Richard Weisman
Open-knowledge reference entry
Richard L. Weisman (June 6, 1940 – December 30, 2018) was an American investment banker and art collector. He was known for his contributions to contemporary art, particularly through his patronage of Pop artist Andy Warhol. He played a key role in the creation of Warhol's Athletes series (1977), a group of ten portraits depicting prominent sports figures
Based in Seattle with connections to Los Angeles, Weisman assembled a significant collection of postwar and contemporary art. His collection drew wider attention after a group of Warhol works valued at $25 million was stolen from a Los Angeles warehouse in the early 2000s, leading to a high-profile insurance claim that he later withdrew in 2009. Following his death in 2018, Christie's auctioned selections from his collection in 2019 and 2020.
Biography
Richard Lee Weisman was born on June 6, 1940, into a prominent art-collecting family. His father, Frederick R. Weisman, a Minneapolis native, helped fund the Frederick R. Weisman Museum on the University of Minnesota campus. His mother, Marcia Simon Weisman, was a major philanthropist and art collector and was one of the Founding Trustees of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles. She taught an arts appreciation class at the University of California, Los Angeles called "I Have a Space Over My Couch and Don't Know What to Put There." His maternal uncle was industrialist and collector Norton Simon. Raised in an environment immersed in art, he began collecting in 1961, acquiring as his first work Early Urge (1955) by Surrealist painter Roberto Matta.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard Weisman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.