In a July interview with Stanford Business School Insights that appears to have gone unnoticed by the art press, mega-collector Ken Griffin was asked about his favorite artwork. Griffin has acquired so many masterpieces over the past few decades—including Willem de Kooning’s Interchange and Jackson Pollock’s Number 17A, in a group deal from David Geffen for a cool $500 million—that one might reasonably assume he already owned his favorite.
Not so.
“Oh god, it’s Blue Poles,” Griffin said. That would be Jackson Pollock’s 18-foot-wide painting Blue Poles, originally titled Number 11, 1952, after the year it was finished. Few works better exemplify Pollock’s flinging-paint-across-the-floor technique. He made it at age 40, just a few years after adopting the method and a year after Hans Namuth’s famous film captured it in action.
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There’s just one problem. Since 1973, Blue Poles has been owned by the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, where it remains the museum’s pride and joy. At the time, though, neither Pollock nor Abstract Expressionism was fully canonized, and the purchase—from New York dealer Ben Heller for about 1 million Australian dollars—was controversial. “The government of Australia almost fell because of the outrage,” Griffin recalled in the Insights interview. “They spent a million dollars on an American painting.” How times change! In 2003 the museum devoted an entire exhibition to the painting’s 50th anniversary.
Money being little obstacle to the hedge fund titan, Griffin told Insights interviewer Michael Liu that he once “offer[ed] the Australians several hundred million dollars to get that painting back to America—with no success.” (ARTnews reached out to the museum for comment, but did not hear back at press time)
The kicker: Liu is Australian. “Yeah, it’s in my home country,” he gloated, barely managing to begin his next question—“What’s one trait that separates good investors from legendary?”—before Griffin cut him off: “Wait, you have that damn painting?”