Rebecca Fine Launches Metis, a New Art Lender Powered by Winston Artory Group Data
Athena Art Finance was among the first firms to establish itself as a go-to lender for collectors seeking a more flexible way to turn their high-value art collections into liquidity, and since its founding in 2015, the firm has provided nearly $1 billion in art financing to collectors. Now, longtime CEO and founding member Rebecca Fine is launching a new venture, Metis Fine Art Finance, which will operate in partnership with Winston Artory Group. Joining Fine in the venture is veteran art lender Giovanna Quattrone, who will serve as Metis’s director and brings years of experience in art-collateral underwriting, market analysis and risk management from their time working together at Athena.
Via the partnership, Metis will gain access to constantly updated valuations and top-level analytics made possible by last year’s strategic merger of art advisory and appraisal firm Winston Art Group with Artory’s pioneering Web3 infrastructure and institutional-grade data platform. That data will fuel Metis’s financing platform, informing and accelerating its underwriting with a level of deep art market intelligence not yet available to conventional lenders. “With all these invaluable insights into the full collection lifecycle, Metis can lead with conviction where others may hesitate, and always on the collectors’ side,” Fine tells Observer.
The company’s name draws on Greek mythology, launching with particularly good timing as Christopher Nolan’s epic film The Odyssey shatters box-office records. Metis was Zeus’s first wife, his most trusted adviser and the mother of Athena. As the Greek Titaness of wisdom, she is the muse behind Metis Fine Art Finance, which aims to tap into that wisdom to navigate the complexities of the art market, solve seemingly intractable problems and consistently provide independent, wise advice.
(Zeus swallowed Metis while she was pregnant after hearing a prophecy that a son born to her would overthrow him; Athena was later born from Zeus’s head. For Fine, this myth provided both an engaging origin story and a sense of symmetry between Athena and the new company.)
Metis Fine Art Finance addresses what Fine sees as a persistent gap in the art-finance market. “Art has matured into a serious asset class, but its financing has not kept pace,” she says, noting that collectors often have to choose between banks that do not understand art and market players, such as auction houses or dealers, whose ultimate interest is selling it. “These people care deeply about their collections and are emotionally invested in them. It is important to many that they can keep the art in their homes. They want to lend works to museums for important exhibitions when opportunities arise. They want to cultivate relationships with artists who matter to them. They do not want to be seen selling art they purchased three years earlier from an artist they love.”
For context, Athena Art Finance was acquired in 2019 in a $170 million deal by Yieldstreet, an online platform for retail investors focused on investments beyond the stock market. The acquisition ultimately transformed Athena’s art-lending operations into an investment product. The launch of Metis Art Finance follows Yieldstreet’s decision to move away from originating its own alternative-investment products and toward a distribution-only model centered on third-party funds, a shift that encompasses both Athena Art Finance’s lending business and Yieldstreet’s art-equity vehicles and that departs from the vision Fine originally had for Athena, she explains. The change also removed the distinctive qualities that had made Yieldstreet’s original model attractive, offering an alternative for people who did not have the funds to invest in a hedge fund or traditional private-equity vehicle but wanted an access point—perhaps with $10,000, $20,000 or $25,000—to invest in other asset classes, art among them. “That is why Yieldstreet bought Athena in 2019: to take the loans Athena had underwritten, originated and serviced and bundle them into small private securitizations,” Fine explains. “This created diversification across various borrowers and many artworks.”
During Athena Art Finance’s years under Yieldstreet, Fine’s team created 11 of those art-debt funds as well as an art-equity fund. While the art-equity funds and the works they own will remain with Yieldstreet under a sub-adviser, Athena’s art-debt investment vehicles are winding down as the company will no longer originate new loans.
Fine is firm that her priority with Metis remains the same as it was at Athena: to provide a uniquely personal, concierge-style lending service that respects both the value of a collection and its owner’s passion for it, with a focus on the collection’s preservation and the collector’s long-term objectives: “People know that we are highly focused on our collector clientele and very responsive. We would pick up the phone at any time.”
Fine grew up around art, a third-generation descendant on her maternal side of a family of female artists and gallerists. Her great-aunt, Rose Fried, was the first female gallery owner in New York City, operating her gallery from 1932 to 1972. Fine’s mother is a sculptor who still works every day at age 84, while her sister Jocelyn and brothers Ben and Jon are painters and filmmakers. After a long career as an art lawyer and cross-border litigator at a major law firm, Fine found in art lending a way to forge a career helping artists, art collectors and people curious about art as an asset class.
Fine also clarified that the relationship with Winston Artory Group is structured to preserve independence. Metis Fine Art Finance is a separate, independently operated affiliate company. It will not exchange client information with Winston Art Group or Artory, nor will it require borrowers to use Winston to provide the formal appraisals supporting its loans; independent third-party appraisers will continue to perform that work. That independence and optionality are critical because they align Metis with the collector’s objectives: to treasure the art and tap its value without any other competing commercial interest.
Nonetheless, the data partnership will allow Metis to assess collections more quickly, answer questions about potential loan size and pricing early and lend with greater confidence. “There is tremendous value in being able to evaluate a portfolio or collection more quickly and accurately at the initial stage. A collector always wants to know immediately how much we can lend and on what terms,” Fine explains.
Many of the company’s clients, she adds, are philanthropists looking for opportunities to make meaningful contributions. “It is not that easy to make donations to museums because very few museums will accept art as a contribution.”
Collectors might use loan proceeds for many different purposes, but Metis will remain agnostic about how they use them. That is another distinction from Fine’s work at Yieldstreet. Still, many collectors are looking to use this liquidity to buy more art, especially in the current market, where they see real opportunities. “They believe there has been a mismatch in pricing and that the market was soft until quite recently, so many see this as a buying opportunity.”
Artory’s data, which comprises more than 44 million transaction records from auction houses across the globe and is already used as a core data set for the annual UBS & Art Basel Art Market Report, should allow Metis to make those liquidity assessments with greater precision. Fine describes the alliance as a way to combine the Athena team’s lending experience with a deeper and more continuously updated body of market evidence. “Their data repository is updated in real time as auction results and, to the extent available, private-sale data come in. The goal is to have the most accurate and complete data at the earliest stage, allowing us to be nimble and efficient and to lend with conviction.”
She is confident, too, that the new institutional funding structure will be more scalable than Yieldstreet’s retail model, under which large loans had to be funded partly through thousands of comparatively small investor commitments.
Many of Metis’s clients are likely to come from the upper end of the collecting market, which is also the segment performing best, as data consistently shows. However, Fine also acknowledges that lendability is not fixed. As artists develop deeper auction histories and broader secondary markets, works that were once difficult to finance can become credible collateral. “Artists who were once considered emerging can, after 10 years, suddenly have strong auction records,” she observes, citing Banksy as an example. “When people came to us with a Banksy, a few years ago, we did not lend against it. Now Banksy has a very serious market. It is a function of liquidity assessment.”
For an art lender, the decisive question is future salability. The number of bidders, frequency of transactions and depth of the secondary market all affect the lender’s ability to recover capital if a borrower defaults. While Metis Fine Art Finance will focus principally on collectors, Fine does not rule out serving clients whom private banks or auction houses cannot accommodate because of regulatory, structural or underwriting constraints. Still, she stresses that the company does not intend to disrupt collectors’ existing private-banking relationships, aiming instead to provide flexibility when conventional providers cannot complete a transaction.
For now, Metis will concentrate on paintings, sculpture and fine art, which remain the team’s principal areas of expertise. Fine does not rule out an eventual expansion into other collectible categories, such as jewelry, watches and classic cars, particularly now that the company has access to Winston Artory’s cross-category expertise and data. However, she says that any such move would require best-in-class specialists with genuine domain expertise.
Although the U.S. remains the key market, Fine is confident about further global expansion of art lending. With Metis, she already has plans to lend internationally wherever regulations permit. Switzerland, England, Spain, Hong Kong and Singapore are also important or viable markets today, with possible activity in Germany and northern Europe. In Europe, only France and Italy are more difficult because of their legal and banking regimes. The company is a non-bank private lender, and licensing requirements differ by jurisdiction, Fine explains. The physical location and ownership structure of the collateral determine whether a transaction is possible. Still, there are sometimes ways to structure a loan around those restrictions. An Italian or French collector may, for example, hold art in a Swiss free port or through an offshore trust, LLC or special-purpose vehicle. In some cases, Metis can lend against those works even when it cannot lend directly against art located in the collector’s home country.
Trusts represent another increasingly common use case. Families often place collections in trusts for estate-planning purposes, leaving trustees responsible for valuable but non-income-producing assets. Beneficiaries may need liquidity, some may wish to exit their interests and others may want to preserve the collection assembled by an earlier generation. A loan can provide funds to buy out beneficiaries, diversify the trust’s investments or pay for insurance, storage and maintenance without requiring the art to be sold.
