaced with out it.”
