Agnes Gund’s Art Collection and the Question of Value in Modern Culture

As significant works by Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly and Joseph Cornell from Agnes Gund’s collection re-enter the market, they bring renewed attention to how cultural value is formed. More than a high-profile auction, their sale highlights the role of collectors in shaping artistic legacy, transforming private commitment into part of the shared history of modern art.

Gund, who died in 2023, occupied a rare position in the American art world. Born in Cleveland in 1938 and later a central force at the Museum of Modern Art, she combined the roles of collector, trustee and activist with unusual consistency. Over decades, she helped shape the canon of modern and contemporary art not only through acquisition but through advocacy, philanthropy and governance.

At the heart of the sale is Mark Rothko’s 1964 canvas No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe), a monumental work painted during a pivotal period in the artist’s career. By the early 1960s, Rothko had moved away from the luminous palettes of his earlier abstractions toward darker, more contemplative fields of colour — a shift that began around the time of the Seagram Murals commission in 1958. In this painting, expanses of green and near-black are interrupted by a charged red band, creating a composition that feels both austere and volatile.

Gund acquired the work directly from Rothko in 1967, during a visit to his studio. That proximity to the artist matters. Much has been written about Rothko’s desire for intimate viewing conditions and his belief that painting could provoke emotional transformation. To live with such a canvas — to position it not in a museum but in a domestic interior — suggests a form of collecting grounded in sustained engagement rather than speculation.

CY TWOMBLY
Untitled
signed, inscribed and dated 'Cy Twombly 1961 Rome' — CY TWOMBLY
Untitled
signed, inscribed and dated ‘Cy Twombly 1961 Rome’ (upper left); signed again, inscribed again, and dated again ‘Cy Twombly Roma 1961’ (lower center)
oil, graphite, wax crayon, and oil-based house paint on canvas
49 1/2 x 57 1/4 in. (125.7 x 145.4 cm.)
Executed in 1961.
Estimate: $40,000,000-60,000,000. Credit: CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD.

If Rothko represents the solemn grandeur of post-war abstraction, Cy Twombly’s 1961 Untitled captures another strain of the period: restless, erudite and gestural. Painted in Rome, the work belongs to a moment when Twombly fused classical references with scribbled marks that hover between writing and erasure. The surface appears improvised, yet it carries the weight of art history in every looping line.

Twombly’s transatlantic sensibility — American by birth, European by adoption — mirrored a broader cultural exchange that defined the 1960s. For collectors like Gund, such work signaled not only aesthetic daring but a cosmopolitan outlook. The presence of similar paintings in major museum collections underscores how quickly this once-radical language entered the institutional mainstream.

The third work, Joseph Cornell’s 1948 Untitled (Medici Princess), shifts the register again. Cornell’s boxed constructions, assembled from found objects and Renaissance imagery, operate on a smaller, more intimate scale. They are meditations on memory and desire, collapsing centuries into fragile theatrical spaces. By pairing Cornell with Rothko and Twombly, Gund’s collection traced a line from poetic assemblage to monumental abstraction — from the handmade to the sublime.

Gund’s importance, however, cannot be measured solely by the works she owned. Her long association with the Museum of Modern Art — joining its Painting and Sculpture Committee in the late 1960s, later serving as president and then president emerita — positioned her at the centre of institutional decision-making during a period of expansion and reassessment. Under her leadership in the 1990s and early 2000s, the museum undertook a major physical enlargement, reflecting both the growth of its collection and the escalating scale of contemporary art itself.

She also gave away much of what she collected. Over the years, she donated more than a thousand works to MoMA and hundreds more to other institutions, with particular attention to living artists. Her relationships with figures such as Louise Bourgeois, Jasper Johns and Kara Walker suggest that collecting, for her, was not merely acquisitive but relational.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of Gund’s belief in art’s civic function came in 2017, when she sold Roy Lichtenstein’s 1962 painting Masterpiece for $165 million. The proceeds funded Art for Justice, an initiative aimed at addressing mass incarceration in the United States through cultural and legal advocacy. In that moment, the market value of a Pop painting was redirected toward social reform, turning an icon of consumer-era irony into a tool of activism.

The forthcoming sale of the Rothko, Twombly and Cornell inevitably raises questions about the circulation of masterpieces in an era of escalating prices. Estimates place the Rothko alone in the region of $80 million. Yet beyond financial speculation lies a subtler story about how private stewardship shapes public heritage. Many of the most significant works of the twentieth century passed through domestic spaces before entering museums or returning to the market.

Gund understood that trajectory. Her founding of Studio in a School in 1977, in response to cuts in New York City arts education, reflected a conviction that access to art begins long before acquisition. Nearly five decades later, the organisation continues to serve public school students, linking the rarefied world of blue-chip painting to everyday classrooms.

In the end, the dispersal of part of Gund’s collection is not simply about ownership changing hands. It is about the ongoing negotiation between intimacy and institution, between market price and moral value. The works by Rothko, Twombly and Cornell carry with them not only the ambitions of their makers but the imprint of a collector who treated art as both aesthetic encounter and public responsibility.

As they travel from private walls to auction galleries and perhaps back into new collections, they remind us that modern art’s history is written as much by those who choose to live with it — and sometimes to let it go — as by the artists themselves.