What's inside Ivanka Trump's male-dominated $25m art collection?

Shortly after their marriage in 2009, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, started collecting art, a hobby she later described as “a fun exploration of our personal and collective tastes”. Cut to 2017 and as part of their previously undisclosed assets, it’s been revealed that the power couple’s collection is valued up to $25m.

No strangers to schmoozing in the art world, the pair has worked with the New York art adviser Alex Marshall and hosted dinners for Sotheby’s on Kushner properties. There is a photo of the couple standing like smitten groupies with the shaggy-haired abstract artist Dan Colen at the opening of his exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in 2014.

When Trump has listed off her favorite artists, they have all been American men. That includes the stencil-text-and-scribble artist Christopher Wool and the celebrity socialite cloud painter Alex Israel. She owns pieces by Nate Lowman, an artist from Las Vegas who paints bullet holes, and Colen, who puts chewed-up bubble gum on canvas – one sold for $578,500 in 2012.

Trump and Kushner have a taste for rebellious “bro art” that first became in vogue with tough-talking abstract expressionists in the 1950s.

“You could call this group of artists a who’s who of ‘bad boy’ art market darlings,” said art collector and partner with Nolita Projects Sarah Getto, in speaking of Trump and Kushner’s private art collection, glimpsed via Instagram.

They fall under the lineage of artists in alignment with Jackson Pollock, a tough guy who took the art world like a savage with his disobedient attitude, rampant drinking problem and adulterous behaviour – he was rumoured to have cheated on his wife with the art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Pollock was often photographed with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, as if he were the art world’s answer to James Dean.

“Bad boys stand in for cultural iconoclasts, the existential opposite of Ivanka and the Trump brand,” said Getto. The artists Trump and Kushner collect have had a raw lifestyle the couple will probably never experience, thanks to their privileged upbringings. “If artists refused to sell to conservative collectors, they would be selling a lot less art,” said Getto. “Where do you draw the line?”

Trump’s taste in art differs from that of her father, who is known for buying a six-foot-tall portrait of himself. He also has finicky tastes; he commissioned Andy Warhol to paint various renditions of Trump Tower in 1981, but didn’t like the palette Warhol chose, so declined to buy the series. Unlike his daughter, he isn’t a fan of contemporary art (he called Chris Ofili’s dung painting “degenerate stuff”) and prefers 19th-century landscapes and figurative bronze sculptures. Trump owns a replica of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s La Loge from 1874 (buying originals would be outside of his nature, as he told the Washington Post his friends spend too much money on art).

His daughter and her husband certainly have their haters in the art world, even among artists in their own collection. Richard Prince sold a piece to the couple and then “disowned” it by returning the $36,000 payment, dubbing the piece “fake art”. New York’s Halt Art Group, led by the curator Alison Gingeras, fights Trump’s brand of faux feminism with street art, an Instagram account called “Dear Ivanka” and protests in front of her family’s buildings.

Last year, Trump posted a photo of herself online standing with a painting by Alex Da Corte. The artist fired back in the comments: “Dear @Ivankatrump please get my work off of your walls. I am embarrassed to be seen with you.” (The artist declined further comment.)

But that might just be the nature of art collecting. “Da Corte isn’t standing in Ivanka’s living room, his art is,” said Getto. “That’s the point of a privately owned collection; it’s not an artist’s exhibition.”

Though art world insiders say Trump and Kushner have a penchant for mediocre art, their art collection shows a love of pared-down abstraction and minimalism made by artists with cool cred. They own a piece by Will Boone, a Los Angeles artist who layers letters of the alphabet to look like steel I-beams. Their piece by Ostrowski is a painting of a blank canvas with a rainbow frame, which is part of his “Relax/Outline Paintings” series from 2013.

In their New York home, the couple displayed one of Lowman’s Black Escalade bullet hole pieces, which sold for $665,000 at Sotheby’s New York in 2013, and a piece by Israel similar to theirs sold for $500,000 at Phillips New York. There is no proof of how much they paid for the artworks, as prices were not disclosed in their financial reports.

Federal rules only require the disclosure of art for investment purposes; the couple said the art was only for decoration. Yet Trump has been using her art collection as a backdrop for advertising shoes and purses from her brand, when she isn’t posing in front of them for photo shoots with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She has also used the artwork in her collection, such as a painting by Wool, to inspire the design of a handbag in her collection called the Mara.

As for female artists, there have been very few that Trump and Kushner have supported publicly. Jessica Sanders, a Brooklyn-based artist whose artwork was mentioned in a blogpost written on Ivanka Trump’s website in 2015, is one of the very few who have been mentioned. “I don’t believe Ivanka owns any of my work,” said Sanders, “but I would hope, given her position, she finds a meaningful way to support women in these dangerous times.”