To appreciate what art means to Jeffrey Gundlach, it helps to know that he named his asset management firm after a beloved work by Piet Mondrian. The story of DoubleLine Capital, which once managed some $150 billion in assets (as well as its messy, litigious origins during the global financial crisis), is fairly well known. A star bond trader who built an intensely loyal team at Los Angeles asset manager TCW, Gundlach had correctly predicted the subprime credit crisis and made his investors a lot of money when Wall Street cratered.
When it came time to name the new firm he founded in December 2009, after his whole team walked out of TCW en masse, Gundlach looked to his art collection and the 13-inch by 17-inch Mondrian painting he bought in the early 2000s, a simple abstraction but one that contained endless fascination for Gundlach. “It’s just three rectangles stacked on top of each other, and a double line,” he told me. “That’s all the picture is. The double line creates this incredible sense of movement and three-dimensionality. It’s a remarkable picture because it’s really just three rectangles and five lines, yet the visual sophistication is extraordinary.”