Free Republic

Feeding art-world anticipation of one of the biggest auction seasons in history, the entertainment mogul David Geffen has sold in private transactions two postwar paintings by Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning for a total of $143.5 million. The buyers, Kenneth C. Griffin and Steven A. Cohen, are among today’s most successful hedge fund billionaires and are both building high-profile art collections. Mr. Griffin, managing director and chief executive of the Chicago-based Citadel Investment Group, and his wife, Anne, bought “False Start,” a seminal 1959 work by Mr. Johns, for $80 million. Mr. Cohen, the founder and manager of SAC...

It is now time to try to wrap up these small “lectures” on the history of art. Today is the tough day: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, etc. I have to admit that I did not “get” these works until I was well within graduate school. For Pollock, it took the documentary by Hans Namuth in which I saw him painting. His work is not just a bunch of random splatters; instead, Pollock carefully dances around the canvas, and you can see the evidence of the “dance,” if you will, on the canvas. (This is the same time that Martha Graham...