The Jeffrey Epstein horror show just keeps on swelling, what with revelations about blackmail, his political protection and his involvement with a major bank. Just this week the British sacked Peter Mandelson, their ambassador to the US, upon learning he had emailed Epstein right after he had admitted guilt to soliciting a minor, writing I think the world of you and I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened. So this seems the right time for a look at Epstein’s foray into the art world.
This began when he connected with Stuart Pivar, the omnivorous art collector, who first came to the attention of the New York artworld because of his daily shopping trips with Andy Warhol for objects. “Andy was looking for ideas,” he says. The connection with Epstein was made in the early 70s, when Pivar and a friend went to visit Jimmy Goldsmith, the French/British magnate/politician, in his then place on the East Side. “He had a huge mansion,” Pivar says. “We walked in and there in a hall was an immense piano. And there was this guy playing Beethoven’s Waldstein Piano Sonata. I was mesmerized. That was Jeffrey Epstein. He was a great player, his brother was in the piano business.”
The two spoke, it went well. “The moment I met him I was impressed by him,” Pivar said. “Jeffrey was an extremely charming, amusing guy, who disarmed me completely with his repartee about everything. He was also extremely good looking. when women got near him, they would get a crush on him. Instantaneously. That’s the way Jeffrey was. He was a brilliant guy.” Although sometimes given to odd behavior. For instance when Pivar spoke highly of hearing him play the Waldstein Sonata, Epstein explained that he had a girlfriend who played piano, that the sonata was a favorite of hers and that this made him work ultra-hard when preparing his own performance. “I played it better than she does. To embarrass her.” he said.
Epstein brought Pivar into his operation. “Every time Jeffrey bought a house it was my job to furnish it with paintings,” he said. “And what would happen is within days I would arrive in a van, with dozens and dozens of paintings out of my own inventory and hang them all over his house.”
For Epstein though such hangings were décor not art. “Jeffrey had no eye for paintings,” Pivar says. ‘And he didn’t believe that paintings could possibly embody any value when an exact copy of them could be made for nothing.” But Epstein brought his game-playing into the artworld too, as when Pivar walked into an Epstein mansions and saw a large painting on a wall, apparently by the great abstract expressionist, Franz Kline.
“I said wow Jeffrey! What a great Franz Kline,” Pivar recalls. “He said it’s a fake. I said why do you hang a fake? “ He said I like it when the art people come, and they say what a great painting! And I tell them it’s a fake. They get embarrassed. That was his favorite trick. He liked to humiliate people who thought they had a higher wisdom about things. He knew nothing whatever about art.”
Epstein respected Pivar’s eye though, told him he wanted his portrait painted by Andy Warhol. “I was best pals with both of them,” he says. He took Epstein to Warhol’s Factory on Union Square. Surprise. “Andy, who was as anxious as hell to do portraits, because he was getting fifteen thousand dollars apiece for them at the time, turned Jeffrey down.
“I said Andy why could you turn him down?
“He’s a poseur. I just don’t like him,” Warhol said.
Was Warhol was ever more specific than that?
“Andy understood people,” Pivar said. “Andy was a very good perceiver of personality.”
Ratted on everyone
Stuart Pivar had become well aware of unattractive elements in Jeffrey Epstein’s life, including his early business career .“When he left Bear Stearns he went directly to the Treasury Department and ratted on everybody he knew. That’s how Jeffrey got started,” he said. But he was unaware that Epstein was a multimillionaire pimp of underage girls. Young girls yes, but children no. A paedøphile is somebody attracted to children under the age of twelve and Pivar notes that the routine description of Epstein as a paedo is flat out wrong. “He used to come around with a couple of gorgeous twenty-one year old Scandinavian girls,” Pivar says. One of his girlfriends was called a medical doctor called Eva Anderson. “He would call me up from time to time and ask me if he should marry her,” Pivar says. “I told him No! She’ll want to have kids. He didn’t. Jeffrey detested kids.”
Pivar’s most direct experience of Epstein’s sexual compulsions came when he acquired a first century Greco-Roman bronze of a foot. The sight of this drove Epstein bonkers. “He screamed I need that! I need that!” he said. “Jeffrey was an uncontrollable foot fetichist. And he had satyriasis.. That’s the male equivalent of a nymphomania”.
Pivar had another positive Epstein observation to make. ”Although basically Jeffrey was a wicked person, nevertheless he played a very interesting role in the science world,” he said. “I held dinners at my house he organised for scientists like Steven Pincus and Stephen J Gould and he sat next to Dan Goldin, the director of NASA, at a Cape Canaveral rocket launch. I was there.” Epstein met with such public intellectuals as Noam Chomsky but could be mischievous on such occasions. “When we sat around a table Jeffrey would always, always be in charge of the agenda,” Pivar says. “When the conversation got to be real scientific Jeffrey would pipe up and say what has that got to do with pussy?
“I would wham him in the ribs and go don’t do that, you’re embarrassing us. Jeffrey was outrageously uncontrollable. Nonetheless he brought together scientists, who met each other and exchanged important ideas. He knew no embarrassment, he knew no shame and that was why he was able to approach people.”
In 2003 Epstein donated $6.5 million to fund PED, the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, a project of Harvard University math and biology professor, Martin Nowak. Further substantial donations to Harvard followed. When Epstein was busted for soliciting minors for prostitution though, Harvard slammed on the brakes. In 2020 a university report on their relationship with Epstein showed that his ties with Nowak had been crucially close. Nowak was sanctioned in March 2021, his PED shuttered and he was banned from serving as principal investigator on any new grants or contracts. Another Harvard academic would observe that he had been “scapegoated”. And in March 2023, Harvard lifted their sanctions and chiefs in relevant disciplines were instructed to “welcome Dr. Nowak back to our respective departments.”
Pivar’s friendly relations with Jeffrey Epstein resumed, and would continue. His contribution to the book Ghislaine Maxwell put together to celebrate Epstein’s 50 year birthday was a limerick, reading:
Jeffrey Epstein at half a century
With credentials plenipotentiary
Though up to no good
Whenever he could
Has avoided the penitentiary.
This was witty but would be proven wrong. Jeffrey Epstein spent nearly thirteen months in a Florida jail, then – though controversy about this continues – hanged himself.
