Robert Mnuchin, an investment banker who found a second career as a powerful dealer of Modern and postwar art, died on Friday in Bridgewater, Connecticut, at 92.
His death was confirmed today by Michael McGinnis, a partner at Mnuchin Gallery in Manhattan.
Mnuchin was a major force at the top tier of the art market, exhibiting works by Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline. He was also known as an advisor to billionaires like Steve A. Cohen and Mitchell Rales.
In 2019, Mnuchin won Jeff Koons’s sculpture Rabbit (1986) on behalf of Cohen at Christie’s for $91 million, the auction record for a living artist. The news was all the more remarkable since one of Mnuchin’s sons, Steven, was the United States Treasury secretary at the time.
“I love to be around art,” Mnuchin père told Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times profile in 2013. “I really believe I have the heart of a collector.” His private collection included works by de Kooning, Rothko, and Pollock.
Born in 1933 in Manhattan, Mnuchin grew up in a Jewish family in Scarsdale, New York, and his parents collected Modern art on a modest scale. After graduating from Yale in 1955, he served in the U.S. Army. In 1957, he joined Goldman Sachs, where he built a successful career over 33 years, retiring in 1990 to pursue his passion for art.
The move was unorthodox.
“He was known to a lot of people in the trade as a passionate collector,” said David Nash, an art dealer. “He had a very specific interest in American Abstract Expressionism and very good taste. He was really quite driven when he turned to being an art dealer.”
Mnuchin opened his first gallery, C&M Arts, by partnering with Los Angeles dealer James Corcoran in 1992. It specialized in Abstract Expressionism. In 2005, he joined forces with Dominique Lévy, changing the gallery’s name to L&M Arts. The two remained partners until 2013, when Lévy struck out on her own. From then on, the business was known as Mnuchin Gallery.
One of Mnuchin’s early clients was Rales, who was then starting on his collecting journey, and helped him acquire major works by de Kooning, Rothko, and Twombly, often for record prices. These works are now part of Rales’s private Glenstone museum in Potomac, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.
In recent years, Mnuchin expanded his gallery’s focus to include more female artists and artists of color with shows devoted to Lynne Drexler, Sam Gilliam, and Ed Clark.
“He was singular in so many ways,” art advisor Amy Cappellazzo said. “Passionate, a gentleman, a great dealmaker, a true believer in art above all else.”
Mnuchin remained involved with the gallery up to the end, visiting it regularly and securing loans for its current survey of Julian Schnabel’s plate paintings, from 1978 to this year. The show runs through January 31.
“He’s been involved all the way through,” McGinnis said. “He enjoyed every minute of it.”
Mnuchin’s survivors include his wife, Adriana, his two sons, a daughter, and two stepchildren.
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