3 Photos
[caption id="attachment_48354" align="alignleft" width="404"] "Interchange" by Willem de Kooning.[/caption]
Ken Griffin, a 47 year-old hedge fund tycoon purchased Jackson Pollock’s “Number 17A, 1948,” and “Interchange” by fellow East Hampton artist Willem de Kooning, according to The New York Times. He purchased the art from David Geffen last fall for $500 million, and has lent the pieces to the Art Institute of Chicago.
According to a newsletter sent by the Pollock Krasner House in Springs, the reported $200 million purchase of the Pollock painting alone, is a record for the artist. Pollock's most expensive sale at auction to date is Number 19, 1948, which fetched $58.3 million at Christie's New York in 2013. Ten years ago, Mr. Geffen sold Pollock's Number 5, 1948 to an unnamed buyer for $140 million, then the highest reported price ever paid for a painting.
[caption id="attachment_48593" align="alignright" width="300"]
Pollock Number 17A, 1948[/caption]
Number 17A, 1948 was reproduced in the famous profile of Pollock, “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?”, in the August 1949 issue of Life magazine. The Life color photo was one of the reproductions used in Peter Blake's model of an "ideal museum" for Pollock's work to illustrate how his paintings would look in the unframed architectural space. The canvas was exhibited in Paris in 1952, when it was bought by the French curatorial entrepreneur Michel Tapié, a great admirer of Pollock, who helped organize the show and wrote the catalog essay.
