Top 200 Collectors

According to the Wall Street Journal, Donald L. Bryant Jr. teases museum curators with the line “You date [the art], you put it up, then you put it in a basement for a couple of years,” to which he adds, “I have a relationship with the art.” The Bryants’ two-level apartment in New York, which they refer to as their private museum, probably doesn’t have a basement. They do rotate their artwork, however, starting with artists like Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Gober, and Robert Rauschenberg, and then switching over to Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Alberto Giacometti, and Jean Dubuffet. Just like the Bryants’ wine—they own a highly successful vineyard in Napa—their artwork has improved with age. In 2013 Bryant sold an Andy Warhol portrait of Marlon Brando for $23.7 million. He had purchased it ten years previously for $5 million.