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.
