Maria Gaetana Matisse; Patron of Modern Art

Maria Gaetana Matisse, 58, a longtime New York gallery owner and modern art patron. The daughter of a German diplomat who helped found Germany’s Christian Democratic Party after World War II, she was born in Vienna and studied art and languages in Munich and London before moving to New York. She married Pierre Matisse, the son of French impressionist Henri Matisse, in 1974 and worked in the Matisse Gallery, which had been founded by the artist in 1931. She and her husband were prominent figures in the modern art world through the 1980s, dealing in works by Joan Miro, Marc Chagall and other contemporary masters. After Pierre’s death in 1989, Matisse remained active in modern art circles, loaning works from the Matisse Gallery collection to museums around the world, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She also founded and led the Pierre and Maria Gaetana Matisse Foundation, devoted to projects her husband had supported, and formed an alliance with the Morgan Library, to which she donated the gallery’s archives. On Sunday of kidney and lung complications.