{"id":75687,"date":"2025-09-20T18:24:15","date_gmt":"2025-09-20T18:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/75687\/"},"modified":"2025-09-20T18:24:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T18:24:15","slug":"key-art-collector-and-moma-funder-dies-at-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/75687\/","title":{"rendered":"Key Art Collector and MoMA Funder Dies at 87"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAgnes Gund<\/a>, one of the greatest and most influential art patrons in the US, has died at 87. The New York Times reported her death on Friday, but did not state a cause.<\/p>\n

\n\tGund\u2019s collecting and philanthropy transformed the American art world, spurring on many others to begin buying art with seriousness. Her influence is most deeply felt at the Museum of Modern Art<\/a>, the New York institution that she had helped fund since 1967, when she joined its international council.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the 40-plus years since then, Gund helped bankroll many efforts that aided in launching MoMA into the future, in particular the museum\u2019s 2004 expansion. That initiative, which involved the creation of an entirely new building, was designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, cost $858 million, and transformed MoMA into the behemoth it is today. At the time of her passing, Gund was listed as president emerita and a life trustee at MoMA, where she served as president from 1991 and 2002.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"NEW<\/p>\n

\n\tShe was also crucial in relaunching the institution now known as MoMA PS1, a vaunted Queens contemporary art center that she helped bring under MoMA\u2019s aegis in 1999. As of Friday, Gund was still listed as a board member of MoMA PS1, where the directorship position, currently held by Connie Butler, is currently titled after Gund.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer impact at MoMA can be seen in its galleries, where masterpieces that she bought and then gifted to the museum appear frequently. She bought art with vigor and fervor, and appeared on the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list frequently, ranking on each edition between 1990, the year the list was first created, and 2018.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven before our current moment when many are focused on expanding the canon, Gund paid special mind to supporting women artists and artists of color. And although she gained respect for her commitment to these artists, she sometimes recalled that museums\u2014including MoMA\u2014didn\u2019t respond to her efforts in kind.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the 2020 documentary Aggie<\/a>, by Gund\u2019s daughter Catherine Gund, Agnes recalled urging MoMA to acquire Adrian Piper\u2019s video installation What It\u2019s Like, What It Is #3 (1991) after the museum had exhibited it in the year it was made. The museum declined to do so, only to rectify the mistake in 2017. The high-impact artwork, in which a Black man rebuts a spread of stereotypes while speaking directly to his viewer, ended up becoming the centerpiece of MoMA\u2019s retrospective for Piper the year afterward.<\/p>\n

\n\tArtists close to Gund\u2014and there were many of them\u2014have always described her as a patron who was always willing to wade into the fray, supporting the kind of work that may have scared off others. \u201cAggie has always been there for the new kind of art,\u201d the artist and filmmaker John Waters says in Aggie. \u201cShe doesn\u2019t question it. She gets behind it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAt MoMA right now, one can find an array of treasures gifted by Gund: a James Rosenquist painting based on the layout of a house, an Ana Mendieta sculpture that aligns the female body with the landscape, a spare Agnes Martin painting from her days in the Coenties Slip district of New York. These are but a few of the more than 250 works she gave to the museum across the years. Others marshaled in a 2018 show at MoMA devoted specifically to gifts from her included key works by Jasper Johns, Elizabeth Murray, Catherine Opie, Martin Puryear, Julie Mehretu, Mona Hatoum, and many more.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Two<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tLongtime MoMA director Glenn Lowry with Agnes Gund and Klaus Biesenbach.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWireImage<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2018, Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, told ARTnews<\/a> that Gund was \u201cahead of her time as far back as the 1970s. She had those convictions and in her own home, obviously, it didn\u2019t require courage perhaps in the same way that it did require courage to advocate at MoMA for a number of artists who\u2014if not for her advocacy\u2014probably the curators would not have been looking at closely.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHer patronage was not limited to MoMA, of course. As of Friday, she was also listed as a standing trustee at the Cleveland Museum of Art, a life trustee at the Morgan Library and Museum, and an emeritus director at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. At various points, she had patronized all those institutions.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer roots lay in Cleveland. She was born in a suburb of that Ohio city in 1938, the second of six children. Her father, a banker, tended to provide her brothers with more opportunities, Gund said, but she persevered and credited her childhood with instilling in her a resiliency that came to define her entire life.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe grew up attending art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, though as she told ARTnews in 2018, \u201cI was never any good at drawing but I was very good at learning the collection.\u201d Gund\u2019s mother, who had taken her to those classes, died of leukemia when Gund was 14, and so she was sent to Miss Porter\u2019s School in Connecticut, where she acquired an interest in art history. (Much later on, in 2019, with Oprah Winfrey, Gund would co-chair an all-women Sotheby\u2019s auction in support of the school. Off to sale went Gund\u2019s prized Carmen Herrera painting, which sold for a record-setting $2.9 million.)<\/p>\n

\n\tGund attended the Connecticut College for Women, receiving an undergraduate degree in history. She then gained her masters in art history from the Fogg Museum, which is now a part of the Harvard Art Museums.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAgnes Gund with Martin Puryear, an artist she collected.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Stefanie Keenan\/Getty Images for The J. Paul Getty Trust<\/p>\n

\n\tShe married Albrecht Saafield, a private school teacher, in 1963, and three years later kicked off her collecting in earnest once she gained an inheritance from her father, who died in 1966. At the time, many top collectors were focused on buying art by Old Masters, and Gund intended to pursue a similar path before realizing she couldn\u2019t. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI wanted to collect Old Master drawings, but I realized I couldn\u2019t live in the low-light conditions those works required,\u201d she told ARTnews in 2018. \u201cI needed natural light for my life. That\u2019s why I was stuck with contemporary art, which I haven\u2019t regretted.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tHer first significant acquisition was a sculpture by the British modernist Henry Moore, Three-Way Piece No. 2: Archer (1964). But she said she felt \u201cguilt\u201d over having bought the work, and her kids had begun sitting atop it as if it were a horse. She gave it away in 1970 to the Cleveland Museum of Art, where it is still on view today.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe befriended the Abstract Expressionists, including Mark Rothko, and began acquiring their work. And she was taken under the wing of Emily Hall Tremaine, herself a key art collector. Her friendship with Tremaine put her in line to acquire all of Ben Heller\u2019s rich collection of Abstract Expressionist art. When Gund attempted to do so, the bank put an end to the plan, citing her father\u2019s wishes \u201cnot to let us do anything insane,\u201d as she put it.<\/p>\n

\n\tGund never separated her collecting and philanthropy from her politics. This much was obvious from her move, in 1977, to start Studio in the School, a nonprofit that continues to offer children art classes today. She did so after spreading open her copy of the New York Times one morning and reading with horror that New York intended to cut back on art classes, which had become a victim of a fiscal crisis facing the city. \u201cHow could children not have art?\u201d she asked herself.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Two<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAgnes Gund (at right) with her daughter Catherine Gund, who made a film about her mother.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Emily Assiran\/Getty Images for Pizza Hut<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring the AIDS crisis, in the 1980s, Gund threw herself behind causes focused on the fight for gay rights. She supported PFLAG, a LGBTQ-focused nonprofit, and even attended a Pride parade in 1989 with her daughter Catherine. \u201cThese were people like me,\u201d Gund told Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/a>. \u201cPeople who loved their kids, who didn\u2019t have a problem with their children\u2014but with the world that says they\u2019re not okay.\u201d (Alongside Catherine, Gund is also survived by her children David, Anna, and Jessica Saalfield. Agnes\u2019s brother Graham Gund, himself a collector of note, recently died.)<\/p>\n

\n\tGund gained mainstream public recognition in 2017, when she sold a prized Roy Lichtenstein painting, Masterpiece (1962), with the plans to use the funds recouped to launch the Art for Justice Fund, an initiative focused on remedying the negative effects of mass incarceration in the US. \u201cThis is what I need to do,\u201d she said at the time, recalling the impact of viewing Ava DuVernay\u2019s documentary 13TH. The work ended up being bought by collector Steve Cohen for $165 million, and Gund put some $100 million toward the newly created fund. The Lichtenstein painting, which long hung above a fireplace in her dining room, was replaced with a Stanley Whitney abstraction.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe received widespread acclaim for the initiative. In 2018, the New York Times profiled Gund under the headline \u201cIs Agnes Gund the Last Good Rich Person?\u201d The Getty Center awarded her a prize in recognition of her philanthropy that same year, and in 2020, she received the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award. (By this point, she had already received the National Medal of the Arts\u00a0from Bill Clinton when he was President.)<\/p>\n

\n\tGund\u2019s holdings will continue to transform America\u2019s museums even after her death. MoMA and the Cleveland Museum are set to receive yet more works, as are nine other institutions, among them the Menil Collection in Houston and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe knew as much while she was alive, but in interviews, she seemed uncomfortable with the notion that she might be important. Instead, she focused on the museums, art, and artists she had supported. As she told ARTnews in 2018, \u201cI\u2019ve loved collecting and I\u2019ve had so much fun doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Agnes Gund, one of the greatest and most influential art patrons in the US, has died at 87.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75688,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[267],"tags":[51391,11845,365,362,363,364,366,18,117,19,17,48751],"class_list":{"0":"post-75687","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-agnes-gund","9":"tag-artnews-top-200-collectors","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-artsanddesign","13":"tag-artsdesign","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-eire","16":"tag-entertainment","17":"tag-ie","18":"tag-ireland","19":"tag-museum-of-modern-art"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}