NORTON WINDFALL
Couple’s gift of 100 works ‘truly transformative’
Judie and Howard Ganek haven’t spent much time at the Norton Museum over the years. That said, it might come as a surprise that they’ve promised more than 100 works from their art collection to the West Palm Beach museum that’s undergoing a $100 million Norman Foster-designed expansion.
It certainly stunned Hope Alswang, executive director and chief executive officer.
The Ganeks, former Palm Beachers who now reside in West Palm Beach, Manhattan and Southampton, New York, have been high-level Norton members for several years, but they’ve never made a major donation of money or art.
Alswang knew they were collectors but she hadn’t seen their art. She didn’t know what to expect when a board member called her and said the Ganeks wanted to talk to her.
“Nothing prepared me for their apartment,” Alswang said. “It was completely beyond anything I could have imagined. When I walked in, there were 20 things right there that had been on my wish list forever.”
One of the first things she would have seen was a life-size figure grimacing at a mirror in the entry — Juan Munoz’s “Towards the Mirror.” A little farther on, she’d have encountered a giant mandala made up of butterflies — an untitled Damien Hirst work — and a figure slumped on the floor with his arms clasped over his head — Antony Gormley’s “Hold II.”
And that’s just the beginning.
A big mountain series painting by Ed Ruscha presides over the dining room. One of painter Sigmar Polke’s wry critiques of capitalist consumerism and a large Anselm Kiefer leadand-ash painting adorn the living room.
The Ganeks’ gift is “truly transformative,” said Cheryl Brutvan, director of curatorial affairs and curator of contemporary art. “Any museum would be thrilled to have this gift.”
It’s the largest, most significant art gift the museum has received since steel baron Ralph Norton founded the museum in 1941 and seeded it with 315 works.
Made up of paintings, sculptures, ceramics and photographs dating mainly from the 1960s to the present, the gift brings to the museum its first works by Polke, Hirst, Gormley, Theaster Gates, Alex Katz, Matthew Barney, Mario Merz and Kiki Smith. Artists with lesser works in the collection that now will be represented by major pieces include Donald Judd, Ruscha, Kiefer, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, and Gilbert and George (duo Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore).
“These are things we could never afford to buy because they’re so important and so expensive,” Alswang said
Selections from the gift will be displayed when the museum reopens in February after closing for six months to complete interior work and reinstall art.
After years of immersing himself in New York’s art scene, “I knew I didn’t want the collection to go to a big museum because it would end up in the basement,” Howard Ganek said. “As collectors, our pleasure is to have people see our art.”
He’d also heard that the Norton’s relatively new contemporary art collection needed strengthening. Beyond that, “Foster’s plan for the museum was superb,” he said. “My sense is you will have a very important museum here in West Palm Beach.”
Among other changes, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect’s plan calls for increasing gallery space by 35 percent, adding a sculpture garden and a dramatic new entrance on Dixie Highway, and restoring traffic flow and sight lines to respect architect Marion Sims Wyeth’s design for the original building.
The Ganeks have been collecting art for about as long as they’ve been married — 56 years.
They enjoy living with their art.
“I like looking at it and seeing different things in it,” Judie Ganek said. “The longer we have a piece, the more interesting it becomes.”
Howard Ganek has always been interested in art, he said. He even took painting and drawing classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, but instead of pursuing art, he opted to major in economics.
Retired for five years, he’s a former partner at the asset management firm Neuberger Berman in New York, where he worked for 40 years. His choice of employer fired his interest in collecting art.
The company’s founder, the late Roy Neuberger, amassed one of the most impressive collections of then-contemporary American art in private hands. Much of it resides at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York.
“I remember walking into the firm for the first time,” Howard Ganek said. “The first thing I saw was an Edward Hopper on the wall. The office was wallto-wall art.”
The couple’s interest in contemporary art also was piqued by their friendship with Arthur Goldberg, a Neuberger Berman partner who was in charge of the company’s art purchases in the 1990s, and his wife, Carol.
“The Ganeks bought well,” Alswang said. “Their eye is very special. They weren’t just buying whatever was of the moment.”
Collecting has been a joint project, but “Judie had a better eye than I did,” Howard Ganek said. “She liked cutting-edge art.”
It’s a good thing, too, her husband said, because those are the artists whose work has appreciated most in value.
The couple plans to hang on to their art for a while longer. But they hope their gift will have a more immediate effect.
“My hope is that other collectors like me will see the Norton as a perfect site for their collections,” Howard Ganek said.