Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose Art Museum Christopher Bedford announced on Friday that collector, businessman and author Stephen M. Salny has promised to donate 48 works to the museum. 

They are all paper works by leading contemporary artists. 

Salny’s gift includes works by Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell and will add to the museum’s existing collection of these artists’ works. The gift also includes works by new artists to the Rose, including Joseph Albers, Richard Diebenkorn, Damien Hirst, Sol Lewitt, Brice Marden and Sea Scully. 

Salny, who sits on the Board of the Foundation for Art & Preservation in Embassies and on the accessions committee for contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, has several personal connections to Brandeis. 

Salny’s grandfather, Samuel M. Salny, was considered a friend to Brandeis from its founding.  As a child, Salny attended art programs with his mother at the Rose Art Museum that were led by Lois Foster.

 Salny said in a press release from the Rose, “It is because of this seminal affiliation with Brandeis, and my appreciation for my visits to the Rose Art Museum, which started at a young age, that inspired me to bequest my collection of contemporary prints to the Rose.” 

A major highlight of the donation are eleven of Kelly’s lithographs.

 The lithographs gifted by Salny along with the Rose’s previously held lithographs,  will show the evolution of the artist’s work over fifty years. 

Notable lithographs include “Green Curve” (1999), “Dartmouth” (2011) and “Blue-Green” (1970), as well as his breakthrough 1962 painting, “Blue White.” 

Included in the gift are  Frankenthaler’s “Sunshine After Rain” (1987) and “Ganymede” (1978). Other prints by Frankenthaler were recently featured in the Rose’s show “Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler.” 

Joining Motherwell’s “Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 58” that is currently at the Rose are “Summer Trident“ (1990), “The Black Wall (1981), “Red Open with White Line” (1979) and “Djarum” (1975). Salny’s gift also includes the first-ever piece of Hirst’s to be acquired by a museum.

Pieces from the Rose’s existing holdings by Ellsworth Kelly, along with pieces from Salny’s gift, will be on view Feb. 12 to Jun. 5.


        —Jaime Gropper