Having failed twice with external candidates, we looked within MOMA for a replacement. The strongest candidate was Richard Oldenburg, brother of the artist, Claes. Dick had run the Publications Department with great ability and had even broken precedent by turning in a modest profit for a few years! Broadly knowledgeable about the arts, Dick was a calm and gracious man, and appeared to be the right person to steer the museum onto a new course. He was appointed director in 1972 and ran MoMA with considerable success for the next twenty-two years.
BUYING THE STEIN COLLECTION
In 1968 the sudden availability of a portion of the fabled Gertrude Stein collection attracted the attention of much of the art world. Gertrude Stein, an avant-garde American writer, had lived in Paris for many years, presiding over a salon attended by many writers and artists, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque. Gertrude and her brother Leo were among the first collectors of Cubist and other radical art forms during the early decades of the twentieth century. They started collecting when most of these artists were unknown, unappreciated, and often indigent. By the 1930s they had assembled an outstanding collection that was displayed in Miss Stein’s Paris apartment. When she died in 1946, she bequeathed part of her collection—consisting of forty-seven paintings, thirty-eight by Picasso and nine by Juan Gris—to her three great-nieces and nephews, subject to a life interest for her longtime companion, Alice B. Toklas.
After Miss Toklas’s death in 1967 the Stein heirs decided to sell the collection. William Lieberman, then director of MoMA’s Department of Prints and Drawings, learned they would be pleased to have the collection go to the museum if we made a competitive offer; otherwise, it would be sold to the highest bidder. The problem was that MoMA, facing a deficit and chronically short of acquisition funds, had no funds available for this purpose.
I felt this was too good an opportunity for us to miss, so I formed a syndicate to buy the collection; it included my brother Nelson; William A. M. Burden; André Meyer, the senior partner in Lazard Frères; Bill Paley; and John Hay (Jock) Whitney, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune.* The six of us agreed to subscribe equal dollar amounts. When Bill Burden dropped out, I voluntarily assumed his share as well.
MoMA’s curators were not interested in the entire Stein collection, but they did want six Picassos to fill gaps in the collection. Syndicate members agreed in advance that these six would go to the museum either outright or in the form of a testamentary bequest by whoever acquired them.
To determine the price that we would offer the Stein heirs, we asked Eugene Thaw, the respected art dealer, to appraise the entire collection. Gene estimated its value at $6.8 million, a price the Steins accepted. We also asked Gene to place a valuation on each work so that we could divide them equitably among us. Gene assigned prices ranging from about $750,000 for the most important Picasso to barely $2,000 for one of the smaller Gris.
The syndicate members gathered in a large room in the Whitney wing of MoMA on the afternoon of December 14, 1968, for the final selection. The paintings had been placed along the walls and made a colorful and impressive sight. Drawing on my experience with the distribution of Aunt Lucy’s estate years before, I suggested a procedure to which the others agreed: We put six numbers in an old felt hat and passed it around. I drew last, and as luck would have it, numbers one and three were left. Each of us then selected a painting in sequence until we reached our dollar quota of $1.1 million (double that for me) or had chosen as many as we wanted.
Peggy and I selected Picasso’s Girl with a Basket of Flowers—the first choice, we later learned, of everyone except Nelson.†, Bill Paley then chose a similar Picasso pink nude of the same period, enabling us to draw our second choice, Picasso’s The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro (one of his first Analytic Cubist paintings and therefore of considerable historical importance). I could see the consternation on Nelson’s face as soon as I announced our choice. Peggy and I ended up with eight Picassos and two Gris, at a total cost of $2.1 million. Nelson, inordinately fond of Picasso’s work, selected twelve by the great Spanish master, a few masterpieces but several of them smaller and of lesser importance. Jock and André chose well but sparingly, and Bill Paley selected only two, both major Picassos. Five Grises and seven Picassos were not selected; they were subsequently sold, enabling us to recoup a portion of our original investment.*
The paintings we acquired during the 1950s and 1960s established standards of quality and beauty that I have tried to maintain in my collecting ever since. Some of our earliest purchases would now command prices a hundred times more than what we paid for them, a reflection of their high quality and the boom in the art market that began in the 1980s and continues today. While we never bought paintings as an investment, our art collection has become one of my most valuable assets and represents a significant part of my personal wealth.
THE EXPANSION OF MOMA
The major problem since the museum’s opening in 1939 has been accommodating the rapid growth of its permanent collection. As a result, the major expansions since 1939 have been complex, costly, and contentious. I have been involved in all of them.
By 1960 the museum had completely outgrown its five-story Art Deco building. Attendance had skyrocketed, and the number of objects in the collection had grown from just under three thousand to more than eighteen thousand, most of which had to be stored in rented space because there was no room on 53rd Street. The museum’s staff worked out of cramped quarters and had to fight each other tenaciously for gallery space to mount exhibitions. As a consequence we launched a campaign to raise $25 million, half of which would be used to add a new wing to the existing building.
Rockefellers were major contributors to the campaign. I gave $1.6 million and along with Nelson persuaded the RBF to make a $6 million grant to assure the campaign’s success. Most important, my aunt Alta Prentice, Father’s sole surviving sibling, who had lived in the two brownstones on 53rd Street just to the east of MoMA for most of her life, made the expansion possible by agreeing, at my request, to give her houses to the museum. Philip Johnson, then the head of MoMA’s architecture department, designed the new East Wing, which opened in the spring of 1964.
At the same time that we broke ground for the East Wing, we expanded to the north by acquiring the Whitney Museum building, which was in the process of moving to new quarters on the Upper East Side. As chairman, I presided over the board’s decision to buy the property and contributed another $700,000 to help defray the cost of incorporating it into the larger complex. These were rather simple and straightforward projects. Future expansions would be infinitely more complex and expensive.
THE MUSEUM TOWER
By the mid-1970s the space we had added was fully utilized through the rapid growth of the collection and the development of our educational programming. While another expansion was needed, there was no reasonably priced contiguous land available, and our finances were in abysmal condition. A new addition would be problematic at best.
For a banker, reading the MoMA balance sheet was a painful experience. The operating deficit in 1974 was $1.5 million, our ninth deficit in a row. The money raised in previous capital campaigns was being frittered away in paying for the deficit, and our endowment had dropped to $15 million from a high of almost $24 million only five years earlier. My own contributions during those years had to be used primarily to help cover the annual shortfall.
The fund-raising outlook was dismal. Consultants advised us that major foundations and corporations, our strongest supporters in the past, had already shifted their resources away from the arts to focus on the pressing “urban crisis.” The consultants were equally dubious of our ability to raise new money from trustees and close friends of the museum. Under the circumstances most trustees believed the best course would be “to learn to live within our means.” That would require, at the least, dramatically limiting acquisitions of contemporary art. While I agreed that we needed to get our financial house in order, failing t
o refresh the permanent collection would compound rather than solve our problems. I believed then, as I do now, that without continued growth in its collection MoMA would lose its public appeal, stagnate, and eventually wither. At best we would become a twentieth-century Frick Museum: a perfectly beautiful place, but a testament only to a brief moment in time.
In light of the consultants’ pessimistic forecast about our fund-raising capacity, it was clear that we had to explore other ways to solve our financial and space problems. We found it with the innovative “tower” project. Richard Weinstein, an architect who had worked with me on projects in lower Manhattan, came up with the idea of packaging properties owned by MoMA along 53rd Street and selling them and the “air rights” above the museum itself to a developer, who would build his own residential or commercial building. Selling air rights (the unused portion of a building’s zoned height) to allow the construction of a taller building nearby has been common practice in New York ever since the enactment of the Zoning Law of 1915. However, few not-for-profits had ever been in a position to take advantage of the provision.
We had to proceed carefully, however, because we had to maximize our financial returns without jeopardizing our tax-exempt status or compromising our ability to expand in the future. Selling the air and development rights would provide a much needed infusion to the endowment but by itself would not cover the cost of the building expansion. Our lawyers came up with an ingenious plan: the creation of “The Trust for Cultural Resources of the City of New York,” an agency of New York State that could hold property, borrow money, collect taxes, and apply the taxes collected to the maintenance of private cultural institutions. The trust’s ability to issue tax-exempt bonds to finance building construction was key because it provided us with direct access to low-cost financing for the project. The trust would collect the equivalent of property taxes from the owners of the new building to amortize the bonds and, after deducting expenses and other costs, pay over the remaining funds to the museum each year.
After the trustees endorsed the project, we approached Mayor Ed Koch, who, in the midst of the City’s fiscal crisis, happily supported the idea. Assemblyman Roy Goodman introduced the bill for us in the New York State legislature, where it took two days of intense lobbying by me and other trustees before the Assembly finally approved it. Warren Anderson, majority leader of the New York State Senate, was especially helpful in ushering the bill through his chamber, and Governor Hugh Carey signed the law creating the trust.
In 1979 the museum conveyed its property and development rights to the trust for a total of $17 million, and the trust sold the property and rights to The Museum Tower Corporation, a private company created for that purpose, for the same amount of money. Over a period of years the trust will reimburse the museum for the cost of the new addition, and the museum, in turn, has leased the building from the trust for $1 a year for ninety-nine years.
Cesar Pelli, dean of Yale’s School of Architecture, designed the building, which opened in 1984. The tower’s crisp modern style fits the neighborhood well. The project more than doubled our exhibition areas, providing for the first time large interior spaces where large contemporary works could be displayed. The lower six floors, which are also used for workshops, classrooms, and offices, sit snugly below the graceful forty-four-story residential tower. Inside the museum one is totally unaware of the large tower rising over it.
The Museum Tower was a creative solution that brought together government, the private sector, and philanthropy in an effective partnership that was beneficial to the museum and the public at large.
CHANGES IN LEADERSHIP
For most of the 1970s and into the 1980s, Blanchette, Bill Paley, and Dick Oldenburg guided MoMA’s physical expansion, refined its program, and added to its already lustrous collection. Bill, unfortunately, became ill and had to step down as chairman in early 1985, and Blanchette took over as board chair. Sadly, Blanchette’s own battle with Alzheimer’s disease forced her premature retirement only a few years later. With no obvious replacement for Blanchette, the board asked me in 1987 to serve for the third time as chairman. I agreed to do so even though I was already deeply involved with Rockefeller Center, the Americas Society, and the New York City Partnership.
There was much to be done. A 1986 outside study concluded that we needed to resolve three critical issues: board composition, our chaotic management system, and our persistent need for new space.
The problem with the board was clear: We were too old. MoMA had no mandatory retirement age for trustees, and in 1991 nine trustees out of forty, including me, were seventy-five or older, and a number of others were not far behind. While many of us had been generous and effective members, we had to make room for the next generation. Our solution was the creation of a new category, a “life trustee,” who would be eligible to chair committees, attend board meetings, and participate in discussions but would not have a vote. While the logic of the proposal was undeniable, its implementation had to be handled skillfully so as not to offend loyal museum supporters. I agreed to take the job of selling the idea to the others. I called on each one, and all of them accepted my proposition with grace and understanding, if not happiness. There were no adverse consequences, as some had feared. Among those added to the board in subsequent years were Mrs. Akio Morita, the wife of the Sony Corporation’s chairman; Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, an art patroness from Venezuela; and Michael Ovitz, the powerful Los Angeles–based media and entertainment executive.
We also made substantial progress on restructuring management. Dick Oldenburg had done an admirable job as director, but the position had increased in scope and complexity. It was unrealistic to expect Dick to handle all these responsibilities unassisted.
Initially, we created a new post—a paid president—to share administrative responsibilities with the director. After searching aggressively for more than a year it became clear that individuals of the quality we were looking for were not prepared to share authority with a director who had been in place for more than twenty years. In the fall of 1993, just before I was scheduled to step down as chairman, Dick announced his intention to retire the following June. His decision allowed us to search for a single individual who would be the sole CEO of MoMA.
Within a relatively short period of time we found the perfect candidate. Glenn Lowry was forty years old and a graduate of Williams College with a Ph.D. in Islamic Art from Harvard. He had worked at the Smithsonian and as director of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada. Because he specialized in a very different field of art history, Glenn was not a threat to any of MoMA’s curators. Glenn is brilliant, tactful, full of energy, and a natural leader.
The final issue—determining where and how to expand as well as how to finance such an expansion—would take much longer to resolve. Within a few years of the opening of the Museum Tower in 1984, MoMA had once again run out of space. Our permanent collection, including almost thirteen thousand films, dozens of classic cars, and numerous oversized modern sculptural works, in addition to our vast holding of paintings, prints, drawings, and other items chronicling life in the twentieth century, now totaled more than a million objects. More than one million people a year poured through MoMA’s doors, and complaints about long lines and crowded galleries had become common. Clearly we needed to expand, but our immediate neighbor on 53rd Street, Saint Thomas Episcopal Church, would not consider selling, and the owners of the Dorset Hotel to the west on 54th Street wanted a price we could not afford.
Our other options—moving the museum to a new location, acquiring a satellite facility, and burrowing into Manhattan bedrock to create more storage and exhibition space—were all rejected for one reason or another. When I stepped down as chairman in 1993, we still had not resolved the issue. But my successors did.
Agnes Gund, president of MoMA and one of the nation’s premier collectors of contemporary art, and Ronald S. Lauder, the chairman of the Estée Lauder cosmetics firm, led the way. In
1996, after three years of negotiations, we finally persuaded the Goldman family, owners of the Dorset Hotel, to sell us their property. The Dorset site was unquestionably the best solution to MoMA’s space problem. Even though the $50 million price tag was very high, MoMA’s board quickly concluded that we could not afford to reject it. That may well have been the most important decision the board has ever made.
“THE FINEST MUSEUM OF MODERN ART IN THE WORLD”
In early 1996, with Glenn Lowry in charge and the Dorset property acquired, we turned to the arduous task of developing plans for the new museum and raising the funds necessary to build it. Although I was chairman emeritus by this time, Aggie Gund and Ron Lauder urged me to play an active role in the monumental task of fund-raising.
We estimated land acquisition and construction costs would be $450 million and assumed another $200 million should be added to the endowment to carry new programs and operations. It was a very ambitious goal. The success of the campaign would depend in large part on our ability to raise large sums of money right at the start, and most of it would have to come from our own board. I agreed to put up $15 million and persuaded Ron Lauder, Sid Bass, and Aggie Gund to provide leadership gifts. So we began the drive with $55 million in hand.
To sustain this early momentum I suggested we create a new donor category: Founder of the Museum of Modern Art of the 21st Century. To join this group required a contribution of at least $5 million. It was a daring strategy, but within two years of the campaign’s inauguration in early 1998, thirty-three individuals and corporations had pledged or contributed at least that amount.
Those of us at the heart of the campaign knew that without substantial public support, a “new” Modern would take much longer to build. Because of MoMA’s positive impact on New York City’s economy—we now attracted almost 2 million visitors a year, many of whom stayed in the City’s hotels and dined in its restaurants—we approached Mayor Rudolph Giuliani with a request for a $65 million capital contribution from the City. The Mayor responded enthusiastically, and after a short, sharp struggle with the City Council, the funds were included in the City’s capital budget.
Memoirs Page 59