Barbara Jakobson’s temple of style: the Upper East Side townhouse welcomed six decades of boundary-pushing artists and designers

A world traveler, a champion of artists and a trustee of New York’s Museum of Modern Art for over fifty years, Barbara Jakobson built a collection that formed an anatomy of her forward-thinking taste. Upon entering her five-story townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — where she welcomed New York’s art glitterati since the 1960s — one might notice the border collie umbrella stand by Piero Fornasetti or the startling picture of a jackal by the South African documentary photographer David Goldblatt. Further inside, art by Josef Albers, Ed Ruscha and Brice Marden mingled with design works by Charlotte Perriand, Emilio Ambasz and Paul Evans.

Jakobson arranged her collection with a curatorial eye, treating her home as a living exhibition that evolved with her and served as ‘a metaphor for life’, according to the eldest of her two daughters, musician and songwriter Jenna Torres. Amongst Conceptual and Minimalist masterpieces by Lawrence Weiner, Donald Judd, and Dan Flavin, she added a Pop surprise by Jeff Koons: the perky polychromed Winter Bears were one of many examples of Jakobson’s inimitable wit. Another: When a tree in her courtyard died, she had it painted Yves Klein blue. Always original, unexpected and embracing the new, Jakobson’s collection reflected the artists whose careers she cultivated early on, including her longtime friend Robert Mapplethorpe. As legendary gallery owner and dealer Jeffrey Deitch tells Christie’s, ‘Barbara was central to the art discourse from the late 1950s to 2025.’

More than two hundred objects spanning art, design, photographs, books and ephemera from Jakobson’s personal collection will come to Christie’s in Temple of Style: The Barbara Jakobson Collection, offered in a single-owner section within Post-War to Present on 26 February and a dedicated single-owner online sale from 18 February to 4 March at Christie’s New York.

Decades ahead of her time

Growing up on Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, Jakobson loved to lose herself in the Brooklyn Museum. After studying art history at Smith College and getting a taste of post-war art through the collecting of her older cousins, she was ready to dive in herself. Building relationships with legendary dealers like Sidney Janis and Leo Castelli was her graduate school — in 1958 she bought a Jasper Johns on an installment plan from the artist’s first show at Castelli’s gallery. This was the humble beginning of nearly seven decades of steadfast patronage. At the recommendation of her friend and family lawyer Arthur Emil, she joined MoMA’s Junior Council in 1961, beginning what would become a lifelong relationship with the museum and its leadership. Jakobson guided key decisions such as the museum’s acquisition of Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955), for which she played an instrumental role by persuading Castelli to donate the work to MoMA.

Jakobson’s collecting journey was inspired by her innate sense of glamour and distinguishing taste. Her roots as a child of the Eisenhower era melded with the cutting-edge art of her time in her foyer, where colour portraits by William Eggleston shared space with Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square: Insight from 1963 and a felt sculpture from 1970 by theorist and artist of the ‘anti-form’ Robert Morris. Jakobson’s younger daughter, actress Maggie Wheeler, remembers that when the cascading piles of red felt were installed, ‘We looked at her like she was a mad professor,’ but these choices also ‘created a wild and imaginative environment for us to grow up in.’

Like an artist, Jakobson let her imagination guide her. As furniture and decorative arts dealer Angus Wilkie observed in his 2023 Cabana profile of his dear friend, ‘Look once, blink twice, this house is her canvas.’

Three iconic photographs by Diane Arbus, including Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, NYC, 1967, greeted visitors at the first staircase. The Arbus photographs also nod to MoMA’s institutional history: two of the prints were in the museum’s Art Lending Service, which was run by the Junior Council and was designed to democratise access to contemporary art by allowing the public to rent works by emerging artists, with a later option to buy.

Jakobson generally acquired works within a year of their making, by artists she personally knew — befriending them before anyone else was buying. The interiors of her home reflect relationships she forged with artists, gallerists, and institutions.

Selected with purpose

Barbara Jakobson knew what she wanted, and every work in her collection was chosen with a purpose.  As her daughter Jenna recalls, ‘Everything you see, she chose because she loved it.’ In 1993, she acquired Jeff Koons’s Winter Bears (1988) around the time of the birth of one of her grandchildren. Her daughter Maggie Wheeler recalls that it was both startling and amusing to see the smiling, waving polychromed wood bears in the living room, and the sculpture became a transformative piece of levity in the home. Her mother’s collection was ‘adventurous from the start’, Torres says, noting that it evinced her love for the ‘unsanctioned, unapproved, and out-of-the-box.’

‘Living with art is Barbara Jakobson’s forte,’ exclaimed Wilkie to Cabana. True to her living and evolving collection, in 2005 Jakobson offered a selection of her furniture and art at Christie’s, sold partially to benefit future acquisitions of MoMA. After the sale, she needed a new bar for entertaining and commissioned the artist Tom Sachs to create Buffet and Shelf, made from repurposed fluorescent orange and white Con Edison street barriers. She first met the artist while he was working with the late Frank Gehry on a furniture line for Knoll International, a project Jakobson initiated.

The bar was ‘a collaborative vision,’ according to Torres. ‘She was very particular about what she wanted, even though it was his work. She wanted pieces of New York.’  Ceruse oak stools lined the perimeter of the bar while a makeshift shotgun shell was mounted above the buffet’s array of liquors and refreshments, each bottle hand labelled. The shelves are capacious, which is only fitting for the host of soirees whose guests included prominent intellectual and cultural figures from Umberto Eco to Fran Leibowitz. Per Wheeler, ‘We grew up around some of the greatest artists of her time.’

A champion of artists

Jakobson had ‘a gift for intuiting that people had value,’ Torres notes. Her role as an advocate of artists was a contribution to art:  ‘She stepped up to the plate and put her faith in them.’  One of Jakobson’s most enduring friendships was with Robert Mapplethorpe. A documentary photograph of the artist at his 1988 Whitney Museum retrospective hung by her bar. He also made several portraits of her and her family, including a serene 1982 portrait featuring a gold-tinted mirrored panel, which hung above the fireplace in a cozy balcony just above the main living room.

In the same room, a red oak and cowhide Richard Artschwager chair sat atop a plush area rug by Barbara Bloom, which recreates the book cover for Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Several other artist tributes to Jakobson also resided there, including a Jim Dine work on paper along with a cherished lineup of bronze figurines made and gifted to her by Robert Graham. A bit of a tongue in cheek jab at domesticity also found a place here in the form of Ed Ruscha’s pastel on paper drawing That Housing Tract Is Only Texture (1976) — rendered in an all-caps declaration — acquired from Leo Castelli in 1989. Another witty thread in her collection, Mike Bidlo’s oil paintings recreate iconic works by modernists like Pablo Picasso, Rene Magritte, or Jackson Pollock. The former two hung in a warm, wood-paneled room upstairs.

‘An homage to Minimalism’

As Torres remembers her childhood, the living room was quite tactile with oriental rugs and fur throws and velvet couches, and after they grew up the room became ‘more of an homage to Minimalism’. Jakobson’s progression by Donald Judd, conceived in 1965 and fabricated in 1969, is characteristic of the artist’s early Minimalist sculpture, taking keen interest in materiality, space and color. The red lacquer sculpture is made of galvanized iron, a metal Judd began using in the 1960s, favoured by the artist for its uniquely rough surface.

Nearby was a sculpture by Judd’s close friend and collaborator, Dan Flavin. Executed in 1964, the ultraviolet fluorescent light work appears in Tiffany Bell and Michael Govan’s 2004 volume Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights, 1961-1996. A 1984 text piece by Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner was emblazoned directly onto Jakobson’s walls, declaring WATER UNDER A BRIDGE.

She loved acquiring furniture designed by the artists she collected, such as Judd’s Desk, No. 10 in painted aluminum.

Glamour and style

In addition to her bold collecting, Barbara Jakobson dressed fearlessly, perhaps a natural inheritance from her maternal grandfather’s pioneering ready-to-wear business in fine clothes for women. In 1984, the legendary fashion photographer Horst P. Horst captured Jakobson in a sumptuous 1952 Christian Dior gown. In 1988, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders photographed her poised with cigarette for his Art World series.

Always attracted to a good glamour shot, Barbara created an homage to the cigarette in her home with a grouping that included a photograph by Richard Prince, a photo of Frank Sinatra giving John F. Kennedy a light at table and a Josef Albers photograph of Russian avant-garde legend Wassily Kandinsky smoking in 1929. Together they exemplify the way Jakobson traced patterns throughout art history in her wide-ranging collection. Wilkie hit the nail on the head when he summed up her home thusly, ‘Nearly six decades under one roof tells the story of a layered amalgam of time where fragments and former traces of another era are subtly represented.’

Forward-thinking architecture and design

‘There is no sacrifice I will not make for aesthetics,’ Jakobson declared in a 1998 oral history interview for MoMA, where she was a pivotal figure in the history of design and especially architecture exhibitions. (Jakobson also served on the board of The Architectural League for forty-eight years.) She prized ingenuity and artistry in her choices of furniture as well. One of many remarkable pieces is a custom L-shaped bookshelf of lacquered wood made by Emilio Ambasz, an architect and former curator of design at MoMA with whom Jakobson worked closely as a member of the formative Junior Council.

In Jakobson’s light-drenched living room, one area of the long, white-washed brick wall became something of a rotating exhibition of paintings by the modernist master Frank Stella. Jakobson was good friends with one of his dealers, Larry Rubin, and pieces would go on display for a time at her home. This unique arrangement had a pivotal effect on Jeffrey Deitch, whose visit to her home as part of a university class trip in 1973 shaped his own trajectory as he writes in a tribute to Jakobson. ‘It was the first time I had seen a great work of art in a private home. It was a foundational experience, part of what inspired me to become an art dealer.’ A ghostly shadow lingers from the outline of Frank Stella’s Felsztyn III (1971), sold at Christie’s in 2005, around which Jakobson painted to emphasize its departure. As Wilkie noted, ‘Thereʼs never been a better argument for negative space.’ Beneath this ‘much-loved ghost’ sat a stunning white leather upholstered sofa designed by Ueli Berger, Eleonora Peduzzi-Riva, and Heinz Ulrich. From 1972, the DS 600 Organic sectional’s snaking design was inspired by the Tatzelwurm, a dragon-like creature from Alpine folklore. This modular sofa model was once crowned the longest in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records.

An upstairs room featured another distinctive bookcase — this one of pine, mahogany, and painted steel — designed by Charlotte Perriand, the mid-century French architect and designer who collaborated with Le Corbusier and Jean Prouvé. Produced in 1952 by Les Ateliers Jean Prouvé, the ‘Tunisie’ Bookcase is a piece Perriand designed for La Maison de la Tunisie, a residential building for Tunisian students at Cité Universitaire Internationale in Paris. Perriand believed in utility over theory, and in the idea that good design should be affordable and functional; Jakobson likewise wanted to believe that design could help people to live a better life.

‘For her, art was life’ 

As Jakobson added to her collection, her family saw her evolve, with Wheeler fondly recalling that  ‘growing up in this home, watching our mother create transformation, taught us about how she saw the world and a creative approach to life. For her, art was life, and change was life.’

In her service to artists and her tenure as the longest-serving member of the Museum of Modern Art’s board, she made a profound contribution to art through steadfast patronage, with a particular passion for bold ideas that pushed the field forward. The works in Jakobson’s collection affirm her ideals, reflecting the ambition of modernism and a life lived well with art.