Jane Meyerhoff, 80; She and Her Husband Built Major Art Collection

Jane Meyerhoff, a collector who with her husband, Robert, assembled one of the major U.S. collections of latter 20th century art, died Saturday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore after heart surgery. She was 80.

The Meyerhoffs announced in 1987 that they would donate their collection, then estimated to be worth more than $300 million, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. At the time, the donation was called the institution’s largest single gift after those from its founding benefactors, who included Andrew Mellon.

“Robert and Jane Meyerhoff put together the finest collection of postwar art that I know of,” said retired Baltimore Sun art critic John Dorsey. He said that the artists on which they concentrated -- Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella -- “are among the greatest artists of the second half of the 20th century.”

They also collected works by other artists, Dorsey said.

“While she was charming, attractive and had a wicked sense of humor, I don’t know any other collector who had such a passion,” said artist Grace Hartigan, whose works the Meyerhoffs collected. “She had a depth that was extraordinary. She had an absolutely instinctive eye for art.”

Meyerhoff’s daughter, Rose Ellen Greene of Coral Gables, Fla., said her mother “was the curator, the genius behind the collection.”

“The collection was always a joint effort, though,” Greene added.

Over the last 46 years, the Meyerhoffs displayed their collection at their home on 300-acre Fitzhugh Farm, where they raised thoroughbreds in the rolling countryside of Baltimore County.

A 1996 article in the Sun described it as “a private Museum of Modern Art.”

“She was a master at arranging artists’ works in a room,” said Kelly, a painter and friend, from his home in Spencertown, N.Y. “She was a very strong and decisive woman, a woman who knew what she was and knew what she wanted.”

He recalled that she would enter his studio and say, “That’s what I want.”

The couple decided to give the National Gallery their entire collection, more than 100 works by modern American and European masters. The decision caused consternation in Baltimore cultural circles, but Jane Meyerhoff stood by it.

“It never charges, not for special exhibitions, not for anything,” she said in 1996 of the Washington gallery. “It is closed only two days a year. It has a ‘no de-accessions’ policy, which means that the institution never sells its art.”

An exhibit that year of the paintings she collected drew more than 159,000 visitors in 113 days.

Last year, Business Week magazine ranked the Meyerhoffs among the top 20 of the nation’s most generous philanthropists, a generosity that went beyond art.

Concerned about the relatively low number of blacks earning advanced degrees in the sciences, the couple established the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in 1988.

Nearly 40 years ago, Jane Meyerhoff was co-chairwoman of a fundraising campaign to convert Baltimore’s old Mount Royal Station into a library and sculpture studio for the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Born Jane Bernstein in Baltimore in 1924 and raised in the city’s Forest Park neighborhood, she was a 1941 graduate of Forest Park High School and earned her undergraduate degree in history at Goucher College.

She married Robert Meyerhoff, a homebuilder and developer, in 1945.

In addition to her husband and daughter, she is survived by two sons, Neil and John, both of Baltimore; a sister; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.