SCOTT BLACK
BROOKLINE, MASS.
IMPRESSIONIST AND MODERN ART
An understanding of the art market’s vicissitudes as well as a picture’s quality has guided Scott Black in the formation of his excellent collection of Impressionist, post-Impressionist and modern paintings. He has spent the last 20 years purchasing museum-quality works by Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and more, many of which have been loaned to top-tier museum exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Grand Palais in Paris. Most recently the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibited “The Romance of Modernism: Paintings and Sculpture from the Scott M. Black Collection”—40 paintings and 15 sculptures tracking the rise of modern art from the 1860s to the 1960s. Founder and chairman of Delphi Management Inc., a Boston-based investment advisory company, the self-described Francophile is a longtime supporter of both the MFA and the Portland Museum of Art in his native Portland, Maine, where he sits on the board of trustees. After a 2006 auction at Sotheby’s, the ever-outspoken Black commented to Bloomberg News on bidding he thought was higher than justified by the quality of the art: “There is a lot of newly minted wealth. This is a way to confirm status, by buying a collection with a signature. New wealth doesn’t know one period from the next.”

HENRY and MARION BLOCH
MISSION HILLS, KAN.
IMPRESSIONIST AND MODERN ART
It’s as long as a 67-story skyscraper laid on its side. The new Bloch Building, a Steven Holl–designed expansion of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, will add 165,000 square feet, increasing museum space by 70 percent. And it will be a permanent reminder of the importance of Henry and Marion Bloch to the cultural life of Kansas City, Missouri. Scheduled for June 9, the opening will mark the completion of the museum’s expansion plan and will be celebrated with a special inaugural exhibition. “Manet to Matisse: Impressionist Masters from the Marion and Henry Bloch Collection” will feature 30 important paintings from the couple’s renowned collection and is sponsored by the H&R Block Foundation, which Bloch chairs. “This building is an architectural masterpiece and will serve as a gateway to bring the world to Kansas City and to the rich depths of the Nelson-Atkins collection,” says Henry. “Marion and I are honored to be a part of this enduring legacy and look forward to sharing our collection with visitors next summer.” Bloch currently chairs the Nelson-Atkins board.

JACQUELINE BRADLEY and CLARENCE OTIS JR.
ORLANDO, FLA.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART
Acollection that began with realist Hughie Lee-Smith, incorporated Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam and installation artist Fred Wilson boasts a commissioned Lyle Ashton Harris head photograph of Jacqueline Bradley and Clarence Otis Jr., and includes some new-media talents can fairly be said to trace the arc of contemporary art. “The collection has evolved over the years as we’ve gotten to know artists. Listening to their voices has led us to new artists and new genres,” says Bradley. “And we pore over catalogs to keep abreast of artists and trends.” It has taken the couple more than two decades to assemble this first-class collection of art by significant African-American artists, mostly from the 1950s to the present, and they continue to add to it. All 70 works in this group will be on view through April 2007 at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Over the years, about one-third of the collection has been exhibited at museums, Bradley reports, including the Whitney Museum of American Art.

NORMAN and IRMA BRAMAN
MIAMI BEACH
MODERN AND POSTWAR ART
Each year since Art Basel Miami Beach first blew into town in 2002, Norman and Irma Braman have chaired the Host Committee, whose efforts help make the fair such a must-do event. And each year they open their museum-like home to invited Basel Miami Beach guests, such as curators and museum groups. Central to the Miami art scene for decades, the Bramans have an exceptional collection of modern art, headlined by Jasper Johns’ iconic “Diver.” The painting was loaned to the MoMA Johns retrospective in 1996 and, reports Norman, is currently on view in the National Gallery of Art’s “Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965.” The collection includes major works by Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Anselm Kiefer, and Alexander Calder whose pieces the Bramans own in sufficient number to have created a wing of their house for them. In 2003 they gave works by Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl and Antoni Tàpies to the University of Florida’s Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art. A Frank Stella painting went to the Menil Collection in Houston in 2006. The couple has made numerous gifts of art to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA), where Irma has chaired the board for more than a decade.

PETER M. BRANT and STEPHANIE SEYMOUR
GREENWICH, CONN.
CONTEMPORARY ART
Peter Brant has been a player in the art market since his days as part of the Andy Warhol crowd, when he bought art directly from the painter and for a time had a financial stake in Warhol’s magazine Interview. He and his wife, Stephanie Seymour, have established the Stephanie and Peter Brant Foundation, which acquires art from the mid-20th century to today and has holdings ranging from Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat to current-day best-sellers like Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley and Andreas Gursky. The Foundation lends extensively to museums around the world; it sent eight pieces to the Brooklyn Museum’s Basquiat show, which traveled to Los Angeles and Houston in 2005 and 2006. The foundation’s collection will be housed in a renovated building in Greenwich, which the couple plans to open in 2008. Brant’s art interests are expansive: Besides serving as a trustee of the Guggenheim Museum, he was executive producer of the films “Basquiat” (1996), “Pollock” (2000) and “Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film” (2006).

ELI and EDYTHE BROAD
LOS ANGELES
CONTEMPORARY ART
Eli and Edythe Broad use their considerable financial resources to underwrite programs in the arts, education and scientific research. The Broad Art Foundation lends contemporary art to colleges, universities, museums and other public venues from its collection of more than 800 works by artists mostly working since 1975, and it continues to acquire works, many of them large or multi-part installations. “It enables us to continue our collecting, sharing our passion for contemporary art,” says Broad, who made his fortune from home-building company KB Home, and then from insurance conglomerate Sun America. “And at the same time it makes art available to a wide audience—so much art leaves the country or goes into private collections and thus isn’t available for the public.” The Broads have established art centers at UCLA, Pitzer College (Calif.) and the California Institute of the Arts. And they recently pledged $60 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a new building (The Broad Contemporary Art Museum) and an acquisition fund. The museum will exhibit works from the foundation and from the Broads’ collection, as well as newly acquired art. The couple has one of the country’s strongest collections of contemporary art—much of it large-scale—including works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, David Salle, Julian Schnabel and Mark Tansey, which they continue to augment. In 2006 they acquired an early Andy Warhol for $11.7 million.

MELVA BUCKSBAUM  and RAYMOND J. LEARSY
ASPEN, COLO., AND NEW YORK CITY
CONTEMPORARY ART
Every other year an artist who appeared in the Whitney Biennial and “has the potential to make an enduring contribution to American art” wins the $100,000 Bucksbaum Award, established in 2002 by Whitney Vice Chairman Melva Bucksbaum. She and her husband, Raymond Learsy, also a Whitney trustee, are an art-world power couple. Bucksbaum is a trustee of the Hirshhorn
Museum & Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), the Drawing Center (New York) and Save Venice; Learsy is a member of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art. They have established purchase funds and endowments at numerous museums and make frequent gifts of substantial artwork. Whether it’s 38 works by 2004 Bucksbaum Award–winner Raymond Pettibon to the Whitney or a Joel Shapiro sculpture for Des Moines’ ambitious Riverwalk project (given with Bucksbaum’s daughter), they deploy their energy, commitment and resources to support a range of museums and artists. Their personal collecting aim, they told the British magazine Prospect, is not just to buy into history, but to anticipate it, collecting artists early in their careers. “The exciting thing about collecting contemporary art is that there is no real body of validation,” says Learsy. “You can become part of the process of validation.”