{"id":409931,"date":"2025-09-09T08:07:15","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T08:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/409931\/"},"modified":"2025-09-09T08:07:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T08:07:15","slug":"storied-collector-and-moma-trustee-dies-at-92","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/409931\/","title":{"rendered":"Storied Collector and MoMA Trustee Dies at 92"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tBarbara Jakobson<\/a>, an iconic collector who was known for wide-reaching web of relationships with artists, dealers, and curators, died at 92 on August 25 in Manhattan. The cause was pneumonia, according to the New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tJakobson, who appeared on ARTnews\u2019s Top 200 Collectors list three times, from 1990 to 1992, was a central figure of the New York art world for decades. She had close relationships with some of the era\u2019s top dealers, including Sidney Janis, Ileana Sonnabend, and Leo Castelli.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe was also a longtime trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, joining its Junior Council in the 1960s, becoming the head of that group in 1971, and being elected a full-fledged board member in 1974. But her history with the institution extended even further back to when an aunt of hers gave her a MoMA membership when she was 12, Jakobson said in an interview<\/a> for a MoMA oral history in 1997.<\/p>\n

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

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

\n\tWhile serving on the Junior Council, Jakobson also became a founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem, which opened in 1968. \u201cOnce we got it started, the idea was that we wouldn\u2019t just be a board of white downtown New Yorkers, we would start it, we would try to get it going and we would leave,\u201d she said in the oral history about her involvement with the Studio Museum.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a MoMA trustee, she persuaded Castelli to donated Robert Rauschenberg\u2019s Bed (1955), one of the artist\u2019s first \u201cCombines,\u201d to the museum; it is now a cornerstone of MoMA\u2019s permanent collection. She was also part of the committee that selected Yoshio Taniguchi to serve as the architect for MoMA\u2019s $850 million expansion, which opened in 2004.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn an interview with the Times, dealer Jeffrey Deitch characterized Jakobson as one of a select few people \u201cwho are essential to how this whole system works, how the consensus of art and quality is formed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJakobson\u2019s townhouse in the Upper East Side, which she moved into in 1965 and in which she raised her three children, was filled with her collection. \u201cI see the house as a vessel for an ongoing autobiographical exercise,\u201d she told Curbed<\/a> in 2021 for its \u201cGreat Rooms\u201d column. \u201cI keep the transformation as proof of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the ground floor at the time was a bar made of Con Ed barricades and designed by Tom Sachs. Elsewhere were works by Matthew Barney, Richard Artschwager, Barbara Bloom, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Peter Halley, and Robert Morris, whose felt piece has not moved since she acquired it in 1970. A portrait of her by Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the many artists who she also forged a friendship with, hangs above a fireplace on the townhouse\u2019s parlor floor.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2005, she sold 41 works of both art and design from her collection, which she had begun to assemble in the 1950s, at Christie\u2019s. Among them were a brass-and-resin chair by Italian designer Carlo Mollino, Josef Albers\u2019s Homage to the Square: Consonant (1957), Diane Arbus\u2019s Xmas Tree in a Living Room, Levittown, L.I. (1963), and Frank Stella\u2019s Felstzyn III (1971). (The outline of where the Stella once hung is still visible in her townhouse.)<\/p>\n

\n\tSeveral of the lots exceeded their pre-sale estimates, though the Stella sold for $72,000 against an $80,000 to $120,000 estimate. The sale made $1.9 million<\/a>, with 10 percent of the proceeds benefitting MoMA\u2019s Acquisition Fund. She also used the funds to pay for new commissions for her home, including the Tom Sachs\u2013designed bar.<\/p>\n

\n\tJakobson was born Barbara Petchesky on January 31, 1933, in Brooklyn. She grew up on Eastern Parkway across from the Brooklyn Museum. She studied art history at Smith College, and during her junior year there, she married John Jakobson, whom she had met when she was 17, just before starting at Smith. At the time of their marriage, John was a student at Harvard Business School and would go on to have a career as a stockbroker. (The couple divorced in 1983.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThey moved to New York in the mid-\u201950s, and Barbara Jakobson would soon become immersed in the city\u2019s burgeoning postwar art world. She soon met Castelli, via an introduction from her cousin, and bought a Jasper Johns works from the artist\u2019s first Castelli show in 1958.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer first purchase was a work by German artist Adolf Fleischmann because she couldn\u2019t afford a work by Piet Mondrian, her favorite artist, so \u201cI just found the closest thing to a Mondrian that I could,\u201d she said in the MoMA oral history.<\/p>\n

\n\tJakobson would go on to grow her collection over the next seven decades, but at the core of it was her love of art and artists. \u201cThis is what drives me and what keeps me interested in art, the art of my own time,\u201d she said in the oral history. \u201cI look to the artists to let me know what we will be thinking because the artist always is there first, they\u2019re always these [C]assandras, whatever it is, whether it\u2019s a new way of painting, that\u2019s why it\u2018s interesting for me to look at the work of new artists.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barbara Jakobson, an iconic collector who was known for wide-reaching web of relationships with artists, dealers, and curators,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":409932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4021,4020,141055,4022,77,23502,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-409931","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-barbara-jakobson","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-obituary","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115173316687388357","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}