Barbara Jakobson, 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.
Jakobson, who appeared on ARTnews’s 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’s top dealers, including Sidney Janis, Ileana Sonnabend, and Leo Castelli.
She 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 for a MoMA oral history in 1997.
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While serving on the Junior Council, Jakobson also became a founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem, which opened in 1968. “Once we got it started, the idea was that we wouldn’t just be a board of white downtown New Yorkers, we would start it, we would try to get it going and we would leave,” she said in the oral history about her involvement with the Studio Museum.
As a MoMA trustee, she persuaded Castelli to donated Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955), one of the artist’s first “Combines,” to the museum; it is now a cornerstone of MoMA’s permanent collection. She was also part of the committee that selected Yoshio Taniguchi to serve as the architect for MoMA’s $850 million expansion, which opened in 2004.
In an interview with the Times, dealer Jeffrey Deitch characterized Jakobson as one of a select few people “who are essential to how this whole system works, how the consensus of art and quality is formed.”
Jakobson’s 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. “I see the house as a vessel for an ongoing autobiographical exercise,” she told Curbed in 2021 for its “Great Rooms” column. “I keep the transformation as proof of life.”
On 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’s parlor floor.
In 2005, she sold 41 works of both art and design from her collection, which she had begun to assemble in the 1950s, at Christie’s. Among them were a brass-and-resin chair by Italian designer Carlo Mollino, Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square: Consonant (1957), Diane Arbus’s Xmas Tree in a Living Room, Levittown, L.I. (1963), and Frank Stella’s Felstzyn III (1971). (The outline of where the Stella once hung is still visible in her townhouse.)
Several 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, with 10 percent of the proceeds benefitting MoMA’s Acquisition Fund. She also used the funds to pay for new commissions for her home, including the Tom Sachs–designed bar.
Jakobson 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.)
They moved to New York in the mid-’50s, and Barbara Jakobson would soon become immersed in the city’s burgeoning postwar art world. She soon met Castelli, via an introduction from her cousin, and bought a Jasper Johns works from the artist’s first Castelli show in 1958.
Her first purchase was a work by German artist Adolf Fleischmann because she couldn’t afford a work by Piet Mondrian, her favorite artist, so “I just found the closest thing to a Mondrian that I could,” she said in the MoMA oral history.
Jakobson 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. “This is what drives me and what keeps me interested in art, the art of my own time,” she said in the oral history. “I look to the artists to let me know what we will be thinking because the artist always is there first, they’re always these [C]assandras, whatever it is, whether it’s a new way of painting, that’s why it‘s interesting for me to look at the work of new artists.”