Barbara Jakobson, an art world power broker who was a longtime trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and who nurtured young artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and David Salle, died on Aug. 25 in Manhattan. She was 92.
Her daughters, Jenna Torres and Maggie Wheeler, said her death, in a hospital, was from pneumonia.
A player in the art world before art was an asset class, Ms. Jakobson was a woman of modest privilege and discerning taste who collected not just works but also the people who made and sold them. Tart and dishy, she was socially strategic and opinionated, intimidating to some but a delight to many others, who valued the depth and breadth of her knowledge, her mentorship and her courtship of the new. She was known for her friendships, particularly with the influential dealer Leo Castelli, whose taste helped form her own.
“She knew everything about everyone,” Glenn Lowry, MoMA’s director, said. “And if you loved art, she loved you right back.”
Ms. Jakobson was known, too, for her Upper East Side townhouse, in which she lived since 1965 and in which she skillfully assembled paintings, sculptures, photographs and furniture that told the story of modern art and design. There were works by Frank Stella, Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns; by Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons; and a few of the bentwood chairs designed by Frank Gehry for the furniture company Knoll — a partnership she had helped broker. There was a swoopy ’50s sofa by Vladimir Kagan that the designer loved so much, he had bought it back from a collector; Ms. Jakobson persuaded him to sell it to her.
“I promise it will be worth it to you, with all the famous bottoms that will sit on that sofa,” she recalled telling him.
Pilar Viladas, writing in The New York Times in 2005, said that the house “illustrated a sensibility that roved way ahead of its time, and in the process became something of a landmark.”
Horst P. Horst photographed Ms. Jakobson at home for Vogue in 1973, and Robert Mapplethorpe took her portrait in 1977, looking formidable on a velvet sofa. Mapplethorpe and Ms. Jakobson often dined together, she driving downtown to meet him in her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, after which she would drop him off at one of his late-night haunts, like the Mineshaft.
“In the art world, there are artists and curators and dealers and other people with defined roles,” the gallerist Jeffrey Deitch said. “But then there are people like Barbara who are essential to how this whole system works, how the consensus of art and quality is formed.”
“She was instrumental in connecting MoMA trustee types with what was going on downtown,” Mr. Deitch added. “And in introducing downtown artists to uptown patrons.”
Ms. Jakobson joined MoMA in the 1960s as a member of what used to be known as the Junior Council, an apprenticeship program designed to groom future patrons. She joined the museum’s board of trustees in 1974, valued not for the size of her donations but for her skill in horse trading and her zeal for the arts and architecture.
Mr. Lowry said Ms. Jakobson was instrumental in persuading Mr. Castelli to give the museum Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bed” in 1989. Rauschenberg had taken the quilt and pillow from his bed and worked them over with paint in 1955; “Bed” became a hugely significant piece, one of the artist’s first so-called combines. Mr. Castelli had bought it for $1,200; when he offered it to MoMA, it was valued at $10 million.
Ms. Jakobson was also an adviser to the committee that chose the architect for the museum’s expansion at the turn of the 21st century. That involved a field trip to Europe with fellow trustees to meet with architects under consideration and tour their buildings. In an oral history of Ms. Jakobson’s tenure conducted by MoMA, she described those stops in zesty detail. “A giant testosterone explosion,” she said of Mr. Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. The commission ultimately went to the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi.
Alice Tisch, a MoMA board member since 2000, said that Ms. Jakobson had embraced her when she joined, “as she embraced so many others.”
“She whispered in my ear,” Ms. Tisch added. “She knew who had done what to whom and when. She knew all the designers, all the artists. She had the closest of relationships with many of them, in all the ways you can imagine.”
Barbara Joan Petchesky was born on Jan. 31, 1933, in Brooklyn and grew up on Eastern Parkway — the Champs-Élysées of Brooklyn, she liked to call it, quoting Joan Rivers — across the street from the Brooklyn Museum, which became her backyard. Her mother, Rose (Parnes) Petchesky, was the daughter of a clothing manufacturer; her father, Joseph Petchesky, was a lawyer. Barbara married John Jakobson, who would become a stockbroker, when she was a junior at Smith College studying art history and he was at Harvard Business School.
The couple moved to New York in the mid-1950s, and Ms. Jakobson worked for a short time in the junior department at Lord & Taylor. After a cousin introduced her to Mr. Castelli, whose gallery was then on East 77th Street in Manhattan, her life took a turn. When Mr. Castelli offered Jasper Johns his first show, in 1958, Ms. Jakobson bought one of the works on an installment plan. She began to haunt all the uptown galleries, and when Mr. Castelli moved to SoHo in 1971, and other gallerists followed, she haunted those, too.
The Jakobsons divorced in 1983. In addition to her daughters, Ms. Jakobson is survived by a brother, Harry Petchesky, and three grandchildren. Her son, John Paul Jakobson, died in 2004.
Mr. Salle recalled meeting Ms. Jakobson when she bought a painting of his in 1980, when he was still in his 20s. “It was as if I already knew her,” he said. “Her understanding of artists and how they do what they do was uncommon. One of Barbara’s charms was having no official role or job title, apart from that of museum trustee. She could move about freely behind the scenes, and she advised a wide array of people. She knew how the world worked, and she got things done.”
Ms. Jakobson told Vanity Fair in 1989: “When I become enthusiastic about an artist, I do not keep my mouth shut. Within five minutes, the jungle drums are beating.”
She was savvy as a collector, and her taste was eclectic. When a tree died in the sliver of yard behind her townhouse, she painted it Yves Klein blue. Two decades ago, Ms. Jakobson sold an important work of Frank Stella’s from 1971, which was shaped like overlapping trapezoids; afterward, she painted around the space where it had hung, so that the wall looked like it was marked by the ghost of the canvas.
“I see the house as a vessel for an ongoing autobiographical exercise,” she told New York magazine in 2021. “I keep the transformation as proof of life.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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