FROM THE MAGAZINE
December 2015 Issue

Agnes Gund, Art’s Grande Dame, Still Has Work to Do

At 78, Gund has poured boundless time, money, and effort into institutions and nurtured careers. Here’s why she thinks she hasn’t accomplished nearly enough.
This image may contain Agnes Gund Human Person Sitting and Restaurant
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Four years ago, the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies honored Agnes Gund with its Leonore and Walter Annenberg Award for Diplomacy through the Arts. The award was presented to Aggie (as she is known to everyone from her driver, Robert, to her pal David Rockefeller) by Hillary Clinton, who proceeded to list all 23 charitable boards and advisory committees on which Gund served at the time. “My God,” I said to Jo Carole Lauder, FAPE’s chair, “when does Aggie sleep?” “At board meetings,” she replied.

Hardly.

Gund’s generosity of time, money, and effort knows no bounds. At 78 she is down to a mere 20 boards and committees, ranging from the New York State Council on the Arts to Socrates Sculpture Park. She was president of the Museum of Modern Art from 1991 to 2002 and currently chairs its International Council and the board of MoMA P.S. 1, its avant-garde branch, in Queens. Perhaps the cause she cares most about is Studio in a School, which she founded in 1977 in response to budget cuts that virtually eliminated art classes from New York City public schools. President Bill Clinton gave her the National Medal of Arts in 1997. She hosts what are probably the most diverse dinner parties on Park Avenue, with guests such as Ellsworth Kelly, Julie Mehretu, and Vito Schnabel. Most nights, however, she can be seen running, in a Lanvin dress or Duro Olowu cape, to two or three exhibitions on her way to yet another benefit.

As we sat in Gund’s living room one recent morning, surrounded by masterpieces by Rothko, Johns, and Lichtenstein, I asked her what motivates her philanthropy. “Guilt,” she replied, “because I had money. I felt I had to do something with it that wasn’t just for living well.” Her father, George Gund II, she told me, “ran the Cleveland Trust Company. He was an isolationist Ohio Taft Republican, very strict, very forceful, and very tight.” Aggie was the second of six children—four boys and two girls—“but whenever we had to sign documents, I signed fifth, because my father believed the boys came first. But he did leave us equal amounts.” He also left $600 million in 1952 to the Gund Foundation, to which she has given over the years, though she did not go on the board, “because I was so much more liberal than my brothers were, and I was scared to death they’d just push me down and say no to everything.”

She is a graduate of Miss Porter’s School and Connecticut College, has a master’s in art history from Harvard University, has been married and divorced twice, is close to her four children and 12 grandchildren, and is beloved by the entire New York art world, yet there is a modesty at her core that is touching. A few days earlier she had been on a Bowdoin College panel with Madeleine Albright, former senator George Mitchell, and M.I.T. professor Alan Lightman. “I guess they had a seat to fill,” she said. “The moderator asked us, ‘How do you feel about what you’ve become?’ I said, ‘I don’t feel like I’ve become what I want to become. I want to do more.’ ”