The Collector: Thomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum

The Collector09.10.2025

The late Thomas H. Lee made his fortune through private equity and leveraged buyout transactions. In 1992, his Boston-based firm acquired Snapple for about $135 million and took it public. Two years later, Lee resold to Quaker Oats for $1.7 billion. [1] Equipped with about $927 million from that sale, Lee entered the art world as a collector and philanthropist. The same year as the Snapple sale, Lee joined the board of the Whitney and paid $1.7 million for Jackson Pollock’s 1949 drip painting “No. 22” at Christie’s May 1994 contemporary art sales. [2]

Lee’s own collecting roots went back to his parents, Mildred and Herbert Lee who were early collectors of contemporary art. His mother, nicknamed Micki, “had an eye and taste ahead of her time,” Carol Vogel wrote in 1998. [3] The couple were early supporters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and often bought from Leo Castelli Gallery. In 1997, after donating to the institution, Lee asked that the second-floor galleries at the Whitney’s former Marcel Breuer location be renamed after his parents.

Lee was a frequent presence at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in the mid-1990s, spending top dollar for postwar and contemporary pieces. In 1995, the year he divorced Barbara Fish, herself a significant collector of women artists, he set an auction record for Arshile Gorky with the nearly $4 million purchase of "Scent of Apricots on the Fields" (1944). [4] The Lees later sold the work to Condé Nast Chairman S.I. Newhouse.

That same year, Lee bought Mark Rothko’s nearly 8-foot-tall “Olive Over Red” (1956) for $1.9 million from Pace president Marc Glimcher. [5] The painting has previously belonged to the Baltimore Museum of Art and was sold at Sotheby’s for $1.04 million in 1988.

In May 1997, he paid $4.1 million at Christie’s for Piet Mondrian's “Composition No. 3 (Composition With Red, Blue, Yellow and Black)” (1929) from the collection of German businessman Jacques Koerfer. [6] In May 2000, he outbid another collector to purchase Sigmar Polke’s dot painting “Two Women” (1968), for a record-setting $1.6 million. [7] Another significant purchase was Andy Warhol’s 1963 “5 Deaths Twice 1 (Red Car Crash),” which sold for $6.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2004.

In 1996 he married Tenenbaum, and together they built one of the most important collections of photography in the country. “He was getting divorced from his wife,” Tenenbaum told Artnet in March 2020. “They had a big art collection, mostly Old Masters. I didn’t care for that stuff. I was only 32. He said, ‘Let’s start over. Go buy some stuff.’” [1] Her first acquisition was a Cindy Sherman photo of a hitchhiker, which she bought at auction for $40,000. In 2015, another edition of the same “Untitled Film Still” fetched $2.9 million at Christie’s. In 2020, the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid tribute to the couple’s holdings with “Photography’s Last Century: The Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Collection.”

Sources

[1] Kazakina, Katya. “A Wall Street Billionaire Shot Himself in His Family Office. His Death Is Reverberating in the Museum World, and the Art Market.” Artnet, March 3, 2023
https://news.artnet.com/market/a-wall-street-billionaire-shot-himself-in-his-family-office-his-death-is-reverberating-in-the-museum-world-and-the-art-market-2261034

[2] Vogel, Carol. “More Downs Than Ups at Spring Art Auctions.” The New York Times, May 13, 1994
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/13/arts/more-downs-than-ups-at-spring-art-auctions.html?searchResultPosition=14

[3] Vogel, Carol. “Inside Art; Selling Icons Of Modern Art.” The New York Times, July 24, 1998
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/24/arts/inside-art-selling-icons-of-modern-art.html

[4] Vogel, Carol. “Low-Risk Auction Ends Fall Sales.” The New York Times, November 16, 1995
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/16/arts/low-risk-auction-ends-fall-sales.html?searchResultPosition=10

[5] Kazakina, Katya. “A $40 Million Rothko Painting From the Estate of Thomas H. Lee Will Test the Market at Paris+ This Week.” Artnet, October 16, 2023.
https://news.artnet.com/market/a-40-million-rothko-painting-from-the-estate-of-thomas-h-lee-will-test-the-market-at-paris-this-week-2376690

[6] Vogel, Carol. “Spring Art Auctions Conclude With a $119 Million Impressionist and Modern Sale.” The New York Times, May 15, 1997
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/15/arts/spring-art-auctions-conclude-with-a-119-million-impressionist-and-modern-sale.html

[7] Vogel, Carol. “Young Audience Spends New Money at Auction.” The New York Times, May 17, 2000
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/17/arts/young-audience-spends-new-money-at-auction.html?searchResultPosition=8

Image: Robert Rauschenberg, “Third Time Painting" (1961)