And in 2009, Donatella Versace hired him to design her secondary collection Versus, where he was seen as making a distinctive mark before stepping down last year to focus on his own signature label.

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The only real evidence of the De Soles's worldly life is their art collection, which features works by Cy Twombly, Brice Marden and Mark Rothko, alongside modern Italian artists such as Giorgio Morandi, Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana and Alighiero Boetti.

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Ms. Yeung has already made her mark on the West: Her spiky heels are in the permanent costume collection of London's Victoria and Albert Museum as representations of contemporary Chinese design.

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In 1968, a year after he finished his legendary series of black murals for his eponymous chapel at the Menil Collection in Houston and just a few months after suffering an aneurysm that nearly killed him, Mark Rothko turned to painting smaller pictures in acrylic on paper laid down on canvas.

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Mark Goldman, who runs two retail shops and a wholesale distribution center, has the largest private collection of them in the U.S. Goldman keeps 100 of these imposing sculptures in the lower Manhattan loft he built as a combo home and private display space.

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