Victor Ganz; Museum Official, Art Collector

NEW YORK — Victor Ganz, vice president of the Whitney Museum of American Art and an internationally known collector of modern art, is dead of lung cancer.

Ganz, 74, was chairman of the Battery Park City Fine Arts Committee and a former member of the museum’s advisory panel for the National Endowment for the Arts. He died Sunday at home in New York.

He began collecting paintings while still in his teens, and as his holdings increased he was able by the 1940s to accumulate works by Pablo Picasso. After the 1950s he turned to such young painters as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella. When they became established he again turned to lesser-known artists.