Top Wall Street Art Collectors

Edvard Munch’s 1895 pastel “The Scream” set became the world’s most expensive piece of art ever sold at auction when the hammer fell at Sotheby’s for nearly $120 million to an anonymous bidder.

Wall Street has been known to amass valuable collections of art, both for corporate and private use. Some speculated that Wall Street collectors were among the frontrunners to purchase Munch’s masterpiece.

CNBC's "Power Lunch" team assembled a gallery of the best known art collectors from the financial world—players who have both the passion and the wherewithal to buy, insure and house a work that is one of the most beloved and well-recognized images in the world.

Click ahead for some of Wall Street’s top art collectors.

By Paul O'Donnell, Special to CNBC.com
Posted 2 May 2012

CEO, Apollo Global Management

After paying $47.6 million for a chalk drawing by Raphael three years ago, Black made more art-world news last year when he and his wife donated $48 million to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to fund the Black Family Visual Arts Center.

Co-founder, KKR

Though his wife, Marie-Josee Kravis, is president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Kravis doesn’t play favorites. A donation of $10 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art uptown paid for a wing in his name. Art gives back, of course: In 2008, Kravis sold Edgar Degas’ "Danseuse au Repos” for $37 million at Sotheby’s, turning a $9 million profit in less than 10 years.

Founder, Third Point Management

Loeb collects mostly contemporary and post-war art with his wife, Margaret Munzer-Loeb, who sits on the Whitney Museum’s sculpture committee. Loeb, himself a board member at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, buys freely in contemporary art. This painting "6. Pries", from Loeb's collection, by German artist Martin Kippenberger, is currently on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

The hedge-fund legend and his wife, Judy, have their name on a gallery of Greek and Roman art at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (where this Cycladic period bowl from their collection resides.) They are equally passionate about their extensive, and eccentric, collection of Peruvian feather textiles.

CEO, SAC Capital

Cohen has spent $500 million to $700 million at art auctions, or an estimated 20 percent of his total fortune. Owner of another Munch painting, “Madonna,” he also likes midcentury Expressionists and Pop Art, spending more than $65 million on a Willem DeKooning and $35 million on Andy Warhol's painting "Large Coca-Cola."

CEO, Lightyear Capital

While chairman of Paine Webber’s board, Marron put together one of the most important corporate art collections in the world—which became the UBS Art Collection after the companies merged in 2000. Marron led a group of donors who raised $1 billion to renovate the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium greets visitors.

CEO, Delphi Management

Black owns the largest private collection of Impressionist, post-Impressionist, and early-modern painting and sculpture in the United States. Though his Cézannes, Pissarros and Renoirs are lent out to museums worldwide, the collection's home is the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, shown.

Chairman, Estee Lauder

Lauder has been devoted to Middle European art since buying a drawing a work by Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele with his bar mitzvah money. In 2006, Lauder paid a record $135 million for Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the highest sum paid for a painting sold at auction at that time. The portrait is in the Neue Galerie of NYC, which Lauder founded.

Founder & CEO, Citadel

His purchase of Jasper Johns’ “False Start” for $86 million in 2006 set a new record for the work of a living artist. Even so, Griffin and his wife, Anne Dias-Griffin, also a hedge fund manager, had enough money left over to donate $19 million to the Art Institute of Chicago.