She was the president of the Museum of Modern Art in New York for more than a decade, donated more than 1,800 artworks to institutions over her lifetime, and once sold her most treasured Lichtenstein painting for $165 million to fund a major anti-incarceration initiative. Seven years before the arts patron and leader Agnes Gund died — at age 87, in the fall of 2025 — The New York Times profiled her lifelong philanthropic work under the headline “Is Agnes Gund the Last Good Rich Person?”
That’s quite possibly so, as the piece noted that by that point, she had spent decades giving her fortune away to the arts, as well as to AIDS research and reproductive rights groups. Generosity on that scale has become a rarity as wealth has increasingly concentrated at the top, and bunker-building tech billionaires seem less interested in arts and culture than previous moneyed generations — unless it’s to buy out the Met Gala.
Gund’s art collection, like her cash flow, was fluid. By her later years, much of her art collection had been promised to museums. But next week, three works that hung in her Upper East Side home by Cy Twombly, Joseph Cornell and Mark Rothko — the last of which had only once been publicly shown — could sell for nearly $150 million combined. The Agnes Gund collection will be sold on May 18 as part of Christie’s wider 20th- and 21st- century evening sale in New York.
“She put artists first,” said Sara Friedlander, who chairs the “Post-war and Contemporary Art, Americas” department for Christie’s. “Her relationships with artists were at the core of her being, and it’s how she was able to acquire such incredible works.”
Rothko made “No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe),” a monumental swath of inky black and deep green slashed with red, in 1964. That same year, he began the 14 darkened panels of the Rothko Chapel in Houston — his final body of work before his death in 1970. According to Christie’s, Gund bought it directly from the artist in his studio; though she was looking for a lighter composition, he countered with a different suggestion. After she purchased the work, it never left her apartment except for a brief one-month loan in 1972 to the Cleveland Museum of Art, which she had often visited as a child in Ohio. She acquired the untitled Twombly painting, made in 1961 during his Rome period, in 1988, and the Cornell, a wooden box assemblage from his “Medici” series, in 1980.
“These were the paintings and the objects that she just wanted to live with every day,” Friedlander said. “When you would go into her living room, you would sit on the couch, and you would see the Rothko to your right and the Twombly straight ahead above the mantel.”
The high estimates all fall toward the top end of each artists’ public auction sales. The Twombly work could sell for as much as $60 million (record: $70.5 million), while the Cornell could fetch $5 million (record: $7.8 million). The Rothko painting, with an estimate of $80 million, might see a historic night if it edges past the dramatic 2012 sale of “Orange, Red, Yellow,” which, at $86.8 million, became the most expensive contemporary artwork ever publicly sold. (Through private sales, however, Rothko’s record is reportedly an eye-watering $186 million).
Gund became president of the Museum of Modern Art in 1991, overseeing its enormous $858 million expansion and, crucially, advocated to give more wall space and support to living artists.
She first became involved as a member of the museum’s international council in 1967, a non-profit membership organization that formed in 1956 prior to strengthen the United States’ artistic exchange abroad, at a time when New York became the center of the art world. Out of the 1,800 works she donated over her lifetime, more than 1,000 went to the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. For more than two decades she chaired the board of MoMA P.S.1 as well, from its initial merger with the storied museum until 2020.
Outside of MoMA, her influence spread across numerous institutions: She was a board member of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, the Frick Collection, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among many others, and former President Barack Obama appointed her to the National Council on the Arts in 2011.
Out of her own initiatives, her advocacy work is perhaps best remembered through Studio in a School, the now five-decade-long program placing teaching artists in New York City schools, as well as Art for Justice Fund (A4J). Funded by the sale of her 1962 Lichtenstein, “Masterpiece,” A4J awarded $127 million in grants to organizations dedicated to ending mass incarceration during its six-year run. (She sold another Lichtenstein following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 and split the proceeds between abortion rights organizations).
“You’ve gotta get people to be more impassioned by what they want to see happen… maybe this is, for me, the only way I can do art,” Gund said in a panel discussion at the National Gallery of Art in 2018.
Even the year before her death, her daughter, Catherine Gund, told Harper’s Bazaar how dedicated her mother remained to the causes she cared about. “She’s functioning in so many arenas, she does more than even I know, and I know more than anyone else knows,” she said. “She’s going to keep doing what she’s always done, focused on the same things: humanity, safety, and agency.”
Her patronage was marked by her personal relationships, Friedlander noted, explaining that rather than just stamping her name on museum wings, she impacted artists’ careers with both her financial support and her friendship, even shifting “the ways in which artists themselves thought about philanthropy.” They joined her causes, too. The artist Julie Mehretu, whose work Gund collected and exhibited, donated her work “Dissident Score” to benefit the Art for Justice Fund, setting a personal record for the artist in 2021 when it sold for $6.5 million through Artsy.
“Aggie understood that art could be used as a social justice component, and that her deep guilt, which led to her great empathy, really created just an extraordinary human being,” Friedlander said.
That sense of guilt was something she often cited as the catalyst for her philanthropy. And despite the great influence she held, in many ways, she was the antithesis of the personality types that tend to accrue power: She was recognized by many for her profound sense of empathy, and in interviews, she described herself as deeply emotional and prone to tears. Her death has left a palpable absence, according to Friedlander.
“No one, no one did it like her and I hope with all of my soul that people will continue that legacy,” she said. “It’s so crucial to the ecosystem of the art world.”
