A Look at Single Donor Museums

Earlier this month the Art Newspaper ran an interesting article on the growth of single donor museums. Stating that not since the Gilded Age have there been such growth by single donors to show and exhibit collections. The article also looks at what may happen based upon how the foundations and museums are endowed and what happens to collections and museum property as the owners age and grow old. Many think the museums and their foundations should be looking beyond exhibitions and support the greater community through publications, scholarship and community programs.

The Art Newspaper reports

From the opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in October to the construction of The Broad in Los Angeles now set to open this autumn, the model of the single-donor museum is thriving. You’d have to dial back the clock more than a century to the American “robber barons” like Frick, Morgan and Huntington to find another moment in art history when so many great institutions were founded by powerful individuals instead of broader coalitions or private-public alliances.

Bernard Arnault (above, right) has kept schtum about an endowment for the Vuitton museum in Paris

As also happened during the Gilded Age, critics today have raised questions about these new museums’ devotion to their own communities, whether regarding accessibility or admission fees. But what has not been examined so thoroughly is what will happen to these new institutions on the death of the founder or the decline in their collecting activity.

Eli Broad says there will be two endowments for his museum, one “well in excess of $200m to cover operating costs” and another for acquisition funds

This issue is especially urgent given the ages of the collectors involved. While Bernard Arnault of the Fondation Louis Vuitton is 65, as is Walmart heir Alice Walton, the founder of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, others who have opened their private art collections to the public are now entering their 70s and 80s.

Saint Louis patron Emily Rauh Pulitzer is 71, Miami collectors Don and Mera Rubell are 74 and 71 respectively, their neighbour Martin Margulies is 76. François Pinault, the French billionaire with art spaces in Venice, is 78, and Eli and Edythe Broad are 81 and 78 respectively. To what extent have these museum founders made plans to ensure the vitality and flexibility of their prized institutions beyond their own lifetimes?

The Fondation Louis Vuitton is unusual because of Arnault’s agreement to turn over the Frank Gehry-designed building to the City of Paris in 2062. But the fate of his personal and corporate collections (and it’s not clear what either contains) is far from guaranteed. He has not publicly discussed either the transfer of works of art to the city or any sort of collection endowment.

For private-turned-public collections, that sort of suspense or uncertainty has unfortunately been the norm. One prominent exception in the US is the Crystal Bridges museum, which promises to survive for generations even if all of Walmart’s big-box stores were strangely to vanish. Before its grand opening in 2011, the museum announced $800m in endowment funds from the Walton Family Foundation, designed to cover operations, acquisitions and capital improvements.

The other exception is Eli Broad’s new museum, which he announced he would endow at $200m, a figure since revised upward. The billionaire now says there will be two endowments, one “well in excess of $200m to cover operating costs” and another for acquisition funds. “We don’t want this to be viewed as a stagnant collection, static and without change,” he says.

Most of the new single-donor museums either do not have endowment plans or have kept them hidden from the public eye, perhaps to afford more freedom to scrap plans as needed. It is also unclear with most collectors whether their personal art holdings will be transferred upon death to their charitable foundation. Some collectors choose to hold back key works to leave to heirs. Others reserve pieces because they wish to live with them, especially following a 2006 change in US tax law making it harder for you to live with your Picasso and get tax breaks for donating it too. (Here too the Broads prove an exception: on their deaths the Broad foundation will receive the hundreds of works of art they currently live with.)

And the pitfalls that collectors face in legacy planning are abundant, with a full range of case studies—from the cautionary to the exemplary—found in the Los Angeles area alone. I am thinking of Frederick Weisman, Weisman’s former brother-in-law Norton Simon and J. Paul Getty.

Weisman rivals Albert Barnes as a cautionary tale of what not to do with a collection. He established his villa in the ritzy Holmby Hills neighbourhood as the permanent home of some 400 works, rich with paintings by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis. Given the area’s parking limitations, the foundation is not open to the public at regular times (although his gallery at Pepperdine University does broaden its reach). If you’ve never seen his first-rate Pop art or colour field paintings, these restrictions are one reason why.

The notoriously prickly tycoon Norton Simon created a more accessible exhibition space by taking over the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1974, a fledgling contemporary art venue, to showcase his Old Masters and Impressionists. But Simon severely restricted loans of his own works of art and his board followed suit after his death. The museum is not in crisis, but it is not especially dynamic either, and you hear staff still speak of “what Mr Simon would have liked”.

In contrast, the Getty offers a case study for how to build a museum that exceeds a collector’s own ambitions and vision. Granted, it would be hard to match the billionaire’s decision to leave the museum four million shares of Getty oil stock, worth about $700m on his death in 1976 and $1.2bn by the time, six years later, probate proceedings were complete and funds distributed. But Getty also made the wise decision to write few restrictions on his institution into his will, defining its purpose—“the diffusion of artistic and general knowledge”—so broadly that future leaders could move as desired towards a university model: a museum with a sister library, conservation laboratories and a foundation-granting arm.

Scott Stover, a cultural philanthropy adviser, says that other single-donor museums should also consider how, beyond displaying works of art, they can “become relevant to a larger community in terms of scholarship, publications, programmes or other activities”. He says that he is “optimistic” about the legacies of Broad, Pinault and Arnault, “not just because they are billionaires with the means to correctly endow the institutions” but because they have already hired “serious third-party professionals” to run their institutions—he singles out Suzanne Pagé at Louis Vuitton as “remarkable”.

Thaddeus Stauber of Nixon Peabody, the lawyer who arranged San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s extraordinary 100-year loan of the Don and Doris Fisher Collection, also praised the professionalism of single-donor museums today, mentioning the smart hire of Don Bacigalupi by Crystal Bridges and now the George Lucas museum. “Running an institution is not all sexy,” he says. “You need to deal with employment issues, ground maintenance and insurance.” Insurance costs tend to be much higher for a collection in one place than when art is spread out, he says.

The open question is the future of smaller museums founded by collectors such as the Rubells, whose net worth is a tiny fraction of, say, the Broads. What will their lively, ahead-of-curve collection look like 20 years from now?

“I’m not sure what America will look like in 20 years,” says Mera Rubell. For the Rubells, legacy planning has taken an unusual, and not especially legally binding, form: “[It] means infecting our children with the love of art, so that they continue. Our children are already very active. Our grandson, who is 13, just bought his first piece of art with his own money.”

Has she set up any sort of endowment? “No, not really. I think that will be up to my children.”

Source: The Art Newspaper