Bay Area Family Donates Masterpieces to Stanford

Stanford University will open a new museum to house a trove of postwar American art donated by a Bay Area family of art collectors, the San Francisco Chronicle says.

The donation of 121 works by the Anderson family of Atherton, Calif., includes Jackson Pollock’s “Lucifer,” one of the most coveted pieces in 20th-century art, and works by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and dozens of other significant American artists.

Neither Stanford nor the Andersons would set a value for the collection or any individual works, but the Chronicle estimates that Jackson Pollock’s “Lucifer” alone could have brought in a nine-figure sum if it had been sold at auction.

The university plans to construct a new building, to be called the Anderson Gallery, to house the collection. It is scheduled to open in late 2014.