Bankers and Painters

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2012/11/bankers-and-painters

The Believer has an essay about fine art and finance. Even if one disagrees with the essay at times, there are some facts and history that may be of interest:

Paul Sachs, an early partner at the family firm, left banking to become a specialist in Italian Renaissance art, and to found the program in curatorial studies at Harvard. Robert Lehman and his father, Philip Lehman, each of whom ran Lehman Brothers, together assembled one of the great collections of Florentine and Sienese art outside Italy. Even the bank established to bail these other banks out, the Federal Reserve, had at its inception Paul Warburg. Warburg, often referred to as the "father" of the Federal Reserve, was the brother of Aby Warburg, one of the greatest scholars of the Italian Renaissance. In much the same way that aptitudes for math and music seem to descend together in families, so do there seem to be lineages for those gifted in the representation of value: the bankers and the painters.

There's a whole section, too, on how the Sears Roebuck initial public offering of 1906 affected the art market.

by Editor  |  Nov 16, 2012 at 1:41 pm Related Topics:  Banking, Goldman Sachs receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list