An American Lesson in Museums: The Met Is Booming Thanks to Private Donations

In terms of art, there is no nation more generous than the U.S. The massive donation, worth $1 billion, from Leonard A. Lauder, chairman of Estée Lauder cosmetics, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art is all over the news. It includes 78 Cubist works, which represent the most important collection in the hands of a private individual and consists of 33 works by Pablo Picasso, 17 by Georges Braque, 14 by Juan Gris and 14 by Fernand Léger. Included in the offer are genuine masterpieces, such as Picasso’s Woman In An Armchair (Eva), Léger’s The House Under The Trees, Gris’ Portrait of the Artist’s Mother and Houses at L’Estaque by Georges Braque. The collection will be open to the public in the summer of 2014. Lauder acquired the paintings over 26 years of searching at international auctions and large collections. The dates of the works are certain and their pedigrees unambiguous.

Jewish-American, 80-years-old and in enviable physical shape and a widower, Leonard, son and heir of the economic empire founded by Estee Lauder, has always carried out philanthropy and patronage with great care for the public good. In the past, he has donated to the Whitney Museum different works of art by major artists, including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Claes Oldenburg, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol, and has helped to support, along with other billionaires like George Lucas, Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, a new research and acquisitions center costing $22 million for modern art at the Met.

We can only congratulate the Met’s Director Thomas P. Campbell for a transaction that transforms the entire face of one of the most important museums in the world — focused mainly on classical art — with a very forward-looking strategy that breaks down the barriers between the ancient and the modern to offer visitors a continually changing and increasingly attractive experience. It is quite the opposite of Italian museums where the historical centers of their collections are cast in stone and incapable of innovation, museums that for decades have discouraged, if not prevented, donations, and are now going begging to sustain a system that is based on waste and scarcity of services, while elsewhere — in the Anglo-American world in particular, but also in emerging countries — art really is a great form of business.

Therefore, in addition to archaeological remains and Impressionist masters, visitors to the Met will find contemporary painting, photography and even works by Damien Hirst, and now the Cubists. Translated into numbers, this means a significant increase in ticket sales, catalogs, merchandising and services of all kinds. When we think of the immense artistic potential of Italy, the failure to apply a similar strategy here leads to a fierce disappointment. While Americans do not have a long past or history and have to buy these by fistfuls of dollars from Europe, we have not succeeded in making our heritage present in museums across our country, which paradoxically constitutes a real cost. Of course, any gentlemen like Lauder in Italy are kept well away from public acts because they would be murdered by the IRS, but the main problem is the excessive sectorization and specialization of our museums: There are too many, and not all of them are keeping up. Optimizing sales in some essential places and providing them with tools to enable a policy of profiting from tourism is key. The modern concept of the museum is that of the Met. Others do not exist and will not survive anyway.