Danor Shtruzman/Wikimedia Commons
Painting collage portrait of Steve A. Cohen by Danor Shtruzman.
For years, Steven A. Cohen rode high as head of SAC. Capital Advisers, using his money to purchase massively expensive works of art—until the Securities and Exchange Commission charged his company with insider trading in 2013. Cohen himself was charged with failing to prevent the practice at his company.
“After learning about red flags indicating potential insider trading by his employees, Steven Cohen allegedly failed to follow up to prevent violations of the law,” said Andrew Ceresney, co-director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement.
The firm finally agreed to a $1.8 billion settlement with the agency. Cohen is still rich—Forbes ranked him the 31st richest person in the U.S. in 2016—and he still is an active art collector.
And art and money provide Cohen with a means to rehabilitate his legacy.
Art and money provide Cohen with a means to rehabilitate his legacy.
Cohen, who is 61, recently donated $50 million for the capital campaign of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In appreciation, the museum is naming its largest contiguous gallery on its sixth floor the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions.
One can guess that another big headline will come if and when the Cohens decide to donate their art collection to MoMA or somewhere else, warranting another naming opportunity, as well as numerous wall labels featuring the donor’s name.
Philanthropy in general, and donations of art in particular, tend to create a halo effect for donors, changing the subject from how they got their money to the public benefit that an act of largesse provides.
Renaissance Italy suffered from murderous, tyrannical families—the Borgias, the Medicis, the Sforzas, among them—who are now best known for their patronage of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and other cherished artists of their time. Financier, union-buster, and robber baron Henry Clay Frick is admired for his collection of Old Master paintings featured in his mansion, which is now an art museum on New York City’s Fifth Avenue.
In our own day, Michael Milken, the poster boy of Wall Street greed in the 1980s, remade himself as an underwriter of cancer research. In 2004, Forbes glowingly described him as “the man who changed medicine” with his philanthropy.
Perhaps, in decades to come, Cohen will be thought of as a Wall Street schemer who was able to avoid jail and spent too much money on trophy works of art during the gilded age of the early twenty-first century. If history is a reliable guide, however, his arts patronage may well become the way he is remembered.
Leland Stanford used his position as governor of California to promote the Central Pacific Railroad, of which he was a part owner and later its president, making sure that all the construction work on the railroad was done by companies he personally owned. Stanford now is known almost exclusively for the prestigious university he founded in the late nineteenth century that bears his name.
Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford similarly were condemned during their lifetimes for exploitative business practices. (According to a 1965 book by Samuel Eliot Morrison, during the 1892 Homestead strike against his steel company, the otherwise pacifist Carnegie called for U.S. troops to shoot his workers.) But the foundations bearing their names are models of forward-looking philanthropy and it is through these nonprofits that their namesakes are remembered.
If history is a reliable guide, Cohen's arts patronage, not his past crimes, may well become the way he is remembered.
Conversely, lack of philanthropy can also affect a person’s reputation. Leona Helmsley, known during the later stages of her life as the “queen of mean” and who told an employee that “only the little people pay taxes,” left $12 million for the care of her dog, named Trouble. He may have been her only mourner.
Nonprofit institutions, such as libraries, universities, and museums, are always looking for donations and not eager to give donated money back. But occasionally this happens for public relations reasons.
Last fall, for instance, Ohio University returned a $500,000 donation to alumnus Roger Ailes, the disgraced chief executive officer of Fox News, labeling him a “distraction from the teaching and academic mission of the Scripps College of Communication.” And in August 2016, Vanderbilt University renamed Confederate Memorial Hall, returning $1.2 million to the Tennessee Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which had been given naming rights back in 1935.
In 2015, after a series of sexual abuse allegations against Bill Cosby, Spelman College in Atlanta deleted a named professorship associated with the entertainer, based on a $20 million gift that Cosby and his wife made in 1988.
Museums do not generally return art works to donors, although some objects discovered to have been looted from historical sites or from victims of Nazis have been sent back to the country of origin or the victims’ families.
Cohen’s $50 million unrestricted grant will support ongoing museum renovation and expansion, including the addition of 50,000 square feet of gallery space. This, MoMA said in a press release, will let it “reconceive the presentation of its collection and exhibitions, and . . . provide greater visitor accessibility through the enhancement of the Museum’s public areas.”
“Steven and Alex Cohen are incredible philanthropists, whose longtime generosity to the Museum exemplifies their deep commitment to sharing the art of our time with the widest possible audience,” said MoMA Director Glenn D. Lowry. “This gift will have an extraordinary impact on our ability to present exhibitions at a scale that is virtually unprecedented. I am also thrilled to have Steve as a new member of our board of trustees.”
The press release does not mention any controversies in Cohen’s past.