The Wall Street Journal runs a fine profile of Agnes Gund, who at age 76 remains active as an arts patron and philanthropist in New York and her native Cleveland.
Beyond New York, where she is president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, Gund remains involved in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.
This is a “pivotal time for contemporary art,” The Journal says, and Gund is a major collector.
From the story:
Her New York apartment is filled with art: At the end of one hallway is a 7-foot-tall painted bronze lamp by Roy Lichtenstein. On the living room floor sits a white marble Louise Bourgeois sculpture called “Eye to Eye” that, on first glance, looks like a collection of uneven bowling pins.The market for postwar and contemporary art is going strong, after record-breaking spring auctions in which works by Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti sold for more than $140 million.
Ms. Gund doesn’t believe all the hype. One of her efforts this summer is to try to figure out which contemporary artists have real staying power. “A number of us got together and asked, ‘Who is going to be in the art history books? Who is going to last?’ And I think many contemporary artists are trendy” and will be forgotten, she says. She credits the high auction prices to speculation by investors. “I think (that) parking art” — without the primary intent of displaying it—“is just ridiculous, and that’s what’s happening now.”
Gund is an heiress to the fortune that her father, George Gund II, made in banking. The Journalsays she started collecting in the late 1960s and now estimates she has about 2,000 works. One of her interests is collecting art by women, and she has been trying to get museums to do the same.
She has also helped start an archive of women’s artwork at Columbia University, and has been outspoken about encouraging curators to show lesser-known female artists from other countries, such as Brazil and Poland, according to the story.
Art has been important to Gund and her family; all four of her children are involved in the arts in some way, and her two dogs are named after artists.
