There’s nothing particularly revelatory about Leon Black in the latest, and perhaps final, release of the Epstein files. After all, the billionaire private equity pioneer’s entanglement with the sex trafficker hasn’t been a secret for some time. As my partner Bill Cohan has reported, their financial ties were investigated in 2021 by Apollo, the alternative asset management firm Black co-founded, which concluded that Black had paid Epstein more than $150 million over the years—supposedly because Epstein helped him implement some superior tax-avoidance strategy. The new tranche of documents doesn’t shed much light on that aspect of their relationship.

What they do reveal, however, is the extraordinary depth and breadth of Black’s art holdings. Included among the latest documents released by the Department of Justice are two detailed auction house appraisals—by Sotheby’s in February of 2012 and, according to a spreadsheet created in March of 2017, by Christie’s in May of 2016. From these we can conclude at least one thing: Leon Black loves art, perhaps even more than he loves money. The 2016 appraisal values his art collection at $2.6 billion, at a minimum, according to my rough calculation.

We also learn that Black is, or was, carrying a substantial portion of his net worth—20 percent is a conservative guess—in art assets, which are illiquid and have real costs associated with them. But the collection itself is eclectic and diversified. The Epstein file documents show a preference for Old Master drawings—he’s got Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, to name only the top three—but there’s a lot more here, including prints, Russian paintings, a range of 19th century paintings, American art, contemporary art, impressionist and modern art, as well as some important Old Master paintings.

We don’t know how much more art Black has bought since 2016, but we do know that his wealth has continued to grow along with his Apollo equity. Current estimates put his net worth around $14 billion, including the art, cash, and other investments. There’s no telling what his art collection is currently worth. Some things he clearly overpaid for; others are earmarked for donations; and some works have been sold or appreciated in value. I’ll play a little of that game below.

The easiest way to look at Black’s holdings is from the top, meaning we should start with the costliest works, assuming they are the most noteworthy, then work our way down to the fine print, as it were. The two most expensive works of art that Black owned as of 2016 are already well known due to the press surrounding their acquisitions. In 2012, Black paid nearly $120 million for one of the five versions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. I would hesitate to try to value the work myself, but judging from the recent sale of Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Elisabeth Lederer for $236 million, my guess is The Scream has appreciated substantially since Black bought it. His buddy Ronald Lauder, with whom he shares ownership of his highest-value works—which we now know from the Epstein file dump—paid $135 million for Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 20 years ago. Even though Munch does not have as many works as desirable to top collectors as Klimt, the fame of The Scream’s image would certainly suggest its value has risen. And Black has other substantial holdings of Munch, including Melancholy, a painting valued at $30 million in 2016, and a handful of the artist’s very valuable prints.

It’s also been well documented that Black bought Pablo Picasso’s plaster Buste de Femme (Marie-Therèse) from Larry Gagosian in 2016, after an ownership dispute with representatives of the Qatari royal family was settled in court. Those reports say Gagosian paid Maya Widmaier-Picasso $106 million. The Epstein spreadsheet says Black’s cost basis was $125,206,250, suggesting that Gagosian made a healthy profit on the deal.

A J.M.W. Turner painting, Seascape: Folkestone—once owned by world famous art historian Kenneth Clark, who prized it above all else—is valued in the spreadsheet at $80 million. That’s up from the $60 million the painting was pegged at when Sotheby’s appraised it in 2012. Of course, a $47.5 million record was set at auction in 2014. Since then, things have not gone so well for the artist: Ehrenbreitstein, which Sotheby’s sold for nearly $24 million in July 2017, resold for under $12 million when it came back to market, surely much too soon, last November. Black’s Turner is a late work in a class by itself, but those are real headwinds. And he owns other Turners, like Goldau, for which his cost basis was $1.3 million, according to the document, but was worth $20 million by the time of the appraisal.

Black also owned several very high-value works by Paul Cézanne, according to both appraisals. There’s Le Marin, on the books for around $60 million in 2016; Chateau Noir, now reportedly on loan to the Beyeler exhibition, valued at $50 million; La carrière de Bibèmus, valued at $35 million; and a still life, Grenade et poires dans une assiette, valued at $25 million. There’s another Cézanne, Bouteilles, pots, rechaud à alcool, pommes, that seems to be jointly owned, or have a complicated ownership across LLCs and trades, for which the cost basis is just under $49 million. Including another high-value Cézanne, and other less valuable works by the artist, it looks like Black is long Cézanne to the tune of over $250 million.

He’s also into Matisse for around $100 million, at least according to the 2016 appraisal. Black’s astonishing, nearly $49 million auction purchase of one of Matisse’s four bronze Backs in 2010, which is listed in the 2012 appraisal, doesn’t appear in the 2017 document. In 2010, it was assumed the Backs were unattainable (you can see a full set of the bronzes in the garden at MoMA). But after Black paid the remarkable sum, another complete set, which had been on loan to the Kimbell Museum, was offered the next year for $200 million. The seller’s logic was simple: If one Back was worth nearly $50 million, four must be worth $200 million. But potential buyers balked, and the work was sold privately at a lower, but still massive, price. Maybe that put Black off his prize—or someone just offered him more.

Black is known to be fearless at auction. He paid almost $48 million each for two separate drawings by Raphael: Head of a Muse, in 2009; and Head of a Young Apostle, in 2012. The Met is mounting a major Raphael show this spring that will feature several of Black’s works. The spreadsheet also says that Black owns two drawings by Michelangelo, one of which, The Risen Christ, was valued at $25 million a decade ago. Black’s cost basis was just $13 million, according to the spreadsheet, which may explain why he dropped out of the bidding last week at Christie’s for a recently discovered Michelangelo drawing of a foot—a study for the Sistine Chapel—that sold for $27.2 million. There are also four Leonardo drawings listed in the inventory.

The list of artworks is so long and varied, I could keep going in this vein for some time, but I risk wearing you all out. Let me just finish up by telling you about some of the other high-value holdings. Black had two Kazimir Malevich works, each valued at $50 million. An Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Berlin street scene that he seems to own in partnership with Lauder was also valued at $50 million. Lauder also had a half share in the Max Beckmann selfie with a horn, valued at $40 million. Constantin Brâncuși’s Bird in Space was also appraised at $50 million a decade ago. Black’s Claude Monet, Nymphéas, thought to be worth $45 million in 2016, probably hasn’t lost value in the interim.

The 2017 inventory mentions a Vincent van Gogh painting titled Carrière pres de Saint-Remy that Black bought for $46 million, which Christie’s thought was worth $60 million in 2016. The document also mentions a van Gogh, Jardin de fleurs, for which Black paid $8.5 million, thought to be worth $25 million by the time of the appraisal.

I am sure there will be other chances to go even deeper into Black’s art holdings. But we’re going to have to leave that for another time.

Speak to you again on Tuesday,
M