Agnes Gund, New York, November 27, 2017. Photo: Emiliano Granado/Contour RA/Getty Images.
Collector and philanthropist Agnes Gund, who as board chair of the Museum of Modern Art oversaw the New York institution’s major 1990s expansion, died on September 18 at her home in Manhattan. She was eighty-seven. Gund was renowned for her keen eye for contemporary art and for her generosity—she was said to have given away two-thirds of her income each year—as well as for her support of women artists and artists of color. She was also an ardent advocate of arts education, establishing New York City’s Studio in a School program, which has aided low-income students for nearly fifty years. Though born into wealth, which she used in part to establish an unparalleled private art collection, Gund gave and gave, promising many works to public institutions and selling others to raise money for political and social initiatives. By the time of her death, noted the New York Times, the first publication to report her passing, the cupboard was bare. “It could be because I feel guilty about having so much more than most people,” she told Crain’s New York Business in 2006, when asked what drove her giving. “If I can have it, others should be able to enjoy it.”
Agnes Gund was born in Cleveland on August 13, 1938, the second of six children. Her father, who had made a fortune in real estate and brewing, was president of the Cleveland Trust Company, then Ohio’s largest bank; her mother, a homemaker, enrolled her in art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Sent as a teen to Connecticut to study at the private Miss Porter’s School after the 1954 death of her mother, Gund found her interest in art further fired by a “magical” art history teacher there, who “showed you how to look at artwork,” she told Lifestyles magazine in 2010. Gund went on to earn a degree in history from the Connecticut College for women. She would marry twice: first, in 1963, to publishing heir Albrecht “Brec” Saalfield, with whom she had four children, and then, in 1987, to attorney and educator Daniel Shapiro. Both marriages ended in divorce.
In 1966, Gund’s father died, leaving her tremendously wealthy. The following year, she joined MoMA’s international council. In 1976, she took a seat on the institution’s board, and in 1991, now armed with a master’s degree in art history from Harvard University, she rose to become president. Additionally occupying the role of chair from 1993 to 1995, she would serve in the unpaid post of president until 2002, shepherding MoMA through an $858 million Yoshio Taniguchi-designed expansion. Completed shortly thereafter in 2004, the new building doubled the museum’s exhibition space. During her tenure at MoMA, Gund pushed the institution to acquire contemporary art, which it had ignored for some years, and was instrumental in the museum’s merger with what was then PS1 Center for Contemporary Art in Queens to form MoMA PS1.
Gund firmly believed in art as a catalyst of social change. In 1977, after the City of New York slashed arts education funding amid a fiscal crisis, she founded Studio in a School, bringing working artists—including Mark di Suvero, Jeff Koons, and Fred Wilson—into the city’s public schools to teach visual arts to underserved students. Forty years later, in 2017, she founded the Art for Justice Fund. Managed by the Ford Foundation, the five-year initiative distributed more than $125 million in grants to arts and criminal justice organizations working to fight mass incarceration in the United States. In order to launch the fund, Gund sold a beloved Roy Lichtenstein painting, Masterpiece, 1962, from her private collection. The canvas fetched $165 million—one of the highest known prices for a work of art. Gund donated $100 million of the proceeds to her new fund and challenged other collectors to follow her example. The Observer reported that Whitney Museum of American Art chair Laurie Tisch subsequently donated $500,000 to the organization, selling a Max Weber painting to do so, and that Julie Mehretu pledged the $6.5 million commanded by her 2019–21 canvas Dissident Score at auction to the fund. In 2023, after the Supreme Court dismantled Roe v. Wade, Gund sold Lichtenstein’s 1970 Mirror #5 and divided the proceeds—$3.1 million—between two nonprofits advocating for reproductive rights.
At her death, Gund was president emerita of MoMA’s board. She additionally served on the philanthropy committee of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and sat on the boards of the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Menil Collection in Houston; and the Frick Collection, the Morgan Library & Museum, and the Socrates Sculpture Park, all in New York. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts—the US government’s highest honor recognizing artists and arts patrons—by President Bill Clinton in 1997. Gund donated heavily to the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, gifting the New York institution some 250 works during her lifetime. Most of the two thousand works comprising her collection—including those by Joseph Cornell, Philip Guston, Vija Celmins, Willem de Kooning, David Hammons, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Kara Walker, to name just a few—have been promised to museums.
