Savoring victory, Metropolitan director Phillipe de Montebello said: “The Annenberg collection is magnificent, ravishing,” and “will make an immeasurable addition” to his museum. The bequest (which goes to the Met after the death of Annenberg, now 83) will become the centerpiece of the Met’s 19th-century European galleries, slated for renovation. Annenberg, the publisher, philanthropist and former U.S. ambassador to Britain, has stipulated that the pictures must remain together.
Annenberg chose the Metropolitan because “the Met and the Louvre are the two complete museums in the world.” The losers mournfully seemed to agree. “The announcement about the Met was no surprise,” said Earl A. (Rusty) Powell, director of the L.A. museum, who accepted a gift of $10 million from Annenberg last week but insists that the money was not a “consolation prize.” Philadelphia’s Scott admitted that his museum couldn’t compete with the “huge audience” drawn by the Met (4.6 million visitors in 1990, compared with 480,000 at Philadelphia).
The reaction at the National Gallery was different - a diplomatic iciness not just at losing the collection but at being sandbagged by the news of the bequest. The New York Times broke the story on the front page just as the National Gallery was kicking off its gala 50th-anniversary celebration. The fete includes a show of 327 works donated in honor of the occasion, including such gems as a set of original Degas wax sculptures. J. Carter Brown, the gallery’s director, called the timing of the Annenberg announcement “a tad quaint” - two tight monosyllables that spoke volumes. Brown took great pains to acknowledge the largesse of Annenberg to the art world and to the National Gallery, which in 1989 received (as did the Philadelphia museum) a $5 million gift from the philanthropist. But gallery staffers discussed the Annenberg news in terms of intrigue and betrayal. It didn’t pass notice that Arthur Sulzberger, chairman of The New York Times, is also chairman of the Metropolitan’s board of trustees.
Annenberg’s immense fortune (in 1988 he sold his Triangle Publications, including TV Guide and Seventeen magazine, to Rupert Murdoch for $3.2 billion) was built on the legacy of his immigrant father, Moses, who started his rise with a wire service that sent racing results to bookies. In 1940, Moses, then owner of The Philadelphia Inquirer, was convicted of federal income-tax evasion and served two years in prison. This family background didn’t make Annenberg the darling of Main Line Philadelphia, whose posh clubs barred him. And he was startled by the vehemence of some in Washington who opposed his appointment as Nixon’s ambassador to London. Despite his friendship with Scott and Brown, Annenberg may still have felt the wounds that he received in these two communities.
The Annenberg collection is certainly a prize to make museum directors knock-kneed with lust. Seeing the paintings at Sunnylands, the 208-acre estate of Annenberg and his wife, Leonore, in Rancho Mirage, Calif:, one writer went into mystical shock: “Before this orchestral blending of color and beauty, serenity and rapture, the brain stumbles. The eyes waltz but the feet are stilled, for fear that the slightest misstep will dissolve this vision of heaven.” More prosaically, the collection contains major works by Renoir, Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet, Degas, Vuillard, Matisse, Seurat, Picasso, Braque and others. “La Berceuse (Woman Rocking a Cradle)” is a picture that meant a great deal to van Gogh, who intended it to be a “lullaby in colors.” Images of women abound in the collection, from Lautrec’s portrait of a nude prostitute confronting herself in a mirror to the affluent domesticity of Renoir’s “The Daughters of Catulle Mendes.” Gauguin’s “The Siesta” takes an almost cinematic angle on a group of Tahitian women at ease in their missionary dresses. One of the most beautiful pictures is Vuillard’s “The Album,” a painting of seven women that dissolves into a gorgeous dream in rose and gold. When Annenberg, who grew up with seven sisters, saw this painting he knew he had to have it.
And now the Met will have it. Annenberg’s gesture is one of the grandest in the long line of men who’ve attained a kind of immortality by wedding their vast wealth with the products of genius. The man whose philanthropies include a recent pledge of $50 million to the United Negro College Fund has earned his reflected glory. Giving well is the best revenge.
