Art Institute of Chicago gets its largest gift ever, including 9 Warhols

Featured on chicagotribune.com

A major private contemporary art collection with a value estimated at $400 million is being donated to the Art Institute of Chicago by local philanthropists Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, in what the museum is calling the largest gift of art in its history and a coup for the institution and the city.

Numbering 42 pieces, stocked with iconic works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and many other instantly recognizable names and spanning a time period from 1953 to 2011, experts called it one of the most significant collections of its kind in the world.

"This is one of the landmark gifts in our 136-year history" and "a great gift to the city of Chicago," said Douglas Druick, the museum's president and director.

Museum trustees formally accepted the donation in a meeting Tuesday evening.

"It's a powerful statement to have a collection of this international stature staying here in Chicago," said Robert Levy, chairman of the Art Institute's board. "It's unbelievably exciting for the Art Institute, for the City of Chicago, for the entire art community of Chicago. It's all good."

The Art Institute will display the collection of paintings, sculpture and photographs in the second-floor galleries of its Modern Wing for the next half-century, as the Edlis/Neeson Collection, beginning in January.

That agreement was crucial, Edlis said.

"The Art Institute made us an offer that I couldn't refuse, which is they will show the art for 50 years. A lot of collectors never get that chance," said Edlis, who is on the board of and a major donor to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and has supported the New Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Edlis and Neeson, who live in a Gold Coast high-rise and in Aspen, Colo., keep their own collection at 200 works, he said, and have been frustrated by what typically happens with donated art.

"They always end up being shown for a short period of time, and then they end up in storage," said Edlis, 89, who immigrated with his family from Austria as a teenager in 1941, moved to Chicago in 1950 and made his fortune founding a local plastics business, Apollo Plastics. "I kept asking them: 'Do you need another warehouse full of art?'"

He said once the Art Institute had settled on the works it wanted, he and the museum's experts independently estimated their value, and both came up with almost the same $400 million figure.

The significance of the gift, though, is far more than monetary.

"At every turn this fills a gap with an iconic masterpiece, but the essence of the story is pop art," said James Rondeau, the Art Institute's curator of contemporary art. "Chicago in general and the Art Institute in particular have been historically poor in collections of classic pop art, and this in one single gift changes that forever."

"In recent memory I cannot recall a more important gift to an institution that comprises several generations of artists so clearly and so astutely," said Laura Paulson, chairman of postwar and contemporary art at the auction house Christie's. "I can't think of anything in the postwar and contemporary art world this generous and this meaningful."

Other works in the donation include sculpture by Cy Twombly, Jeff Koons and Charles Ray, photographs by Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, and paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and Gerhard Richter. The works tend to be pivotal ones in the lives of these artists, Paulson said.

"It's not simply names and numbers," Druick said. "It's the works themselves. It's the best of the best. These are incredibly passionate and discerning collectors who have very ably refined their collections over time. … It's part of the tradition of the Art Institute. It's not that we have X dozen Monets. It's the Monets we have."

Madeleine Grynsztejn, director of the MCA, said she considered the Edlis/Neeson gift a major triumph locally.

Click here to read the full article or view the video interview with the donor.