She was the president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York for greater than a decade, donated greater than 1,800 artworks to establishments over her lifetime, and as soon as bought her most treasured Lichtenstein portray for $165 million to fund a serious anti-incarceration initiative. Seven years earlier than the arts patron and chief Agnes Gund died — at age 87, in the fall of 2025 — The New York Times profiled her lifelong philanthropic work beneath the headline “Is Agnes Gund the Last Good Rich Person?”
That’s fairly presumably so, as the piece famous that by that time, she had spent many years giving her fortune away to the arts, in addition to to AIDS analysis and reproductive rights teams. Generosity on that scale has change into a rarity as wealth has more and more concentrated at the prime, and bunker-building tech billionaires appear much less in arts and tradition than earlier moneyed generations — until it’s to buy out the Met Gala.
Gund’s art collection, like her money stream, was fluid. By her later years, a lot of her art collection had been promised to museums. But subsequent week, three works that hung in her Upper East Side residence by Cy Twombly, Joseph Cornell and Mark Rothko — the final of which had solely as soon as been publicly proven — could sell for nearly $150 million mixed. The Agnes Gund collection can be bought on May 18 as half of Christie’s wider Twentieth- and Twenty first- century night sale in New York.
“She put artists first,” stated Sara Friedlander, who chairs the “Post-war and Contemporary Art, Americas” division for Christie’s. “Her relationships with artists were at the core of her being, and it’s how she was able to acquire such incredible works.”
Rothko made “No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe),” a monumental swath of inky black and deep inexperienced slashed with purple, in 1964. That identical 12 months, he started the 14 darkened panels of the Rothko Chapel in Houston — his ultimate physique of work earlier than his loss of life in 1970. According to Christie’s, Gund purchased it instantly from the artist in his studio; although she was trying for a lighter composition, he countered with a special suggestion. After she bought the work, it by no means left her residence besides for a quick one-month mortgage in 1972 to the Cleveland Museum of Art, which she had typically visited as a toddler in Ohio. She acquired the untitled Twombly portray, made in 1961 throughout his Rome interval, in 1988, and the Cornell, a picket field assemblage from his “Medici” sequence, in 1980.
“These were the paintings and the objects that she just wanted to live with every day,” Friedlander stated. “When you would go into her living room, you would sit on the couch, and you would see the Rothko to your right and the Twombly straight ahead above the mantel.”
The excessive estimates all fall towards the prime finish of every artists’ public public sale gross sales. The Twombly work could sell for as a lot as $60 million (report: $70.5 million), whereas the Cornell could fetch $5 million (report: $7.8 million). The Rothko portray, with an estimate of $80 million, would possibly see a historic evening if it edges previous the dramatic 2012 sale of “Orange, Red, Yellow,” which, at $86.8 million, grew to become the most costly up to date art work ever publicly bought. (Through personal gross sales, nevertheless, Rothko’s report is reportedly an eye-watering $186 million).
Gund grew to become president of the Museum of Modern Art in 1991, overseeing its huge $858 million growth and, crucially, advocated to present extra wall house and assist to dwelling artists.
She first grew to become concerned as a member of the museum’s worldwide council in 1967, a non-profit membership group that fashioned in 1956 previous to strengthen the United States’ creative alternate overseas, at a time when New York grew to become the heart of the art world. Out of the 1,800 works she donated over her lifetime, greater than 1,000 went to the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. For greater than 20 years she chaired the board of MoMA P.S.1 as effectively, from its preliminary merger with the storied museum till 2020.
Outside of MoMA, her affect unfold throughout quite a few establishments: She was a board member of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, the Frick Collection, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, amongst many others, and former President Barack Obama appointed her to the National Council on the Arts in 2011.
Out of her personal initiatives, her advocacy work is probably finest remembered by way of Studio in a School, the now five-decade-long program putting educating artists in New York City faculties, in addition to Art for Justice Fund (A4J). Funded by the sale of her 1962 Lichtenstein, “Masterpiece,” A4J awarded $127 million in grants to organizations devoted to ending mass incarceration throughout its six-year run. (She bought one other Lichtenstein following the Supreme Court’s resolution to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 and break up the proceeds between abortion rights organizations).
“You’ve gotta get people to be more impassioned by what they want to see happen… maybe this is, for me, the only way I can do art,” Gund stated in a panel dialogue at the National Gallery of Art in 2018.
Even the 12 months earlier than her loss of life, her daughter, Catherine Gund, told Harper’s Bazaar how devoted her mom remained to the causes she cared about. “She’s functioning in so many arenas, she does more than even I know, and I know more than anyone else knows,” she stated. “She’s going to keep doing what she’s always done, focused on the same things: humanity, safety, and agency.”
Her patronage was marked by her private relationships, Friedlander famous, explaining that moderately than simply stamping her title on museum wings, she impacted artists’ careers with each her monetary assist and her friendship, even shifting “the ways in which artists themselves thought about philanthropy.” They joined her causes, too. The artist Julie Mehretu, whose work Gund collected and exhibited, donated her work “Dissident Score” to learn the Art for Justice Fund, setting a private report for the artist in 2021 when it bought for $6.5 million by way of Artsy.
“Aggie understood that art could be used as a social justice component, and that her deep guilt, which led to her great empathy, really created just an extraordinary human being,” Friedlander stated.
That sense of guilt was one thing she typically cited as the catalyst for her philanthropy. And regardless of the nice affect she held, in some ways, she was the antithesis of the persona varieties that are likely to accrue energy: She was acknowledged by many for her profound sense of empathy, and in interviews, she described herself as deeply emotional and liable to tears. Her loss of life has left a palpable absence, in keeping with Friedlander.
“No one, no one did it like her and I hope with all of my soul that people will continue that legacy,” she stated. “It’s so crucial to the ecosystem of the art world.”