{"id":150453,"date":"2025-09-12T02:58:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T02:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/150453\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T02:58:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T02:58:07","slug":"ken-griffin-loves-pollocks-blue-poles-so-much-he-tried-to-buy-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/150453\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Griffin Loves Pollock\u2019s Blue Poles So Much He Tried to Buy it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ a-font-body-m     \">\n\tIn a July interview with Stanford Business School Insights that appears to have gone unnoticed by the art press, mega-collector <a href=\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/t\/ken-griffin\/\" id=\"auto-tag_ken-griffin\" data-tag=\"ken-griffin\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Ken Griffin<\/a> was asked about his favorite artwork. Griffin has acquired so many masterpieces over the past few decades\u2014including Willem de Kooning\u2019s Interchange and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/t\/jackson-pollock\/\" id=\"auto-tag_jackson-pollock\" data-tag=\"jackson-pollock\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Jackson Pollock<\/a>\u2019s Number 17A, in a group deal from David Geffen for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2016\/02\/19\/luxury\/ken-griffin-david-geffen-de-kooning-jackson-pollock\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">a cool $500 million<\/a>\u2014that one might reasonably assume he already owned his favorite.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ a-font-body-m     \">\n\tNot so.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ a-font-body-m     \">\n\t\u201cOh god, it\u2019s Blue Poles,\u201d Griffin said. That would be Jackson Pollock\u2019s 18-foot-wide painting Blue Poles, originally titled Number 11, 1952, after the year it was finished. Few works better exemplify Pollock\u2019s flinging-paint-across-the-floor technique. He made it at age 40, just a few years after adopting the method and a year after Hans Namuth\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=6cgBvpjwOGo\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">famous film<\/a> captured it in action.<\/p>\n<p>\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n<p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<img decoding=\"async\" class=\"c-lazy-image__img lrv-u-background-color-grey-lightest lrv-u-width-100p lrv-u-display-block lrv-u-height-auto\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Credit-@Matthew-Sherman-1.jpg\" data-lazy-src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Credit-@Matthew-Sherman-1.jpg\" alt=\"Dinosaur skeleton.\" data-lazy- data-lazy- height=\"\" width=\"\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ a-font-body-m     \">\n\tThere\u2019s just one problem. Since 1973, Blue Poles has been owned by the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, where it remains the museum\u2019s pride and joy. At the time, though, neither Pollock nor Abstract Expressionism was fully canonized, and the purchase\u2014from New York dealer Ben Heller for about 1 million Australian dollars\u2014was controversial. \u201cThe government of Australia almost fell because of the outrage,\u201d Griffin recalled in the Insights interview. \u201cThey spent a million dollars on an American painting.\u201d How times change! In 2003 the museum devoted an entire exhibition to the painting\u2019s 50th anniversary.<\/p>\n<p>Money being little obstacle to the hedge fund titan, Griffin told Insights interviewer Michael Liu that he once \u201coffer[ed] the Australians several hundred million dollars to get that painting back to America\u2014with no success.\u201d (ARTnews reached out to the museum for comment, but did not hear back at press time)<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph larva \/\/ a-font-body-m     \">\n\tThe kicker: Liu is Australian. \u201cYeah, it\u2019s in my home country,\u201d he gloated, barely managing to begin his next question\u2014\u201cWhat\u2019s one trait that separates good investors from legendary?\u201d\u2014before Griffin cut him off: \u201cWait, you have that damn painting?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a July interview with Stanford Business School Insights that appears to have gone unnoticed by the art&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88,12223,92803],"class_list":{"0":"post-150453","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-jackson-pollock","14":"tag-ken-griffin"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}