Roy Neuberger
December 26, 2010 by staff
Roy Neuberger, Roy R. Neuberger, a Wall Street investor who became one of the leading collectors of modern art in America, died Friday at his home in Mahnhattan. He was 107 years.
Neuberger died at his home, located in Manhattan’s Pierre Hotel, said Rich Chimberg, a spokesman for the firm Neuberger Berman.
Neuberger survived three stock collapses with enough money to buy one of the largest private collections of some of the major works of contemporary artists.
The man bought hundreds of paintings and sculptures by artists like Milton Avery, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe and others. However, he never sold any work of any living artist, considering that the contemporary art collectors should buy and keep, as well as access to the public.
The works are now scattered in 70 institutions in 24 states. Much is shown at the Neuberger Museum of Art located in the town of Purchase, north of the city of New York.
In a White House ceremony in 2007, President George W. Bush awarded him the National Medal of Arts.
Neuberger was a full-blooded New Yorker; he lived in that city for almost a century after arriving from his native Bridgeport, Connecticut.
The financier and collector finished high school but gave up college to work in the department store B. Altman & Co. as a buyer of fabrics. In two years we worked there, he developed a taste for the arts and business.
To be closer to Europe, he had known through books, Neuberger moved to Paris in 1924 thanks to the money he inherited from his father. It was when he decided to start collecting art.
In his autobiography, 1997, entitled”So Far, So Good: The First 94 Years”Neuberger said that”to start doing it (to collect art) needed to have capital, a figure considerably higher than I had inheritance left and gave me an annual income of about two thousand dollars. So he returned to work hard.”
He returned to Wall Street in the spring of 2009 and became a trader at brokerage firm Halle & Stieglitz.
Considering that the stock market was going to collapse, Neuberger sold short the shares of the most popular titles then, Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and managed to sneak the collapse of the stock with a loss of only 15 percent of your money.
After becoming a stockbroker in 1930, Neuberger opened his own business with a partner and once again survived the collapse of the stock in 1987.
In 1996,”the Dow Jones Industrial Average passed the 5704 (points) and (his wife) Marie and I have spent 64 years together,”wrote Neuberger wonderful. The wife died in 1997.
Neuberger published his second book of memoirs, entitled”The Passionate Collector”in 2003.
A Neuberger is survived by his daughter, Ann Neuberger Aceves, their sons Roy S. Neuberger and James A. Neuberger, eight grandchildren and 30 great-grandchildren.
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