Agnes Gund, the president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, sometimes
runs out of ready cash for her liberal philanthropy. “This is why I have
to sell so much art, because I promise things that I can’t really pay
for,” she told Andrew Goldstein, the editor of Artnet, last month. Hence Gund’s sale of “Masterpiece” (1962), by Roy
Lichtenstein, a painting that for years had hung above the mantel in her
Park Avenue apartment. She has given a hundred million dollars, from the
sale price of a hundred and sixty-five million, to establish the Art for
Justice Fund, dedicated to relieving mass incarceration in the United
States. (The Ford Foundation will administer the fund, as an extension
of its prior commitment to criminal-justice reform.) This is a new cause
for Gund, whose many past ones include Studio in a School, which she
founded, in 1977, to counter cuts to city and state funding for art
education in public schools, and, for the past fifteen years, a
concerted opposition to repealing the estate tax.

Several stories crisscross in Gund’s spectacular gesture. The happiest
is about her. She has been bettering New York for more than half a
century, since she arrived, from Cleveland, as a banking heiress with a
deep love of art, later bolstered by a master’s degree in art history
from Harvard and a gnawing social conscience. Her services to MOMA, as
a versatile official and an ever-ready patron, include steady pressure
for the recognition and hiring of women and minorities—for her, an
intimate concern. She has six African-American grandchildren. In person,
Gund is soft-spoken and serious, but given to touches of warm humor. Her
presence lends a familial air and an infectious self-respect to any art
event.

Another narrative pertains to the eclectic tribe of very rich people in
the vicinity of art and its institutions. The love of art—even the same
art—crosses political aisles. Steven A. Cohen, a hedge-fund billionaire
and a MOMA board member not usually associated with progressive causes,
bought “Masterpiece.” (Cohen and his wife, Alexandra, swelled a PAC for
Chris Christie with a few million dollars, in 2015, and reportedly
chipped in a million for Donald Trump’s Inauguration.) The art world
traditionally, and still, tilts to the left, but an increasing number of
conservatives populate its upper echelons of collecting and patronage.
The Koch brothers are both critically influential contributors to
conservative causes and major patrons of the arts. (They also have an
expressed interest in criminal-justice reform; perhaps they know of
Gund’s new project.) The Cohens just announced that their philanthropic
foundation will give fifty million dollars to MOMA, to support the museum’s expansion plan. This earns them naming
rights: the museum’s sixth floor will house the Steven and Alexandra
Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions.

Roy Lichtenstein died in 1997. What might he think of all this, if he
were alive today? He was a Democrat; he created prints in support of
Dukakis, in 1988, and of Clinton-Gore, in 1992. But his overriding drive
was to bring qualities of high art into taut accord with motifs from
commercial mass culture. There is a term for that kind of aspiration:
American. Pop art essentialized—or freeze-dried, as things developed—a
national dream of at least consumerist democracy. No amount of money,
Andy Warhol said, can buy you a better Coca-Cola than the one that a
homeless man on the street is drinking. Social historians, with critics
consulting, might explain the stages of how and why symbols of that
movement and moment, preëminently by Lichtenstein and Warhol, became
nine-figure top prizes for oligarchs.

Then there’s the matter of artistic values conflated with the prices
that the oligarchs are able—far beyond able, actually, given the
colossal scale of their fortunes—and eager to pay. In a world that made
more sense to me than ours does, “Masterpiece” would not now be, as the
Times reported, one of the fifteen most expensive art works ever sold.
It is a typical Lichtenstein, made “iconic” (a workhorse buzzword, these
days) by the echt nineteen-sixties cool of its subject and style. A
generically pretty woman gushes to a generically manly man, regarding a
stretched canvas that we glimpse from the back, “Why, Brad darling, this
painting is a masterpiece! My, soon you’ll have all of New York
clamoring for your work!” Lichtenstein invests a mediocre comic-strip
image with startling formal integrity. The work emits what auction
people call “wall power.” Did the artist make many paintings that are as
good, and some that are better? Yes, for what that’s worth, apropos a
market that steamrolls discrimination.

Finally, Gund’s coup initiates an unfolding tale of responsible luck.
She has said that she hopes other collectors will siphon excess money
through the crazily inflated art market to ameliorative worldly ends.
Some are already responding to her call. The Times reported that Laurie M. Tisch, a chairwoman of the Whitney Museum,
announced a contribution of half a million dollars to the Justice Fund,
from her sale of a Max Weber painting, saying of Gund, “I was moved by
her passion.” Call it volunteer taxation, pending enough of the
legislated kind, or, in Gund’s words for her aim, “solving problems
through art.”