Roy R. Neuberger, a giant among 20th century American financiers, stock brokers and patrons of the arts, has died at Manhattan's Pierre Hotel at 107, the New York Times reported on Saturday. Neuberger, founder of investment firm Neuberger Berman, had lived most of his long life in New York City, the Times reported.
The paper cited Neuberger's grandson, Matthew London, as saying Neuberger had died on Friday at his home at the famous hotel overlooking Central Park. Born on July 21, 1903 to a wealthy Jewish family that moved to Manhattan from Connecticut in 1909 - Neuberger was orphaned at the age of 12.
He dropped out after just one year at New York University but eventually continued his education with a sojourn in Europe from 1924, living comfortably on inherited money. He had developed an eye for painting and sculpture while working as a fabric buyer at the B. Altman & Co department store, where he also acquired a sense for trading, which he later applied to the trading of financial products.
During his European fling in his early 20s, Neuberger made the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris his home base. The young bon vivant and art lover played tennis, frequented the Louvre and other museums and formed a lifelong friendship with art historian Meyer Schapiro.
But he was also inspired at this time by a biography of Vincent van Gogh to collect and support the work of living artists, who like van Gogh often led hard lives of poverty. To raise the funds he would need to acquire contemporary art, he went to work on Wall Street in the spring of 1929, just as the bull market of the Roaring '20s was near its peak.
BOLD GAMBLE One early trade helped define Neuberger's career, and helped make his reputation as a money manager. In mid-1929, using his own money, he sold short 100 shares of the Radio Corporation of Americas, the most feverishly bid stock of its era, which was trading around $500 a share.
When the market crashed in October 1929, Neuberger's gamble helped offset loses in other blue chip stocks and allowed him to leverage his wealth as the market gradually recovered over the next decade. He met his future wife, Marie Salant, an economics graduate of Bryn Mawr College, at the Halle & Stieglitz Co brokerage where they both worked at the time. They married at the depth of the Great Depression in June 1932.
Inspired by his success at managing his personal assets, he co-founded Neuberger Berman in 1939 with Robert Berman. The two men established one of the first no-load US mutual funds, the Guardian Fund, which is still in operation. His firm was eventually acquired by Lehman Brothers but spun off again in 2008 as an independent asset management fund when Lehman sold off assets as it went into bankruptcy.
Never forgetting van Gogh, Neuberger began to build his art collection in the late 1930s, focusing on contemporary art, and he never sold a painting by a living artist, the Times said. "I collect art because I love it," the paper quoted him as saying, and not for its investment value.