Robert E. Mnuchin, a Goldman Sachs partner who used trading-floor savvy, Wall Street connections and a deep love of art to build a second act as one of New York’s foremost gallerists and art dealers, died on Friday at his home in Bridgewater, Conn. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Lisa Hedley Wick.
Under Goldman Sachs’s formidable managing partner, Gustave Levy, Mr. Mnuchin helped in the 1960s and ’70s to build the firm’s institutional equities trading business, which specializes in buying and selling large amounts of stock.
After he retired, his second career as an art dealer also put him in the middle of multimillion-dollar transactions — though he maintained that, for him, it wasn’t about the money as much as the allure of the art.
“The reason to buy art is because you love it, you love it, you love it,” he told The New York Times in 2013.
After graduating from Yale in 1955 and serving briefly in the Army, Mr. Mnuchin arrived on Wall Street as it was entering a golden era. The market had only recently fully recovered from the trauma of 1929, retaking pre-crash highs just a few years earlier. A new bull market was romping amid America’s postwar economic boom.
As incomes rose, Americans saved for retirement as never before. Much of that money migrated to Wall Street through mutual funds and corporate pension funds. The increasingly important role of the professionals managing those pools of capital — known as institutional investors — reshaped the field.
Their need to quickly buy and sell giant slugs of stock overwhelmed the capacity of the New York Stock Exchange. The traders who matched buyers and sellers at the exchange simply didn’t have deep enough pockets to handle the amounts institutional investors needed to trade.
Old-line bankers stepped in, with firms like Goldman and Salomon Brothers establishing institutional sales and trading divisions catering to these giant clients.
Mr. Mnuchin was unusually adept at this business, known as block trading.
“The acknowledged dean of block traders on the Street is Robert E. Mnuchin,” The Wall Street Journal wrote in a 1978 story exploring the rise of block trading. (His principal rival, the paper noted, was the head of equity trading at Salomon Brothers, Michael Bloomberg.)
A charismatic presence on the trading floor, Mr. Mnuchin relentlessly worked the phones with counterparts on client trading desks, with brokerage firms and with traders at the New York Stock Exchange. His startling ability to store large amounts of information in his head meant he knew on the fly what various buyers and sellers were interested in. He also had a knack for getting trading partners to quickly accept or reject the shares he had on offer, according to the 2008 book “The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs,” by Charles D. Ellis.
“Bob is the best trade-putter-together I know of in the business,” Mr. Levy, of Goldman, said of Mr. Mnuchin, as Mr. Ellis relayed in his book.
Robert E. Mnuchin was born on Sept. 5, 1933, in Manhattan, to Leon A. and Harriet (Gevirtz) Mnuchin. His father was the senior partner of the law firm Mnuchin, Moss & Marlin, and served as a director of prominent retailers like Bonwit Teller and S.H. Kress.
The Mnuchins collected pieces by Franz Kline and Mark Rothko, as well as a Matisse that the family later found out was fake. The young Robert had a privileged upbringing, spending his early years on Central Park West — 1940 census records show a maid and live-in governess as members of the household — before the family moved to the affluent Westchester County suburb of Scarsdale, where he attended Scarsdale High School.
In 1957, Mr. Mnuchin married Elaine Terner. The couple had two sons: Steven, who served as Treasury secretary during the first Trump administration, and Alan. The marriage ended in divorce. Mr. Mnuchin later married Adriana Graber, with whom he had a daughter, Valerie.
In addition to his stepdaughter, Mr. Mnuchin is survived by his wife, Adriana; his two sons; his daughter; and another stepchild from his second marriage, Bradley Abelow.
He became a partner at Goldman Sachs in 1967; was appointed head of trading and arbitrage there in 1976 (a role he shared with Robert Rubin, later a Treasury secretary under President Clinton); and served on the firm’s powerful management committee in 1980. He retired in 1990.
With his wife Adriana, Mr. Mnuchin bought the Mayflower Inn in Washington, Conn., near their weekend home in Litchfield County, renovating it and reopening the property in 1992.
The couple also began to focus more intensely on their already formidable art collection, which included works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Rothko.
In the early 1990s, the Mnuchins converted part of their townhouse on East 78th Street in Manhattan into a gallery called C&M Arts, a collaboration with James Corcoran, a West Coast art dealer. Mr. Mnuchin then partnered with Dominique Lévy on another gallery, L&M Arts; after her departure in 2013 to start a new gallery, the business was renamed Mnuchin Gallery.
“I’ve loved art for so long, I was looking for a way to become even more involved,” Mr. Mnuchin told The Times in 1992 about the opening of C&M Arts.
The gallery developed a specialty in Abstract Expressionism, with shows like a 1993 exhibition of Pollock’s smaller drip paintings on paper. Mr. Mnuchin became known for working closely with billionaire collectors like Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund investor, and Mitchell Rales, a founder of the conglomerate Danaher. He became a mainstay at major art New York auctions, often competing for the highest-priced works available.
Writing about a Christie’s auction of postwar and contemporary art in 2005, The New York Sun reported that Mr. Mnuchin was “extremely active and by the middle of the sale took to simply shouting out his bids.”
The next year, in a bidding war with another dealer, Larry Gagosian, over “Sinking Sun,” a 1964 work by Roy Lichtenstein, Mr. Mnuchin “made sure he would be the winner on this picture,” The Sun reported, “by jumping ahead on the price he was willing to pay, throwing out numbers $100,000 or more higher than the next bidding increment.”
In 2008, Mr. Mnuchin told Art & Auction magazine: “I love going to auctions. All the people in the room love it, too — otherwise they would just call in their bids.”
In May 2019, he placed the winning bid at Christie’s on Jeff Koons’s “Rabbit,” a shiny stainless steel sculpture inspired by a children’s toy. It sold for $91.1 million, including fees, at that point a record price for a work by a living artist. (It was later revealed that Mr. Mnuchin was bidding on behalf of Mr. Cohen, the hedge fund investor.)
“I love to be around art,” Mr. Mnuchin told The Times in 2013. “I really believe I have the heart of a collector.”
Matt Phillips is a former financial markets reporter for The Times.
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