Willem de Kooning’s painting “Woman III,” from 1952-53.
SOTHEBY'S NEW YORK
April 2-14, 2009
The hedge-fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen. and his wife, Alexandra, for the past decade, have been among the highest profile collectors in the art world. They have bought works like Damien Hirst’s “Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” the 14-foot tiger shark submerged in a tank of formaldehyde, for $8 million, and de Kooning’s seminal painting “Woman III,” which Mr. Cohen bought privately in 2006 from the entertainment mogul David Geffen for a reported $137.5 million. Although Mr. Cohen has lent works to museums occasionally (the shark is on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art), most of his collection has never been publicly exhibited. But next month Sotheby’s will show a group of 20 works that the couple have collected over the past decade. The exhibition, from April 2 to 14, is a carefully selected group of paintings, sculptures, works on paper and photographs that all depict women. The idea for the theme show arose one recent evening during a dinner at the Cohens’ home. Tobias Meyer of Sotheby's recalls sitting in the dining room staring at “Le Repos,” Picasso’s 1932 depiction of his wife Olga (a canvas Mr. Cohen bought at Christie’s in 2006 for $34.7 million) while in the background he could see Warhol’s 1964 “Turquoise Marilyn” hanging over the living-room fireplace. Mr. Cohen was quick to add that nothing was for sale. “This is not a way of selling my pictures,” Mr. Cohen emphasized. The earliest work in the show will be van Gogh’s “Peasant Girl With Yellow Straw Hat” (1890), which Mr. Cohen bought from the Las Vegas casino owner Stephen A. Wynn in 2005. It also includes two Matisse sculptures, three Picassos paintings, a Modigliani canvas, Edvard Munch’s Madonna, an early Rauschenberg blueprint and a Lucian Freud painting, and Pablo Picasso’s Le Repos along with examples by contemporary artists, like Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman.
