Leon Black Plans to Turn Woolworth Mansion Into His Own Museum, Book Reveals
A forthcoming book by journalist William D. Cohan, Money to Burn: Leon Black, Apollo and the Remaking of Wall Street (2026), reports that billionaire financier and art collector Leon Black plans to turn Manhattan’s Woolworth Mansion into a foundation to display his art collection, which the book estimates at $5 billion. Cohan writes that Black said he wants the East 80th Street property to become “his version of the Neue Galerie”; Black bought the French Gothic mansion last November for $38 million, according to Curbed. The report appears amid renewed scrutiny of Black’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, including a U.S. House vote this week to hold Black in contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas in an Epstein investigation; Black previously acknowledged paying Epstein $158 million from 2012 to 2017 for financial advice. Black resigned as chairman of the Museum of Modern Art in 2021 after an open letter signed by more than 150 artists, but remains a MoMA trustee; his collection includes a pastel version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) and works by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso.
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This story was covered in Museums Under Pressure, Markets Keep Climbing