Roy Neuberger | Financier, collector, 107

Roy Neuberger, 107, a cofounder of money manager Neuberger Berman who traded stocks until he was 101 and was a collector of such American artists as Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Edward Hopper, died Friday at his New York home.

Mr. Neuberger bought about 1,000 works of art over the years. Unlike stocks, which he traded for seven decades, he said he never sold any art.

"It would be a criminal act for me to sell," he told Bloomberg News in 2003, the year he turned 100. "In art, I buy because I love the work."

Rather than sell, he donated works to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, and to dozens of other U.S. museums. Most of his collection is at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y.

"In the beginning, I collected art for a purpose - to help support living artists," Mr. Neuberger wrote in So Far, So Good: The First 94 Years, his 1997 memoir. "Now I am simply a lover of art."

The National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a National Medal of Arts in 2007, saying, "His support of the visual arts has served as a model for private philanthropy."

Mr. Neuberger moved in 1991 to a seven-room apartment in the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue that he decorated with works by Alexander Calder, Adolph Gottlieb, Milton Avery, and others.

Orphaned at 12, Mr. Neuberger was raised by his older sister. He dropped out of New York University after a year, worked three years at a department store, then dipped into a $30,000 inheritance and sailed for Paris in 1925. Visiting the Louvre three days a week confirmed his belief that "I had a good eye" for art, he said.

Mr. Neuberger said he became determined to make a fortune to buy art and support little-known artists. Returning to the United States, he got a job on Wall Street at the brokerage firm Halle & Stieglitz in 1929, months before the stock market crashed.

In 1939, Mr. Neuberger started his money-management firm with Robert Berman. That same year, he became a serious art collector.

- Bloomberg News