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Steven Cohen, who runs the $14 billion hedge-fund manager SAC Capital Advisors, is raising his profile as an art collector with an unusual loan show at Sotheby’s in New York.
Starting tomorrow, the auction house will display 20 rarely seen works by such artists as Andy Warhol and Vincent van Gogh. They have a combined market value of about $450 million, dealers say. The pieces, owned by Cohen and his wife, Alexandra, all depict women.
Auction houses often host special exhibitions to showcase sales in advance. In this case, Sotheby’s and Cohen say the show will offer nothing for sale, although it does coincide with Cohen’s increasingly close ties to the auctioneer. As of March 6, SAC owned 5.9 percent of the company, up from 4.6 percent on Dec. 31, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Cohen, 52, has paid large sums as he built up a major art collection. He’s best known as the 2004 buyer of Damien Hirst’s $8 million formaldehyde-soaked shark, on loan to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. More recently, he snagged two pieces by Jeff Koons, including the shiny 9-foot-tall “Hanging Heart (Violet/Gold)” sculpture, according to people familiar with the transaction. Another heart from the same series fetched $23.6 million at Sotheby’s in 2007.
Last year, Cohen consigned at least eight paintings to New York dealers to sell, among them works by Willem de Kooning, Ed Ruscha and Pablo Picasso. He hoped to raise money for a major purchase that — as financial markets tumbled — he ultimately decided not to make, according to sources close to Cohen. They declined to disclose his target.(Bloomberg)
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