Making Sure Their Art Stays Alive

Foundation promotes the work of little-known, nonliving artists

For little-known artists who want to win attention to their work, the Judith Rothschild Foundation is just the place to turn. But there is one caveat: They must be dead.

Few philanthropies spend any money helping individual artists, but the Rothschild Foundation is probably the only fund that specializes in cultivating an appreciation of painters, photographers, and sculptors who are no longer alive.

The foundation was created through a bequest from Ms. Rothschild, an abstract painter and collagist who died in 1993 at age 71 — and who knew what it felt like to be overlooked. Although her works are held by institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art, Ms. Rothschild never became a household name. She was once described by a critic in The New York Times as a “dedicated and knowledgeable artist who never really found herself as a painter.”

Unlike many of her colleagues, however, Ms. Rothschild had a small fortune at her disposal and was determined to use it to fill what she saw as a gap in philanthropy’s attention to artists.

Today, her foundation gives away $200,000 to $400,000 a year to help conserve artworks, hold exhibits, publish catalogs, and take other steps to give a higher profile to the work of artists who were not widely known during their lifetimes. It also puts some of its resources into helping museums around the country display Ms. Rothschild’s work.

$30-Million Art Collection

While the grant program has won much praise, the Rothschild fund is better known in some circles for its $30-million-dollar art collection. It has also drawn attention, and questions, because of its unusual governance structure.

The bulk of the foundation’s $36.1-million endowment is in the form of masterpieces by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and other 20th-century artists — works that the fund often lends to museums. Ms. Rothschild inherited most of the art from her parents, Herbert and Nannette Rothschild, owners of a company that manufactured and imported upscale furniture. (They were not part of the Rothschild banking family.)

Museums around the country are closely watching what happens to those works. Ms. Rothschild’s will stipulated that the foundation could only exist for 25 years after her death — which means that after 2018, all the works will have to be donated to museums or sold, and the assets distributed to charity.

Making the decision about what happens to those pieces will be a longtime friend of Ms. Rothschild’s: Harvey S. Shipley Miller, the foundation’s sole trustee, who also serves as the foundation’s top full-time staff member.

While Ms. Rothschild made clear to friends and others that she didn’t want a foundation bogged down by bureaucracy and controversy, some in the art and philanthropic worlds suggest that Mr. Miller’s role leaves him vulnerable to the appearance of conflicts of interest. In particular, they note that he receives a six-figure annual payment from the foundation and free living quarters at the foundation’s office, Ms. Rothschild’s Upper East Side brick row house, which contains a significant portion of her collection of modern art and the more than 1,000 works she produced.

Surprise Appointment

Mr. Miller says he was surprised to learn that he was in charge of the foundation, because Ms. Rothschild had made only vague remarks about her plans for such a bequest.

After she died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, Mr. Miller discovered that her will had detailed plans for the foundation. The foundation received almost all her assets, since Ms. Rothschild had no children and had been divorced from the novelist Anton Myrer.

But Ms. Rothschild apparently had dreamed of beginning such a philanthropy for many years, according to Jack Flam, an art history professor at City University of New York, who helped organize a retrospective of Ms. Rothschild’s work at the Metropolitan Museum two years ago.

In 1958, when she was 37, Ms. Rothschild wrote to her parents about her desire to provide financial support and organize museum shows for “unseen and unsung” artists “who for one reason or another have been unduly ignored [or are not] commercially appealing to dealers.”

John Oddy, who served as the first director of the Rothschild Foundation’s grants program, says Ms. Rothschild decided to focus on dead artists because “she looked around and saw there were certain types of funding available for art students, for early-career artists, for mid-career artists, and even a couple of funders who were interested in end-of-career artists.” But none appeared to be interested in artists who were no longer living. She was deeply concerned that, once her unknown peers died, there would be no opportunity for the public to revisit their work, and as a result they might be left out of art history textbooks and otherwise forgotten.

A Second Chance

Now Ms. Rothschild’s foundation is giving many artists a second chance for appreciation. Its grants program, which started operating in 1996, offers money to raise the profile of artists who have died since 1976 — largely those who would have been peers of the foundation’s benefactor.

The artists whose work is given a lift through the grants are chosen by a review committee that has included art history professors, museum curators, and noted artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Chuck Close. There are typically between one and two dozen winners each year, with grants ranging from $4,000 to $42,000.

Among this year’s 14 recipients was the Cinque Gallery, in New York, which received $20,000 to exhibit the work of Charles Alston, founder of the “306 group,” named for 306 West 141st Street, a studio and gathering place for black artists in Harlem in the 1930’s. Ruth Jett, director of the non-profit gallery, says she is hopeful that the exhibit will be a powerful tool to heighten awareness of Mr. Alston.

“It’s really so exciting for young people, who may not have been exposed to his work,” she says.

Earlier recipients of Rothschild grants have already succeeded in winning new attention for artists who didn’t achieve much fame in their lifetimes.

The New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York, received $20,000 last year for an exhibition of the work of David Wojnarowicz.

Mr. Wojnarowicz had his first solo exhibition in 1982 at age 28. But he later tumbled into relative obscurity, in part because he was an early participant in Act Up, the provocative anti-AIDS group.

When he died of the disease in 1992, at age 37, his funeral was marked by a demonstration in the streets protesting the federal government’s slowness in acting to approve AIDS drugs.

The art world, however, took little notice of his passing.

Mr. Wojnarowicz “wasn’t easy to promote” during his lifetime, says Dan Cameron, curator of the New Museum, in part because of the haunting, at times shocking, nature of the images he created. Moreover, he says, “his role as an activist made him an anathema to the market,” adding that many gallery owners “felt a nervousness about supporting someone who seemed to be getting into trouble all of the time.”

The $20,000 Rothschild grant was critical seed money for the Wojnarowicz exhibit, which cost $150,000 to produce. Mr. Cameron says Rothschild’s backing helped the museum secure additional funds from the Rockefeller and Henry Luce Foundations and persuaded the Versace fashion-design company to be a corporate sponsor.

Mr. Wojnarowicz’s profile is on the rise because of the grant money, Mr. Cameron says. The exhibit drew 50,000 visitors — half as many people as had visited the museum the previous year — and its catalog remains a top seller.

“He was an artist whose time had come,” says Mr. Cameron.

Estate Planning for Artists

Besides its grants to promote particular artists, the foundation is also trying to help living artists anticipate what to do with both their art and their assets after they die. With the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, in Colorado Springs, it sponsored a conference that led to the publication in 1998 of an estate-planning manual for artists.

Wilder Green, a former deputy director of the Museum of Modern Art who now chairs the foundation’s grants committee, says his longtime friend Ms. Rothschild would have been pleased by the manual because she had “seen a lot of situations where, either because of the personality of the artist or not having good advice, everything ended up a mess.”

He says she thought that “if only there had been a friendly lawyer to give them some advice, they would have been much better off.” The foundation manual, he says, “is an easy way for them to have that well-founded advice.”

While Ms. Rothschild was tight-lipped about her estate plans, she got enough legal advice to decide that she wanted to set up her foundation as a charitable trust, not a non-profit corporation.

In New York State, trusts don’t need to have more than one trustee — something that makes them appealing to donors like Ms. Rothschild who wanted to be sure that her foundation carried out her instructions. She also hoped that the 25-year restriction on operations would ensure that the fund was always led by close friends whom she trusted.

Ms. Rothschild “had seen other artists’ foundations that had been taken over by lawyers and were dragging on and were unfocused, and she just felt there was a great deal of waste,” says Mr. Green, who was one of Ms. Rothschild’s choices to be trustee if Mr. Miller had declined the role.

“She wanted to be sure that her money was well-spent and well-directed within a certain time limit and then went out of business,” he adds. “Although it limits those of us who are administering it, it is a godsend because we know what we can do and what we can’t do.”

Mr. Miller says that he would like to add trustees to offer other perspectives on the foundation’s operations, but that lawyers have advised him that Ms. Rothschild’s will does not allow him to do so.

Conflicts of Interest

As the foundation’s sole trustee and one of its two full-time staff members, Mr. Miller faces potential conflict-of-interest questions, particularly with regard to his compensation. In addition to receiving rent-free living accommodations in the foundation’s headquarters, Mr. Miller earned $202,932 in 1998 — the most recent year for which the foundation’s informational tax return is available. According to the Council on Foundations, more than half of the trustees at similar-sized foundations receive no compensation. Of the 46.7 percent that do, the median annual fee for board chairmen is $9,500 — meaning that half make less and half earn more.

While Mr. Miller notes that he functions more like a full-time executive director or president, often working 60 to 75 hours a week, his salary still far surpasses that of top officials at comparable foundations, who earn a median salary of $73,000, according to the council.

Mr. Miller acknowledges that his compensation may be “toward the upper end,” but he notes that he and Ms. Rothschild’s executor determined that it was in line with his responsibilities, the hours he keeps, and his lack of any clerical or administrative support.

But some observers say that Mr. Miller’s salary and benefits, combined with the lack of additional perspectives on the governing board, raise troubling questions.

An official at another foundation who has extensive knowledge of private foundation law and policy, but who asked not to be identified, says: “A sole trustee living in the funder’s elegant house with a $30-million collection of paintings that is not widely accessible to the public and getting a huge salary begins to look like something that is not being operated solely and exclusively for the benefit of the general public, for whom all these assets are held.”

While everything the foundation is doing appears to be legal, the foundation official notes, it still tends to raise eyebrows.

“The primary rule is not only to avoid any improprieties, but to avoid even the appearance of an inappropriate use of assets held in public trust,” the official says.

Mr. Miller responds that he only resides at the foundation office because he otherwise would have to pay for round-the-clock guard service to protect the art collection, under the terms of its insurance policy.

“It is seen as a job requirement, not a form of housing provided,” he adds.

He also notes that the collection of modern art was on tour from 1996 to 1998, and various pieces from it have been lent since then on a regular basis to museums around the world. As for public visitors to the headquarters, he says, “anyone is welcome to make an appointment to come; there is no restriction on that. It is just not our primary purpose.”

Need Won’t Disappear

In addition to raising questions about Mr. Miller’s role, some observers have wondered why the foundation doesn’t just sell its art collection and use the proceeds to expand its grant making.

But Mr. Miller says such a sale would be unwise. “If you did a major sale all at once you could depress the market. It would look like a distress sale,” he explains.

However, he notes that the foundation plans to sell pieces from the collection as financial needs arise; the rest will gradually be donated to a variety of museums between now and 2018.

Mr. Miller says he assumes that when the foundation starts to get closer to its shutdown date, it is likely that the proceeds of any sales would be poured into additional grants.

Mr. Oddy, the former director of the grants program, says such a move would be welcomed, as there are few other sources of philanthropic support for artists who aren’t well-known. For most foundations and corporations, he says, “the more famous an artist is, the more they want to support that kind of exhibition.”

Yet at the same time, he notes, many other artists may have produced excellent work but have been overlooked because they worked in an unpopular style at the time, weren’t able to develop successful commercial relationships with galleries, or simply had “difficult personalities.”

“I don’t think the Rothschild Foundation has the power to rewrite history,” he says. “But I think it can provide an opportunity for reassessment.”

THE JUDITH ROTHSCHILD FOUNDATION