Collector, president, activist: the legacy of Agnes Gund

Agnes Gund dedicated her life to the belief that art could change the world. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, she grew up in a family that valued curiosity and education, and these lessons would guide her lifelong engagement with art and philanthropy.

A singular figure in the cultural landscape, Gund built one of the most admired collections of her generation and broke new ground as a patron and activist. As a mother of four, she passed down her love of creative expression and served as the beloved matriarch to an extended family of artists, curators and cultural leaders. In all these roles, Gund reimagined how we engage with art, and her legacy endures not only in museums and institutions, but in classrooms, communities and movements for justice across the world.

This May, three masterworks from her collection will be offered at Christie’s in New York. This selection by Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly and Joseph Cornell represents the very essence of both Gund and her collection: passion, excellence and connoisseurship.

A lifelong collector

Gund’s eye was guided by conviction. She acquired works she believed in, creating a collection in which contemporary voices were thoughtfully paired with the classic. Never afraid to lead, she often supported artists long before they achieved widespread recognition. ‘You can learn so much by looking at art,’ she once said. ‘You can learn about people and how they see the world.'

Over time, her collection came to reflect the close friendships she cultivated with artists whose work she admired, from Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein to Julie Mehretu and Cindy Sherman. The result was one of the most admired collections of its kind, bringing together modern masters and compelling voices of the present.

Among Gund's most celebrated acquisitions was No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) (1964), which Mark Rothko personally recommended to her. In 1967, while visiting her friend and notable collector Emily Hall Tremaine, Gund mentioned that she dreamed of owning a Rothko. Tremaine suggested they visit the artist’s studio, where Gund acquired the painting directly from him. It is one of very few works purchased from Rothko that remains with the original owner.

The nearly eight-foot canvas is a sublime example of Rothko’s mature period, animated by sultry greens and indigo tones punctuated by an electric band of red. Emulating the techniques of Old Masters such as Titian and Velázquez, Rothko transforms the surface into an active field of colour that envelops the viewer in its emotional depth. Gund later wrote to Rothko to describe how the painting revealed itself anew each time she looked at it, a gesture the artist warmly acknowledged. Indeed, the painting held a special significance for Gund. Though she lent hundreds of works to museums around the world, No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) left her home only once for an exhibition, and she soon missed it. Its acquisition proved an inflection point in her life as a collector and patron.

Another painting by a modern master taking cues from the past is Untitled (1961) by Cy Twombly. Painted in Rome four years after his permanent move, the work reflects Twombly’s reverence for his adopted Mediterranean home. With bold, gestural marks, he reimagines the canvas as a layered landscape reminiscent of an ancient site. Inscribing the bottom of the canvas with ‘Roma,’ Twombly reveals his enthrallment with the city and underscores an ongoing dialogue with history.

The painting was acquired by Gund just before Twombly’s landmark retrospective opened at at MoMA in 1994. The exhibition traced nearly a century of the artist's work and affirmed his position as one of the most important artists of the postwar era.

In Joseph Cornell’s Untitled (Medici Princess) (circa 1948), Italian dynasties and modern vocabularies converge once more through one of the artist’s celebrated shadow boxes. At the work’s centre is a reproduction of Bronzino’s Portrait of Bia de’ Medici, the daughter of Cosimo I. The image is set within a wooden box and surrounded by ephemera including another painting from the Florentine Renaissance, Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy. The assemblage is a cornerstone of Cornell’s celebrated Medici series and showcases the artist’s mature aesthetic. Blending influences from Abstract Expressionism and Renaissance iconography to Surrealist whimsy, Cornell creates a rich artistic tapestry that is reminiscent of many of the best works in Gund’s collection.

Together, these works demonstrate the breadth of Gund’s interests and her unwavering commitment to quality. Yet she understood collecting not as possession but as stewardship, motivated by a belief that art should be seen and enjoyed as a democratic experience. Over her lifetime, she donated more than 1,000 works from her personal collection to MoMA and more than 800 to other public institutions.

A transformative president

Gund’s transformative leadership benefitted institutions around the globe, but perhaps none more so than the Museum of Modern Art. After joining MoMA’s international council in 1967, Gund served as its president from 1991 to 2002. She then became President Emerita, Life Trustee and Chairman of its International Council.

During her 11-year tenure as president, Gund oversaw the development of the museum’s contemporary holdings and placed emphasis on acquiring work by women artists and artists of colour, decades before such priorities became popular practice. She also guided the museum through its landmark $858 million expansion, culminating in a new building designed by Yoshio Taniguchi that redefined MoMA for a new century.

Beyond MoMA, Gund’s service extended widely. Frequent visits to the Cleveland Museum of Art as a child gave her an early appreciation for making art accessible to the public. Motivated by a belief in museums as living entities, her influence helped shape these institutions as well as the very people and structures that sustain the arts.

She sat on the boards of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies and numerous other organisations. She co-founded the Center for Curatorial Leadership and supported initiatives such as YoungArts, Independent Curators International, the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Her influence helped shape these institutions as well as the very people and structures that sustain the arts.

These contributions were recognised at the highest levels. She received the National Medal of Arts in 1997 and was later appointed to the National Council on the Arts by President Barack Obama in 2011. Yet despite these accolades, Gund preferred to remain behind the scenes, focused on the work rather than the recognition.

A pioneering activist

For Gund, art was never separate from society. She was not only a passionate collector and patron, but an active philanthropist who used her resources as a catalyst for change. In the 1970s, she founded Studio in a School, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to bringing arts education to public schools across New York City, with a particular emphasis on children from low-income families. Nearly five decades later, the programme continues to flourish. It has expanded to multiple cities nationwide and served more than 1.2 million school children since its inception.

In 2016, after watching 13th by Ava DuVernay, Gund was moved to confront inequities within the American criminal justice system. The following year, she made a remarkable decision: she sold Masterpiece, a work by her close friend Roy Lichtenstein that Gund had cherished and lived with for decades, to establish the Art for Justice Fund.

Time-limited and urgent by design, the fund awarded over $125 million in grants to artists and advocates working to reduce mass incarceration, promote justice reinvestment and reshape the national conversation around criminal justice. For Gund, the sacrifice of a beloved artwork was not a loss, but a transformation. As she herself reflected, what Masterpiece ‘has gained as an object is much more than what it was.’

As Darren Walker, former President of the Ford Foundation, has observed, ‘Aggie understands that art makes it possible for us to have empathy, and that without empathy there is no justice.’ This conviction shaped her wide-ranging activism, from AIDS research to women’s rights and environmental causes. She believed in using resources and relationships to make change now, not later.

Gund’s life was powered by art, which she viewed not simply as an object of beauty, but as a force for connection, education and justice. As a collector, president and activist, she demonstrated that cultural leadership and social responsibility are not separate pursuits, but deeply intertwined commitments.