It’s good news that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is getting the Doris and Donald Fisher collection, on loan, to fill planned new galleries. But if you’ve read just the bare-bones announcement in today’s papers, you may have missed a couple of significant parts of the deal.
Quick recap: the Fishers wanted to build their own museum in the city’s Presidio, but were turned down. Rather than taking their art and going elsewhere, the Fishers (happily) are remaining loyal to the city where they made the fortune, via The Gap, that allowed them to buy their collection: some 1,100 works by Alexander Calder, Chuck Close, Willem De Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Anselm Kiefer, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and others.
Now, significantly:
- Works from the Fisher Collection will be on view in a new wing that will also include art from the museum’s collection. In addition, works from the Fisher Collection will be interwoven in existing galleries with SFMOMA’s modern and contemporary holdings. (Segregating private collections, after a while, is almost always a mistake for the institution and the art.)
- The Fishers will create a trust, administered in collaboration with SFMOMA, to oversee the care of their collection at the museum, renewable after 25 years.
- Before building the 100,000 sq. ft. expansion, SFMOMA will work with Bain and Company to develop a real business plan to define the impact of the enlarged facility, increased operations, and enhanced programming on the museum’s expansion and annual operating budgets. (If other museums had done this before their expansions, many would not be in the trouble they’re in now.)
- The business plan will inform both the contributions to the capital campaign and endowment that will be made by the Fishers and the funds that need to be raised by the museum.
We’ve all heard complaints about the excessive influence of business executives on museums in the last few years. This time, the opposite seems true. The Fishers know business, and so does Charles Schwab, chairman of SFMOMA’s trustees. Under director Neal Benezra, the museum seems to have got this one right.
Here’s a link to the full press release. Strawberries to all.
UPDATED, 9/28: Don Fisher died yesterday, according to the Wall Street Journal.