Ronald Perelman plans to exchange art for “free life”

The Sotheby’s auction house will help a famous financier and collector to get rid of onerous assets.

Famous New York financier and collector Ronald Perelman, who last month sold two works from his $37.3 million collections at Sotheby’s Rembrandt to Richter (From Rembrandt to Richter), approached the auction house to sell a much larger part of his collection of contemporary art. These are works of art valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. It is planned that most of the items for sale will be offered to auction house clients privately, but it is obvious that some of them will still be included in auction catalogs. According to Bloomberg, at least part of the proceeds from the sale of works of art will be used to pay off the debt of Citigroup Inc.

The sale of part of the art collection is not the first major reorganization of Perelman’s assets this year. He recently liquidated his other assets, including a stake in Humvee AM General and a flavoring company he had owned for decades. Last Monday Perelman circulated a statement in which he said that the purpose of all these changes is “a less complicated and pressure-free business life.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Perelman’s collection of art is currently valued at about $3 billion and includes sculptures by Alberto Giacometti and Jeff Koons, as well as paintings by Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning and other authors of the so-called “blue chips. Which works from his collection will be available to Sotheby’s are still unknown, but it is clear that sales must be well organized and strategically distributed over the coming period of art market activity.