Displaying items by tag: hedge fund manager

Billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin has given $10 million to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through his charity.

The gift by the Kenneth C. Griffin Charitable Fund will be used to create the Griffin Galleries of Contemporary Art, the museum said in a statement Friday. The gift is part of the museum’s Vision Campaign to raise $64 million for programming, which has reached $60 million in private donations toward the goal.

“The Vision Campaign is about great art and ideas -- that connect with the community and propel the MCA as a leader in the cultural economy,” Madeleine Grynsztejn, the museum’s Pritzker director, said in the statement.

Billionaire money manager Steven A. Cohen is selling a 1958 Franz Kline painting valued at as much as $30 million during the semi-annual auctions of postwar and contemporary art in New York next month, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Christie’s said it will offer Kline’s Abstract Expressionist painting “King Oliver” at its evening sale on Nov. 12, with an estimate of $25 million to $30 million. Cohen, 58, is the seller, said the people, who asked not to be named because the information is private.

Steven Cohen, an American hedge fund manager and founder of SAC Capital Advisors LP, purchased Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) La Reve (1932) from casino tycoon Steve Wynn for $155 million. The sale marks the highest price paid by a U.S. collector for an artwork.

Cohen and Wynn have been in discussion about the sale since 2006. Originally, Wynn agreed to sell the painting to Cohen for $139 million but the transaction was cancelled after Wynn, whose vision is compromised, put his elbow through the canvas. The work has since been restored and the repair was factored into the selling price.

The sale comes less than two weeks after SAC Capital settled an ongoing insider trading case with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for $600 million; it was the largest insider trading settlement in history. Cohen, who started collecting art in 2001, has an expansive collection that includes works by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Andy Warhol (1928-1987), Jasper Johns (b. 1930), and Gerhard Richter (b. 1932).