At the time, Neuberger held 192,000 shares, said Andrea Trachtenberg, a company spokeswoman. Neuberger said he sold his own shares and retained those earmarked for his three children.
Though no longer an employee, Neuberger still went to the office most days to manage his own funds. After back surgery in August, he now trades almost daily from home.
The company reported income of US$119.13 million on revenue of US$603.36 million for last year. The stock rose 44 cents yesterday to US$28.54 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Neuberger's first art purchases, in 1938, were two paintings by Peter Hurd, stepbrother of artist Andrew Wyeth. He frequented New York galleries every Saturday, buying something almost every week from the 1940s to the 1960s, said Lucinda Gedeon, director of the Neuberger Museum.
"He was always looking," she said. "He went to all the major openings. He was very much a part of the scene, and very well acquainted with the dealers." Neuberger, an early champion of Milton Avery, became the American painter's largest single collector. "I looked at the work of Henri Matisse, and I believed that Milton Avery was comparable," said Neuberger.
He owns at least 200 works by Avery. Two hang side-by-side in his seven-room apartment in the Pierre Hotel, as do other works by Alexander Calder and Adolph Gottlieb. His larger collection of American artists includes Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper and Willem de Kooning.
Neuberger provided 14 paintings by Jacob Lawrence that were the centerpiece of a retrospective of the African-American artist's work at the Whitney in New York last year.
In a way, his life on Wall Street was almost "a second career," Neuberger said. He bought art to hang in his company's offices, helping pioneer what became a common practice.
"It was known that there was art in the offices, before the days of widespread corporate collections," said Avis Berman, an art historian and specialist in American art. In 1990, Neuberger Berman used company funds to establish its own collection of work by emerging American artists.
Instead of selling art, Neuberger donated hundreds of works to museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the Whitney.
The bulk of his collection -- about 800 pieces -- is owned by the Neuberger Museum on the campus of the State University of New York at Purchase. He has promised the museum another 200 works, Gedeon said.
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