PAUL and GAYLE STOFFEL
DALLAS
CONTEMPORARY ART
When a collection won’t stop growing, build a new house. That’s what Gayle and Paul Stoffel are doing to accommodate their contemporary art holdings. Over the past 15 years, the couple has collected first German postwar paintings, then Pop art followed by Minimalism, in each case acquiring platinum names—Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, for example. Most recently, they’ve been collecting newer artists like Elizabeth Patton, Peter Doit and Luc Tuymans, and are now acquiring photography, as well. “We try to buy the best we can afford within the body of an artist’s works,” Gayle says. “We don’t always agree, but we always come to an agreement.” The Stoffels have made outright gifts to the Dallas Museum of Art, where Gayle is a trustee, and a promised gift of seven major works, including pieces by Robert Ryman and John Baldessari. And since 1999, with a group of other Dallas collectors they’ve been giving $75,000 to $100,000 annually to the Contemporary Art Initiative, enabling the museum to make strategic purchases. In 2005, accompanied by Neal Meltzer, a New York art adviser who has been working closely with them, the Stoffels visited the studios of Chuck Close and Ellsworth Kelly and bought important works directly from the artists. “Gayle has tremendous enthusiasm and passion and the heart of a great collector. Paul has remarkable business sense and tremendous charm,” Meltzer says. “Together, they’re a dynamic collecting couple.”

NORMAN and NORAH STONE
SAN FRANCISCO
CONTEMPORARY ART
Norman Stone is a psychologist working with disadvantaged youths. He is also an art fanatic. He and his wife, Norah, concentrate their considerable energies on contemporary art that can reasonably be called difficult—in particular, pieces that the couple feels were influenced in some way by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys. “Our works by these three earlier artists establish an aesthetic and intellectual framework” for the later work they collect, Norah says. Their large Pacific Heights home is overflowing with art, and to provide adequate space the Stones are presently building a 5,000- square-foot “art cave” at their Napa Valley home. Mainstays of San Francisco’s contemporary art scene, the couple is known for opening their home to visiting museum groups. Norman is a trustee of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Norah, in  her capacity as chair of the Director’s Circle, organizes international educational trips for museum supporters. The Stones have given art to various museums but are keeping the bulk of the collection together with the intent of donating it to a single institution. “Our collection has a focus, and we hope it will remain as a piece,” Norah says. “It’s sad when a great collection is broken up.”

EUGENE and CLARE THAW
SANTA FE
OLD MASTERS AND AMERICAN INDIAN ART
Acknowledged as one of America’s towering benefactors, Eugene Thaw, with his wife, Clare, gave another important gift in September 2006 to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, where Thaw has been a trustee for many years: 14 drawings, ranging from Rembrandt to Pollock, valued between $20 million and $30 million. Then in December, Thaw gave to The Frick Collection a Jean-Antoine Houdon bust, a portrait of Madame His, described by director Anne L. Poulet as “a work of exquisite beauty and refinement.” In addition to being perhaps the country’s preeminent collector of Old Master drawings, Thaw has assembled one of the country’s finest collections of American Indian art, which he donated in its entirety to the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Thaw continues to acquire works to strengthen both the Morgan and Fenimore collections. He has served on the boards of the Morgan, the Frick Art Reference Library, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Fenimore, and has given important works to these institutions as well as to the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery of Art. Museums across the country have received funds from The Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust, which makes grants totaling $5 million a year in support of the arts, education, and cultural preservation. As a collector, scholar and patron, Thaw has received many honors, including the American Association of Museums’ Medal for Distinguished Philanthropy.

EDDI VAN AUKEN
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
ANTIQUE CANES
People find many things to collect. Eddi Van Auken found canes. Browsing an antiques show 10 years ago, she noticed three antique canes, which became the germ of a collection that is now inundating its owner. Canes are appreciated for quality, originality and ornateness, much like jewelry. Van Auken’s collection numbers many hundreds of outstanding examples in materials including ivory, gold and silver, and ranges from the craftsmanship and precious materials of a Fabergé or a Cartier to the ingenuity and charm of a folk carving. Her oldest is an ivory cane from 1590. “You can get so many canes in a little footprint,” she says, and has had 80 stands made, each holding a great many of them, to accommodate her extraordinary and still growing collection. Van Auken is active in an international community of cane collectors, who tend to keep a low profile and meet every couple of years. She sponsored, organized and chaired Canemania 2006 as well as the most recent International Cane Collectors Conference, and has supported international cane events in Europe. “Canes have taken over my life,” she says.

JOEL WACHS
NEW YORK CITY
CONTEMPORARY ART
One month after 9/11, Joel Wachs, recently of Los Angeles, assumed the presidency of the New York–based Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, a grant-giving charity (more than $10 million in 2006) with a $200 million endowment. Wachs had been a Los Angeles city councilman for 30 years when he resigned mid-term to take over the foundation whose board he’d served on for six years. Wachs has been collecting contemporary art for many years; indeed, as an influential and art-loving councilman, he was one of the people instrumental in the establishment of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, an institution to which he is loyal and generous. He served on its board from 1983 to 2002. Wachs focuses on young emerging artists, “not only because they’re more affordable but because a purchase means something to an artist early in his career.” He reports, “I spend between a quarter and a third of my income each year on art and I make a point of always giving away at least as much in value as I’ve bought. Most of it goes to MoCA, more than 100 works so far. Last year I gave a rare John Baldessari phototext painting.”

SHELBY WHITE
NEW YORK CITY
ANTIQUITIES
In the 1990s, Shelby White and her late husband, Leon Levy, gave the Metropolitan Museum of Art $20 million for new galleries. This April, the Met’s New Greek and Roman Galleries will open, centered by the majestic Leon Levy and Shelby White Court, which the Met describes as “a monumental, peristyle court ... with a soaring two-story atrium.” “These magnificent galleries fulfill a pledge my husband and I made more than 10 years ago,” says White, a Met trustee. White and Levy supported numerous archaeology projects, including the Shelby White–Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications at Harvard and excavations at the ancient site of Ashkelon in Israel. Last year, New York  University’s President John Sexton and White, trustee of the Leon Levy Foundation, announced the creation of the school’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, a degree-granting graduate research center for multi-disciplinary studies, to be funded with a pledge from the foundation of up to $200 million.

JOHN WILMERDING
PRINCETON, N.J.
AMERICAN ART
Collecting is in John Wilmerding’s genes. A scion of the renowned Havemeyer- Webb collecting family, which gave a major Impressionist, Old Master and Orientalist collection to the Metropolitan Museum and later established the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, Wilmerding has spent his life in the service of American art. He is a collector, to be sure, but he has also been a professor of American art at Princeton University for nearly 20 years; deputy director at the National Gallery of Art from 1983 to 1988, and a curator there from 1977 to 1983; and an author of esteemed books, including American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875 (National Gallery of Art, 1980), American Marine Painting (Harry N. Abrams, 1987) and American Views (Princeton University Press, 1991). After the NGA’s exhibition, “American Masters from Bingham to Eakins: The John Wilmerding Collection,” he announced that he was donating to the nation his collection of 51 important 19th-century American works. This gift is all the more felicitous because, according to the NGA, “Wilmerding made many of his acquisitions based on how they would fill gaps and build on strengths in the Gallery’s existing collection of American art.” Wilmerding also is serving as adviser to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.