The Whitney Museum of American Art and Storm King Arts Center in Mountainville, N.Y. announced a major gift today, revealing that the Lipman Family Foundation recently donated David Smith’s Cubi XXI (1964) to the two institutions.
The exact value of the gift is not known, but Eli Broad paid $23.8 million for a work in the same series, Cubi XXVIII, at Sotheby’s in 2005, then the highest price ever reached for a contemporary work of art.
Whitney director Adam Weinberg told The New York Times the gift was also culturally significant.
“While we have major work from most of Smith’s career, we did not have a ‘Cubi,’ ” Mr. Weinberg said. “He only did 28 of them.”
The Times notes that the Lipman family patriarch Howard Lipman, was a great patron of both the Whitney and Storm King before his death in 1992.
