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Did everyone get to see the summary of fundraising and endowment-building in Texas, in this morning's New York Times?  Another angle on Houstonian collecting and largesse comes from Mark Pompelia, who forwards this, from the on-line version of the Houston Chronicle:  

Feb. 15, 2005, 6:12AM

BEQUEST TO MFA COULD SET RECORD FOR AN ART MUSEUM
Oil heiress's gift ultimately may be up to $450 million

By SHANNON BUGGS
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, soon could be entered in the annals of philanthropy as the recipient of the largest cash gift to a fine arts museum ever publicly announced.  Caroline Wiess Law, the daughter of one of Humble Oil Co.'s founders, made the museum the prime beneficiary of her estate.

When all of Law's assets are sold and the legal proceedings conclude, possibly by the end of this year, the museum could net between $400 million and $450 million, said director Peter Marzio.

“In recent history, this would be one of the biggest, if not the biggest cash gifts to an art museum," said Mimi Gaudieri, executive director, Association of Art Museum Directors in New York. "This money will help make Houston one of the most important museums in terms of programming and serving the public."

Law's giving would rank as No. 1 in non-art donations to museums on a list compiled by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, which tracks charitable donations of $50 million and more.

Less pressure on budget
The MFA already has plans to kick off a capital campaign in the coming months for designing and building a third structure on its campus to house 20th century and contemporary art, Marzio said. This comes after the museum raised $125 million to build the 200,000-square-foot Audrey Jones Beck building, which opened in March 2000.

"If the Law bequest works out the way we want, " Marzio said, "there will not be as much pressure on the operating budget to build the new building as there was on the budget when we built the Beck building."

Because the Law gift is endowed money, it is not meant to be spent. Instead, the cash will be invested by money managers Fayez Sarofim in Houston and Luther King in Fort Worth.

The $165 million the museum has already received from Law's estate has raised the museum's total endowment to $545 million. A second check of $165 million is expected to arrive by the end of March, making the city's wealthiest arts organization even richer.

"It's a magnanimous gift not only to the MFA but to the entire city," said Ed Wulfe, president of the Houston Symphony. "It ensures the long-term viability of one of our major arts organizations and allows it to continue to impact the quality of life of our entire city."

An avid art collector, Law followed her mother's footsteps on the MFA's board of directors. She used oil industry inheritances from her parents and husbands to support the museum's growth.

She was named a life trustee and was thanked by the board for her generosity over the years with the honor of her name being bestowed on the museum's main building designed by architect Mies Van Der Roh.

"She felt that our family has been very lucky and that this city has been very good to us and that it is our privilege and duty to give back to the city and that this gift might inspire others to do the same," said Jim Elkins, Law's nephew and executor of her estate.

Soon after Law died in 2003 on Christmas Eve and her 85th birthday, her estate gave the museum Law's contemporary art collection valued at between $60 million and $85 million. The 55 major works include pieces by Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro.

The estate also distributed $25 million checks each to the museum, Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

What was not mentioned in the museum's announcement about that gift was that Law named the museum the residual beneficiary of her estate. Anything not specifically given to a person or institution was to go to the museum, including all of the assets of her foundation, which is valued at $18 million and is scheduled to be dissolved by the end of the year.

The endowment also allows the museum to use less of the endowment's income every year to run the fine arts museum and the central administration of an arts organization that also operates the Glassell School of Art and the decorative arts museums at Rienzi and Bayou Bend.

The museum's budget requires a draw of about 5.1 percent of the $544 million endowment total return to generate one-fourth of the the $41 million needed to operate the museum this fiscal year, which ends June 30.

History of efficiency
Before this infusion of cash, the museum earned a reputation as an efficient charity by spending 88 percent of its budget on programs and services and paying only 4 cents to raise $1 in charitable contributions, said Charity Navigator, a Web-based evaluator of the financial habits of nonprofits.

That compares with the average art museum's spending just 68 percent on programs and 13 cents on fund-raising expenses.

But one area in which the MFA appears stagnant is in revenue growth. Over the past three to five years, the average art museum grew by at least 6 percent, deriving primary revenue from individual donations, corporate contributions and and ticket sales. The MFA's revenue in that time frame rose only 1.6 percent.

[Houston] Chronicle reporters Everett Evans, Purva Patel and Charles Ward contributed to this story.

From the Times:
February 16, 2005
Major Gifts of Cash and Art for Texas Museums
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

       
HOUSTON, Feb. 15 - In a shower of philanthropy valued at some $400 million, the Dallas Museum of Art on Tuesday announced a series of cash gifts and art bequests from leading collectors that will enrich the museum's holdings by more than 800 Modern and contemporary works, including those by masters like Monet, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Gerhard Richter.

The museum, known for its pre-Columbian, African, Indonesian and American decorative-arts collections, will also get a striking new gallery space, the Rachofsky House, designed by Richard Meier. The museum said its new Monet, a 1903 work known as "Water Lilies - The Clouds," was "the most important Impressionist painting in private hands in Texas."

The donations, made by an unusual collectors' collective, promise to return to the public eye paintings and sculptures by a number of major artists of the 20th century whose available works have been increasingly disappearing into private hands. The donors said their gifts would be deeded upon their deaths, but would continue to be accessible for lending.

"It changes the future of this museum and makes it one of the most important centers for contemporary art in North America," said John R. Lane, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art, in an interview on Tuesday. In coming years the museum may have to add space to accommodate the gifts, he said.

Outside experts were also pleased. "I'm thrilled for Dallas," said Rusty Powell, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, who praised the collections as "each in its own way of enormous importance." Together, he said, the gift "creates a remarkably important modern lodestone for the Dallas Museum."

The Dallas windfall came as Houston, its sometime urban rival, increased the estimate of a gift to its art museum from its largest benefactor, an oil heiress who died in 2003, to about $450 million, a figure reported Tuesday in The Houston Chronicle and confirmed by Peter Marzio, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts here. He said that the will of the philanthropist Caroline Wiess Law had already yielded the museum $330 million in cash - not counting her gifts of artworks - but that an additional $100 million or more was expected when her estate was settled, making her donation possibly the largest money gift ever to a fine arts museum in this country.

Mr. Lane, of the Dallas museum, said he was not taken aback by what he jokingly referred to as "Houston's salvo at the same time," but instead was delighted for Houstonians. "It's good for the cultural life of Texas," he said.

The Dallas gifts, coming less than two years after the opening of the museum's adjacent $70 million Nasher Sculpture Center, represents a financial commitment of "the better part of $1 billion," said Robert K. Hoffman, a leading Dallas art patron, civic leader and Coca-Cola bottler who organized the latest series of museum bequests.

"We collected collegially," Mr. Hoffman said by telephone. "We have a good idea what others are doing and we tried not to duplicate each other." And, he added, "we want the cultural resources to stay here."

The gifts arrive, moreover, amid a Dallas cultural building boom: a new $275 million performing arts center includes an opera house designed by Norman Foster, a theater designed by Rem Koolhaas and an arts high school. They will become part of the Dallas Arts District, which already embraces the Morton H. Myerson Symphony Center.

The Dallas donors are Margaret McDermott, a 93-year-old benefactor of the museum, who gave the Monet, and three sets of collectors also long affiliated with the art museum: Mr. Hoffman and his wife, Marguerite; Cindy and Howard Rachofsky; and Deedie and Rusty Rose.

The Hoffmans' gift, making up about 350 of the promised items, includes works by Joseph Beuys - some recently lent to the Menil Collection in Houston for its Beuys show - Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Lucien Freud, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline, Ellsworth Kelly, Philip Guston, Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Whiteread and Sol LeWitt.

The Rachofsky pledge, rich in Minimalist art, involves about 400 works by Mr. Richter, Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Sigmar Polke, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Tom Friedman, Kiki Smith, Robert Gober, Mona Hatoum, Jim Hodges, Robert Irwin and others. It also includes the house that Mr. Rachofsky, a hedge fund manager, began building in the 1980's as a residence and came to use as a gallery when it was completed in 1996. Mr. Rachofsky said there was no truth to the Dallas gossip that he had intended the structure as an exhibition space and had added a toilet and bedroom to get around zoning restrictions.

Mr. Hoffman described the Rachofsky House as "a 21st-century Bayou Bend" - a modern take on the Houston museum's decorative-arts annex, the former mansion of the heiress and patron Ima Hogg.

The collection donated by the Roses - he was an owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team and now is president of Cardinal Investment Company - is strong in sculpture, Modern furniture and handmade objects, and includes works by Robert Ryman, Franz West, Ana Mendieta and Richard Tuttle.

Mr. Rachofsky said his collection covered two broad themes: Minimalism and purity of form and "postmodern notions of identity."

"It clearly fills in an area the museum doesn't have," he said.
In addition, Mr. Hoffman said that each couple made what he called seven-figure commitments toward an endowment drive that the museum said had already raised $65 million, with $70 million more to go, to put the museum's total endowment at $208 million. Another benefactor the museum declined to name gave $32 million for a separate acquisitions fund.

The Houston museum's endowment is far greater, $544 million, but still a quarter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's.
Ms. Rose, a past president of the Dallas Museum of Art's board, gave credit to Mr. Hoffman for the idea of jointly pledging their separate collections "now, before we die."

When Mr. Hoffman told Ms. Rose that he and his wife and the Rachofskys had decided to give their separate collections to the museum and were asking her and her husband to join them, Ms. Rose said she was so happy, "I almost started crying."