This is a good news story for two art museums in San Diego, but the credit belongs not to them but to Max Anderson, who posted it on Facebook, which is where I saw it.
On Sunday, the San Diego Union-Tribune published an article headlined “Onetime Local Arts Patron, Wife Leave Unexpected Gifts to Two Museums.”
The article outlined how a man named Vance Kondon, once a resident of San Diego, remembered his city when he died, even though he had left it — left the country, in fact — in the early 1990s. He owned a collection of works by Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Gabriele Munter (her Tuntzing is at left), Robert Ryman, and others, that today is valued at $45 million, according to the paper. Â
In his will (he died in 1996), he, and his wife, Liesbeth Giesberger (who died last year), made the donations. The Museum of Art, according to the paper, received 48 works, mostly pre-1950 works by Expressionist artists, including Schiele, Klimt, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Ott Dix and August Macke. Roxana Velasquez, the museum’s director, put a $20 million value on the gift.
Meantime, the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, received 30 works, ” mostly post-1950 Minimalist canvases, mixed-media works and sculptures by artists that include Richard Serra, Christo, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Craig Kauffman, Robert Mangold and Brice Marden.” Director Hugh Davies called the windfall “the largest single gift in the history of the museum” and said they were “conservatively”worth $25 million.
Great for these two institutions, and — oddly – neither museum announced the gift, at least no on their websites. You’d think such transformative gifts would be worth a press release, no? Or at least a link to the Union-Tribune article? Maybe a note on their Twitter feeds (here – for the Museum of Art — but no), though the contemporary museum did tweet about it. Is it because the donors are deceased?
If I were running one of these museums, I’d be more active spreading the news.
UPDATE, Mar. 22: OK, the San Diego Museum of Art has now posted a short item on its homepage, with a link to the newspaper article. Not idea, imho, but better than nothing.
UPDATE 2: Now there’s a press release online, with more images.