As the youngest child of investor/art collector Roy R. Neuberger ”“ who turned 107 July 21 ”“ Jim Neuberger is sometimes asked the secret of his father”™s longevity.
“He always loved his vocation and his avocation ”“ the stock market and his art collection,” Jim Neuberger said. “I found a real analogy between what he thinks about stocks and art: It”™s unconventional. He manages to find his own taste, his own intuition despite the pressures of the marketplace or popularity.”
Roy Neuberger”™s willingness to remain true to his inner compass enabled him to found a highly successful investment management firm during the Great Depression ”“ Neuberger Berman, which was sold to Lehman Bros. for some $2.63 billion in cash and securities in 2003 and then resold to its own management five years later as part of Lehman”™s liquidation.
That same inner compass also spurred Neuberger to champion artists who today make up a Who”™s Who of American Art ”“ Alexander Calder; Nyack native Edward Hopper; Jacob Lawrence; Georgia O”™Keeffe; David Smith, a onetime sculpture teacher at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers; and especially, Milton Avery, often called “the American Matisse.”
In 1969, at the behest of his good friend Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, Neuberger donated a significant portion of his collection ”“ more than 900 works ”“ to found the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College. Today the Neuberger has more than 7,000 modern, contemporary and African works.
Wry and spry
The man who gave the museum a collection and a name is also still going strong.
“He”™s doing quite well,” Jim Neuberger said. “He”™s especially doing well in reading. This year, he”™s reading Hemingway ”“ he”™s been on a Hemingway kick ”“ along with several newspapers daily. And he watches golf and tennis.”
Though no longer able to get out on a court himself, the elder Neuberger works with a masseuse and a physical therapist several times a week. (He also has round-the-clock nurses and aides.)
And while he lives in Manhattan full-time now, he still has a weekend home in Cortlandt and keeps tabs on his Purchase namesake.
“He wants to know what”™s going on up there (at the Neuberger) and wants to know the place is under good stewardship,” said Jim Neuberger, a museum trustee who sees himself as a liaison between the board and his father.
Former Director Thom Collins, who visited Roy Neuberger before leaving to head up the Miami Art Museum, likes to tell the story of how he described for Neuberger the more than 750 works acquired during his tenure.
“Any of them good?” Neuberger said.
That”™s pure Neuberger ”“ wry and spry, a connoisseur of fine art and finer women. (He was married for almost 65 years to the former Marie Salant, an arts patron who died in 1997, and later became a good friend to another striking brunette, singer and arts advocate Kitty Carlisle Hart, who died in 2007.)
Neuberger was also a quick raconteur with a wealth of quips and stories from a lifetime that has spanned the 20th century and beyond. This reporter recalls him describing taking off from an airport in Vietnam at the height of the war that he saw as the central event of the 20th century, gunfire illuminating the runway. He could also ruminate just as piquantly on the riches of his pal Rocky.
“Kykuit,” Roy Neuberger said of the historic Rockefeller family estate in Pocantico Hills, “is what God would”™ve built had he had the money.”
That kind of conversation is apparently more difficult nowadays as Neuberger is hard of hearing, son Jim said. But despite this and the need for assistance in walking, “he has a high quality of life. He gets enjoyment from life.”
The real treasure
Roy Neuberger has always gotten enjoyment from life. Though orphaned at 12, the Bridgeport, Conn., native found a second mother in his older sister Ruth, while an inheritance from his parents gave him the freedom to travel to Europe in the 1920s, when being an American in Paris really meant something.
It was there in the City of Lights that Neuberger read Floret Fels”™ biography of Vincent van Gogh, becoming outraged at his struggles to sustain himself as an artist. Neuberger made a vow ”“ to support living artists by collecting them.
To this end, he got a job on Wall Street months before the crash. He would become legendary for presciently selling RCA shares short during the Depression.
“He was known for doing well when the stock market was doing badly,” Jim Neuberger said of the crashes of ”™29 and ”™87. “He”™s famous as a contrarian. He makes the point that the stock market is not so much bulls and bears as sheep.”
Again that inner compass: “I don”™t think he looks back too much and regrets”¦.”
Neuberger began buying art in 1939 ”“ the same year he founded Neuberger Berman with Robert Berman. Within several years, he would be donating works to museums and colleges nationwide, foreshadowing the Neuberger Museum itself.
Though Jim Neuberger sees a correlation between his father”™s ability to pick stocks and artworks, he says his father never confused stocks with art.
“He said in his (autobiography ”˜So Far, So Good”™), Don”™t fall in love with a stock, fall in love with a woman,” Jim Neuberger says.
Stocks were for making money. Art was the real treasure.
“I love the fact that when Thom Collins became director, he asked my father what the direction of the museum should be,” Jim Neuberger said. “Dad said, ”˜It”™s not my museum, it”™s yours.”™ I”™m proud of the fact that he felt art was something to be loved, not a commodity to be sold.”
