Art courses through Sarah Arison’s veins. It would be an exhausting LinkedIn litany to list all of her art endeavors, but here are a few: President of the Arison Arts Foundation, President of MoMa, Chair of the Board of YoungArts, and board member of MoMA PS1. Arison is also a passionate collector, focusing on living artists. But her gateway to art was Impressionism, and a Eugène Boudin beachscape that hangs on her bedroom wall is symbolic of this journey. Arison spoke to us from Aspen where she was busy prepping for this week’s ArtCrush, the Aspen Art Museum’s annual gala and auction she is co-chairing for the first time.
I have a lot of artists in my family and my form of rebellion was being a very hardcore math and science person. I was on the math team and in high school I decided that I wanted to be a geneticist. I was a bio major in college and was not engaged with the arts. Although my grandparents always made the arts part of our time together growing up. We would go to the ballet or the symphony or the museum. But I was very focused on my future as a scientist.
Sarah Arison. Courtesy of Sarah Arison.
That dramatically changed when I was a teenager, and my grandmother decided that she wanted to take me to France for part of the summer. We were in Paris and we were getting a tour from a curator at the Musee D’Orsay, and my grandmother was really into it and, you know, I thought it was fine. But the curator was like, “if you really like this, just outside of the city is Giverny which is Monet’s home and gardens where he painted all the water lilies and the Japanese bridge and it’s really easy to get there.”
We ended up doing that and somebody who worked at Giverny was like, “if you’re enjoying this, you can drive a little ways and you get to Cezanne’s studio and you can look out the window.” So, it began this epic journey that ended up spanning two summers following in the footsteps of the Impressionists.
Claude Monet, The Japanese Footbridge (1899). Photo: Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
We obviously saw a lot of their art, but it was also about their stories and their relationships. We ended in Auvers-sur-Oise where Van Gogh spent the last 69 days of his life and did 71 paintings. One of the things that they had that was so powerful were the letters between him and his brother Theo. You can go into all these museums and see Impressionist paintings, but really personalizing it and having a story and a history behind these pieces that we’re all so familiar with was transformative.
Very shortly after that, my grandmother brought me to the annual gala for YoungArts, which is the organization that my grandparents founded. The mother of one of the winners came up to me, with tears in her eyes. She’d heard I was part of the family who had founded the organization and said: “I have to thank you so much for what you’ve done for my son.
Vincent Van Gogh, The Plain of Auvers (1890). Found in the collection of Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna. Photo: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
“I used to yell at him when he would come home from school and sit on the floor and draw, I would tell him to go do his real work like math and science. Seeing him here being mentored by luminaries in his field, being looked at by the greatest universities in the country for scholarships, I realized that this is his real work and that I should support him.”
I had this huge “aha” moment of the importance of YoungArts and what my grandparents had founded. I had this moment of recognition that if somebody in the family didn’t get involved and try to bring it into the future, it would probably become stagnant and cease to exist. So, I went back to college and I changed my major from biology to a double major in business and French with a minor in art history.
Eugène Boudin, Trouville, Scene de Plage (1888–95). Courtesy of Sarah Arison.
When I went to her and said, “Grandma, I wanna help,” she gifted me that Boudin painting as a memento of our time following the Impressionists in France together. But also, maybe it was a vote of confidence in what I would hopefully end up doing with YoungArts and other philanthropic work in the arts that I’ve done.
The Boudin is the only piece that is in my bedroom, and has been that way actually for three apartments now. Ninety-five percent of the work that I own, I know the artists, I’ve been in their studio, I’ve worked with them in some capacity, whether an artist from Greater New York at MoMA PS1, or a YoungArts winner or mentor. And then there is this random Eugene Boudin!
That trip with my grandmother was transformative, and definitely changed everything. As for the narrative of the painting, I grew up in Miami. So, we always had family time at the beach. I now have a five-year-old girl and an almost two-year-old girl. We have our beach days and there’s something about those family experiences. But to me, the painting is symbolic. The Boudin has become a part of my environment. It’s one of those things where if I was in a situation where I needed cash, I would sooner sell the apartment than that painting. It’s so symbolic and means so much. It’s the start of my whole adult and professional life.
I am in the process of moving back to Miami after 18 years in New York, so that my daughters can have more time with my grandmother. This will be the first thing that’s installed.
–Sarah Arison, as told to William Van Meter
Art is more than a thing to hang on your wall. More often, it’s a font for happiness and joy. In Art We Love, we ask charismatic individuals from the art world and beyond to tell us about a work of art that has made a lasting impression.