Art Market Monitor

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Cohen Sells, Sotheby’s Markets in Qatar

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Liz-1-Early-Colored-Liz-1963

Carol Vogel is in Qatar with the rest of the New York art pack as the Qataris celebrate Damien Hirst. Of course, the focus on a Contemporary art provides ample opportunity for marketing other works:

Last week Sotheby’s took over a gallery in the Katara Art Center — a collaborative cultural village of galleries with an open-air theater — where it showed highlights from next month’s important contemporary art auctions in New York. On view were two major Warhols: “Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz),” a 1963 image of Elizabeth Taylor on a bright-yellow background that is estimated to sell for $20 million to $30 million, and “5 Deaths on Turquoise (Turquoise Disaster),” painted the same year and expected to bring $7 million to $10 million. While the seller was not named and officials at Sotheby’s declined to comment, the paintings are part of a larger group of works, which also includes an abstract canvas by Gerhard Richter, being sold by Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire, whose company, SAC Capital Advisors, is fighting criminal charges of insider trading. Sandy Heller, an art adviser who works with Mr. Cohen, declined to comment on the sale, but art experts familiar with Mr. Cohen’s collection identified the works as his.

Dealbook adds the inference that Cohen is selling to pay his legal bills despite the fact the hedgie has assets of $9bn in his own fund:

Mr. Cohen has hundreds of works in his prodigious collection and, in keeping with his trader’s mentality, buys and sells them with frequency. Owners of fine art also often sell art for tax reasons, as they can defer their tax liability by exchanging one piece for another.

Still, the dispositions come as Mr. Cohen faces mounting legal bills and record penalties that he might be forced to pay as part of a settlement related to criminal insider trading charges brought against his fund, SAC Capital Advisors. The government has offered the fund a deal to resolve the case by pleading guilty and paying a penalty of nearly $2 billion. Mr. Cohen’s lawyers are in the midst of negotiating a possible plea deal with prosecutors, though the two sides have yet to reach an agreement.

The Gang’s All There, Talking Art in Qatar(NYTimes)

Legal Bills Rising, Cohen Is Said to Plan Art Sales (Dealbook)

Billionaires Use Art to Get Low-Interest Loans

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Bloomberg picks apart reports that Michael Steinhardt, the former hedge fund manager, has used his art collection as collateral on loans for a real estate project in Manhattan’s financial district. The $250 million hotel, residential and retail complex project may be funded for less than 3% because Steinhardt was willing to offer his art as collateral, according to Katya Kazakina and Miles Weiss:

According to a UCC financing statement filed by JPMorgan in July, the Steinhardts pledged three oil paintings that Picasso created between 1922 and 1936, along with two works on paper, including a charcoal entitled ‘Homme a la sucette’ that he drew in 1938. The collateral also includes four works by Klee, two by Johns, and single works by Honore Daumier, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, as well as a Pollock that, according to Beverly Schreiber Jacoby, the president of BSJ Fine Art in New York, once belonged to Si Newhouse Jr., the chairman of Advance Publications Inc.

Steinhardt is not the only well-heeled investor using art as get-free-money pass from the banks:

Other fund managers who have secured loans by art in recent years include billionaire [Steven] Cohen, founder and chairman of SAC Capital Advisors LP in Stamford, Connecticut. Cohen, an avid collector who recently sold a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor by Andy Warhol for $26.9 million, pledged undisclosed “works of fine art” to Deutsche Bank Trust Co. Americas under an Oct. 30, 2009, borrower security agreement, according to New York state records. […]

[Nelson] Peltz, the billionaire who co-manages Trian Fund Management LP, pledged 15 works by artists such as Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir to Bank of America NA, according to a financing statement filed in May 2009. Peltz also secured the lending arrangement with antiques, including a pair of Louis XV commodes, a set of four Italian white marble busts dating as far back as the 17th century, and four Chinese side chairs that were made around 1725, the document shows.

Steinhardt Pledges Picassos for Real Estate as Art Loans Surge (Bloomberg)

 

 

Cohen Announces a Sale

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Carol Vogel announces the sale of Steven Cohen’s Self Portrait of Manet at Sotheby’s next month in London. Though the work, estimated at $30-45m, is a major addition to Sotheby’s sale, the announcement is significant for the way it flaunts the hedge fund manager’s ownership.

The seller, the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, has owned the work for nearly a decade. “It was one of Steve’s first purchases,” said Sandy Heller, Mr. Cohen’s adviser. “Now it’s time for the painting to live another life.”

Mr. Cohen’s decision to part with the Manet comes at a time when he seems to be investing in major works of far more modern art. Two months ago he bought one of the best examples of Jasper Johns’s “Flag” paintings from Jean-Cristophe Castelli, son of Mr. Johns’s legendary dealer, Leo Castelli, for a reported $110 million. (The elder Mr. Castelli, who died in 1999, loved the 1958 “Flag” so much that he never sold it.)

Cohen has cleverly used his interest in art as a public relations tool. Before so many stories began to circulate about Cohen’s art purchases–the Pollock, the de Kooning, the Johns–for record prices privately, the billionaire was mostly known for his penchant for secrecy. At that time, Cohen’s hedge fund, SAC, had become the focus of suspicions about the way it used information on Wall Street and traded off that information. Cover stories in BusinessWeek and segments on 60 Minutes painted Cohen as a dark figure whose secrecy indicated something to hide.Continue Reading

Cohen Hoists the Flag

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Christie’s is ecstatic right now at the news that Steven A. Cohen has bought Leo Castelli’s own Jasper Johns flag painting–one that had been on loan to SFMoMA by Castelli’s heir–for a rumored $110 million. The painting joins Cohen’s other remarkable nine-figure acquisitions in what Brett Gorvy calls “the most comprehensive collection of American postwar images in private hands.”

For Christie’s this revalues the Crichton transaction. Carol Vogel quotes Gorvy in her New York Times story on the sale:Continue Reading

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