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“The reason to buy art is because you love it, you love it, you love it.” The late financier-cum-gallerist Robert Mnuchin said this to The New York Times for a 2013 profile that outlined how decades spent as a heavyweight at Goldman Sachs had evolved into a career as a pre-eminent New York art dealer and gallerist.
While he was still a partner at Goldman Sachs, Mnuchin and his wife, Adriana, spent their free time learning about art. They had remarkable taste and prescience, turning a portion of their Upper East Side townhouse into a living gallery. Mnuchin, who became a Wall Street legend for his powerful instincts in trading, used that sixth sense for success and his instinctive curiosity to champion artists like Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Barnett Newman and more. He and Adriana lived amongst their art, spurning the term “collection,” which, to them, had the whiff of hiding art away in a storage facility.
By the end of his life in 2025, Mnuchin was still active in the gallery—which should come as no surprise given how much love and passion he invested in his art and artists. It is a rare treat, then, for us to be hosting Robert Mnuchin: Collector at Heart, a single-owner sale that will take place at the Breuer on 14 May, 2026. In honor of this live auction, we’re highlighting four shows held by Mnuchin Gallery over the years that showcase his curatorial eye and enduring legacy in the New York contemporary art scene.
In 1996—before he had fully assumed the icon status he commands today—a major Jeff Koons exhibition was derailed by production challenges. With remarkable foresight, Mnuchin Gallery stepped forward in the early aughts to mount Jeff Koons: Highlights of 25 Years. One of the artist’s earliest and most steadfast supporters, Mnuchin's clarity and conviction resulted in what was effectively the first major retrospective of Koons’s work in New York. The exhibition brought together for the first time some of Koons’s most celebrated achievements—among them Balloon Dog (Orange), shown alongside Rabbit (1986) and Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988)—offering a powerful early testament to the brilliance and cultural force of Koons’s oeuvre.
De Kooning was one of Mnuchin’s favorite artists and the gallerist organized multiple exhibitions of his work over the years, including the show highlighted here, the seminal Willem de Kooning: Five Decades. The exhibition featured works from the 1940s to the 1980s, including major museum loans. Two years later, Mnuchin would describe the show to Marion Maneker for Artnews, saying “I think the de Kooning is the chairman of the board… De Kooning is Picasso-esque. He really has at least five totally distinct periods, and I think that really separates him from anybody that didn’t have many periods. Nobody else has done that.”
Mnuchin owned and lived with the artist’s Two Women, which was featured in the show.
In 2021, in collaboration with Michael N. Altman and Christopher Rothko, Mnuchin Gallery mounted an exhibition of works by the Hudson River School artist Frederic Edwin Church and the Color Field canvases of Mark Rothko titled Church & Rothko: Sublime. The artists were separated by a century and their work was, upon first glance, disparate, but Mnuchin’s exhibition begged the viewer to look deeper. By juxtaposing the two artists—one classical, the other thoroughly abstract—the exhibition delved into the lineage of light and color between the Church and Rothko and “explore[d] the aesthetic force of two American artists who probed the formal boundaries of the sublime.”
Evocative and novel, the exhibition was centered around Brown and Blacks in Reds and No. 1, both of which will appear in the evening auction on 14 May.
One of the final exhibitions held at the gallery, the Franz Kline show featured 15 black-and-white paintings as well as a selection of works on paper spanning 1950 to 1960. The exhibition highlighted the personal nature of the artist's Abstract Expressionism, drawing attention to the emotional anchors of the pieces (Kline often named his works after friends, music, and places from his childhood). It was an apt theme for a gallerist like Mnuchin, for whom art was deeply personal.
For the show, Mnuchin lent his own Kline, Harleman, which is named after Kline’s childhood friend. It is a featured lot in the upcoming auction with an estimate of $12-18 million.
