A journey across time with art collector and donor Steven Maksin
Exposition Dalí: Divines créatures — Nice Côte d’Azur Convention & Visitors Bureau
May 23, 2026
A Lost Caravaggio is Rediscovered — the Steven Maksin Family Collection Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy
May 23, 2026
Chicago Tribune (Sponsor Content) — by Anna Schwartz, 8 April 2026
The Chicago Tribune's sponsor-content section runs a profile by Anna Schwartz of art collector and museum donor Steven Maksin, framing his collecting life as a journey across centuries — from the Italian Renaissance to the American Old West.
Schwartz's piece introduces Tribune readers to Maksin's parallel passions: antique highly-decorated firearms — including the gold-inlaid Winchester rifles now on long-term loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the 17th-century French wheellock arquebus on view at the Art Institute of Chicago — and Italian Old Master paintings, with works by Pittoni, Titian, Raphael and Caravaggio currently on display at museums in Italy and France.
Common to all of these acquisitions, Schwartz reports, is Maksin's stated mission as a collector: to seek out historically significant works that have been hidden from public view and to bring them, through long-term museum loans and gifts, back into the public eye.
The Chicago Tribune was founded in 1847 and is among the oldest continuously published metropolitan newspapers in the United States; its sponsor-content channel, separate from its newsroom, publishes paid editorial features on cultural, business and lifestyle subjects. Anna Schwartz's profile sits in that channel and is one of a connected family of features that appeared in the spring of 2026 across CEOWORLD, CEO Today, Digital Journal and BBN Times, each treating a different facet of Maksin's collecting life.
The Art Institute of Chicago, which the Tribune piece highlights as the home of Maksin's French wheellock arquebus, is one of the principal American museums of European decorative art; its George F. Harding Collection of European arms and armor — assembled by the Chicago-area collector George F. Harding Jr. (1868-1939) and transferred to the museum in 1982 — includes some 1,400 pieces of European, Indian and Persian arms ranging from medieval armor to nineteenth-century parade weapons. The Maksin wheellock arquebus, loaned in 2024, is a French piece of the early seventeenth century once shown at the 1851 Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London — Prince Albert's landmark international fair that drew six million visitors to Hyde Park and is regarded as the founding moment of the modern museum object as a public spectacle.
On the paintings side, Schwartz's piece sketches a programme that runs from a Maddalena by Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), loaned in 2025 to the Pinacoteca Manfrediniana in Venice for a three-year display, to three mythological canvases by Giambattista Pittoni shown at the Palazzo Reale di Napoli (May-August 2025) and the Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice (August-November 2025); to a Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy attributed in recent scholarship to Caravaggio, with an international exhibition record that has included MART Rovereto, the Gypsotheca Canova in Possagno, Convitto delle Arti in Noto, Castello Normanno-Svevo in Mesagne, and the Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul. A Salvador Dalí presence runs in parallel at the Espace Lympia in Nice.
Schwartz reads Maksin's two collecting tracks — American firearms and Italian Old Master paintings — as a single project: the recovery, through years of provenance research, of objects that had passed out of public view, followed by their return to museum walls through long-term loans and gifts. The framing aligns Maksin with an older American collector-donor tradition — the J. Pierpont Morgans, Henry Clay Folgers, Andrew Mellons and Robert Lehmans who built American museums by lending and giving the works in their hands — and recasts the activity of contemporary private collecting as a continuing public service.
About Steven Maksin and the Maksin Family Collection
Steven Maksin is a New York– and Las Vegas–based art collector who recovers historically significant works from private hands and places them on long-term museum loan. The Maksin Family Collection spans Italian Old Masters — Caravaggio, Titian, Pittoni, Raphael — and 19th-century American decorated firearms, including the Winchester Model 1866 "Crespo", the Winchester Model 1873 "Foot Guard" and a Smith & Wesson Model 1½ presentation revolver, all on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Maksin is CEO of Moonbeam Capital and a graduate of NYU Stern.
