Embattled investor Ron Perelman sold art worth nearly $1 billion after shares of Revlon Inc. he was using as collateral plunged, and lenders including Deutsche Bank AG demanded repayment, recently unsealed court filings show.
The list is a who’s who of 20th century artists, including Cy Twombly, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Alberto Giacometti, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Perelman — once touted as America’s richest man — was known to be selling art in recent years. But the filing from a long-running insurance court case is the first time the list of all 71 works has been made public. The sales raised $963 million from 2020 to 2022, though little of that went to Perelman, who had to repay $910 million to his creditors.
A representative for Perelman declined to comment. The 81-year-old investor has fallen out of Bloomberg’s list of the world’s 500 richest people after having a net worth of $19 billion as of 2018.
The liquidation of his artwork came after shares of Revlon, the cosmetics company he bought for $1.74 billion in 1985, lost more than half their value as the COVID-19 pandemic roiled markets in early 2020. Perelman was using his stock as collateral, and one of his lenders, Deutsche Bank, issued a margin call.
Deutsche Bank was also lending against Perelman’s art and during the negotiations permitted the removal of one asset — an Ed Ruscha painting, Box Smashed Flat — from a loan facility. The justification was so it could be examined for possible damage from a fire at Perelman’s Hamptons estate 18 months earlier.
Perelman’s holding company, MacAndrews & Forbes, would consider “filing an insurance claim, as they believe the resulting proceeds could be $30-50 million, or 3-5x its most recently appraised value,” according to Deutsche Bank’s credit report.
In 2020, Perelman sued his insurers to force them to honor his claim on five artworks with a scheduled value of $410 million that he said were damaged in the fire, including the Ruscha. The case is ongoing.
Many of the pieces Perelman did sell were auctioned by Sotheby’s, while others went in private transactions. At least two were bought by Citadel founder Ken Griffin, who purchased Brice Marden’s Letter About Rocks #2 and River 4 for $30 million and $9.5 million, respectively.
Griffin toured Perelman’s Manhattan townhouse as well as his Hamptons home.
“I saw a lot of art. My understanding was pretty much everything was for sale,” Griffin said in a deposition. “There were rumors that Ron was facing financial challenges.”
Revlon filed for bankruptcy in June 2022.