Agnes Gund

EO

I wanted to ask you about your dreams. In Aggie, you spoke about your father’s passing in 1966, when you bought Henry Moore’s Three-way Piece No. 2: Archer and later dreamt you needed to donate or sell it. Have your dreams ever instructed you to do things beyond that moment?

AG

I don’t know, other than that. I was never bent on making a proper collection. I’ve collected more randomly than compulsively over the course of my philanthropic efforts. Ronald Lauder, for example, buys numerous things a day—I don’t. I might buy one, sometimes none. It genuinely depends on what’s available, what mood I’m in, and what’s happening politically or socially at the time. I’m not programmed in any particular way. I don’t go out saying, I’ve got to have a Jenny Holzer or I need this person. I collect what appears and feels like it belongs. It’s not as thought-out as people might assume. If I were richer, my choices might be more considered—what I could buy would certainly change, especially lately.

I sold the Henry Moore because my kids were always climbing on it, and I worried for the sculpture. After that I leaned toward works that could live on the wall—canvases rather than freestanding pieces. I’ve always been cautious with objects children could topple. I do have one sculpture now, by Rachel Whiteread, and I’ve collected several of her works. The only artist I’ve really gone in depth with is Roy Lichtenstein—I must have a dozen or more of his storied pieces. On the whole, when I collect, I give it or promise it to an institution.

EO

You’ve almost exclusively given to the Cleveland Museum and MoMA. Are there other institutions you’re interested in?

AG

I’ve given some things to the Allen Art Museum, the Menil Collection, the Morgan Library & Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Met, Harvard Art Museums, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

EO

How do you approach collecting for institutions?

AG

With MoMA, for instance, Ann Temkin—the Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture—often guided what I gave. I acquired a number of works by Nick Cave because of her. Everything of his that I liked was from the period when he was doing work similar to Yinka Shonibare, which was when I collected him the most. I only bought a few things by Shonibare, but I followed him closely—I went to hear him speak and kept up with what he was doing. I’ve always been interested in that kind of politics, in where artists stand in relation to one another and to the larger world and public.

EO

What was it like collecting while you were living in Concord, Massachusetts? How were you thinking about art then, and how did that shift as you transitioned to the city

AG

Well, I kept coming into the city regularly. I came on weekends, or whenever something was happening that called me in to see friends. I was more attached to New York than to Concord because that’s where my social life was—where people were interested in art, collecting, and thining more broadly across issues beyond working the home. In Concord, that just didn’t exist. Most of the women there were housewives, doing what they thought was expected, oriented toward home life in a way that didn’t include art, and certainly not large pieces that has an institutional focus. That contrast made me restless.

We do have a huge work by Mark di Suvero at our country house—he gave it to us. [Laughs.] It’s still there, and I should really do something about that. I ought to pay him back, but I haven’t yet. I still want to leave things to people I haven’t given to. I bought a lot of his other works too that I have been able to place with people or in accessible spaces. One is downtown in Zuccotti Park, where people climb on it and sit on it, which I love. That difference—between a sculpture people can use in public and one sitting quietly in the country—probably shaped the way I thought about collecting for institutions, and how to be of and in service of communal thinking and building. Some works really belong in public life, in fact they usually thrive.

EO

Can we talk about your relationships? You were close with Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein and moved in the same circles as Warhol. That milieu wasn’t just social—it established a set of expectations around collecting, influence, and how people came together.

AG

I don’t know whether I was pivotal in that way, but I collected Brice Marden early. Not the great big masterpieces Ronald Lauder has in his house—I liked art I could actually live with. So I bought his drawings and smaller paintings, but I mostly gave them away to institutions. MoMA received the most, and Cleveland got a lot as well.

EO

How has the way people collect changed?

AG

I think it’s much more selfish now. People collect for different reasons than they used to. When I collected Jasper Johns, it all happened within a year or two—I acquired quite a few of his major works in that period. I got Map, and also Perilous Night, the piece he made in Colmar inspired by Grünewald. There were two of those; one is in a museum now, and the other I still have at home with Map. I also have a smaller work, though I’ve never been entirely sure whether it’s Jasper’s or Bob Rauschenberg’s. They would tell me a different story each time. Jasper would sometimes say they both worked on it. What they loved was that the side was left open so the wind could catch the gold inside—it would shift and shimmer whenever a breeze moved through.

EO

Do you have a different approach to collecting now?

AG

While there isn’t politics in how I collect, I react differently now because I don’t have space to put things up. If I had more walls, more open places, then the collection would look very different.

EO

So you buy mainly to engage with the work in space?

AG

I’d like to, and most of the time I do, but when Ann Temkin organized the show of my collection at MoMA, it was all over the place. There was a Sol LeWitt on the ground, and another piece I never had up in my house, which isn't really representative of why and how I approached collecting as a practice.

EO

How do you feel about your legacy now being tethered to Lichtenstein, after selling Masterpiece in 2017 for the Art for Justice Fund, which raised $150 million for criminal justice reform?

AG

The way you put it makes it sound much more important. The beauty of Lichtenstein’s practice was his ability to draw out different themes that resonated deeply with viewers. He began by looking at Monet, then at Japanese landscapes. He made maquettes and then real-life objects from them. He didn’t stick to just one thing. He kept working in different capacities as he got older, and his retrospective at the National Gallery showed just how vast the work really was.

I didn’t own works of his on that scale. I had a lamp at the end of our hall—an important work, but not nearly as delicate as some of the others. It’s interesting: I was never tempted to put together a collection that said something or conveyed a particular meaning. I could have concentrated on a couple dozen artists and gone deep, but instead I was all over the place.

EO

It seems like you collected the way someone might write in a diary. Would you say you collected works as you had new daily experiences?

AG

Yes, often with a drawing or a small piece. I have a Yayoi Kusama, for instance. I bought one and then gave it to my sister. She preferred another, so I bought that one and gave it to her. I never built series or depth. I regret that.

I almost acquired Ben Heller’s collection of Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Pollock. Before he broke it up, I bought a big Jasper—big for our collection. We also bought a Klein that I later sold. When I see works I’ve sold in someone else’s house, I feel melancholic. I wish I still had them. I’ve saved one of Jasper’s, but I still think about the pieces I’ve let go.

EO

What was your relationship with Gorky? Did you own his work?

AG

I had a number of them. One, Apple Orchard, was by far the most beautiful. It could be seen as a significant piece, though Gorky never sold for much at the time. To me, he was pivotal. I didn’t know him personally—he was before my time—but I loved his use of color. I’ve been looking recently at Le Corbusier, who Gorky was drawn to. I was drawn to him too, because of Colmar—where the Grünewald is. I didn’t like that particular Corbusier very much, but I liked the association. Often, when I decided what to collect, it was about the people as much as the work.

EO

Let’s talk about your time at MoMA. What was it like when you first joined the Painting and Sculpture Committee in 1968?

AG

I went to all the MoMA Painting & Sculpture Committee meetings. I loved seeing what they were acquiring—it shaped how I thought about collecting. In those early years, I’d walk in and see works I’d never encounter again. As MoMA grew, its acquisitions became more strategic, more focused. They bought a lot. To keep collecting myself, I had to let some go—I sold nine works at one auction. I’ve always been skeptical of auctions. I rarely bought or sold through them.

EO

Was there anyone in those rooms—curators or fellow committee members—who influenced you?

AG

Yes, absolutely. I had just come off the MoMA International Council in 1967, so I was watching the institution morph in real time. It was humbling to be alongside voices like Kynaston McShine and Robert Rosenblum, and especially William Rubin. Rubin could speak with such poetry about a painting—when he loved something, you understood why. When he didn’t, he was blunt. Kirk Varnedoe was mesmerizing in a different way—more contemporary, more forward. Those early dialogues shaped how I learned to look.

EO

What was the committee itself like?

AG

It was primarily women. The men were placed in other positions—more institutional, less day-to-day. Some faded out. People like Barbara Jakobson and Ronald Lauder became more prominent in shaping what happened.

EO

What was MoMA like at the time? Did you understand it as the historical institution it’s seen as today?

AG

It did feel that way. It was still shaped by Alfred H. Barr Jr. and his wife, Margaret Scolari Barr, who was a good friend. She was deeply involved but, as a woman, couldn’t obtain the same recognition. Back then—as Ann Temkin has written in Inventing the Modern—it was women who built the collection, while the men held the titles. Lillie P. Bliss was crucial, and Dorothy C. Miller too. Miller’s 12 Americans defined the period. It was a more closed time.

EO

The story of MoMA is often told through its men—Philip Johnson, Alfred Barr, Nelson Rockefeller, William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe—the so-called “visionaries.” How did women actually shape the institution?

AG

Their say was limited. When I was president, it was the same: every day something happened at the museum, but it wasn’t treated as important. Back then, you couldn’t always tell what the men had actually accomplished—it was more about appearances.

Men held the dominant position in what visitors perceived. What women said or did wasn’t considered as interesting. Often it still isn’t. Collectors like Ronald Lauder and Leon Black have always been at the top. Leon’s collection is extraordinary. Ronald is formidable.

Other institutions are more explicit about their patrons—the Menil, Oberlin. At the Hammer, Annie Philbin built something remarkable. Out West, Louisa Sarofim assembled one of the strongest drawings collections. Women at the helm of these institutions built holdings that earlier generations couldn’t, constrained as they were by expectation.

EO

What do you think the job of a collector is?

AG

It should be to help institutions build their collections. If someone has the means, they’ll work with more than one institution and its curators—or they’ll act as curators themselves. The de Menils did that. They had the resources and the knowledge, and many of their acquisitions went directly into institutions.

Somebody once told me, “Don’t get reliant on the head of your museum. They don’t determine what happens. It’s the collectors, the people who give, who have the most sway.” I think that’s true. MoMA has always been built by many people who were loyal and worked behind the scenes. It also matters how someone uses their pull. Ronald Lauder can buy in ways I never could. Neither Marie-Josée nor I could determine the most important works for the museum on our own. It was always a combination of people leaving and giving things that made MoMA’s collection so strong. If those three women who started it hadn’t had the vision and means, the museum would have been nothing.

EO

What did you think of the Met and the Whitney at the time when you were collecting work?

AG

I didn’t think they’d make much of a dent in the contemporary world. Their collections weren’t strong then. They’ve improved a lot since, but they can never match the Modern, because they didn’t collect at the right time. The Modern is still adding, but it has the quality.

If you look at the 900 works I’ve given to the Modern—not spectacular, maybe—but they show the continuation of what was going on in those periods. Even just a few Lynda Benglis pieces—enough to capture that moment.

EO

Were you privy to the Lynda Benglis Artforum fiasco in 1976? The advertisement she placed?

AG

Yes, I knew about it. Just the other day The Street by Balthus was shown, and it reminded me that MoMA had been gifted another Balthus by James Thrall Soby. We showed The Street in the Times and it broke down. The other painting we couldn’t show—there was a woman with her dress lifted, her lower body exposed. People objected. It was controversial as a gift, and I don’t know where that work is now.

EO

The 1990 exhibition Dislocations—a selection from the permanent collection—feels like a show that could open today. Can you speak about Adrian Piper?

AG

Rob Storr curated it. There were maybe eight artists, and it was a very important show. Adrian Piper was one of them. Louise Bourgeois too—she did a locomotive train. It was spectacular. Piper wasn’t well-known then, but her inclusion showed Rob’s insight. Her work was monumental, deeply cerebral, about what you think rather than simply what you see. David Hammons was in it as well. There was contention around the show, but Piper’s contribution stood apart. She should be much better known—her work still isn’t fully understood, and that’s precisely why it matters.

It’s like the Neue Galerie today. The lines outside are extraordinary. Twenty-five years ago, not so much. They’re showing Schiele now—nude men, extraordinary drawings. He builds the figure like a column, up and out. Very interesting. But not for everyone.

EO

Can you talk about David Hammons?

AG

David Hammons had a piece in that show, and it was almost completely ignored—because of the person he was, and the climate at the time. It’s very hard to talk about. The dynamics involved too many personal things, from people who weren’t important and certainly not seminal. What mattered to me was that the work itself wasn’t given the attention it deserved.

EO

Okay, tell me about Louise Bourgeois. 

AG

Louise Bourgeois has only really become important in the last, I’d say, twenty years. When I started collecting her she wasn’t. But she was the only woman in abstract expressionism who received any attention at all. She was one of the eight artists Rob included in Dislocations. She was often shown alongside the same artists, but she still wasn’t widely known. Now she’s in everybody’s collection, and everybody wants to show her. She’s more recognized as important today, but she always was—she was simply the only woman who was shown in those circles. That’s why Adrian Piper is so remarkable, because she came from nothing. Why do you know so much about Adrian Piper?

EO

I studied her intimately in college—I read everything I could long before the MoMA retrospective, when I was working at Artforum. I was thinking about the My Calling (Card) series, and how her work has aged so well conceptually. It feels prophetic. Being a Black person, I feel like what she figured out is that you can resolve things in art that you can’t resolve in any other medium. Maybe in writing, but even then it’s different.

AG

Music and dance too. Dance especially. MoMA has done a lot with dance—not overly with Alvin Ailey, but much with Ralph Lemon. I felt that even if I couldn’t always explain it, I could still appreciate it.

EO

Can you speak about the Whitney Museum and what it was like when you were actively collecting?

AG

I think the Whitney made the best decision of its life to move downtown. It opened up a whole different opportunity. They could never have done what they do now if they had stayed uptown. Uptown was too narrow a circle, even though their biennials and exhibitions were always important. I think they’ve expanded in a good way. Their Alvin Ailey show is terrific.

EO

What about the New Museum?

AG

Lisa Phillips has done a great job there. It’s hard to navigate, because of where it is—it’s not an easy location—and because of the building. It just goes up and up, but it isn’t broad enough.

EO

Exactly. It’s a vertical build, not conducive to showing paintings in the way the Met is.

AG

Yes. The Met is trying to right itself now, but it had a lot of trouble. It has access to the best of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, and it could still have an impact if it showed more of what it would like to have. But it may be too late—it’s too spread out.

EO

It’s big. It’s like Disneyland.

AG

Yes. The whole museum is a general museum. That’s why the Cleveland Museum of Art is so great. If you could combine Cleveland with the Met, you’d have a great institution. But you can’t do that.

EO

I wanted to ask about growing up in Cleveland in an American business family. Obviously, you were going to have an impact on the world in some way, because your father had such power. What’s your own relationship to power? How have you understood it?

AG

I don’t think I had much of a relationship to power, because Cleveland was never considered a major place. I was talking to someone the other day about who we wanted to run the museum, and we couldn’t get anybody. Sherman Lee, who was a great director—if you put aside that he didn’t do everything there was to be done—did a fabulous job. He made sure that what he brought in was, in his view, important. He built a fabulous Asian collection, one that hasn’t been surpassed.

EO

Your generation changed so much of the world I’m now encountering. Did it feel that way while you were doing it?

AG

A lot of people influenced what happened. I wasn’t really one of them. There are many who brought art forward where it hadn’t been before. The Menil is the best small museum I’ve ever seen—though it’s not so small anymore. Dominique de Menil built that museum. She had a lot to do with shaping it as it now stands, with the art. That’s the person you should go to next. She created a wonderful drawings collection. They have the best of any museum. But you have to do that early—before the institution is even ten years old. When you’re young, you seem able to do it all.

EO

Barbara Kruger organized Picturing “Greatness” at MoMA in 1988. I was thinking about her alongside Phyllis Lambert—you were all operating in different realms of the art world. Do you remember when Kruger first entered the Modern?

AG

Her earliest work in MoMA’s collection came in around 1982—Untitled (You Invest in the Divinity of the Masterpiece). As for Mrs. Lambert, yes, I knew her. She was Phyllis Lambert, née Bronfman—part of the prominent Bronfman family—and she made her own mark as a philanthropist and architectural patron. She was a very important force at MoMA in the early years. She had real influence, not just from her family background but through what she did for architecture and the arts.

EO

What made Mrs. Lambert important?

AG

She was a participant in everything she promoted—that’s really forceful. Being Canadian gave her international visibility, and commissioning the Seagram Building gave her authority that went far beyond her family. Later, with the Canadian Centre for Architecture, she made her own mark as a patron. She was older than I was, and I always called her Mrs. Lambert out of respect.

EO

You also created an after-school program, Studio in a School. What pushed you to start that?

AG

In 1977, when New York City cut nearly all funding for arts education, schools lost their art teachers. I couldn’t stand the idea of children growing up without access to art, so I started Studio in a School to bring practicing artists directly into classrooms. It was about participation—joining what you support, just as Mrs. Lambert always did.

EO

I was thinking about the Four Seasons at the Seagram Building and how they cultivated a scene. It was a site for high culture. Was it on your radar?

AG

It was. One year we hosted the Studio in a School gala at the Seagram Building. The next day the teachers brought their students, who were asked to sketch the Seagram, Lever House, and the palace-like building across the street. These children hadn’t even been born when those buildings went up, but watching how they looked at them was powerful. That sense of participation—that you join what you value—was very moving.

Scott Burton was another who lived by that principle. He really affected the art world by doing. Kirk did a show of his at the Modern that was pivotal. He died in the first wave of AIDS in the U.S., but his work has come back—people are pointing out where it is again.

EO

You mentioned politics—did you feel them at the time?

AG

I was pretty naïve then. I didn’t know about the politics in the way I do now. And I hate them—I’ve hated them from the beginning. Back then it was an easier time, if you can say that. I didn’t know much about the carving out of shows.

EO

Even if you were naïve then, how do you see things now?

AG

Right now, I think Barbara Kruger is essential to any discussion of what’s going on. She was always a forecaster—her work said what was happening before others recognized it. Now you see that language everywhere in protests: short, poetic, very few words that say a lot. Protest signs today are very much based on her work. I wish I could be out there myself, but I can’t walk. Still, what she started has become a model for how people make their voices seen.

EO

Can you speak to SoHo in the 1980s and ’90s? I interviewed Yvonne Rainer the other day. What were you thinking of Rainer at the time? She was really well-received at MoMA early on.

AG

The person that comes to mind—what’s his name—the dancer who just had work at MoMA. Not Alvin Ailey, but…yes, Ralph Lemon. That was a very good show. Ailey was the foundation, of course. He gave so many Black dancers a stage, a home, a vocabulary. He was the big presence, almost like a canon in himself. Lemon was different. He carried that history but pushed it somewhere else—more conceptual, more experimental. He was already active in the 1980s, and in the ’90s he began those larger projects that crossed into visual art, music, even literature. You could feel Rainer in that lineage too. It was downtown energy moving uptown, into the museum.

EO

Can you speak to performance and the reception of performance in those early days when Yvonne Rainer was performing? She was part of that SoHo community with Gordon Matta-Clark, Lucinda Childs, and Robert Wilson.

AG

I remember we went to the big premiere that Lucinda Childs was in. Who else was in it? There was a whole group. Alan Shields was part of it, and he was a white man—that was unusual then. You started to see more diversity coming in, more Black and brown artists on stage, and I think that was something that changed from Rainer’s generation. She had been very downtown, very experimental, and later you could feel that opening up into a more multicultural frame—Black artists, Indian artists, African artists—it was beginning to be part of the mix.

People sometimes ask me why I didn’t collect more African art at the time. And I say, well—think about who was visible. There were very few names that were known in New York in those years. Marisol, maybe. And then someone like Niki de Saint Phalle—she was working in France, but we showed her at PS1 some years back. She had already been at it for a long time.

EO

Women make the art world go around. I’m curious about the gallerists in SoHo at that time—people like Paula Cooper and Mary Boone.

AG

Paula Cooper was wonderful—she still is wonderful. She hasn’t stopped. She opened her gallery in SoHo with an anti–Vietnam War benefit, which tells you everything. She’s principled. She was showing people like Carl Andre, Donald Judd, later Elizabeth Murray, who was just extraordinary. I remember seeing Elizabeth there early on. Paula never wavered.

Mary Boone was a different kind of story. She came a little later, in the late seventies, also in SoHo, but she rose very fast. It was the 1980s boom years. She represented Schnabel, Salle, Barbara Kruger for a while—even Basquiat briefly. She was glamorous, market-driven, and she became the symbol of that period in a way. Paula was the steady anchor; Mary was the star of the art-market moment.

EO

What were your relationships with the gallerists more broadly?

AG

Marian Goodman—we were just talking about her the other day—she was a big influence on me. I’ve had a lot of Paula Cooper’s artists too. Most of them were men in the early days, and now she has a lot of women. Elizabeth Murray was the first I saw there—just a great artist. She died too young, of cancer.

Marian was different from Mary Boone because she was international. She had William Kentridge—I have a big wonderful piece of his that will eventually go to the Morgan’s Drawings Department. She also had Baldessari, who I’ve always liked. She had Tacita Dean. That was the thing about her: she had a whole roster of people nobody else had.

EO

Why did Marian Goodman, in particular, have such an influence on you?

AG

I was drawn to the way her gallery looked, and to the artists she showed. Kentridge, Kruger—you can compare them. They’re both very political, very much about why things are happening the way they are. And then Tacita Dean—completely different, but with the same seriousness. Marian’s gallery always had that weight. You left thinking.

EO

I’m from California, and Baldessari has always been important to me—the teaching, the humor, burning his work at 39. What drew you to him?

AG

I love it. You can’t call it subtle, but it’s witty. We have one of him with the fishing pole—it wasn’t ever important what he was fishing in. He did a piece for Studio in a School, which meant a lot. That program was where we really had artists give back, through prints and editions—people like Julie Mehretu, Sarah Sze. But Baldessari we had way back when, and it mattered.

EO

And internationally—London, Paris—did you spend a lot of time building relationships abroad?

AG

I had to. That’s the thing. After the ’70s, ’80s, even into the ’90s, all the people that were important were universally known. That goes for Tacita Dean and everybody from Marian’s gallery. That’s what made her so successful—she had the people no one else had. Kentridge, Tacita Dean, Anselm Kiefer, Wolfgang Rihm. They were all seeing the world the same way.

EO

Were you spending time abroad at all?

AG

No, I wish I could have. But I had children here, and they weren’t going abroad. They’ve been adventurous in many ways, but not adventurous enough to spend a year abroad.

EO

How important was your time at Harvard for you?

AG

Very important. I loved the teacher we had—people thought he was a little crazy, but I thought he was nifty. He paid attention to me, even though I wasn’t one of the stars there. I learned discipline. We studied Poussin, the French painters—I stayed fairly close to artists I thought could really do the work.

And later, when I was in New York, there was Holly Solomon. She was something else—wild and woolly. Not uptown at all. She ran this space in SoHo that wasn’t like a gallery, more like a stage. She gave room to people who weren’t being taken seriously at the time—Pattern & Decoration artists, performers, people doing something decorative or theatrical when Minimalism was still king. Laurie Anderson, Robert Kushner, Liza Lou, Gordon Matta-Clark—they all found a home with her. Holly made the unconventional feel possible.

EO

You were also talking about how Andy Warhol knew how to present himself. From your point of view as a collector, how important was that?

AG

Oh, very important. Hockney too—he always knew how to frame himself. Warhol is the best-known artist of our time. Everyone knows him. He was exceptional. But I don’t think the portraits were so good in the end. The early ones were wonderful. Then he got too fast—too slick, turning them out. But the car crashes, the electric chairs, the disasters—those were powerful. He could do almost anything—that was the danger. He made a lot of things that didn’t matter, but if Warhol did them, they mattered anyway.

EO

What about the dealers—Castelli, Gagosian—what did you make of them at the time?

AG

Leo was very thoughtful of his artists. He and Ileana—his ex-wife, but still important to him—covered the waterfront. They had everybody: Johns, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Lichtenstein. He was generous—he would keep artists on stipend even when the work didn’t sell. That gave them stability. If you put Marian Goodman and Castelli together, you had almost the whole field—serious work and international scope.

And Leo was also a friend. His daughter, Nina Sundell, was a friend of mine. After I got divorced, I visited her in Venice. Her mother had a villa there. It was all connected—family, artists, galleries.

Gagosian came later, and he was different—more commercial. He changed the scale. Planes, parties, big collectors. It was another world entirely.

EO

Did you derive much pleasure from going to openings in the 1960s and ’70s?

AG

Well, it depends on what you wanted. If you wanted to see big names, you could. At Leo’s, at one point, you saw everyone making art in America—Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol. It was exciting, but you had to pay attention.

EO

And could you feel the commercialization of art coming, even then?

AG

Yes, you could feel it. Leo was like a coach scouting a football team. He found artists young, gave them support, and built them up. He rose with them. And Ileana was the same—she saw things others didn’t. Together they built a system. That was the beginning of the art world as an industry.