“He used to collect modernism. Now he’s into classic postwar and contemporary,” Good said of Cohen. “That’s a natural evolution. On the high-ticket things, if he likes them, he keeps them. If he doesn’t, he sells them.”
New Approach
Cohen’s approach, setting records as a buyer and seller with a changing taste, is fairly new in the collecting world. Traditionally, collectors spent decades building their holdings with a mix of superior and mediocre works, and they rarely sold.
“They loved it. They lived with it,” said Wendy Cromwell, a New York-based art adviser. “That was the old-school way.”
An example of such a collection is on view at Sotheby’s, which is selling a 500-lot trove amassed by its former chairman A. Alfred Taubman, Cromwell said. “Masterworks,” the first sale from the collection, is on Wednesday.
New Record
Cohen’s style of collecting is different. In May, Cohen’s 1961 Jean Dubuffet painting “Paris Polka” fetched $24.8 million at Christie’s, more than three times the artist’s previous auction record of $7.4 million set six months earlier. A year ago, Cohen’s Franz Kline canvas, “King Oliver" (1958), fetched $26.5 million, also at Christie’s in New York, the second- highest price for the Abstract Expressionist painter.
The owner of Point 72 Asset Management, a family office that manages about $11 billion, in 2013 consigned a group of seven paintings to Sotheby’s. They tallied at least $77 million, led by Gerhard Richter’s 1986 abstract painting “A.B. Courbet" that fetched $26.5 million.
Cohen’s recent acquisitions include Alberto Giacometti’s 1950 painted-bronze sculpture “Chariot” that fetched $101 million at Sotheby’s in November 2014.
Fontana Record