The Market Meltdown and the Arts

On a visit to Tate Britain yesterday I made a point of checking out a small portrait head that's of very little interest as a work of art. It's a picture of Sir Edwin Manton, who died three years ago at 96. It's placed prominetly at the Tate because Manton was one of the museum's largest benefactors, second only to the founder Sir Henry Tate. Twenty years ago Manton also founded the American Patrons of the Tate. (He had moved to the U.S. in the 1930s.) After his death his foundation also gave a major collection of British art to the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts and a gift of $50 million to the Clark's research and academic program.

I was thinking about Manton yesterday because of the way he made his money — he was a co-founder of A.I.G., the giant insurance company that had a near death experience this week. A.I.G. is still a major corporate member of the American Patrons, but I don't think it will be handing out much money to the arts anytime soon. Meanwhile, Lehman Brothers' arts philanthropy was more focused on performing arts education, but it also had involvements with the visual arts. And of course Kathleen Fuld, the wife of Lehman's CEO Richard Fuld, is a board member of the Museum of Modern Art. The Fulds were frequent donors to MOMA and its collections. I don't know how much of their net worth is tied up in Lehman's battered stock, but I expect they'll be economizing for a while.

As Bloomberg News pointed out this week, if a corporate philanthropic foundation is sufficiently endowed, it can coast for a few years even when the parent is hurting — or even gone. But in all likelihood there's a cold wind about to blow through a lot of museums in the U.S. and elsewhere. In July, when Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, introduced a new modified design for the Herzog & deMeuron addition planned for Tate Modern, he described the current fund raising environment as the most difficult in years, and said that if the Tate couldn't raise the projected $429 million budget for the addition — it was only about a quarter of the way there at the time — the new building would be called off. And that was before the events of this week, which have hammered the markets in London just as hard as the ones in New York. At the very least, I don't recommend that he go calling on A.I.G.

In related news, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts announced this week that it had completed the $500 million capital campaign to finance its new addition by Norman Foster. Not a moment too soon.