Barbara Jakobson, an iconic collector who was identified for wide-reaching internet of relationships with artists, sellers, and curators, died at 92 on August 25 in Manhattan. The trigger was pneumonia, in keeping with the New York Occasions.
Jakobson, who appeared on ARTnews’s High 200 Collectors checklist thrice, from 1990 to 1992, was a central determine of the New York artwork world for many years. She had shut relationships with a few of the period’s high sellers, together with Sidney Janis, Ileana Sonnabend, and Leo Castelli.
She was additionally a longtime trustee of the Museum of Trendy Artwork, becoming a member of its Junior Council within the Nineteen Sixties, changing into the pinnacle of that group in 1971, and being elected a full-fledged board member in 1974. However her historical past with the establishment prolonged even additional again to when an aunt of hers gave her a MoMA membership when she was 12, Jakobson stated in an interview for a MoMA oral historical past in 1997.
Associated Articles
Whereas serving on the Junior Council, Jakobson additionally turned a founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem, which opened in 1968. “As soon as we acquired it began, the thought was that we wouldn’t simply be a board of white downtown New Yorkers, we might begin it, we might attempt to get it going and we’d go away,” she stated within the oral historical past about her involvement with the Studio Museum.
As a MoMA trustee, she persuaded Castelli to donated Robert Rauschenberg’s Mattress (1955), one of many artist’s first “Combines,” to the museum; it’s now a cornerstone of MoMA’s everlasting assortment. She was additionally a part of the committee that chosen Yoshio Taniguchi to function the architect for MoMA’s $850 million growth, which opened in 2004.
In an interview with the Occasions, vendor Jeffrey Deitch characterised Jakobson as certainly one of a choose few folks “who’re important to how this complete system works, how the consensus of artwork and high quality is fashioned.”
Jakobson’s townhouse within the Higher East Aspect, which she moved into in 1965 and during which she raised her three youngsters, was crammed together with her assortment. “I see the home as a vessel for an ongoing autobiographical train,” she instructed Curbed in 2021 for its “Nice Rooms” column. “I preserve the transformation as proof of life.”
On the bottom ground on the time was a bar product of Con Ed barricades and designed by Tom Sachs. Elsewhere had been works by Matthew Barney, Richard Artschwager, Barbara Bloom, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Peter Halley, and Robert Morris, whose felt piece has not moved since she acquired it in 1970. A portrait of her by Robert Mapplethorpe, one of many many artists who she additionally solid a friendship with, hangs above a hearth on the townhouse’s parlor ground.
In 2005, she bought 41 works of each artwork and design from her assortment, which she had begun to assemble within the Nineteen Fifties, at Christie’s. Amongst them had been a brass-and-resin chair by Italian designer Carlo Mollino, Josef Albers’s Homage to the Sq.: Consonant (1957), Diane Arbus’s Xmas Tree in a Dwelling Room, Levittown, L.I. (1963), and Frank Stella’s Felstzyn III (1971). (The define of the place the Stella as soon as hung continues to be seen in her townhouse.)
A number of of the heaps exceeded their pre-sale estimates, although the Stella bought for $72,000 in opposition to an $80,000 to $120,000 estimate. The sale made $1.9 million, with 10 % of the proceeds benefitting MoMA’s Acquisition Fund. She additionally used the funds to pay for brand spanking new commissions for her dwelling, together with the Tom Sachs–designed bar.
Jakobson was born Barbara Petchesky on January 31, 1933, in Brooklyn. She grew up on Jap Parkway throughout from the Brooklyn Museum. She studied artwork historical past at Smith School, and through her junior 12 months there, she married John Jakobson, whom she had met when she was 17, simply earlier than beginning at Smith. On the time of their marriage, John was a pupil at Harvard Enterprise Faculty and would go on to have a profession as a stockbroker. (The couple divorced in 1983.)
They moved to New York within the mid-’50s, and Barbara Jakobson would quickly grow to be immersed within the metropolis’s burgeoning postwar artwork world. She quickly met Castelli, by way of an introduction from her cousin, and purchased a Jasper Johns works from the artist’s first Castelli present in 1958.
Her first buy was a piece by German artist Adolf Fleischmann as a result of she couldn’t afford a piece by Piet Mondrian, her favourite artist, so “I simply discovered the closest factor to a Mondrian that I might,” she stated within the MoMA oral historical past.
Jakobson would go on to develop her assortment over the subsequent seven many years, however on the core of it was her love of artwork and artists. “That is what drives me and what retains me taken with artwork, the artwork of my very own time,” she stated within the oral historical past. “I look to the artists to let me know what we will probably be considering as a result of the artist all the time is there first, they’re all the time these [C]assandras, no matter it’s, whether or not it’s a brand new means of portray, that’s why it‘s fascinating for me to take a look at the work of recent artists.”
