She has actively distinguished her collection by founding the Center
for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. On a trip to
Russia in 1987, she met Bard President Leon Botstein, who planted the idea to
put her collection in a small town with a school and research center.Today her
congeries of some 1,750 pieces is on permanent loan to the center, along with
archives of books and videos. Her mission is to provide both a research facility
for 20th-century art and a locus for scholars to conduct comparative studies of
art with literature and music. Graduate students study Hessel’s works, while she
is content to buttress a foundation that preserves the collection in its
wholeness.
“I was multicultural before it was politically correct, and I
always saw art in a societal context,” she says. “With Bard, there will be an
end point to the collection that I want to enjoy.”
Corporate Curator
Donald B. Marron, CEO and founder of the private equity
investment firm Lightyear Capital in New York, began collecting art in the late
1960s at the financial firm Mitchell Hutchins, where he was president. He
expanded his corporate and personal collections during his 20 years as chairman
of PaineWebber and through its subsequent merger with UBS AG. A standout in any
art crowd at his basketball-player height of 6 feet, 7 inches, Marron is also a
longtime board member and former president of the board of the Museum of Modern
Art in New York. So it was no great surprise when he turned to MoMA in 2002 to
make an outright gift of 37 important works of modern and contemporary art from
the corporate UBS PaineWebber Collection. While it was an enormously generous
gift by the standards of the art world, it was still a minor ripple on the
corporation’s bottom line. The newly renovated MoMA will display the works,
featuring artists such as Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston and Susan Rothenberg,
when it reopens in 2005.
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