Live Auction: 14 May 2026 • 6:00 PM EDT • New York
A lifelong collector, Robert Mnuchin’s illustrious second career as a dealer and trusted advisor, following his first in banking, indelibly shaped the tenor, texture, and spirit of this generation’s most formidable collections—one of which is his own. Led by pivotal Abstract Expressionist masterworks by Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, the works Robert and Adriana collected reflect a true continuity in vision and instinct. Mnuchin’s steadfast dedication to championing these artists not only guided his gallery’s programming but also reflected in his personal collection, culminating here in some of the most significant examples created by each artist. Driven by a sophistication of taste and indefatigable conviction when pursuing works of the highest quality, Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart stands as a capsule of Robert and Adriana’s incomparable eye and intuition.
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Works from Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart
“I love to be around art. I really believe I have the heart of a collector.”
Robert Mnuchin
The story of the art world today cannot be told without the legacy of Robert Mnuchin. Born in 1933, Mnuchin’s encounters with American postwar art were cultivated early on, with his family having collected works by Franz Kline and Mark Rothko in their home, first in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and then in Scarsdale, New York. His career, however, began on Wall Street. Today heralded as one of the great elder statesmen of American banking, Mnuchin joined Goldman Sachs in 1957 and was made partner a decade later. At the helm of the firm, he revolutionized the then-nascent block trading industry and, in 1980, went on to join Goldman Sachs’ management committee.
All the while, Robert and his wife Adriana had been assembling one of the most significant private collections in the country. Refined over decades through carefully considered yet always deeply instinctual acquisitions, the collection has seen countless masterworks. In addition to the major paintings, sculptures, and works on paper included in Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart, the Mnuchins’ holdings have spanned Barnett Newman’s The Promise from 1949, one of the artist’s earliest Zip paintings donated by the Mnuchins to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Franz Kline’s Untitled from 1957, which later achieved a record price of $40.4 million for the artist in a 2012 auction and the study for which is included in the Contemporary Day Auction, Willem de Kooning’s seminal …Whose Name Was Writ in Water from 1975, again donated by Robert and Adriana to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, to Frank Stella’s Orphir from 1962, a rare and monumental Copper Painting now at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, among numerous important examples by Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, and Andy Warhol, among others. These works not only adorned the walls of their home but were the sole reason for having walls at all: each residence they occupied functioned as a backdrop for the collection, refined and minimal so that the art could sing. In fact, Robert and Adriana’s townhouse on East 78th Street, which later became Mnuchin’s gallery space, was purchased to serve as the most optimal gallery for their collection.
So irrepressible was Mnuchin’s love for art that collecting alone couldn’t contain the bounds of his interest. Following his retirement from Goldman Sachs in 1990, he converted part of his townhouse on the Upper East Side and opened C & M Arts in partnership with James Corcoran. His conviction, curatorial eye, and infallible instincts immediately proved as adept at running the gallery as they did for his and Adriana’s personal acquisitions. In 2005, he began partnering with Dominique Lévy and renamed the gallery L & M Arts, and in 2013, with her departure, he inaugurated Mnuchin Gallery. Across the various iterations of Mnuchin’s operation, the gallery was simultaneously the respected voice for blue chip postwar art and a wellspring for the cutting-edge twentieth-century avant-garde, often placing the two in an extraordinary, electrifying dialogue. At every juncture, the constant, of course, was Robert himself.
"The paintings lit my dad up. They were his friends and his children. Sometimes when we couldn’t get his attention, we knew he was hanging paintings in his head."
Valerie Mnuchin
For thirty years, Mnuchin organized and oversaw seminal exhibitions of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, John Chamberlain, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Philip Guston—many of whom are represented in Mnuchin’s private collection and all of whom reflect the sincerity and consistency of his tastes. His tributes to the giants of postwar abstraction were complemented by breakthrough presentations for Alma Thomas, Lynda Benglis, and Lynn Drexler, artists who—largely through Mnuchin Gallery’s intrepid support—were recovered from relative obscurity in the stone-cast lineages of Western art history. Collecting and dealing, selling and buying, to Mnuchin, were always grounded in the same spirit: a tireless and unyielding love for objects of incomparable beauty. In 2004, he mounted a watershed show of Jeff Koons’ work, one often credited with cementing Koons’ status and reputation. Fitting, too, that Mnuchin would make history when he placed the winning bid on Koons’ Rabbit at auction in 2019 on behalf of a collector—a sale that made Koons the most expensive living artist in history. A longstanding supporter of Koons’ oeuvre, Mnuchin acquired another major work from the Statuary series, Louis XIV from 1986, over a decade ago.
Mnuchin proudly shared his love of art, and the collection he and Adriana cherished and treasured is perhaps the greatest testament to this remarkable life and legacy of all, elegantly summarizing the curiosities that simultaneously absorbed and fulfilled him during his life. The ambient and atmospheric fields of feathered reds and blacks in Mark Rothko’s extraordinary masterpiece, Brown and Blacks in Reds from 1957, is met by the architectonic muscularity of Franz Kline’s panoramic Harleman from 1960. The constellations of primary color and line in Joan Miró’s Dormeurs réveillés par un oiseau from 1939 couples with the sculptural seated muses of Pablo Picasso’s Deux femmes nues assises from 1921, which together constitute a triumph of European Modernism.
Particularly impressive is the miniature retrospective of Willem de Kooning captured in Mnuchin’s collection, whom he referred to as “the chairman of the board.” The five works here offer a window into the most pivotal developments across four decades of de Kooning’s protean, ever-evolving practice, beginning with the sharp interchanges of the intimate Untitled #4 into the aqueous and widely exhibited Two Women, which at once evokes both flesh and nature, continuing through to the theatrical physicality of the frothy Untitled and ending with quiet, balletic lyricism of Untitled XLII.
“I love what I do,” Mnuchin shared in a 2021 interview with ARTnews, “I’d be lost without it.” (Robert Mnuchin quoted in: Daniel Cassady, “Robert Mnuchin, Goldman Sachs Power Broker Turned Influential Art Dealer, Dies at 92,” ARTnews, 20 December 2025 (online)) The collection exuberantly presents a dissertation on abstraction’s enduring power through the objects that grounded Robert, who, through varied acts in life, found direction and unending inspiration on his very own walls. What remains so remarkable is the continuity in Mnuchin’s taste: from the gallery to his personal collection, he knew what he wanted and loved, and more than anything, believed in it.
