Steven A. Cohen

Steven A. Cohen (* 11. June 1956 ) is an American entrepreneur , hedge funds - manager and art collector.

Life

Cohen grew up in Great Neck in the US state of New York . He attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania . After completing his studies, Cohen started working for Gruntal & Co. in 1978. SAC Capital (SAC), registered in Anguilla and headquartered in Stamford , Connecticut , was founded by Cohen in 1992 and has been led by him ever since. In 2005, Cohen was named A New Prince of Wall Street by the New York Times newspaper . In 2008 Cohen took over 4.7% of the shares in the auction house Sotheby’s . In 2009 he increased this proportion to 5.9%.

Cohen lives in Greenwich , Connecticut. He is married and has several children.

Art collection

One of the earliest acquisitions that Steven A. Cohen and his wife Alexandra made on the art market was a Madonna painting by Edvard Munch from 1894/95 for $ 11.5 million. The first acquisitions also included Impressionist paintings such as the self-portrait with a palette by Édouard Manet , a water lily painting by Claude Monet from 1906 and a sculpture of a ballet dancer by Edgar Degas . The Cohen collection contains a landscape study Isle Grande Jatte by the pointillist Georges Seurat . This was followed by 20th century works of art such as a drip painting by Jackson Pollock from 1952 and a study of Pope Innocent X (after Diego Velázquez ) by Francis Bacon from 1950. Cohen also acquired works by contemporary artists such as Richard Prince and Tom Friedman .

In 2004 Cohen bought Paul Cézanne's Portrait de femme (around 1900) at Christie's in New York for $ 10 million. Also in 2004, Andy Warhol's picture Superman from 1960 came from the Gunter Sachs collection to the Cohen Collection via the art dealer Larry Gagosian . With a presumed purchase price of 25 or 30 million dollars, it was the artist's most expensive work of art at the time. In 2007 Warhol's painting Turquoise Marilyn was added to the collection. The purchase price for the picture, which was also purchased privately, is said to have been $ 80 million, a new price record for a work by Warhol.

In 2005, Cohen acquired two major works of late impressionism from casino owner Stephen A. Wynn for $ 100 million . Through the mediation of the art dealer William Acquavella , in addition to the painting Paul Gauguin's Tahitian Family from 1902, the painting Portrait of a Young Peasant Woman by Vincent van Gogh from 1890 came into the Cohen Collection.

The headlines in 2006 was the acquisition of the painting Woman III by Willem de Kooning , created in 1952–53. According to the New York Times , Cohen paid $ 137.5 million for this painting. The sale between the previous owner of the painting David Geffen and Cohen was brokered by the New York art dealer Larry Gagosian. A month before the purchase of Woman III , Cohen, also from Geffen, bought the 1955 abstract De Kooning painting Police Gazette for $ 63.5 million. Another work by a Pop Art artist in the Cohen Collection is the painting Popeye by Roy Lichtenstein .

One of the best-known works of contemporary art in the Cohen Collection is the shark placed in formaldehyde, entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst . Cohen acquired this work, one of the major works of the Young British Artists, in 2004 for $ 8 million from British collector Charles Saatchi . The work is on permanent loan from the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until 2010 . In 2008 the Cohens also lent the Balloon Dog (Yellow) and Sacred Heart (Red / Gold) sculptures by Jeff Koons to the museum for an exhibition.

In April 2009, Sotheby's in New York is showing a selection of works of art from the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Collection to the public for the first time. Artworks of this exhibition, presented under the title Women , are the sculptures Figure Decorative (1908) and Grand nu Assis (1922–29) by Henri Matisse , as well as the paintings Portrait of a Young Peasant Woman by Vincent van Gogh, Madonna by Edvard Munch, Portrait de femme by Paul Cézanne, Nu Couché au coussin Bleu by Amedeo Modigliani , Femme Nue Couchée , Le Repos and Femme Assise by Pablo Picasso , Untitled (Sue) by Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil , Woman III by Willem de Kooning, Anthropologie de l'epoque blue ( ANT.78) by Yves Klein , Turquoise Marilyn by Andy Warhol, Dancers (1966) by Gerhard Richter , Untitled Film Still # 21 (1978) by Cindy Sherman , Portrait of Rose (1978–79) by Lucian Freud , Spiritual America and Graduate Nurse by Richard Prince, The Visitor by Marlene Dumas and Night (1999–2000) by Lisa Yuskavage . The Independent wrote in 2009 that Cohen intended to build a private museum in Greenwich, Connecticut . Cohen sold Manet's self-portrait with a pallet at an auction at Sotheby’s on June 22, 2010 , where the painting found a new owner for 22.4 million British pounds (including the auction house's premium). The amount achieved was the highest price ever paid for a work of art by Manet.

Works from the Cohen Collection

Vincent van Gogh:
Portrait of a Young Peasant Woman , 1890
Paul Cézanne:
Portrait de femme , 1900
Paul Gauguin:
Tahitian Family , 1902
Amedeo Modigliani:
Nu Couché au coussin Bleu , 1916

capital

Steven A. Cohen is a multi-billionaire. On the Forbes list of 2017, his fortune is stated at around 13 billion US dollars , which makes him number 92 on the list of the richest people in the world.