DONALD and BARBARA JONAS
NEW YORK CITY
POSTWAR AND CONTEMPORARY ART
When the hammer fell and ended a Christie’s evening sale of important contemporary art, the Jewish Communal Fund of New York City was $40 million richer than at the evening’s start. The auctioned art—13 works by artists including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline—were part of the distinguished collection of Donald and Barbara Jonas, who for more than 30 years have been acquiring important postwar art. (Barbara is a former trustee of the Guggenheim Museum.) Since their first purchase, a painting by Arshile Gorky, they have largely focused on the Abstract Expressionists who lived and worked in New York City. When the couple decided to give part of their collection to fund good causes while they were still alive to see the results, they chose the donor-advised JCF as the vehicle. “We had planned to do this anonymously,” says Donald, a retired retailing executive and former CEO of Lechters, the national housewares chain, “but we were persuaded that our public avowal might stimulate other collectors to follow suit.”

CYRUS and MYRTLE KATZEN
CHEVY CHASE, MD.
20TH- TO 21ST-CENTURY ART, SCULPTURE AND GLASS
Cyrus Katzen, a dentist turned real estate developer, and his wife, Myrtle, gave American University a lead gift of $10 million toward the building of the Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Arts Center, a 130,000-squarefoot complex that provides space for visual and performing arts. In addition, the Katzens have donated 300 works by 20th-century masters, including Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Amedeo Modigliani, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, and are establishing an endowment to support the center’s gallery operations. It was Cyrus who talked the university into forsaking a modest addition to an existing arts structure in favor of the much larger free-standing building, which now enhances the campus, fills curricular needs and provides show space for young Washington, D.C., artists. The Katzen holdings are far more eclectic than the American University gift would suggest: folk art, studio glass, carved jade, traditional and contemporary sculpture, contemporary and modern paintings, and works on paper—and monkeys dressed as dentists. The Katzens enjoy personal relationships with some of the artists they support—they befriended Larry Rivers, who painted their portrait, and Gene Davis, represented in their collection by seven pictures; at AU Myrtle knew Ben Summerford, Robert D’Arista and John Grazier, all now represented in their collection. According to the Katzen Arts Center, their collection focuses on “art that makes you smile and laugh.”

JAY and JEAN KISLAK
MIAMI
MATERIALS RELATING TO THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE AMERICAS
Jay and Jean Kislak moved to Florida decades ago and, finding themselves fascinated by their new home, began collecting materials relating to its earliest history. As their interest expanded to the broader subject of the early years of European exploration of the New World, what had begun with some rare maps and books grew into an encyclopedic collection of diverse material. The happy culmination: The couple gave to the Library of Congress “The Jay I. Kislak Collection: The Cultures and History of the Americas,” 4,000 rare documents, maps, books, paintings, prints and artifacts. You might think such a sizable gift would leave a big hole, but the Kislaks still have thousands of objects from more than 25 centuries of pre- Columbian culture. Over 200 of those, primarily from Mexico and Guatemala, are on display in the Kislak Foundation’s gallery in Miami Lakes, Florida, which is located in the offices of the Kislak National Bank and is open five days a week by appointment.

HELEN KORNBLUM
ST. LOUIS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY WOMEN
Apassion for photography has motivated Helen Kornblum since childhood, which is understandable given that her parents owned a photo supply business. And although she grew up to be a psychotherapist and not a photographer, it’s still a major part of her life. “The Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the 20th Century,” organized by the Saint Louis Art Museum (and seen in five other museums), featured images that portray the complex lives of modern women by 80 accomplished female photographers in her collection, including Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Kiki Smith and Hannah Wilke. “I noticed years ago that women were frequently excluded from clinical trials, which led me to think they’d been overlooked in the arts, as well. It seemed natural to use the art form of photography, of women in photography, to advocate for issues like women’s health and their role in society,” says Kornblum. She serves on the advisory committee of The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, and was a guiding force in its exhibition “Inside Out Loud: Visualizing Women’ s Health in Contemporary Art,” which featured prominent female artists. Kornblum also is a trustee of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

WERNER KRAMARSKY
NEW YORK CITY
CONTEMPORARY WORKS ON PAPER
From earliest childhood museum visits with his art-collecting parents (his father owned two major van Goghs that sold at Christie’s in 1988 and 1990), it was the drawings that captured Werner (“Wynn”) Kramarsky’s young imagination. He developed a livelong love of Albrecht Dürer’s drawings and attributes to them the appeal of a reductive or minimalist way of seeing and communicating. Kramarsky has assembled what is probably the country’s largest but surely the finest collection of contemporary works on paper. Totaling more than 2,000 abstract works—almost exclusively Minimalist and post-Minimalist drawings—the collection encompasses all the giants in contemporary art. Kramarsky is a great and generous collector and supporter of young artists, and he has been known to insist on including their works in his frequent museum loans. He has given more than 200 drawings to the Museum of Modern Art (where he is a life trustee) and to numerous other institutions. Kramarsky just completed eight years as chairman of the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation and has been a trustee of the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

LEONARD and EVELYN LAUDER
NEW YORK CITY
20TH-CENTURY MODERN FRENCH ART
Leonard and Evelyn Lauder have an acclaimed collection of modern 20thcentury French paintings, particularly by Cubist stars Picasso, Gris and Braque. But their interests are broad—the couple is known to also collect items as diverse as postcards and English porcelain dolls’ heads. And to the museum-going public, Leonard is most closely associated with the varied collection of American 20th-century art he oversees, and augments, at the Whitney Museum of American art where he serves as chairman of the board. The Lauders have given and loaned art from their extensive personal holdings to many institutions and have underwritten exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art among others. Leonard gave the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston his collection of 20,000 Japanese postcards and donated a poster collection to MoMA. He exemplifies the benevolent trustee practice of acquiring works specifically to meet a museum’s needs, to fill a gap in its collection or enable it to move in a new direction. In late 2006 he gave the Whitney eight works by Kiki Smith, in conjunction with the museum’s exhibition, “Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005.”

RONALD S. LAUDER
NEW YORK CITY
AUSTRO-GERMAN ART
Last year saw many record sales, not least among them the acquisition by Ronald Lauder of Gustav Klimt’s magnificent portrait of “Adele Bloch-Bauer I.” Lauder, Leonard’s brother, purchased the celebrated work directly from the Bloch-Bauer heirs and installed it in the Neue Galerie in New York, the small museum he established in 2001 to celebrate Austrian and German art of the last century. The Klimt, which cost Lauder a reported $135 million, is an immensely popular addition to the collection that features art of the Vienna Secession and Wiener Werkstätte movements. It has been reported that since “Adele” has been on view, the attendance has nearly sextupled, to around 10,000 visitors a week. “The painting is a major masterpiece whose beauty should be enjoyed by many,” says Lauder, chairman emeritus of the Museum of Modern Art. “Klimt is one of Austria’s foremost artists, and ‘Adele I’ represents the best in German and Austrian art. It’s my hope that with this extraordinary work, the Neue Galerie will become even more of a destination than before.” At Christie’s fall auction, Lauder bought Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Berlin Street Scene” for the museum’s collection, paying a record $38 million.