Dubbed by speculators by some, admired as shrewd dealmakers by others, the Mugrabis have become dominant players in the market for Postwar American Art
When José Mugrabi (left) began actively trading in the mid-’80s, he partnered with israeli billionaire collector Sammy Ofer. After their bitter split, some of their purchases. Alberto Mugrabi (right) serves as a roving ambassador and sales scout for the family business headed by his father, who declined to be pictured. Portraits by Juan Brenner
A defining moment in the making of collector andart trader José Mugrabi took place on November 10, 1988, at Sotheby’s evening sale of contemporary art in New York.
It was at the cusp of the art boom. Mugrabi, the Israeli-born Colombian textiles magnate, fellinto a bidding match with the late Thomas Ammann for the cover lot, Andy Warhol’s massive Marilyn Monroe (Twenty Times), from 1962, estimated at $1.3 million to $1.8 million. Mugrabi outdueled the Swiss dealer for the six-foot-high picture, sending it soaring to a record $4 million. It was a giant leap for Mugrabi. He already owned some Warhols, but none approaching this value or quality.
Asked about that night 15 years later, Mugrabi relishes the moment. Gesturing expressively with one outstretched fist, he says, “Ibought a part of American culture, so paid very little for it, put in those terms.” He pauses before adding, “With Warhol, I find something extremely emotional and difficult to explain. He’s a revolutionary.”
Today Mugrabi, 63, working with his sons Alberto, 33, and David, 32, is among the most active international players in the market for postwar American art. His collection of Warhols numbers several hundred pieces, which are packaged for lucrative and ever -changing museum exhibitions around the world, from Rio de Janeiro to Taipei. He is constantly buying and selling, and the art world is filled with anecdotes about the savy deals he’s done.
In June 2002, the day before the Art Basel fair opened, Mugrabi bought a 1963 Silver Liz from the Richard Gray Gallery for a sum believed to be $3.3 million. Just weeks later, he flipped the painting to Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg for its contemporary sale that November-securing a reported $4 million guarantee. One prominent dealer approached by the auction house as a potential buyer criticized the consignment, later telling a colleague, “It was a picture sold by a master negotiator,bought by a master speculator and offered on the market, so what kind of value can you put behindit?” It took the sale’s top price, $4.4 million.
Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe (Twenty Times), 1962, one of José Mugrabi’s first major purchases
Last May at Christie’s New York, another guaranteed Mugrabi work, Warhol’s 1966 Marlon, fetched $s.1 million. Mugrabi had bought it for $I.7 million at Sotheby’s New York in November 1997, before the recent precipitous climb in Warhol’s prices. There are very few Warhols of this caliber in private hands, and he almost has a monopoly on great pictures,” says Brett Gorvy, Christie’s co-head of postwar and contemporary at, who aproache Mugrab ast season fora Warhol consignment So we made a very concious decisian to go to him [for a picture], knowing what whatever we’d be doing would be expensive. But if you want to find some of the best Warhols in private collections, José Mugrabi owns them.”
Lower-profile than fellow New York collector-trader Peter Brant, Mugrabi “has been a tremendous force in the market for certain artists,” says Lucy Mitchell-Innes, a partner in the Madison Avenue gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash. “He’s very, very passionate about postwar American art.” Mitchell-Innes names Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat as two of those “certain artists,” and that list can be expanded to Tom Wesselmann, another of Mugrabi’s favorites, and to a somewhat lesser degree, Jeff Koons. (Mugrabi was the tenacious underbidder for the Koons sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles, which made a record $5.6 million at Sotheby’s New York in May 2001.)
“he sees, he feels and he acts with his instincts,” Alberto says of his father. “he’s very stubborn, but he knows what he likes”
“They help facilitate the market,” one admiring auction house specialist says of Mugrabi and his sons. “They are constant buyers for inventory and constant sellers, similar probably to the Nahmads in Impressionist and modern art. They help things move along, they help things appreciate, but at the end of the day, they’re in the trade and there to make money.”
Unlike the Nahmads, the family of art traders who are widely known as auction room bargain hunters, the Mugrabis will stretch far for property they covet. “José is certainly not a cheap guy,” says Christie’s Gorvy. “I he wants something he will pay, even if it’s over the market price, because he believes the market will follow.”
Earlier this fall, the publicity-shy Mugrabi reluctantly agreed to a rare interview at the Park Avenue offices of Fashion Concepts, the name of his family’s art-trading company. Seated behind a massive desk, with two small Warhol Jackies and a Flower painting hanging on the otherwise bare walls, he wore a dark suit, a striped shirt with white cuffs and collar and no tie. His sons, Alberto and David, sat attentively nearby for much of the meeting. They were there in part to calm their father, who kept his hands busy, at one point balancing a pen on his finger and later switching to a small strand of turquoise worry beads.
Gesturing expressively and always maintaining eye contact, the self-made businessman spoke simply but forcefully about his consuming passion, recounting his early days as a collector. Remarkably, or so it seems now, before Mugrabi’s name took on such heft in the market for Warhol and other postwar American artists, his first auction purchase was in the Impressionist arena. At Sotheby’s in November 1982, he acquired a relatively unremarkable Renoir landscape for $126,000. Scanning a dog-eared loose-leaf ledger that documents his initial purchases, he enthusiastically announces, “November 3, 1982. That was my first painting.” A stickler for details, he frequently calls on his longtime secretary, Esty Newman, for backup during our interview. “Esty, bring me the Christie’s London catalogue….”
In the early 198os, before Mugrabi moved to New York full-time to focus more on art, he traveled frequently between the city and Colombia for his successful textiles importing business. At that time, he took the sophisticated but conservative advice of Roberto Polo, then with Citibank’s private-banking division. Polo later made headlines of his own as a disgraced and fugitive money manager, but the Cuban-born financier and art connoisseur was a star rainmaker at Citibank, and the two men hit it off.
In addition to the Renoir, Mugrabi acquired works by Eugène Boudin, Honoré Daumier and Camille Pissarro, which a former auction house executive describes as “lesser Part I pictures.” Quickly hooked, Mugrabi “started buying pretty indiscrimi-nately,” according to a knowledgeable source, including lower-priced Part Il auction material, usually with Polo at his side.
But Mugrabi soon underwent a radical shift, as he began to embrace postwar art. In May 1983 at Sotheby’s New York, he bought Mark Rothko’s Abstract Expressionist No. 15, from 1949, for $126,500, coincidentally the same price he paid for the Renoir. “I knew zero-below zero-about Rothko,” recalls Mugrabi, without a trace of embarrassment. “But I was in New York, went to the auction house, saw the piece, liked it and bought it.”
Asked how he made the leap of faith to postwar art, he laughs as if still delighted by the event, saying, “To me, it’s the same. If I like something, ifI feel it, this is it. I go with intuition.” Mugrabi notes that he made the decision to buy the Rothko without the advice of Polo or anyone else.
By the mid-198os, Mugrabi had become a familiar face in the salesrooms. He allied himself with Sammy Ofer, the Israeli billionaire shipping mogul and voracious art collector, and the two eventually formed a quiet art partnership in 1989, with Ofer financing Mugrabi’s choices. Together they acquired more than 100 works by a range of artists from Jackson Pollock to Warhol, for the express purpose of resale for profit. It was a common salesroom scene in New York in the late ‘8os: Ofer ensconced in his front-row seat, flanked by Mugrabi and leading Imp/mod art trader David Nahmad. None of the men are currently on speaking terms, according to several sources, a result of past art-trading disputes.
The eventual falling-out between Mugrabi and Ofer led to a legal fight in a London court, involving expert art witnesses for both sides. In 1995 a panel of judges issued a binding arbitration ruling, common in real estate disputes, known as a buy-sell deal. One party (in this case, Ofer) divides the disputed property into two parcels and the other (Mugrabi) has first choice on which chunk to take, assuring an equitable distribution.
“There was some difference of opinion between us,” says Mugrabi, repeatedly squeezing a pink gel “stress ball” in one hand. “We bought some paintings together, and later Mr. Ofer realized they were very bad artists, like Warhol, Basquiat, Jackson Pollock and de Kooning, so he decided it was better to sell them.” Ofer could not be reached for comment.
Some of that divided property subsequently wound up on the auction block, according to a knowledgeable source. One of the pieces put up by Ofer, a nearly 7-foot-square Warhol Flowers, from 1964, sold at Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg in November 2000 for $I.9 million, double the low estimate. “José is not very happy with that,” says a source, “because he was the one who obviously saw the potential of Warhol, and Ofer benefited from his focus.” Ofer also retained a Double Elvis, another thorn in Mugrabi’s side, since Warhol’s Elvis paintings have become extremely rare to the market.
That rocky episode, already legendary among a small coterie of dealers and art world insiders, illuminates one aspect of Mugrabi’s forceful and uncompromising per-sonality: “He’s a tough cookie” and a “hard, hard-headed businessman,” says an auction specialist (one of a handful contacted for this article who insisted on anonymity). “He’s a very tough negotiator, and certainly a lot of changing of the mind goes on, which makes it difficult to close a deal.” Adds Manhattan-based private dealer Darlene Lutz, “It’s no secret to anybody in the art world that he goes after what he wants with a vengeance.”
“he’s done what I told him he couldn’t do – find the right speculations and make a fortune. I have to hand it to him”
German curator Heiner Bastian came up against Mugrabi’s famous stubbornness several years ago, when Bastian was organizing the huge traveling Warhol retrospective that appeared at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Contemporary At in Los Angeles in 2001-02. He allegedly wooed Mugrabi for a crucial loan of Marilyn Monroe (Twenty Times). Mugrabi said he would only agree if Bastian also included one of the artist’s later and less championed Drag Queen paintings from his “Ladies and Gentlemen” series. Neither budged, and the Marilyn wasn’t in the show.
Despite the scale of his art-buying and -selling, which could rival that of some major contemporary art galleries, Mugrabi barely acknowledges being in the art busi-ness. “I still don’t see it like a real business,” he says. “It’s more passionate than a business. If I sell something, it’s to buy something better.” Asked if he’d ever consider selling Marilyn (Twenty Times), he replies, “T’ve received monumental offers for it-monu-mental. But it is not for sale.”
A number of art world professionals familiar with his activities find that hard to believe. “Everything ends up being for sale,” says one New York dealer. “He’s basically a speculator who runs an art business.”
It’s important to note that Mugrabi sells only to the trade and has no private clients of his own. For years, he has worked closely with his older son, Alberto, who serves as a kind of roving ambassador and sales scout for the family art business. David, his other son, recently joined the business after a stint on Wall Street as a managing partner of Dalton Kent Securities, a stock-trading venture started in the late 199os that was funded by Mugrabi and five partners before it was sold earlier this year.
Alberto, who began attending auctions with this father as a teenager in the mid- 8os and joined the business full-time in 1994, describes his father as a visionary. “He sees, he feels and he acts with his instincts,” Alberto says. “He’s very stubborn, but he knows what he likes.”
The elder Mugrabi’s instinct for postwar art, and for Warhol in particular, was initial reted with substantial skepticism among his peers. “People were telling me to my face that I was buying stupidly,” says Mugrabi, amused by the recollection, “and more stupidly when I was buying late Warhols.” Yet he seems to possess a keen sense of when to sell top works. In December 2000, he consigned Salvador Dali’s exquisite 1945 nude, Ma femme nue regardant son propre corps devenir marches trois vertèbres d’une colonne, ciel et archi-tecture, to Sotheby’s London. He had acquired the painting at Sotheby’s New York in November 1983 for $470,000. This time around, it fetched £2.9 million ($4.3 million). “He’s done what I told him he couldn’t do,” says one New York private art dealer, “find the right speculations and make a fortune. I have to hand it to him.”
“the Mugrabis help facilitate the market at the end of the day they’re in the trade and there to make money”
Several sources say that Mugrabi, sensing a unique market opportunity a few years ago, at the height of the cutthroat competition between Christie’s owner François Pinault and Phillips’s new owner, Bernard Arnault, considered offering them his entire collection of Warhols. The price, depending on whom you ask, would have been somewhere between Sigo million and $250 million. The winner would have gotten an instant Warhol museum, stronger in major works than the one established by the Warhol Foundation in Pittsburgh-but apparently the idea never reached the discussion stage.
One dealer, who insists on anonymity, dismisses the story completely. “Mugrabi is famous for spreading this kind of information as a way of inflating the value of his inventory,” the dealer contends. “He’s a shameless self-promoter.”
No matter how you label Mugrabi-collector or dealer, trader or speculator-he’s done more than simply corner a piece of the Warhol market or make millions on shrewd trading instincts. He has actually expanded the Warhol “brand” name internationally with more than a decade’s worth of variously packaged exhibitions, all of them boasting in-depth catalogues. A recent example, “Andy Warhol: The Celebrity Portraits,” featuring some 50 paintings from the Mugrabi collection, was staged at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas. Paper Ball, a subsidiary of the New York-based gallery Pace Wildenstein, produced the show. It attracted 125,000 visitors, at S15 a shot, during its seven-month run earlier this year. The catalogue acknowledged that “José Mugrabi set out to create what would become the world’s most comprehensive private collection of the artist’s work.”
“It wasn’t the definitive Warhol celebrity show,” says Marc Glimcher, chairman of the Bellagio Gallery and president of Pace Wildenstein. “The space wasn’t big enough for that. But the Mugrabis had the material to follow that obsession all the way through Warhol’s life.” He credits Alberto with coming up with the celebrity portraits theme-believed to be the first show devoted to the subject. The Mugrabis received both a fee for the show plus a percentage of the gate, according to Glimcher.
So what will happen to the Mugrabi collection, hundreds of Warhols, dozens of Basquiats and Wesselmanns, and a recently acquired trove of vintage Jacques Lartigue prints bought directly from the photographer’s widow? Is there a Mugrabi museum in the future?
Smiling at the question, José Mugrabi turns to his sons and says, “Alberto and David will keep working.”