A major gift to SAM
An art collecting couple recently gifted more than a dozen 20th-century abstract expressionist and European masterworks, collectively worth about $400 million, to the Seattle Art Museum. SAM plans on opening the collection to the public in October.
Included are works by Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and three often overlooked women artists of that era — Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler.
“The acquisition means that ‘in one gift, in one fell swoop,’ SAM will have one of the best public collections of New York school paintings in the country.”
Abstract expressionism developed in New York in the 1940s and 1950s.
