100 Top Collectors Who Are Making a Difference
March 2007
AARON FLEISCHMAN
WASHINGTON, D.C.
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Aaron Fleischman, the Washington communications and utilities mega-lawyer, has been building one of the country’s major art collections over the past 20 years. His holdings range from early 20th-century European abstraction to the present and include outstanding examples of scores of important modern European masters, as well as A-list American Modernists, Abstract Expressionists, Pop artists and Minimalists. “What’s most impressive about his collection is that it runs literally from the beginning of the 20th century to today, and in every case the artists are represented at their highest level of accomplishment,” says Lisa Dennison, director of the Guggenheim. “He also collects several artists in depth; you can see the whole history of a career in a few key paintings.” Fleischman is a frequent lender to museum exhibitions. In the past year, his David Smith sculpture “Sculptor and Model” was in shows at both the Whitney and the Guggenheim and his 1934 Picasso “Tête de Femme, profil droit (Marie-Thérèse)” was featured in the Whitney’s “Picasso and American Art” catalog. Other works from his collection have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago. Fleischman serves on boards of trustees and committees at museums in Washington, New Orleans, New York and Miami.
JOHN C. and ELIZABETH FONTAINE
NEW YORK CITY
AMERICAN, ASIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN ART
Over the years, Jack and Betty Fontaine have filled their Manhattan apartment with an eclectic collection of American, Asian and Latin American art and decorative objects. It started, simply enough, in the 1950s with a couple of prints. “We didn’t set out to make a collection. We’ve bought what we like, what has meaning for us and what works well in our home,” Betty says. “When we think about our collection, Betty and I immediately think of the National Gallery, which we visit as often as we can, because in a very real sense, the Gallery is part of our collection, as it is every American’s,” says Jack, who was recently elected chairman of the NGA’s board of trustees. He just retired after 12 years as chairman of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and 30 years on its board. The foundation has a history with the NGA: When the Kress Foundation dispersed its collection of more than 3,000 pieces of European art between 1947 and 1961, 1,800 works were given to the National Gallery of Art.
ELLA FONTANALS-CISNEROS
MIAMI
LATIN AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY ART
The hot-hot Miami art scene continues to evolve. The rapidly expanding Miami Art Museum (MAM), established in 1996, and Miami Art Central (MAC), established in 2003, have just signed a cooperative agreement. MAC, a kunsthalle created and supported by Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, has distinguished itself by its international and experimental programming, and will henceforth produce these cultural events for MAM. “As an active member of MAM’s board of trustees, I felt that the missions of MAM and MAC were converging,” says Cisneros. “This partnership [known as MAC@MAM] provides an elegant solution.” Cisneros is the force and money behind another well-regarded Miami institution, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, known as CIFO, which she established in 2002. CIFO is dedicated to promoting “emerging and mid-career contemporary multi-disciplinary artists in Latin America,” providing grants, commissions and group shows. Occupying a redesigned warehouse in the Wynwood Art District (with a mosaic tile façade that looks like a bamboo jungle), CIFO showcases Cisneros’ collection of abstractgeometric and contemporary art from Latin America, and contemporary international art with an emphasis on photography and video art.
MAXINE and STUART FRANKEL
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH.
CONTEMPORARY ART AND CERAMICS
Every academic art museum needs supporters like Maxine and Stuart Frankel, whose eponymous foundation gave $10 million in 2004 to support an addition to the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), Ann Arbor, the largest gift in the museum’s history. The new 53,000- square-foot wing will more than double the museum’s present space when it opens in 2008. It will be known as The Maxine and Stuart Frankel and the Frankel Family Wing. Maxine serves on the national advisory boards for UMMA and for the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York. She is on the board of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, a museum based on Donald Judd’s artistic theories about the interrelationship between art and the surrounding landscapes, and chairs The Cranbrook Academy of Art and The Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills) board of governors. The Frankels have built an outstanding personal collection of contemporary art and ceramics, including works by Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou and Barbara Hepworth, which they loan to museums around the world.
PATRICIA and PHILLIP FROST
MIAMI BEACH
AMERICAN ABSTRACT ART
Say “Florida International University” and the names of Patricia and Phillip Frost instantly surface. The Frosts gave the lead naming gift to the university, for its Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, which, in its rebuilt and greatly expanded form, will open in 2008. A medical doctor, Phillip is the founder of the IVAX Corporation, which develops and markets pharmaceutical products; Patricia has been a public school educator for nearly 30 years. Together, they assembled a representative collection of American abstract art from the 1930s and ’40s by artists like László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, John Sennhauser and Charles Green Shaw. In 1987, they gave this collection to The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art, which in 1989 published The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection, American Abstraction, 1930– 1945 by Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Patricia is chairman of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Board and chairman emeritus of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Last year, Phillip was elected a regent of the American Art Museum, where the Frosts have established an endowment that helps fund The Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award, which annually honors a scholarly essay in American art history that has appeared in the museum’s journal, American Art.
DAVID and DANIELLE GANEK
CONNECTICUT
PHOTOGRAPHY, CONTEMPORARY ART
Hedge fund investor David Ganek and his wife, Danielle, are active collectors across a number of fields—painting, sculpture, photography and video, with an emphasis on works from the 1990s by artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Damien Hirst. In 2004 the couple made a promised gift to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art of 13 rare vintage Diane Arbus prints, more than doubling the museum’s holdings by the legendary photographer. Included are some of Arbus’ more famous images, such as “A young waitress at a nudist camp, N.J., 1963,” and “A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968.” According to the Met, the gift represents one of the most significant acquisitions of 20th-century photography in the museum’s history, all the more so because the prints were made by Arbus and acquired directly from her estate by the couple. Ganek, who runs a hedge fund called Level Global Investors, is reported to have commissioned Ed Ruscha in 2003 to paint one of his signature word pictures for the firm’s corporate headquarters using the word “Level.”
STEPHEN A. GEPPI
BALTIMORE
COMICS MEMORABILIA
Step right up, kids of all ages. Steve Geppi’s Entertainment Museum has something to amuse and inform just about everyone. GEM, which opened in 2006, is a sprightly history of America’s comics, and their spillover influence on toys and board games, animation cels, movie posters and advertisements. The thousands of items on view, almost all of them owned by Geppi, fill 17,000 square feet above a baseball museum at Baltimore’s Camden Yards— which is fitting because Geppi is a minority owner of the Orioles, the fulfillment of yet another boyhood dream. To give historical context to the mass of material, objects are arranged by era and create a lively and amusing continuum of pop culture. “Look around the museum and you’ll see that the history of popular culture is so tightly woven into the social fabric of the United States that it parallels mainstream history,” Geppi says. He has been collecting comics memorabilia all his life, and this infatuation eventually led to his founding Diamond Comic Distributors Inc., the largest distributor of Englishlanguage comic books.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Aaron Fleischman, the Washington communications and utilities mega-lawyer, has been building one of the country’s major art collections over the past 20 years. His holdings range from early 20th-century European abstraction to the present and include outstanding examples of scores of important modern European masters, as well as A-list American Modernists, Abstract Expressionists, Pop artists and Minimalists. “What’s most impressive about his collection is that it runs literally from the beginning of the 20th century to today, and in every case the artists are represented at their highest level of accomplishment,” says Lisa Dennison, director of the Guggenheim. “He also collects several artists in depth; you can see the whole history of a career in a few key paintings.” Fleischman is a frequent lender to museum exhibitions. In the past year, his David Smith sculpture “Sculptor and Model” was in shows at both the Whitney and the Guggenheim and his 1934 Picasso “Tête de Femme, profil droit (Marie-Thérèse)” was featured in the Whitney’s “Picasso and American Art” catalog. Other works from his collection have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago. Fleischman serves on boards of trustees and committees at museums in Washington, New Orleans, New York and Miami.
JOHN C. and ELIZABETH FONTAINE
NEW YORK CITY
AMERICAN, ASIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN ART
Over the years, Jack and Betty Fontaine have filled their Manhattan apartment with an eclectic collection of American, Asian and Latin American art and decorative objects. It started, simply enough, in the 1950s with a couple of prints. “We didn’t set out to make a collection. We’ve bought what we like, what has meaning for us and what works well in our home,” Betty says. “When we think about our collection, Betty and I immediately think of the National Gallery, which we visit as often as we can, because in a very real sense, the Gallery is part of our collection, as it is every American’s,” says Jack, who was recently elected chairman of the NGA’s board of trustees. He just retired after 12 years as chairman of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and 30 years on its board. The foundation has a history with the NGA: When the Kress Foundation dispersed its collection of more than 3,000 pieces of European art between 1947 and 1961, 1,800 works were given to the National Gallery of Art.
ELLA FONTANALS-CISNEROS
MIAMI
LATIN AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY ART
The hot-hot Miami art scene continues to evolve. The rapidly expanding Miami Art Museum (MAM), established in 1996, and Miami Art Central (MAC), established in 2003, have just signed a cooperative agreement. MAC, a kunsthalle created and supported by Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, has distinguished itself by its international and experimental programming, and will henceforth produce these cultural events for MAM. “As an active member of MAM’s board of trustees, I felt that the missions of MAM and MAC were converging,” says Cisneros. “This partnership [known as MAC@MAM] provides an elegant solution.” Cisneros is the force and money behind another well-regarded Miami institution, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, known as CIFO, which she established in 2002. CIFO is dedicated to promoting “emerging and mid-career contemporary multi-disciplinary artists in Latin America,” providing grants, commissions and group shows. Occupying a redesigned warehouse in the Wynwood Art District (with a mosaic tile façade that looks like a bamboo jungle), CIFO showcases Cisneros’ collection of abstractgeometric and contemporary art from Latin America, and contemporary international art with an emphasis on photography and video art.
MAXINE and STUART FRANKEL
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICH.
CONTEMPORARY ART AND CERAMICS
Every academic art museum needs supporters like Maxine and Stuart Frankel, whose eponymous foundation gave $10 million in 2004 to support an addition to the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), Ann Arbor, the largest gift in the museum’s history. The new 53,000- square-foot wing will more than double the museum’s present space when it opens in 2008. It will be known as The Maxine and Stuart Frankel and the Frankel Family Wing. Maxine serves on the national advisory boards for UMMA and for the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York. She is on the board of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, a museum based on Donald Judd’s artistic theories about the interrelationship between art and the surrounding landscapes, and chairs The Cranbrook Academy of Art and The Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills) board of governors. The Frankels have built an outstanding personal collection of contemporary art and ceramics, including works by Eva Hesse, Lee Bontecou and Barbara Hepworth, which they loan to museums around the world.
PATRICIA and PHILLIP FROST
MIAMI BEACH
AMERICAN ABSTRACT ART
Say “Florida International University” and the names of Patricia and Phillip Frost instantly surface. The Frosts gave the lead naming gift to the university, for its Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, which, in its rebuilt and greatly expanded form, will open in 2008. A medical doctor, Phillip is the founder of the IVAX Corporation, which develops and markets pharmaceutical products; Patricia has been a public school educator for nearly 30 years. Together, they assembled a representative collection of American abstract art from the 1930s and ’40s by artists like László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, John Sennhauser and Charles Green Shaw. In 1987, they gave this collection to The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art, which in 1989 published The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection, American Abstraction, 1930– 1945 by Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Patricia is chairman of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Board and chairman emeritus of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Last year, Phillip was elected a regent of the American Art Museum, where the Frosts have established an endowment that helps fund The Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award, which annually honors a scholarly essay in American art history that has appeared in the museum’s journal, American Art.
DAVID and DANIELLE GANEK
CONNECTICUT
PHOTOGRAPHY, CONTEMPORARY ART
Hedge fund investor David Ganek and his wife, Danielle, are active collectors across a number of fields—painting, sculpture, photography and video, with an emphasis on works from the 1990s by artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Damien Hirst. In 2004 the couple made a promised gift to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art of 13 rare vintage Diane Arbus prints, more than doubling the museum’s holdings by the legendary photographer. Included are some of Arbus’ more famous images, such as “A young waitress at a nudist camp, N.J., 1963,” and “A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968.” According to the Met, the gift represents one of the most significant acquisitions of 20th-century photography in the museum’s history, all the more so because the prints were made by Arbus and acquired directly from her estate by the couple. Ganek, who runs a hedge fund called Level Global Investors, is reported to have commissioned Ed Ruscha in 2003 to paint one of his signature word pictures for the firm’s corporate headquarters using the word “Level.”
STEPHEN A. GEPPI
BALTIMORE
COMICS MEMORABILIA
Step right up, kids of all ages. Steve Geppi’s Entertainment Museum has something to amuse and inform just about everyone. GEM, which opened in 2006, is a sprightly history of America’s comics, and their spillover influence on toys and board games, animation cels, movie posters and advertisements. The thousands of items on view, almost all of them owned by Geppi, fill 17,000 square feet above a baseball museum at Baltimore’s Camden Yards— which is fitting because Geppi is a minority owner of the Orioles, the fulfillment of yet another boyhood dream. To give historical context to the mass of material, objects are arranged by era and create a lively and amusing continuum of pop culture. “Look around the museum and you’ll see that the history of popular culture is so tightly woven into the social fabric of the United States that it parallels mainstream history,” Geppi says. He has been collecting comics memorabilia all his life, and this infatuation eventually led to his founding Diamond Comic Distributors Inc., the largest distributor of Englishlanguage comic books.
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