Anne Bass, the Philanthropist and Art Collector Who Captivated New York’s High Society, Has Died at 79

Anne Bass, the elegant, curious, and generous philanthropist who
presided over New York’s high society in the 1980s, died on
Wednesday at age 79 after a long illness.

A sharp-eyed art collector with a taste for French
Impressionism, American Pop art, and the Abstract Expressionists,
she leaves behind two daughters, novelist Hyatt and photographer
Samantha, as well as her longtime partner, the painter Julian
Lethbridge.

Bass was, by most accounts, more introverted than your
standard-issue socialite (she once agreed to talk to a Texas
Monthly reporter on the precondition that he not ask
“anything personal”). But she represented a distinctly old-school
sort of patron—one who viewed championing the arts as a kind of
serious duty.

Over the years, she donated to or sat on the boards of the Fort
Worth Art Museum, the New York City Ballet, the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, and the New York Botanical Garden. She also gifted
many of her own couture pieces to the Costume Institute at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Bass studied art history and Italian literature at Vassar
College. In 1965, she married Texas oil tycoon Sid Richardson Bass;
the couple would go on to become one of the largest shareholders of
the Walt Disney Company. They settled in Fort Worth, Texas, where
she commissioned the architect Paul Rudolph to design her
house in 1970. The home was surprisingly light-filled for a
Brutalist structure, and decorated with Bass’s striking art
collection, including a series of Andy Warhol portraits of her
family, a classic Morris Louis pour painting, and a monumental
Frank Stella.

In the early ’80s, the couple moved to New York, where they
acquired a Rosario Candela apartment at 960 Fifth Avenue. Bass
fused 1920s architecture with George II-era furniture and blue-chip
art, including vibrant orange and yellow Rothkos (Shades
of Red from 1961 and Number 1 from the following
year) and a Monet painting of London’s Houses of Parliament. Her
love of ballet was evidenced in one of the six original casts
of Degas’s Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, also on
view in the apartment. It stood, like a companion, in front of
Balthus’s 1955 painting Young Girl at the Window.

Despite her private nature, Bass still found her way into the
gossip columns when, in the late 1980s, she separated from her
husband, who would go on to take up with Mercedes Kellogg. She
secured what was, at the time, the biggest divorce settlement in
Texas history, amounting to around $200 million. And while she
largely receded from the social circuit (and the headlines) by the
2000s, she re-emerged in 2007, when she and Lethbridge were held
hostage at her Connecticut estate for a night by three men. (Her
butler was later charged.)

In 2009, she coproduced the documentary Dancing Across
Borders about her experience meeting a young dancer on a
trip to Cambodia with the World Monuments Fund, and helping him get
admitted to the American School of Ballet.

Asked by the Texas Monthly reporter if it was
ever difficult having so much money, she recalled a conversation
with her father after Sid had asked him for permission to
propose.

“He told me how much he liked Sid but asked if I was sure I
wanted to marry him. He said I should think about it because great
wealth could breed a lot of unhappiness.” The reporter asked how
she had replied. “I thought about it,” she said, “and I decided I
could handle it.”

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Captivated New York’s High Society, Has Died at 79 appeared
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