Billionaires Are Buying Art by Laura Owens. Will Everyone Else?

Bloomberg Pursuits has been highlighting artists on the rise as part of an ongoing look at art as an investment.

Museum wall text regularly includes a work’s title, date, dimensions, and oftentimes, if the object is on loan, the name of its owner.

Occasionally the owner prefers to be anonymous, in which case the work is listed as coming from a “Private Collection,” but anyone browsing the Whitney Museum’s midcareer retrospective of the painter Laura Owens will observe that many lenders have made their names public.

Some of those names are obscure. Others will be familiar to those with a knowledge of the international jet set: Martin Eisenberg, a co-founder of Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc., and his wife Rebecca lent three paintings to the show; the Ringiers, a Swiss publishing family, have five works on view. Other paintings have been lent by the billionaire François Pinault, the photographer Mario Testino, and the billionaire pharmaceutical heiress Maja Hoffmann, who lent one 14-foot-wide work and a series of 33 small paintings from 2012. The foundation of megacollector Peter Brant, meanwhile, has lent three paintings, while one of his sons has lent another, and yet another two are listed as a “private collection, courtesy of the Brant Foundation.”

This is a collector base that most artists could only dream of. But despite having the attention (and money) of this high-profile group of influential buyers, Owens, until recently, was rarely known outside of a tight-knit coterie of art-world insiders. “It’s all within a small group of people,” says the adviser Lisa Schiff. “Not every great collector was interested in Laura Owens, but there was a core group that was big enough and competitive enough.”