Rita R. Fraad; Collector and Patron of American Art
Hyfler/Rosner
Rita R. Fraad, 88, a Collector and Patron of American Art,
Dies
By WOLFGANG SAXON NY Times
Rita R. Fraad, a collector and patron of American art, died
on Sunday at her home in Scarsdale, N.Y. She was 88.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said her daughter Sara F.
Henderson.
Starting in the late 1940's, Mrs. Fraad assembled a noted
private collection of 19th- and 20th-century American art,
from which she lent and donated to museums and galleries.
Among her principal beneficiaries was her alma mater, Smith
College, with its nationally respected art museum.
Others included the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of
Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she sat on the visiting
committee on American art and sculpture.
She was also a trustee of the Archives of American Art, a
part of the Smithsonian Institution that promotes research
in the visual arts and amasses artists' papers and other
memorabilia.
Rita Rich Fraad, a lawyer's daughter, was born in Brooklyn.
She graduated from Smith College in 1937, a year before her
marriage to Daniel Fraad Jr. Mr. Fraad had just joined the
Allied Maintenance Corporation, a modest building service
founded by his father in 1888.
While her husband built Allied Maintenance - later Ogden
Allied Maintenance - into one of the country's leading fuel
suppliers to airlines, Mrs. Fraad saw to their private art
collection. It brought together works by Homer, Eakins,
Sargent, Prendergast, Hassam, Bellows and Hopper, among
others.
In her later years she focused on contemporary American
works on paper and regularly gave them to the Smith College
museum, either drawing works from her collection or buying
them for the museum.
Mrs. Fraad was a member of the museum's visiting committee,
an advisory panel, until last year. She established an
endowment fund for American art at the Smith museum, where a
sampling of her collection, called "Realism Today," was
exhibited in 1988.
Her husband died in 1987. Mrs. Fraad is survived by Ms.
Henderson and another daughter, Dr. Martha F. Haffey, both
of Manhattan; a sister, Janet Bradley of Tulsa; six
grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.