Victor Ganz

Victor Wendell Ganz (1913–1987) was an American business owner and art collector. He was the president of D. Lisner & Company, a small costume jewelry manufacturer. With limited resources he and his wife Sally Wile-Ganz built one of the most important collections of contemporary art in the 20th century. They became known for their ability to choose art, as "collectors who never made a mistake".

Ganz started collecting art in his teenage years with the purchases of watercolors by Louis Eilshemius and Jules Pascin and an oil painting by Raphael Soyer. With these purchases, his fascination with contemporary masters was born.

Ganz had almost no training and was largely self-taught. In the 1930s he had a strict regimen in order to learn more about art. Every Saturday he traveled as far as possible, visiting exhibitions and art shows in and around New York. Although he made contacts with artists, dealers and curators, most of his knowledge came from the study of the works themselves.

In 1941, there began what Ganz sometimes described as "a love affair with Picasso". He bought his first Picasso in 1941, Le Rêve, for $7,000. (Steve Wynn, seller of the painting, had arranged to sell it to Steven A. Cohen for $140 million, which would have made it the highest price ever paid for a painting, but he infamously poked a 6 inch hole in the picture with his elbow while showing it to some prominent guests in 2007.) In 1942 Ganz married Sally Wile and together they started a collection. Thereafter the Ganzes bought heavily and very well in all periods of Picasso. In 1956 they acquired the entire series of Picasso's variations of Eugène Delacroix's The Women of Algiers. The series was composed of 15 works and acquired at a cost of $212,953. Victor later sold all but five to dealers and museums for about $138,000.

Dispersal of the collection Sally Ganz consigned 12 paintings to Sotheby's, where they sold for $48.4 million on November 10, 1988, the third-highest gross for a collection of modern and contemporary art sold at auction. Inheritance taxes forced the Ganzes' children to dispose of the most valuable part of the collection in 1997. In November 1997, works from the collection were sold in four separate auctions at Christie's, New York. At the time, Christie's estimated the sales to fetch more than $125 million. More than 25,000 people visited Christie's to view the works and more than 2,000 people attended the auction.

For 73 of the 114 works sold in 1997, initial purchase prices are known. In 1997 dollars, these works had cost $4.9 million and fetched $206.5 million (including buyer's premium) in November, 1997. The Ganzes are estimated to have netted revenue of $183.8 million. The annualized growth in value (after inflation) was 12.06%, or 11.74% after seller's commissions. At the time of the auction, it was the largest private owner art sale in history.