Art collector Roy Neuberger dies at 107

Roy R. Neuberger, a Wall Street investor who became one of the nation's top modern art collectors, has died. He was 107.

Neuberger died Friday at his home in Manhattan's Pierre Hotel, said Rich Chimberg of Neuberger Berman, the money management firm cofounded by Neuberger in 1939.

He died of natural causes, his son James A. Neuberger said Friday.

The elder Neuberger had survived Wall Street's three major crises with enough money to build one of the largest private collections of major contemporary masterpieces.

"He got to Wall Street in 1929, a few months before the crash. He was 25," his son said. "He worked every day until he was 99."

Neuberger acquired hundreds of paintings and sculptures by artists such as Milton Avery, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe. But he never sold any work by a living artist, believing collectors should buy contemporary art and keep it, while giving the public access. The works have been displayed at 70 institutions in 24 states, such as at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum and the Neuberger Museum of Art.

"In the beginning, I collected art for a purpose - to help support living artists . . . Now I am simply a lover of art," he wrote in his 1997 memoir, "So Far, So Good: The First 94 Years." In 2007, President George W. Bush presented him with the National Medal of Arts.

Born in Bridgeport, Conn., Neuberger went on to live much of his life in New York City. He dropped out of college to work for as an upholstery fabric buyer at B. Altman & Co. To get closer to the European scene he knew from books, he moved to Paris in 1924 on money inherited from his father. That's where he decided to start collecting. In "So Far, So Good," he said that "to do so, I had to have capital of considerably more than the inheritance that gave me an annual income of about $2,000. . . . So I decided to go back to work in earnest."

He began as a runner for the brokerage firm Halle & Stieglitz. He sold short on the most popular stock then, RCA, and came out of the market crash with only a 15-percent loss.

His wife of more than 60 years, Marie, died in 1997. He also is survived by his daughter, Ann Neuberger Aceves, and another son, Roy S. Neuberger; eight grandchildren; and 30 great-grandchildren.

A funeral was planned for today at Manhattan's Riverside Memorial Chapel. With Bloomberg News