Not many leaders, no matter how well-known and well-respected among their peers they are, have two long and successful careers in separate fields. Robert Mnuchin, who was a partner at Goldman Sachs and a member of its management committee for more than 30 years when the investment bank was still a private partnership, spoke about his second 30-year career as an art dealer during this ARTnews LIVE with Leaders interview.

The treasury secretary’s father, a New York art dealer, paid a record price last week for a work by a living artist. But for whom?

Museum-quality exhibitions by major postwar artists are the bread-and-butter of the swank gallery run by powerhouse dealer Robert Mnuchin. 

How did you get your start as a gallerist?

My passion for collecting transformed from buying to selling, but it started with a true passion for the works. Whether buying art as a collector or selling it as a dealer, you have to love it first and foremost.

Robert Mnuchin came to the art business long enough ago that some might not remember the octogenarian dealer’s life before. Yet in 1990, when he retired from Goldman Sachs, he’d earned the nickname “Chief,” and was hailed by The New York Times as “one of the pioneers of the institutional equity trading business in the 1960s.” He came to art first as a passionate consumer, then a collector, and then a dealer. Below the New York dealer speaks about those various roles, and why they’re not always compatible.

As a partner at Mnuchin Gallery, Sukanya Rajaratnam is a major influencer in the New York City art world. After honing her skills at Deitch Projects and Christie’s, she joined L&M Arts, where she was instrumental in its smooth transition to Mnuchin Gallery two years ago. Seven years later, she has helped make it one of the most important galleries in New York, through her position in highlevel private and institutional sales, and her curatorial work. Born and raised in Sri Lanka, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cambridge, Rajaratnam is an adopted New Yorker. Here she gives us her insight on this art capital of the world.

Ensconced within a stately townhouse on New York’s Upper East Side, the art dealer Robert Mnuchin has spent the past quarter decade putting on shows of mostly American art that brim with intelligence, historical savvy, and the kind of quality that one tends to find a few blocks to the west, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The term "game changer" has been used to such an extent that it's nearly at the point of abuse.  But few can doubt the art world landscape of 2014 has drastically changed from years past.  For our latest Power List, we looked beyond the usual winner's circle to those who are resetting the rules from the inside out. 

When it came to filling a gap in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, the single greatest priority for James Rondeau, its chairman of contemporary art, has been to find a 1960s stack, one of those serial boxlike units that are perhaps Donald Judd’s most popular works. “It’s something I knew we had to have since I arrived here in 1998, and probably curators before me were on the lookout for one too,” Mr. Rondeau said.
 

Since Robert Mnuchin recently turned 80, some might expect him to be slowing down. Instead, he is speeding up, or at least starting a new chapter with the Mnuchin Gallery. He opened it this year after parting ways with Dominique Lévy, his partner at L&M Arts, a gallery that was a prominent player in the art market during the economic boom, bidding large sums at auction.

Equal parts connoisseur and razor-sharp businessman, Robert Mnuchin rose to the highest ranks of the financial industry before becoming one of the world’s top dealers in modern and contemporary art.