The collector Ingvild Goetz
announced she is donating her Munich museum and 375 contemporary
artworks to the state of Bavaria, and will hand over more than
4,000 other works on permanent loan.

The museum, designed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog
and Pierre de Meuron, houses art by Richard Prince, Tracey Emin,
Rachel Whiteread, Douglas Gordon, Mike Kelley, Roni Horn, Isa
Genzken, Diane Arbus, Andreas Gursky and Cindy Sherman. The
pieces included in the gift are mainly video works, the Bavarian
government said in a statement on its website.

“This is one of Bavaria’s most important art acquisitions
of the last decades,” said Horst Seehofer, the prime minister
of Bavaria. “The famous Goetz collection is above all a gain
for the state collections in the area of video art.”

The Muenchner Merkur newspaper estimated the value of the
gift at about 30 million euros ($40 million). Barbara Schepanek,
a spokeswoman for the Bavarian government, said she couldn’t
confirm that figure.

Goetz, the daughter of the mail-order tycoon Werner Otto,
founded a gallery in the 1970s in Switzerland, later moving it
to Munich and Dusseldorf. She closed it to focus on collecting
in the 1980s, and has since become one of the most influential
collectors of contemporary art, regularly featuring in Artnews
magazine’s list of the 200 top buyers worldwide.

The collection numbers more than 4,700 artworks, including
500 film and video works.

Bavaria has pledged to fund the upkeep of the museum and to
retain it as a showcase for contemporary art, the principle
reasons Goetz cited for her decision to donate her life’s work.
Goetz will continue to manage both the museum and the
collection, according to the government statement.

Muse highlights include New York and London weekend guides;
Lewis Lapham on history; Jeremy Gerard on U.S. theater; and Greg
Evans and Craig Seligman on movies.

To contact the reporter on the story:
Catherine Hickley in Berlin at
chickley@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Manuela Hoelterhoff at
mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.