KAREN and J. ROBERT DUNCAN
LINCOLN, NEB.
CONTEMPORARY SCULPTURE AND ART
The rolling land of Lincoln is perhaps an unexpected site for enormous contemporary sculpture, but the 40-acre estate of Karen and Robert Duncan is dotted with a dozen such pieces, including a giant bronze Louise Bourgeois spider and oversized works by Julian Schnabel and Beverly Pepper. Thisisn’t merely a sculpture garden, though. The Duncans own more than 700 works, mostly three-dimensional, by well-known artists (Georgia O’Keeffe, Niki de St. Phalle, Roy Lichtenstein) as well as by unknowns. They have some paintings (including Motherwell, Sultan and Hung Liu), video works (Tony Oursler and Nam June Paik among them) and a growing photography collection. “We buy what we love, no matter what the medium, no matter known or unknown artist, no matter fine art or craft, no matter easy or tough and controversial,” says Robert. “It’s an eclectic gathering of beautiful things, a very personal collection.” The couple has established friendships with some of the artists whose works they collect, which adds a special pleasure. In 2003, 70 artists came to a weekend celebration the couple hosted. “We plan to do that again in 2007 and hope for an even larger turnout,” says Robert. “We host many tours of our collection; anyone seriously interested in art or architecture is welcome.” Not without reason, this magazine has called the Duncans “the Medicis of the Midwest” (Art & Antiques, May 2005).

BARNEY EBSWORTH
SEATTLE
MODERNIST AMERICAN ART
Barney Ebsworth has been collecting mostly Modernist American art for about 30 years, compiling a collection that numbers more than 200 works by artists including Calder, Warhol, de Kooning, Hockney, Hopper, Johns, Pollock and O’Keeffe. Wherever he calls home, he plays a pivotal role in cultural life. When he lived in St. Louis, he was a museum trustee and generous donor there. He currently resides in Seattle, where he is a trustee of and major donor to the Seattle Art Museum. Ebsworth has built a unique home-cum-gallery on Lake Washington— an architecturally lauded structure that, although 14,000 square feet, was designed to blend comfortably into the landscaped setting— and he opens his home for numerous arts benefits. (See Art & Architecture: The Ebsworth Collection & Residence, William Stout Publishers, 2006.) Seventy of his works were exhibited in “Twentieth-Century American Art: The Ebsworth Collection,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where he is a member of the trustees council and co-chairman of the collectors committee. He has given to the NGA works by Charles Sheeler and Arthur Dove, among other gifts. He also is a commissioner of The Smithsonian American Art Museum. When asked once about the fate of his collection, Ebsworth answered, “I’m not going to sell them, that’s for sure.” It’s the answer you’d expect from a holder of the 2002 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture’s Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Award for Outstanding Patronage of the Arts.

JULIAN I. EDISON
ST. LOUIS
MINIATURE BOOKS
Books the size of a playing card, a postage stamp or your thumbnail have beguiled Julian Edison since his college days. Today he has a library of many thousands of these remarkable miniatures spanning 4,000 years, almost all 3 inches high or smaller, which fill bookshelves in his library. Some might be hard to see: His smallest book is less than 1 millimeter high, printed by the Tokyo-based Toppan Printing Company in 2000. “Miniature books have been produced for reasons of practicality, curiosity and aesthetics,” he says. “Many people think of these as novelties which can’t be read, and for the most part nothing could be further from the truth. Most of them don’t require a magnifying glass to be read. The type size and the size of the book don’t necessarily correspond.” Harvard’s Houghton Library held an exhibition of highlights from the collection in 2005. This spring, the Grolier Club in New York will hold an exhibition of highlights from it, to coincide with the publication of Miniature Books: 4,000 Years of Tiny Treasures (Harry N. Abrams Inc.), which Edison co-edited with Boston rare book dealer Anne C. Bromer. “Bringing knowledge of this segment of book publishing to the larger world is, I hope, our tiny contribution to the world’s culture,” Edison says.

MITZI and WARREN EISENBERG
SHORT HILLS, N.J.
+ SUSAN and LEONARD FEINSTEIN
LONG ISLAND, N.Y.
CONTEMPORARY ART
The Eisenbergs and Feinsteins are tied by many threads. Both couples have been collecting contemporary art for more than a decade. The women are trustees of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the only museum in the city devoted exclusively to contemporary art. The men are the founding partners and co-chairmen of Bed, Bath & Beyond, the thriving national housewares chain. And the four are close friends, often traveling together. Thus, it’s perhaps unusual but not surprising that the couples together pledged the lead gift, reputedly around $10 million, for the New Museum’s new building on New York’s gentrifying Bowery, scheduled to open this year. “We’ve made a commitment to the New Museum because it’s truly a unique New York institution and because of its unwavering dedication to contemporary art,” says Warren Eisenberg. “The new building will be a new landmark for the city,” adds Susan Feinstein.

ROBERT HATFIELD ELLSWORTH
NEW YORK CITY
CHINESE ART AND ARTIFACTS
Robert Hatfield Ellsworth is a renowned scholar, collector, dealer and author in the fields of classical Chinese furniture and Chinese 19th- and 20th-century paintings. In 1970 he wrote the first authoritative book on dating Chinese furniture; this classic reference work was reprinted in 1998. Ellsworth, who has been a dealer in Chinese art since 1958, gave nearly 500 Chinese paintings to the Metropolitan Museum in 1986, which featured 90 of them in a special exhibition in 2001. All of these works had been previously reproduced by Ellsworth in his epic work, the hard-to-find three-volume Later Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 1800–1950 (Random House, 1987). His most recent book is the twovolume Chinese Furniture: The Hung Collection (AMR, 2005). Ellsworth, who has traveled to China many times, spent years aiding the Chinese in raising funds for the restoration of temples, residences and decaying historic villages. He is, not surprisingly, greatly honored in China for these efforts.

SARAH GAMBLE EPSTEIN
WASHINGTON, D.C.
EDVARD MUNCH WORKS ON PAPER
Sarah Epstein, with her former husband, Lionel, has one of the largest private collections of works on paper by Edvard Munch in the United States. Epstein became fascinated with the artist when she first saw an exhibition of his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 1950, moved by what she described in an article she wrote in 1997 (Scandinavian Review) as “anxious, lonely looking individuals in a crowd ... I was so taken by these images that Munch immediately became my artist for life.” She began collecting with the purchase of three prints in 1962. Today the Epstein Family Collection numbers more than 300 graphics— drawings and a few oil paintings—and an accompanying oral history of people who knew the artists, compiled by Epstein. “Over the years,” she wrote, “on numerous trips to Norway, Germany and France, I taped interviews with many people who had known Munch and many whose portraits he painted.” Epstein plans to donate the entire collection to the National Gallery of Art, which held a major exhibition of her collection in1997 that subsequently traveled to other museums, and published Edvard Munch: Master Prints from the Epstein Family Collection, with text by Epstein. She also wrote the foreword to Munch and Women: Image and Myth, 1997. And, in further testament to the strength of her commitment to Munch’s oeuvre, she commissioned a composition by Swedish composer Ulf Grahn inspired by themes in Munch works for a concert which premiered in her home.

DAPHNE FARAGO
LITTLE COMPTON, R.I., AND KEY BISCAYNE, FLA.
STUDIO JEWELRY AND FIBER ART
Wearable works of art using unconventional forms and materials.” That’s how the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston describes a recent gift from Daphne and Peter Farago of more than 600 pieces of contemporary studio jewelry, mostly made after 1940 by American and European artists. (Highlights of the collection will be on display May 2007–Feb. 2008.) Farago has amassed one of the largest and finest collections of these unusual pieces, defined as one-of-a-kind or limited-production objects, created by artistscraftsmen in independent studios. Her first collection was of early American objects. “I loved the uniqueness of a single object made by one person, so it was an easy transition to studio jewelry. And as my collection grew I decided that I would like it to go to a museum, so I tried to form a group a museum would want,” she says. The Faragos additionally gave the museum 80 contemporary fiber art pieces. They also are supporters of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, which opened a Daphne Farago Wing in 1994.