Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died by apparent suicide in 2019 while in jail facing additional charges related to alleged sex trafficking in New York and Florida, cultivated an expansive network of powerful and influential contacts in a wide array of fields—art very much among them. In addition to his dealings in the worlds of finance, science, and technology, the reputed billionaire engaged with art institutions, collectors, and cultural enterprises now reckoning with their affiliations with a figure whose history is being closely examined. Below, a guide to what we’ve come to know so far about Epstein’s ties to the art world. Portions of this article were previously published on August 27, 2019. While conspiracies related to Epstein’s crimes proliferate, so, too, do wild theories surrounding art personally owned by him. No artwork has generated more attention than a painting by Petrina Ryan-Kleid featuring a smiling Bill Clinton wearing a dress and high heels. Titled Parsing Bill, the painting was “just a silly school artwork that was supposed to show, pictorially, the messages we are bombarded with in regards to these presidents,” Ryan-Kleid told Artnet News. In a 2012 email unsealed in 2026, Epstein instructed his unnamed recipient to hang the work prominently, “so that people walking by can smile.” At his New York mansion, Epstein also exhibited a sculpture of a woman appearing to descend a rope. In an Artnet essay, critic Ben Davis identified its sculptor as Arnaud Kasper, who displays a similar work on his site called Regard sur le monde (2019). But that work lacks the veil and white dress that Epstein’s sculpture has. Davis termed Epstein’s collection “janky,” which is one adjective someone could use to describe much of Epstein’s holdings, most of which are not by particularly famous artists. Epstein’s art ran the gamut from the provocative—his townhouse featured a large painting by Jorge Alvarez called Coming of Age Ceremony (1995), which depicts a young boy with an erection—to the anodyne, with one unsealed document offering an itemized list of design objects that Epstein apparently owned. All were worth well under $1 million. The mysteries of Epstein’s collection resurface every time a new batch of files is released. In 2025, when pictures of Epstein’s Virgin Islands home were made public, people feasted on images of bizarre masks hung from his walls. The Brussels Times, meanwhile, did an investigation into a sculpture of an archer near the house’s pool and determined that it was a copy of a work by Belgian modernist Arthur Dupagne, not an authentic piece by him. Still, it is clear that Epstein held more than a passing interest in art. Pictures from files provided to the public show that he strew his house with art tomes, including the catalog for “Picasso Sculpture,” the Museum of Modern Art blockbuster that featured an artwork he played a role in helping collector Leon Black purchase. He also kept abreast of art news; one email in a 2026 file release showed that Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen’s wife, sent Epstein a New York Times article on a copyright infringement suit against Jeff Koons, whom Epstein met in 2013. Editor’s Note: The below entries are organized in descending order by the most recently reported news. Epstein’s ties to Leon Black started gaining controversy in 2019, when it was reported that Epstein remained a named director of the Leon Black Family Foundation—a charitable entity helmed by Black, a long-running ARTnews Top 200 Collector—years after his controversial plea deal landed him in prison in 2008. Soon after, the organization said that Epstein had resigned from his post in 2007 at the family’s request and remained listed on paperwork “due to a recording error” that was corrected upon discovery. Initially, Black sought to distance himself from Epstein, writing to his employees at the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management that his company “has never done any business with Mr. Epstein at any point in time,” in an internal memo reported on by the New York Times. Afterward, amid growing scrutiny, media reports showed that Epstein provided financial advice to Black while he was CEO of Apollo. In 2021, a probe found that Black paid Epstein $158 million between 2012 and 2017; the results of that inquiry moved Black to resign from Apollo. Black also left his post as chair of the Museum of Modern Art’s board that year amid protests from artists, though as of 2026, he remains a trustee. In 2023, Black agreed to pay the US Virgin Islands, where Epstein owned a private island, $62.5 million to settle all Epstein-related claims. The settlement agreement noted that Black was not accused of wrongdoing. The 2021 probe did not find any evidence that Black was involved in Epstein’s sex crimes. In 2023, an autistic woman accused Black of raping her at Epstein’s New York mansion when she was a minor. Black faced similar claims in 2022 from another woman who dropped her case in 2024. Between 2025 and 2026, as Epstein’s files were released by the Department of Justice as part of a wider investigation, further evidence of his ties to Black reached the public. A list of artworks in Black’s $1.1 billion collection was made public as part of a 2026 release, as was extensive communication between Epstein and other individuals regarding artworks Black sought to purchase or ended up buying, including a $115 million Picasso sculpture. Some of those transactions appear to have involved Gagosian gallery. A 2026 release of Epstein-related files by the Department of Justice revealed various exchanges with Steve Tisch, the owner of the New York Giants and one of the US’s top art collectors. Tisch, who appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list between 2016 and 2024, corresponded with Epstein about several women, debating their ethnicity and personality attributes. “We had a brief association where we exchanged emails about adult women, and in addition, we discussed movies, philanthropy, and investments. I did not take him up on any of his invitations and never went to his island,” Tisch said in a 2026 statement, referring to the private Caribbean island that Epstein owned. “As we all know now, he was a terrible person and someone I deeply regret associating with.” A 2026 release of Epstein files by the Department of Justice also revealed that he had corresponded with Jean Pigozzi, one of the world’s greatest collectors of contemporary African art. The two discussed the physical attributes of women. Pigozzi also emailed with a person named “Gmax,” who is most likely Ghislaine Maxwell, an Epstein associate who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in Epstein’s crimes. Pigozzi told ARTnews that the emails were “stupid” and said of his relationship to Epstein, “I never had anything to do with him and girls. Zero. Nothing. I also regret that I met him and Ghislaine.” While Epstein’s direct communications with artists appear to have been limited, he did email with one art star: Jeff Koons. The Wall Street Journal revealed in 2023 that Epstein had sought a meeting with Koons; documents unsealed in 2026 revealed that Epstein really did visit Koons’s studio with filmmaker Woody Allen. One 2013 email also shows that Koons corresponded directly with Epstein’s assistant, with the artist writing to say he would attend a dinner party held by Epstein. Koons did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment. Leslie Wexner, a retail mogul whose cultural contributions include funding the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, had a close relationship with and received financial advice from Epstein dating back to 1989. In 2019, Wexner claimed in a memo sent to the Wexner Foundation that Epstein had “misappropriated vast sums of money” from him and his family during that time, and that the discovery was made as Wexner separated from Epstein in 2007. “This was, frankly, a tremendous shock, even though it clearly pales in comparison to the unthinkable allegations against him now,” Wexner’s memo read. It continued: “I am embarrassed that, like so many others, I was deceived by Mr. Epstein. I know now that my trust in him was grossly misplaced, and I deeply regret having ever crossed his path.” Wexner was also the previous owner of the notorious seven-story townhouse on New York’s Upper East where Epstein lived, following a transfer of the property, reportedly with no money involved, to a trust under his control. Since the initial reports on Wexner’s ties to Epstein in 2019, further claims have come to light. A 2022 Hulu series showed that employees at Victoria’s Secret, where Wexner formerly served as CEO, had complained about Epstein’s role in the company’s business, though it remained unclear how Epstein had been given so much internal power. In 2024, newly unsealed documents revealed that Virginia Giuffre, an alleged victim of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, had said in a legal filing that she had had sex with Wexner multiple times. In 2025, a leather-bound book celebrating Epstein’s 50th birthday was revealed to the public; Wexner had written a message for it in which he said, “Dear Jeffrey, I wanted to get you what… so here it is…” Wexner has sought to distance himself from Epstein; he has not been charged with a crime. In 2025, after a newly unsealed FBI email listed Wexner as one of Epstein’s “co-conspirators,” Wexner issued another denial, with a spokesperson telling the Columbus Dispatch that he was “neither a co-conspirator nor target in any respect.” From 1987 to 1994, Epstein was a board member of the New York Academy of Art, a private university in Lower Manhattan focused on graduate-level education combining, as per the Academy’s website, “intensive technical training in the fine arts with active critical discourse.” In 1995, he met Maria Farmer, a 25-year-old aspiring artist and student at the Academy who, a year later, reported to the New York City Police Department and the FBI that she and her 16-year-old sister, Annie, had been sexually assaulted by Epstein and his close friend and associate Ghislaine Maxwell. (Maxwell has been accused by Maria Farmer and other victims of facilitating and participating in Epstein’s abuse and assault of young women. In 2022, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in Epstein’s crimes.) In 2019, the New York Times reported that Maria Farmer met Epstein at a gallery show tied to her graduation, after which Epstein “called her to offer her a job acquiring art on his behalf, and later managing the entrance to a townhouse he was renovating.” Farmer said that, at the time, she told Eileen Guggenheim, then dean and current board chair of the Academy whom Farmer says introduced her to Epstein, about his assaultive behavior. (The Times article states that “Ms. Guggenheim said in an interview that the details she was aware of at the time did not rise to a level that would require intervention.”) Painter Eric Fischl, a mentor of sorts for the artist, has said he remembers Farmer calling him about a physical encounter with Epstein: “I just kept telling Maria, ‘You’ve got to get out of there. You’ve got to get out of there,’ ” Fischl told the Times. Stuart Pivar, cofounder of the New York Academy of Art and a noted collector, gave an interview published in 2019 by Mother Jones in which he said Epstein had been his “best pal for decades” until he learned of the allegations. Noting an exchange with Farmer that served as a turning point in his relationship with Epstein, Pivar said, “She started to tell me about some terrible thing, too terrible to utter, having to do with Jeffrey Epstein. And then a minute later, he shows up. And I began to put two and two together. And I realized that something was going on, which I didn’t know about. And at that point, I knew that he had a different life that I was not aware of.” Around this time, the Office of the President at the New York Academy of Art established a committee to “formalize a protocol for how art collectors can and should interact with the Academy’s student artists,” according to the school. In a statement to ARTnews, the institution said, “The New York Academy of Art is deeply shocked and saddened by what one of our graduates, Maria Farmer, went through at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, and we are truly sorry for what happened to Maria. Jeffrey Epstein was introduced to the Academy via former board member Stuart Pivar, who left the Academy’s board acrimoniously and has had no relationship with the Academy since 1994.” The New York Academy of Art said it does not have on-site access to financial records before 1999, but from 1999 to 2014 Epstein made a single contribution of $30,000 and purchased tickets to fundraising events. Epstein donated some $800,000 over the course of 20 years to the M.I.T. Media Lab, a research center for technology, media, science, art, and design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joichi Ito, director of the Media Lab, issued an apology in 2019 for allowing Epstein to donate to the research center as well as accepting Epstein’s investment in his own “outside funds that back start-ups,” according to the New York Times. “In my fund-raising efforts for M.I.T. Media Lab, I invited him to the lab and visited several of his residences,” Ito said in his statement, adding, “I am deeply sorry to the survivors, to the Media Lab and to the M.I.T. community for bringing such a person into our network.” He later resigned from his post. The university also launched an investigation in 2019 into its relationship with the financier. In an email sent to the M.I.T. community first reported by the New York Times, M.I.T. president L. Rafael Reif wrote, “We recognize with shame and distress that we allowed M.I.T. to contribute to the elevation of his reputation, which in turn served to distract from his horrifying acts.” Two professors with connections to the Media Lab severed ties with the research center in reaction to news of Epstein’s donations: Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media, and J. Nathan Matias, a professor at Cornell University who had an arrangement as a visiting scholar. Another, the artist Neri Oxman, faced controversy over her ties to Epstein in 2019 after it was revealed that she had gifted him a 3D-printed marble after he gave $125,000 to her design lab in 2017. Oxman apologized, saying, “I regret having received funds from Epstein and deeply apologize to my students for their inadvertent involvement in this mess.” A representative for the M.I.T List Visual Arts Center—a contemporary art museum on campus with exhibition space and site-specific commission programs—told ARTnews at the time that the List Center did not receive any money from Epstein and had no affiliations with him. In a deep dive into Epstein’s social circles, New York magazine named art dealer Leah Kleman among the figures in an extensive list featured in a “little black book” that he kept of contacts along with records charting relationships of different kinds. As noted by New York, Kleman, who has sold art and antiques from the Manhattan Art and Antiques Center, described negotiating prices with Epstein as “something like a scene out of the movie Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.” And in 2019, she told Bloomberg that Epstein, a client of hers for 25 years, wanted deals on work he hoped would make an impression on others: “When he comes in, he is Jeffrey Epstein and he is entitled to a discount. He is big into shock value.” Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s brother, served as chairman of the board of Cooper Union—the renowned college of art, architecture, and engineering in New York City—when the school ended its free admission policy in 2014 and resigned from that position shortly after the trustees decided to discontinue full scholarships for all students, a policy that had been in place throughout the institution’s history. In 2019, in an apparent attempt to distance himself from his brother, Mark denied that his real estate company, Ossa Properties, had business connections to Jeffrey’s investment management firm. But Jeffrey had reportedly used apartments at Ossa Properties’ 301 East 66th Street condominium complex in New York to house “friends, employees, and associates in apartments in the building, including models connected to MC2, the modeling agency in which he invested,” according to New York magazine. (Mark has said that Jeffrey did not own any shares of the building.) Additionally, Jonathan Barrett, a managing director at investment firm Luminus Management who worked at J. Epstein & Co. and Ossa Properties in the ’90s, has told the Wall Street Journal that at the time he worked for Ossa, he believed that the two companies were affiliated. Mark Epstein has not been accused of any wrongdoing; attempts by ARTnews to reach him for comment in 2019 were unsuccessful.