How the record sale of a Lichtenstein painting changed the life of Agnes Gund
How the record sale of a Lichtenstein painting changed the life of Agnes Gund
AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS YEAR, The Museum of Modern Art in New York. he mounted an exhibition called Visit to the studio: selected gifts from Agnes Gund, which included 55 of the more than 800 works funded or partially funded for the institution since the early 1970s by the esteemed collector, philanthropist and president emeritus of 80 years of age of MoMA. The exhibition included important pieces by artists such as Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Alice Neel and Kara walker, most of which were bought by Gund herself in a parade of half a century of visits to the studios of contemporary artists.
In July, a week before the closing of the exhibition, the Fellows of Harvard Art Museums organized a private visit and a discussion between Gund and MoMA's principal curator, Ann Temkin. (Gund received a master's degree in art history from Harvard in 1980). The group, made up of donors and academics, gathered in the 53rd Street lobby on a warm summer morning before the museum opened. The first piece of the series was that of William H. Johnson. Children, a 1941 painting featuring three African-American children.
Gund joined the group quietly and alone, in a navy silk shift dress with a gold brooch, her hair and makeup impeccably groomed. When he entered, he did the social rounds, but he was not encouraged until he saw Esmay Smith, a security guard who has worked at MoMA for more than 37 years. Gund gave him a hug and took her hands as they talked for several minutes. The moment between a legendary donor and a museum staff member left Smith glowing when Gund returned to his tour.
The masterpiece of Lichtenstein, which Gund sold to create the Art for Justice Fund.
Photo:
Roy Lichtenstein, "Masterpiece", 1962, Oil on canvas, 54 x 54 in. (137.2 x 137.2 cm), © State of Roy Lichtenstein
"That's like my mother," says Smith. "She treats everyone here in the same way, no matter your color, your creed, if you are a man or a woman or what you do, she is with you, she is a woman of purpose with a big heart." The guards and other staff members, Smith has approached Gund, who joined the board of directors of the MoMA in 1976 and was president from 1991 to 2002. (Smith says that Gund receives birthday cards from all the guards every year. ) "Do you believe in angels?" Asks Smith. "I did not believe in them until I met her."
Gund has dedicated his adult life to art collecting and philanthropy. His first effort to combine the two occurred in 1977, when he founded Studio in a School, a nonprofit organization based in New York that subsidizes arts education programs, after reading that the government would reduce the funding of the arts in the public schools. For more than 40 years, the organization has presented artists from Gund, such as Jeff Koons and Clifford Ross, to students who would never have been encouraged to express themselves through the arts. "Aggie is the best, and her passion for the arts is contagious," says former Mayor of the City of New York, Michael Bloomberg. "He did an incredible job presiding over our Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission, and knows how to inspire artists and create great organizations. She is revered as a philanthropist because she is very effective and generously supports a wide variety of good jobs in our city and throughout the country. "Since the early 1970s, she has supported institutions such as The Frick and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. New York, as well as organizations such as J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia In 1997, Gund received the National Medal of the Arts, the highest award given to artists and patrons of the arts by the government of The United States, by President Bill Clinton In 2015, he delivered a David Hammons-inspired basketball game to the Cleveland Museum of Art in honor of professional player LeBron James, who, like Gund, grew up in Ohio and played for the Cavaliers From that gift, Temkin jokes about the MoMA tour: "We know that it is not monogamous with MoMA and that it gives to other institutions, which is incredible".
Leo Castelli, Agnes Gund and Robert Rauschenberg (1989).
Photo:
Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
What propelled Gund's name to the top of the art press last year was the sale of Masterpiece, A painting by Roy Lichtenstein in 1962, which Gund bought directly from the artist's studio in 1976 and which he had hung over the fireplace in the dining room of his Park Avenue apartment. The piece, considered one of the most important in the work of Lichtenstein, sold for $ 165 million in a private sale organized by the Acquavella Galleries of New York. (The buyer was the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen). Subsequently, the Ford Foundation, in partnership with Gund, announced that $ 100 million of proceeds would be used to create the Art for Justice Fund, a criminal justice organization focused on reducing mass. Imprisonment and reform of the penal system. It was a bittersweet moment for Gund, the president of the organization and founding donor: he was separating himself from one of his most beloved works of art for a cause he believed he had to support. "I've always said that this is what gets me in trouble: I promise more than I have, and then I have to sell things that I do not want to sell many times," Gund says as he sits on a cream. Sofa color under a painting of Cy Twombly in the library of his house. (In the dining room across the aisle, a painting by Stanley Whitney now hangs where Lichtenstein once stood). "I was sad to see it work because I had a very important position in my life: I knew the artist; I am a friend of his wife; I lived with that for so long. But this was important for me, and I did it. "
The widow of the artist, Dorothy Lichtenstein, gave his blessing for sale. "That would have made Roy really, sublimely happy," says Lichtenstein of her husband, who died in 1997. "Aggie is impeccable."
"She is a singular force in the art world and is known for having a keen eye and a big heart. Everyone who speaks will also say that, "says Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation.Walker and Gund have been friends and philanthropic cohorts for almost two decades, and when Gund was conceptualizing the fund, she called him to see if they could collaborate. Walker remembers discussing books like Michelle Alexander's. The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the era of color blindness and Bryan Stevenson Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption, but it was Ava DuVernay's movie 13 °, A documentary on the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery, which prompted Gund to take decisive action. "Immediately after leaving the theater, he called me crying. For the first time, "says Walker," she fully understood the legacy of race and racism and the effects on our criminal justice system. She said: "Well, I have to do something, I want to make some contribution to help change the situation in our country."
The impetus for the fund came close to home: "It really started with my grandchildren," says Gund, who has four children and is known as Nonna by many in her family. Six of their 12 grandchildren are African-American. "I had probably thought of [race inequality] before, but I never liked how I am now. I visited several prisons and I have also seen these injustices. " According to the website of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, African-Americans are imprisoned at a rate more than five times higher than that of whites in this country. Since its launch in June 2017, the Art for Justice Fund has awarded $ 32.45 million to 68 individual artists or organizations dedicated to criminal justice reforms and support for art-related programs in prisons and aims to add approximately $ 7 million for 13 new beneficiaries by the end of 2018.
Gund's friend, Jo Carole Lauder, president of the Foundation for Art and Conservation at Embassies, remembers when Gund visited San Quentin State Prison outside San Francisco earlier this year. Walker accompanied her, and during the visit sent Lauder a candid photo of Gund walking the grounds next to an inmate. "It's the back of them, Aggie on the left and the man on the right, and it was very moving," says Lauder. "I think it's something that Aggie cares about a lot."
Gund in the state prison of San Quentin.
Photo:
Samuel Robinson
New York-based artist Taryn Simon, who photographed Gund for this article, mounted an exhibition called The inocents MoMA PS1 in 2003, which explored injustices in the US judicial system and documented the first exemptions of prisoners through DNA testing in the United States. Similar to Gund's mission with the background, Simon's project sought to expose social disparities through contemporary art. "The usefulness of art is abstract," says Simon. "While I do not know that art necessarily changes society, I have seen that its inability to effect systemic changes makes visible the dysfunction of the systems themselves."
When deciding whether to sell Lichtenstein's painting, Gund called Walker to realize the idea. "Basically, I think she called to ask, 'Do you think I'm crazy?' I knew it would blow everyone's mind Some people strongly believe that they do not sell art for any reason, even to reform the criminal justice system, but there is something unique about Aggie that has produced this incredibly empathetic and disinterested woman. "
Gund was the second oldest of six children born within seven years in one of the wealthiest families in Cleveland. As a child, she spent a lot of time at the Cleveland Museum of Art. "I went to lunch because there were sandwiches," he recalls, "and we were not allowed to have sandwiches at home." Her mother, born and raised in New England, enrolled her in Miss Porter's in Farmington, Connecticut, a boarding school for girls that has students like Jacqueline Kennedy and Gloria Vanderbilt. Her art teacher, Sarah MacLennan, had a Ph.D. in art history and engaged with Gund even after she left her class, sending her postcards from places like the Morgan Library. In addition, her aunt would accompany her to New York City to see several museums, including the Frick Collection, whose contents Gund memorized after frequent and frequent visits. She says that she knew that she would never be an artist, but that she delighted in freedom of expression.
Photo:
Taryn Simon for WSJ. Magazine
Gund's mother died in 1955, when Gund was still in Miss Porter, so she decided to stay on the East Coast to attend what was then called the Connecticut College for Women and get a degree in history. In 1963, he married Albrecht Saalfield, an educator and, finally, a school teacher, and had three daughters and a son. (They divorced in 1981. Gund married Daniel Shapiro, a lawyer, in 1987. They also divorced later.) In 1976, when Saalfield was the director of the Greenwich Country Day School, Gund read an article in the newspaper. about how the art programs had been. He has been cut off from elementary schools and decided at that time to create Studio in a School. A year later, the program started with three schools, two in Brooklyn and one in the Bronx, and the next year it grew to include another one in Manhattan. Today, Studio in a School is located in more than 200 schools and early education centers in the five boroughs of New York City, and through the Studio Institute there are additional initiatives in New York, Memphis, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia and Cleveland. "What's funny is that we did not think the program would make a big difference," says Gund. "In a way, it seemed pointless: there are many more schools than there are opportunities to access them. But now, when you see the schools with which we have worked, there is a totally different attitude towards the arts. It makes a big difference in the lives of these children. " Through Studio in a School, Gund has seen that for some students art programs, instead of traditional classrooms, are the best environment for them to thrive and express themselves.
Gund was satisfied with her first job in art education, but her passion was always to meet the artists. When his father died in 1966, he began to collect more aggressively. "Aggie never loses a visit to the studio," says Diana Widmaier-Picasso, art historian and granddaughter of the 20th-century artist. She met Gund 20 years ago when the artist Ellsworth Kelly, a close friend of Gund, presented them on a trip to Asia with the International Council of MoMA. "I was the youngest member, and he immediately came and spent time with me," says Widmaier-Picasso. "Aggie has a voracious curiosity for the human mind and soul. She collects with her heart. "
What is surprising about Gund's collection at home (he has the paintings of Philip Guston and Jasper John in his living room) is how he discovered artists at the beginning of their careers and acquired their work before it was considered valuable (and of price as such). "She does not collect trophies, although some of her works have become trophies," explains Marie-Josée Kravis, a friend and fellow president of MoMA and a member of the board of directors.
"She allows things to touch her, she sees things and she feels them, and that's an incredible ability, it gives her the ability to understand artists so well," says Klaus Biesenbach, who met Gund when he moved to New York to to be a curator in PS1 (which later merged with MoMA) in 1996. Biesenbach served as the chief curator. MoMA and the PS1 director before starting work as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in October. For the past two decades, she has gone with Gund on countless visits to artists' studios, and is still surprised at how quickly a relationship can establish. "In 10 minutes she will be the artist's best friend," says Biesenbach. "I will look at them and I will feel like a person who just walked 10 minutes ago, I stay there and I think, how did he just do that?
With respect to the sale of Lichtenstein, Walker admits that it may appear as another case of a mega collector that charges an intelligent investment. But at this time in his life, Gund sells valuable works only to create a better world for art itself. "It's about supporting artists, it's not about buying beautiful images." This does not start with the idea: "I want to have something expensive on my walls," says Walker of Gund's thought process. "The idea starts with ' I love artists because they are fundamental to improving society. "We are a great country because, in part, we have great artists who make great art." For Aggie, it's all about art. "
Today, Gund frequently lends art from his collection to institutions and works on behalf of museums to acquire pieces for his permanent collections. She says that she would prefer to leave an improved social fabric to her family than a couple of paintings. "Children do not get much compared to what museums get," says Gund about his benefactors. And his daughter Jess Saalfield is fine with that. "Aggie has discovered how to sublimate her wealth guilt into a powerful force for change. It humanizes the populations it seeks to support by raising their voices above their own, "says Saalfield, a 50-year-old psychotherapist who lives in western Massachusetts with his two daughters." All of Aggie's work and passion have shaped my sense of justice, solidifying my belief that with privilege comes responsibility, that being an activist is not only worthy, but is part of who we are. "His legacy is one that I also commit myself to convey to my own children "
ART HISTORY Agnes Gund with her own earrings and The Row dress. Toilet, Noreen Clarke.
Photo:
Taryn Simon for WSJ. Magazine
"Strangers often approach me and my children to let us know what it means to them," says Catherine Gund, Gund's 53-year-old daughter, who is a documentary maker. "It has taken me a lifetime to discover the meaning of its magic."
Does Walker think that another collector will follow Gund's example? "I'm not holding my breath for the next sale of $ 165 million," he says. "But I do believe that people will be inspired by it." When the Art for Justice Fund was announced, some of New York's greatest philanthropists pledged their support, including Jo Carole Lauder; Laurie Tisch, trustee of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the financier Daniel S. Loeb; Brooke Garber Neidich, an administrator of Whitney; and Donald Marron, a former president of MoMA. And many of Gund's friends have followed his example in their own way: last spring, one of them auctioned a JAR brooch, art jewelry in Paris, and donated the funds to the Art for Justice Fund. (Gund refused to provide the friend's name). The fund is a five-year initiative and, according to Gund, during its first year raised an additional $ 8 million from individual donors and $ 8 million from collaborative efforts.
But for Gund, it's not the size of a check that matters. It is the intention. "I know that if you sell a painting for $ 165 million, it will attract you a lot of attention," she says. "But people have given me $ 50 or $ 300, and for me that's just as important, maybe even more important, because that means that it's creating awareness, and that, along with generosity, is for me the most significant thing that exists. "
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