Agnes Gund, 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.
Gund’s 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, the New York institution that she had helped fund since 1967, when she joined its international council.
In the 40-plus years since then, Gund helped bankroll many efforts that aided in launching MoMA into the future, in particular the museum’s 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.
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She was also crucial in relaunching the institution now known as MoMA PS1, a vaunted Queens contemporary art center that she helped bring under MoMA’s 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.
Her 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.
Even 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—including MoMA—didn’t respond to her efforts in kind.
In the 2020 documentary Aggie, by Gund’s daughter Catherine Gund, Agnes recalled urging MoMA to acquire Adrian Piper’s video installation What It’s 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’s retrospective for Piper the year afterward.
Artists close to Gund—and there were many of them—have 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. “Aggie has always been there for the new kind of art,” the artist and filmmaker John Waters says in Aggie. “She doesn’t question it. She gets behind it.”
At 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.
Longtime MoMA director Glenn Lowry with Agnes Gund and Klaus Biesenbach.
WireImage
In 2018, Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, told ARTnews that Gund was “ahead of her time as far back as the 1970s. She had those convictions and in her own home, obviously, it didn’t require courage perhaps in the same way that it did require courage to advocate at MoMA for a number of artists who—if not for her advocacy—probably the curators would not have been looking at closely.”
Her 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.
Her 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.
She grew up attending art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, though as she told ARTnews in 2018, “I was never any good at drawing but I was very good at learning the collection.” Gund’s mother, who had taken her to those classes, died of leukemia when Gund was 14, and so she was sent to Miss Porter’s 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’s auction in support of the school. Off to sale went Gund’s prized Carmen Herrera painting, which sold for a record-setting $2.9 million.)
Gund 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.
Agnes Gund with Martin Puryear, an artist she collected.
Photo Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for The J. Paul Getty Trust
She 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’t.
“I wanted to collect Old Master drawings, but I realized I couldn’t live in the low-light conditions those works required,” she told ARTnews in 2018. “I needed natural light for my life. That’s why I was stuck with contemporary art, which I haven’t regretted.”
Her first significant acquisition was a sculpture by the British modernist Henry Moore, Three-Way Piece No. 2: Archer (1964). But she said she felt “guilt” 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.
She 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’s rich collection of Abstract Expressionist art. When Gund attempted to do so, the bank put an end to the plan, citing her father’s wishes “not to let us do anything insane,” as she put it.
Gund 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. “How could children not have art?” she asked herself.
Agnes Gund (at right) with her daughter Catherine Gund, who made a film about her mother.
Photo Emily Assiran/Getty Images for Pizza Hut
During 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. “These were people like me,” Gund told Harper’s Bazaar. “People who loved their kids, who didn’t have a problem with their children—but with the world that says they’re not okay.” (Alongside Catherine, Gund is also survived by her children David, Anna, and Jessica Saalfield. Agnes’s brother Graham Gund, himself a collector of note, recently died.)
Gund 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. “This is what I need to do,” she said at the time, recalling the impact of viewing Ava DuVernay’s 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.
She received widespread acclaim for the initiative. In 2018, the New York Times profiled Gund under the headline “Is Agnes Gund the Last Good Rich Person?” 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 from Bill Clinton when he was President.)
Gund’s holdings will continue to transform America’s 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.
She 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, “I’ve loved collecting and I’ve had so much fun doing it.”