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, according to the New York Times.
Jakobson, who appeared on ARTnews’s High 200 Collectors record thrice, from 1990 to 1992, was a central determine of the New York artwork world for many years. She had shut relationships with among the period’s high sellers, together with Sidney Janis, Ileana Sonnabend, and Leo Castelli.
She was additionally a longtime trustee of the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, becoming a member of its Junior Council within the Nineteen Sixties, turning 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 said in an interview for a MoMA oral historical past in 1997.
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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 obtained it began, the thought was that we wouldn’t simply be a board of white downtown New Yorkers, we’d begin it, we’d attempt to get it going and we’d go away,” she mentioned 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 Instances, supplier Jeffrey Deitch characterised Jakobson as one in all a choose few individuals “who’re important to how this entire 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 by which she raised her three kids, was stuffed along with her assortment. “I see the home as a vessel for an ongoing autobiographical train,” she told Curbed in 2021 for its “Nice Rooms” column. “I hold the transformation as proof of life.”
On the bottom ground on the time was a bar manufactured from 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 Residing Room, Levittown, L.I. (1963), and Frank Stella’s Felstzyn III (1971). (The define of the place the Stella as soon as hung remains to be seen in her townhouse.)
A number of of the tons exceeded their pre-sale estimates, although the Stella bought for $72,000 towards 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 house, 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 Faculty, 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 scholar at Harvard Enterprise College 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 change into immersed within the metropolis’s burgeoning postwar artwork world. She quickly met Castelli, through an introduction from her cousin, and acquired 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 may,” she mentioned 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 enthusiastic about artwork, the artwork of my very own time,” she mentioned within the oral historical past. “I look to the artists to let me know what we shall 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 manner of portray, that’s why it‘s fascinating for me to take a look at the work of recent artists.”
