News｜Ocula – Arturo Di Modica Negotiated a ＄12m Platinum Bull

By Sam Gaskin, London

Sicilian-born sculptor Arturo di Modica is best known for his Charging Bull (1989), a work now inextricably associated with America’s finance industry. But Di Modica worked tirelessly throughout his life, creating dozens of bull sculpture of different sizes as well as other works in bronze, stainless steel, and marble.

The Shanghai bull di Modica did realise was already unlikely enough. Unveiled in 2010, it was widely perceived as a statement of the city’s ambition to displace Hong Kong as the region’s financial centre, and China’s bid to become the world’s leading economic power. In the spirit of these rivalries, di Modica told The Wall Street Journal he made the Bund bull ‘redder, younger, and stronger’ — red, because it’s ‘the colour of China’ and strong because ‘it’s about a strong nation’.

The sculpture was something of a capstone to China’s ‘economic miracle’, the transformation from an impoverished Communist country in 1989, when the New York bull was installed, to the ‘socialist market economy’— a hyper-competitive capitalist society presided over by an authoritarian government — it is today. However, Harmer said, ‘Arturo wouldn’t be thinking about that.’

‘He came to America with nothing and by 1987 he had a four-level studio he owned on Crosby Street [in Lower Manhattan], he had some of the world’s strongest collectors, and he had a Ferrari,’ he said. ‘The [New York] bull was a gift back to America. It wasn’t a finance-related thing; it was to inspire people to keep on fighting for the future.’

British billionaire Joe Lewis, who turned the millions he made in themed restaurants into billions trading currencies, is the biggest private collector of di Modica’s bulls. He owns the New York bull as well as 16-foot bronze bulls at the first tee of the Isleworth golf course in Florida and at Albany Marina in the Bahamas.