The artistic investor

By Georgette Gouveia

When Roy R. Neuberger died at his Manhattan home on Christmas Eve, the loss could be felt from Wall Street to museums around the country. For Neuberger, who lived to the grand old age of 107, didn’t merely have a footing in both the financial and artistic worlds. He inextricably linked them, using the wealth that he amassed first as a stockbroker and then as co-founder of the investment firm Neuberger Berman to create a collection that ultimately became the basis for Purchase College’s Neuberger Museum of Art and also nurtured 70 institutions around the United States.

In a sense, Neuberger inherited both his business acumen and his artistic passion. He was born on July 21, 1903 in Bridgeport, Conn. to Louis Neuberger, a businessman with an interest in the stock market, and his wife, the former Bertha Rothschild, who played the piano. Orphaned at age 12, Neuberger was raised by an older sister, Ruth, whom he would later fondly recall as a real mother to him.

After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School in Manhattan, where the family had moved, and attending New York University briefly, Neuberger took a job as an upholstery fabrics buyer at the now-defunct B. Altman & Co., honing his eye for shape, line and color. Neuberger’s next move would transform his life. He took a comfortable inheritance and set sail in the spring of 1924 for Paris, then the center of the art world. In the City of Lights, he once told this reporter, he refined his tennis game and his connoisseurship of women. He also read Floret Fels’ biography of Vincent Van Gogh, whose impoverished neglect so moved him that he decided to become a collector of living artists.

To do this, however, he would have to make real money. He headed to Wall Street in the spring of 1929, becoming first a runner and ultimately a broker for the firm Halle & Stieglitz. Almost immediately, he demonstrated the intuitive skills that would define his career as an investment specialist, selling short shares of RCA as a hedge against the fall he sensed was coming. Ten years later, he and Robert Berman founded Neuberger Berman, where Neuberger worked until he was 99. (The firm was sold to Lehman Brothers in 2003 for roughly $2.63 billion in cash and securities. Five years later, it was resold to its own management as part of Lehman’s liquidation.)

The same year Neuberger started his investment company, he began collecting painters and sculptors who today make up a Who’s Who of American Art – Alexander Calder; Nyack native Edward Hopper; Jacob Lawrence; Georgia O’Keeffe; David Smith, a onetime sculpture teacher at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers; and especially Milton Avery, whose use of flat, colorful shapes led him to be dubbed “the American Matisse.”

In 1969, Neuberger donated a significant portion of his collection, more than 900 works, to found the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, spurred by his good friend Nelson A. Rockefeller, then governor of New York. Today the Neuberger has more than 7,000 modern, contemporary and African works.

The man who gave his name to both an investment firm and a museum was always wry and spry, as evinced by the title of his autobiography, written at age 94, “So Far, So Good” (John Wiley & Sons). Speaking of his pal Rocky’s ancestral home in Pocantico Hills, Neuberger once observed, “Kykuit is what God would’ve built had he had the money.” (His own woodsy weekend retreat in northern Westchester, with its views of undulating verdure, wasn’t too shabby, either.)

Neuberger also possessed a courtly appreciation of women that is all but lost in our vulgar age. Whenever you’d interview him, he’d speak with profound respect of his late wife, the former Marie Salant, who shared his foothold in both the investment and museum worlds for almost 65 years. (Neuberger is survived by their three children – Ann Neuberger Aceves, Roy S. Neuberger and James A. Neuberger, as well as eight grandchildren and 30 great-grandchildren.)

Later Neuberger formed an attachment with another vibrant brunette, the late singer and arts advocate Kitty Carlisle Hart. He liked to tell the story of how they met cute at a Metropolitan Museum of Art board of trustees meeting, where he switched the place-cards so that he could sit next to her.

That was vintage Neuberger, a man who believed in making his own luck.

How fortunate we are that he chose to share it with others.

Georgette Gouveia is a reporter for the Westchester County Business Journal. Follow the Journal online at westfairinc.com.

Kudos...

To The New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, which was the only institution in our area to receive the 2010 National Medal for Museum and Library Service from the Institute of Museum and Library Service.

The medal, which comes with a $10,000 cash prize, is the nation’s highest honor for museums and libraries that make extraordinary civic, educational, economic, environmental and social contributions.

Said IMLS acting director Marsha L. Semmel: “This year’s national medal winners are serving their communities with innovative and creative approaches to lifelong learning, commitment to addressing diverse community needs, plain old hard work, and a lot of heart.”

The Botanical Garden is known not only for its specialty gardens and virgin forest but its medical research facilities and its seasonal exhibits that combine nature with art and botanical illustration (not to mention one of the best cafeterias and gift shops around). In sum, it is like a mini-vacation.

(With art in WestABC art 1206: Caption: The New York Botanical Garden’s annual Holiday Train Show offers up botanical versions of some of New York’s most recognizable landmarks, including the garden’s own Enid A. Haupt Conservatory.)

All his son

Of all deaths, suicide most begs the question, “Why?” Since Mark Madoff died, pundits and bloggers alike have looked to the Bible and the ancient Greek dramatists for answers. Perhaps the best analogies, however, are to two 20^th-century works about the dark side of the American dream. In Arthur Miller’s play “All My Sons,” Larry Keller, a bomber pilot in World War II, deliberately crashes his plane after realizing that his father – a bastion of respectability -- sold faulty airplane parts to the government, causing the deaths of 21 pilots.

In Giacomo Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly,” the deluded geisha Cio Cio San -- finally realizing that race as much as her love for the faithless Pinkerton has doomed her hopes of being a modern American wife -- commits hara-kiri while her blindfolded son plays nearby. (You'll recall that Madoff hanged himself as his 2-year-old slept in the next room.)

That someone would kill himself within the proximity of his child is what most disturbs some people. Perhaps the suicide's pain is so great that it blocks out everything -- and everyone -- else.

Or perhaps we simply can't reconcile that death and life, monstrosity and normalcy can coexist.

W.H. Auden addressed this seeming incompatibility in the opening lines of his poem "Musee des Beaux Arts":

"About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along...."