The Collector: David Geffen

The Collector07.08.2025

The entertainment mogul and arts philanthropist David Geffen has acquired one of the most admired—and valuable—collections of postwar American art. His collection is relatively small compared to that of other billionaires—supposedly around 50 pieces—but his savvy taste and deal-making skills have earned him exceptional works by David Hockney, Jasper Johns, and Jackson Pollock. “Piece for piece, work for work, there's no collection that has better representation of postwar American art than David Geffen's. Period," former LACMA curator Paul Schimmel once said. “It is to postwar American Art what the Frick Collection is to Old Master painting.”

A particularly legendary Geffen acquisition was of Willem de Kooning’s “Woman III,” one of the few paintings from the artist’s early 1950s series still in private hands. The complex 1994 trade involved a handoff on a Vienna airport tarmac with the help of the Zurich dealer Doris Ammann. Geffen took the de Kooning home while the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art received a 16th century book of Persian miniature paintings (estimated value: $20 million). Geffen parted with the painting in 2006 for roughly $137.5 million. The buyer, hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, had recently bought a different de Kooning from Geffen, the 1955 landscape “Police Gazette,” for $63.5 million.

According to Larry Gagosian, staff at his Madison Avenue gallery would joke that when Geffen stopped by it meant that they would “make payroll this month.” Geffen sold Hockney’s “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two-Figures)” to Joe Lewis in 1995. In 2018, Lewis auctioned the painting at Christie’s for $90.3 million, making it the most expensive work by a living artist ever sold at auction. Dealer Leo Castelli purchased Johns’ “Target with Plaster Casts” for $1,200 directly from the artist and sold it to Geffen for $13 million in 1993. Geffen also purchased Johns’ “Corpse and Mirror” for $8.36 million at an auction of the Victor and Sally Ganz collection at Christie’s. In 2015, Geffen sold the 1948 Pollock drip painting “Number 17A” to hedge fund founder Kenneth C. Griffin for $200 million. All of these works were displayed in Geffen’s Malibu home in the 1980s.

Image: Jasper Johns, “Target with Plaster Casts” (1955)