Remembering Art Collectors Lost, From Elaine Wynn to Richard Kramlich

Graham Gund, an architect who died this past June at 84, amassed a significant collection of contemporary art with his wife, Ann, with whom he appeared seven times on the ARTnews Top 200 list. He lent his name to the directorship of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), where the couple were longtime patrons. Pierre Terjanian, the MFA’s recently promoted director, recalls the transformative role Gund played at the museum. Graham was very much involved in our governance. He was probably our longest serving trustee. He was elected to the board in 1973, became an honorary trustee in 1992, and later chaired a number of committees. Our largest set of galleries for temporary exhibitions is named for Graham. And then, of course, there is his role as a collector and a very generous donor of works of art that are rather remarkable. He gave a series of gifts of art—some directly from him, and others from him and his wife—as well as funds for the purchase of works on paper, paintings, sculpture, and even decorative arts and photography. He collected what he liked, and he was very selective. That’s reflected when you look at the gifts that came to the MFA. Most recently we received from [them] a promised gift of a painting by Philip Guston, which was part of our [2022 Guston] exhibition. In 2021, there came the gift of a Cy Twombly painting, Il Parnasso (1964). It’s in the space adjacent to our ancient Greek galleries, and there’s a direct connection between the inspiration for those works and the ancient work displayed nearby. He gave a wonderful work by Martin Puryear, a stainless-steel object that can function as a bench. But it’s a fixture of the space between the contemporary art galleries and the rest of the building. He was involved in the search process for the director, so I got to spend some time with him. He had a lot of qualities I got to admire. First of all, he was really interested in how art can shape community—and even urban life—whether through architecture or individual artworks. He was interested in how institutions can help shape what a community is or looks like, and he was always thinking about the public service of institutions. When I joined the museum [in 2024], I was asking more questions than I had answers for, and he would take the time to listen and to provide advice. He was also very inquisitive: He would respond with another question. I wish I could have continued that journey with him. Richard Kramlich, a venture capitalist who died this year at 89, amassed with his wife, Pamela, one of the world’s great video art collections. Starting with a Fischli/Weiss videotape purchased for just $350 in 1987, the couple went on to buy key works by Joan Jonas, Dara Birnbaum, Richard Mosse, and many others. Many of these pieces were on view in their cutting-edge home in Northern California, purpose-built by Herzog & de Meuron for the display of video art. Rose Lord, managing partner at Marian Goodman Gallery, remembers Kramlich and his passion for the medium. I believe that Pam and Dick were always drawn to artists who weren’t afraid to take risks in their practice—to push their medium in urgent exploration and investigation of the codes, dissent, dialogue, and gestures through which meaningful discussion is created. The way in which exceptional video art was integrated into their original home in Presidio Heights in San Francisco was pioneering and inspiring. I remember visiting in 2002 and looking with wonder at how Dara Birnbaum’s 1990 landmark video installation Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission was installed spiraling up the stairwell of their elegant home. With poles suspended from the ceiling to evoke satellite waves and broadcast footage of the event scattered across small monitors, the installation mimicked the haphazard and creative ways that information was transmitted in the moment: through television footage, audio clips, and even fax machines. And then there is the “Break-In Transmission”: Dan Rather and his CBS Evening News camera crew being shut down by the Chinese authorities. Before I met Dick personally, I had heard a great deal about him from Marian Goodman, Dara Birnbaum, and artist James Coleman. They all very much enjoyed his inquiring mind, his broad and deep knowledge of cultural and political matters, his quick humor and generosity. When I sat with Dick at gallery dinners, we exchanged tips for books, articles, and exhibitions, and I would always leave with several great tips for interesting books and articles. The Kramlichs have been hugely influential in dispelling the myth that it isn’t possible to live with video art—and inspiring others to collect media art, especially video, which, in its different forms, has transformed our world in the last decades. They also blazed a trail by commissioning a house (in collaboration with Herzog & de Meuron) that was specially designed for them to live alongside their collection of media art. And more than this, they provided pioneering research into the preservation, conservation, and presentation of time-based works—making it easier for others to follow in their footsteps. In addition, they helped advance the inclusion of this work within the narrative of contemporary art history by being very ready and willing to lend their works to a broad array of institutions around the world. Leonard Lauder, who died in June, was a fixture on the Top 200, listed in every edition since its publication began, in 1990. Known for his singular collection of Cubist art, part of which he donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lauder also supported the Whitney Museum. He joined that latter institution’s board in 1977 and was named chairman emeritus in 2011. Despite his collecting focus on early 20th-century European modernism, he was an advocate for the Whitney’s contemporary art program. Scott Rothkopf, who became the museum’s director in 2023, speaks about Lauder’s decades of support for the Whitney. I first met Leonard when I joined the Whitney as a curator in 2009. He made a point at that time of getting to know all the curators because he cared so much about the collection and our artistic program. We very quickly bonded over the fact that we shared a favorite American artist in Jasper Johns, and I would eventually come to do a Johns show that he supported. We were in the process of moving toward the construction of our new downtown home and had ambitions for our program. He loved a big idea. He loved something that could feel spectacular and catchy, given his history in marketing at Estée Lauder. He was always interested in how we could get people excited about American art. Leonard also put together with great tenacity one of the great, if not the greatest, Cubist collections. In my experience, Leonard was unique among major collectors and philanthropists in that there was such a huge asymmetry between his personal collecting passion—Cubist art—and the museum to which he devoted most of his time and money, the Whitney. There was essentially no overlap between the art that he chose to buy for himself and the art that he gave to the Whitney and the exhibitions that he supported there. For me, that was always just a remarkable statement about his generosity. To some degree, Leonard was a very patriotic person. I think something about his love for this country stimulated his passion for the Whitney’s mission of being a museum of art of the United States. He went to a place that he sensed needed him, where he could catalyze change—and he did. There are so many ways that the museum as it exists today benefited from his generosity, his thinking, his involvement, and his collaboration. The most conspicuous evidence of Leonard’s philanthropy is the existence of the building that we’re now in: the transformative gift of more than $130 million that enabled the move downtown. Beyond that, he wanted the Whitney to participate on a more global stage in terms of the greatness of its collection, and he played such a tremendous role in very key acquisitions by artists such as Jasper Johns, in donating the artist’s Three Flags (1958). In July we opened a new long-term, multiyear installation of our collection featuring 25 gifts from Leonard. We chose all those works before he died, so it wasn’t like we set out to make a memorial exhibition. So much of what he contributed surfaces at the museum all the time. I remember, after his last visit to our Alvin Ailey show, which he loved, he called me and said he hoped that the Whitney would be the most adventurous museum in America. Baron Guy Ullens de Schooten, a Belgian businessman who died this past April at 90, was among the foremost collectors of Chinese contemporary art. In 2007 Guy and his wife, Myriam, established what is now known as the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, a Beijing-based institution that operates three satellite locations and is today considered one of China’s greatest art museums. (The Ullenses controversially began selling works from their collection in 2011, and then sold the museum in 2016.) Philip Tinari, director of the UCCA since 2011, remembers Ullens, whom he first met in 2004 at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon, France, which staged a survey of Chinese contemporary art co-organized by the couple’s namesake foundation. Guy Ullens occupies such a special place [in China] because he was so early to the gathering. He definitely moved the needle in some ways. In 2002 he showed his collection at the Espace Cardin in Paris. So many key artists of the time were there presenting installations, like Wang Gongxin, Xu Zhen, Huang Yong Ping, and Sun Yuan. He was genuinely interested in what all kinds of people have to say, and I think he just took a lot of pride in the fact that he was doing something unlikely. It was unprecedented. Then, by getting involved in the first place, and even in deciding to sell [works from his collection] at the time that he did [beginning in 2011], he affirmed the value of the things that he had. In China in the early 2000s, there was an institutional buildout and a market buildout. At that moment, his collecting was really constructive for the art world in China. The persistence of the UCCA was another vote of confidence. There’s just something about it that seems so bizarre now, almost 20 years later: How logical did it feel in 2007 for a Belgian to set up an art museum in the middle of Beijing? He was a creature of a certain historical moment. He really relished watching this global world take shape. Even if he stepped aside after 10 years, he provided the initial investment and the guidance during this first period of the UCCA. He set the standard for the UCCA. During the second period, which is when I joined [in 2011], we started to think about how to build an institution more grounded in the city and its society, and about what all this collecting meant for all its artists. Collecting and then selling always raises questions. I am sure there were people who felt that those works were being acquired in the early years in the service of a lasting museum. And so, you still hear people who feel upset by the way that aspect played out. On the other side, I would argue that the UCCA has become more of a Kunsthalle, with a program of rotating exhibitions executed at a certain level, rather than a place to appreciate an unchanging permanent collection. He always had this real sense of wonder. And I always felt like he was this bridge to old Europe. He would talk about the topography of World War I battlefields with this familiarity—the way that all the outskirts of Paris had trenches everywhere. But he also had this grounded side. I would always hear him express how grateful he was to be among people that he really cherished, and to have this team working toward this common vision. Leonard Riggio, the longtime executive chairman of Barnes & Noble, built a collection rich in works by blue-chip artists, among them Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, and Walter De Maria. Within the art world, he was best known for his association with the Dia Art Foundation, of which he was chairman from 1998 to 2006 and helped realize its acclaimed outpost in Beacon, New York. Riggio departed the institution on somewhat acrimonious terms, but a decade later, he started to rebuild his relationship with the foundation at the invitation of director Jessica Morgan. Morgan speaks about returning Riggio to Dia’s firmament. When I first started at Dia in 2015, my feeling was very much that all the people who had been so significant in bringing the institution into being at various points should be in our orbit. Around my first week working here, I got in touch with Len, telling him, “it’s very important to me that everybody feels welcome here.” Then we started seeing each other very regularly, and there was a certain amount of getting over the hump of the past. But I told him, “As far as I’m concerned, there’d be no Dia:Beacon without you.” We just really hit it off. It was so important to me to bring him back into the Dia fold, and I’m so happy to say that that happened over the years. He was completely self-educated around art, and yet he had this deep, passionate knowledge and intentional learning, particularly in relation to Dia’s artists. He was so generous in sharing and so passionate in wanting to explain the high-concept artworks [in his collection], whether it be Arte Povera or Walter De Maria. There’s no way he was reaching for the easy work. His passion for art, I think, came from appreciation of everything that it brought him in life, from ideas and concepts to materiality and process to beauty and culture. He had an immense curiosity. Len always talked about this seismic moment of encountering Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses [1996–97] in Chelsea. He always told me that seeing that work opened his eyes to a very different type of art from the kind he had been collecting, which, at that time, had been more 19th-century and early 20th-century art. His pathway to becoming much more deeply involved with the artists of the ’60s and ’70s generation—and then his involvement with Dia—came when he asked Michael Govan, who was then Dia director, “what’s going to happen to these works?” And Michael said, “Well, I don’t know.” And Len said, “How can it be that you’re not going to keep this forever? This is so important.” As the story goes, Dia:Beacon came from that conversation and Len’s realization that Dia had no physical place where these works could be maintained. He paid tens of millions of dollars for the renovation. On top of that, he also acquired and gifted extraordinary bodies of work by Serra, Dan Flavin, Agnes Martin, Robert Smithson—seismic contributions to the institution. Truly, Dia would not look the way that it does now, were it not for him. Len became very committed to the idea that artworks of our time should have this relationship to temporality—that there should be this idea of permanence and this commitment to supporting artists in that way. Matthew Strauss, who died in 2024 at 91, appeared on the Top 200 list with his wife, Iris, from 2009 to 2019. The couple’s home, just outside San Diego, was packed with works by artists ranging from Gerhard Richter and Antony Gormley to the de la Torre Brothers and Elizabeth Murray. His art patronage focused on enriching the local community, with major donations to the University of California, San Diego, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), where he was a longtime trustee. MCASD director Kathryn Kanjo remembers Strauss. Matt started collecting the late 1980s with a kind of vengeance. He focused on art to get him through difficult moments in his life: His kids were out of the house, and he and his wife, Iris, had relocated. It was a period when Iris had lost her father, and he wanted to give her something else to think about. Collecting became a way to structure time. He cared so much about what art could do, and he went in very passionately. When I met him, in the early ’90s, he came on the scene ready to go and ready to learn. Matt was an autodidact. He did his research, but it really started with looking—looking at places where he could learn. What always impressed me about Matt is that he wanted his collection to be of his time. He started out buying artists who were established, but he would buy their new work. As his collecting went on, it shifted beyond just new work to new ideas and new artists. A lot of early purchases were of work by women artists—Jennifer Bartlett, Helen Frankenthaler, Nancy Graves, Elizabeth Murray—which is more typical now but was at the time pretty rare. He had very strong opinions, but he wanted to hear yours as well. He might reject them because he liked what he liked, but he understood that there were multiple things happening in the art world. In whatever direction you look, Matt would install work—generally large-scale work—in every available space, puzzled together. Their house was richly installed with their artworks, and when it got overcrowded, they built an addition that really functioned just like a gallery. They also acquired the property next door to display works acquired for their family foundation, which was another component of collecting for them. Matt had that ability to block out everything around the artwork and just look at the artwork for what it was. He was that way at an art fair, too, amid the visual cacophony. He would home in and find the one piece that, as he would say, “moved his molecules”—something that affects not your eyes but your gut. He had maybe an old school way of collecting, in that he would look at the artwork and think about the object that was made, but he wouldn’t get so caught up in the scene of its creator. Matt did not hang out with artists—I think that was so he could have a very direct relationship with the object. Elaine Wynn, a cofounder of Wynn Resorts with her former husband, Steve, was a collector of masterpieces, including works by Picasso, Manet, and Francis Bacon, whose 1969 triptych she acquired for $142.4 million at auction in 2013. As a philanthropist, Wynn, who died this past April at 82, devoted her generosity to her two interests of art and education, with organizations like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Communities in Schools. She was LACMA’s board cochair from 2015 until her death, and donated $50 million toward a forthcoming building designed by Peter Zumthor. LACMA director Michael Govan recalls Wynn’s support for the institution since 2011. Elaine had started to spend a little time in LA because her daughters were living here. She had, by that time, amassed a fairly significant art collection. Her taste and interests were broad—that’s why she loved LACMA and our exhibitions. She would look at everything, whether it be contemporary or ancient or Impressionist. I was connected with her when we started planning how to bring Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass sculpture to LACMA. She ended up coming to the desert in Nevada, meeting Mike, and seeing the sculpture. In the midst of that, I was planning LACMA’s new building, and she was very curious about it. That began a longer discussion. Like most people, she had never heard of the architect Peter Zumthor or seen a building of his, so we went with her granddaughter and my daughter to visit many of Peter’s buildings. She was deeply moved by the beauty and emotional power of the architecture. She was also moved by the reaction of her granddaughter, who was around 16. I think that solidified the idea that this was timeless, beautiful, and accessible architecture that spoke to two different generations. After that trip, she became deeply interested in the architecture and what we were doing, and then offered to get involved, with a huge gift toward the campaign. She got that I was trying to make something very special for Los Angeles, something that was not available anywhere else. She really did her homework and studied. She saw art as a place for her own thought and meditation in a complex world. She felt that art was central to our lives and should be accessible to all—this idea that art can be connected to education. She saw it as everyday life. She was not a collector in that sense of obsessive collectors who collect art to have a big collection, or to compete with others about it, or to focus on a period of art history and try to collect all of that. I felt that, for her, it was always more about this idea about the power of art and the power of education to change lives. We also worked closely on the Las Vegas Museum of Art. I remember when I first met her in Nevada, my complaining about why there was no art museum in Las Vegas. (Las Vegas is the largest city in America without an accredited, stand-alone art museum.) This idea that there was no place for a middle-schooler to take a field trip to an art museum drove her to work on it. She selected Francis Kéré as the architect because he had built schools and he spoke passionately about education. She committed to help lead it, speaking before the city council to help secure the land. That’s just another example of her interest in museums as places for everyone to access art.