THE COLLECTOR’S DILEMMA Major art collectors around the globe are looking for the right way to cement their legacy. Claire Wrathall explores six strategies, from donation to standalone museum There comes a time in every collector’s life when they begin to wonder about legacy and what will happen to their art after their death. Will their heirs want it enough to pay the estate duties the inheritance necessitates? And what if they don’t? Should one transfer ownership to a foundation in order to share one’s passion with the public? Or is it simpler just to give it away? Venture up to the second floor of Renzo Piano’s elegant annexe to the Art Institute of Chicago and you will find yourself in a sequence of galleries named the Edlis/ Neeson Collection – an assemblage of nine stellar Warhols (including Twelve Jackies, Mona Lisa Four Times, Liz #3, two self-portraits and a Big Electric Chair) plus a further 35 works by the likes of Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Brice Marden, Takashi Murakami, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Ugo Rondinone, Cindy Sherman, Cy Twombly and others that almost perfectly encapsulate the story of Pop art and what it gave rise to. They are also, says the AIC’s director James Rondeau, “one of the truly transformative gifts in the museum’s history”. Quite a tribute given the bequests it has received since it opened its permanent home in 1893, soon after which Mrs Henry Field set a trend by donating a collection of 19th-century French paintings and commissioned Louis Comfort Tiffany to build a gallery to hang them in, all in memory of her husband. Stefan Edlis, whose fortune was made in plastics, was nearly 90 when he and his wife Gael Neeson made the gift, for “the simple reason”, she says, that there are “no grandkids”. To ensure the paintings and sculpture they were promising, which together are valued at more than half a billion dollars, should not just end up in storage, the gift came with “restrictions”, meaning its terms require that the works must be shown together for at least 25 years and on display for at least 50. “We wanted the collection to stay together because it reflects our life,” says Neeson. “It means so much to us to share it. We get lovely notes from people who’ve been moved by it. And that’s very rewarding. Stefan came to the States [from Vienna in 1941] as a refugee with , but he was always generous. Giving to people was always his way. It makes you feel like you’ve done something.” M ore than that, adds Rondeau, “Stefan and Gael wanted their perspective in the mix. They wanted it to be this portrait of what they’d spent their lives doing. You feel the presence of collectors and what it means to have had an eye.” If Edlis and Neeson were happy to leave the custodianship of the cream of their collection to an established institution, others pondering posterity prefer to open museums of their own, a trend that would seem to have grown exponentially since the turn of the century. In 2014, The Economist newspaper reported that in China new museums were opening at a rate of one a day. And according to the China Museums Association, there are now more than 5,500 private museums in the 86
country, most famously institutions such as Wang Wei and Liu Yiqian’s three Long Museums and the late Budi Tek’s Yuz Museum Shanghai. There are hundreds – no definitive list exists in the – US, too, prominent among which is Glenstone, just outside Washington DC. “Do you want to be the richest man in the cemetery?” Mitchell Rales recalls his father asking him in 1998, ahead of his decision to establish it. The US billionaire co-founder of the Danaher Corporation, a self-styled “science and technology innovator”, Rales bought his first Jackson Pollock in 1990 and the collecting bug bit. Eight years later, he survived a horrific helicopter accident in Russia. Life seemed fragile and finite, and “I was thinking about what I wanted to do as an important legacy for the family” when he realised that “art made me feel more alive than anything else”. (No less a dealer than Larry Gagosian has called him one of the greatest collectors of our time; and David Zwirner has praised his commitment to buying “only the best” of any given artist’s oeuvre.) So Rales bought some land in Potomac, Maryland, set up a foundation to which he donated his art and built a museum to exhibit it in. It opened in 2006, adding a substantial new building in 2018, the better to display a world-class assemblage of Abstract Expressionist paintings (by Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell et al), not to mention a holding of Louise Bourgeois to rival the one at MoMA and what he calls “the largest, most in-depth collection” of works by Roni Horn, one of a still-growing number of living artists, he and his wife, Emily Wei Rales, an art historian and curator whose career had begun at the Guggenheim in New York, continue to collect. Of course, the challenges in establishing such an institution are immense. “A museum of contemporary art is not going to be contemporary for long unless you can keep adding to the collection,” says the art market commentator Georgina Adam, author of The Rise and Rise of the Private Museum, stressing not just the need for a substantial endowment from which to fund a museum if it is to endure, but also sufficient money to enable an ongoing acquisitions programme. “Underestimating costs is a major pitfall.” Though few institutions are as well resourced as Glenstone. According to Adam, the Raleses donated US0 million in stock to the foundation between 2012 and 2014, and the fair market value of its assets as recorded on the foundation’s 2018 tax form was US.8 billion. L egacy aside, the reasons collectors give for wanting to establish museums can go well beyond a desire to share their art with the wider public. “In the beginning, it was never my plan to have a museum,” says the Turkish construction magnate and collector Erol Tabanca, whose Odunpazarı Modern Müze, better known as OMM, opened in 2019 in Eskişehir, where he was born. As 60 loomed, he had begun to consider both what he might do with his collection of 1,000-plus modern and contemporary, mostly Turkish works of art, and for his hometown, which lies approximately equidistant between Ankara and Istanbul on the high-speed rail link that connects them. “It’s a university city with quite a big population of young people,” he says. “An up-and-coming place.” But it hadn’t a significant art gallery, nor much in the way of tourism. “We took the Guggenheim in Bilbao as inspiration,” he continues. “And what we’d really like is to create the same ‘Bilbao effect’.” Quite an ambition given that that museum is powered by the might of the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation and its collection continues to draw up to a million visitors a year. Tabanca realised he needed to create not just a gallery, but a landmark. An architect by training (who paid his way through college by playing basketball professionally), he considered designing it himself, “but then I thought that an investment on this scale should create an impact not only in Turkey but all over the world”. A friend suggested Kengo Kuma, whose practice KKAA has designed, for example, the 87
