In the early 1980s, Arthur Sackler followed the news about HIV but without much interest. Purdue Frederick had never researched antiviral drugs. It had nothing on the drawing board that might show promise in battling AIDS to submit to the NIH. Moreover, none of Arthur’s pharma clients for the McAdams ad agency seemed to be rushing forward to develop a drug.
Working through the obstacles to a government-pharma-research partnership on AIDS was something that would have seemed to have been a natural for Sackler. When he worked at Schering during World War II he witnessed firsthand the gigantic joint effort by the government and a handful of pharmaceutical firms to convert penicillin from a promising lab compound into a wonder drug. Sackler, who was proud of his social activism that dated back to his efforts to end the Red Cross segregation of black and white blood in the 1940s, might have railed against the Reagan administration’s reticence to make AIDS a public health priority because of its prejudices against the early victims, gay men and intravenous drug users. It was not just the emergence of AIDS and the political controversises around it, however, that failed to grab Arthur’s attention. He was paying little heed to most of his businesses because he was consumed with a long-standing personal obsession: where to bequeath about one thousand of his rarest art objects.
All three Sackler brothers had a lofty view of themselves since the spectacular opening of the Metropolitan Museum’s Sackler Wing, with its restored Temple of Dendur. The first exhibition were the glittering treasures from the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamen. It had been impressive, even by the standards of the Met, New York society, and the art world.1 Arthur thought it an “epic debut.” Mortimer claimed it “gave rise to the term ‘blockbuster’ exhibition.”2
Thomas Hoving, who had been solicitous and amiable in courting Arthur and his brothers, had resigned as the museum’s director. He made the Sacklers feel as if they were every bit as important as the Rockefellers or Lehmans. Hoving’s replacement was the Met’s vice director, Parisian-born Philippe de Montebello, the son of a French count and wartime resistance fighter. His family traced its heritage to Napoleonic aristocracy.3
The urbane Montebello had little patience with the Sacklers. Montebello had started at the Met as an assistant curator in European Paintings before Arthur had struck his first deal in 1966 for his named galleries and the basement storage to house his collection. Montebello was a witness to the many failed attempts of his predecessors to persuade Sackler to commit a significant portion of his superlative Asian collection to the Met. Arthur, whom he considered crass, irritated him and he had decided not to be cowed by Sackler’s implied threat of donating the collection elsewhere. Few institutions rivaled the Met with a gravitas that would be illustrious enough for Arthur.
Montebello thought Arthur had a nonstop litany of “petty grievances” about how the museum used the temple. Sackler found the new director “a fogey, a Europhile, an elitist.”4
Adding to the tension with the Met was a story that broke in ARTnews just before the Dendur inaugural. It exposed the special arrangement of Sackler’s storage room in the Met’s basement.5 When called for a comment, the museum’s general counsel told the reporter that whatever happened at the Metropolitan was “none of the public’s damned business.”6 That was not quite true since the Met was publicly funded. The article piqued the interest of the New York attorney general, who opened an investigation into why the museum had over the years spent nearly a million dollars for storing Sackler’s art.7 Although unsubstantiated, Sackler was convinced the leak to the press was from Montebello.8 I 9
Marietta was convinced that Arthur was also afflicted with a “need for recognition.”10 The two had divorced and Arthur was courting British-born Jillian Lesley Tully, twenty-five years his junior.11 Not long after they married in 1981, Arthur purchased one of New York’s most iconic residences, a twenty-seven-room triplex at 666 Park Avenue. It had originally been commissioned by Mrs. William Vanderbilt in 1927 but she never moved in. The New York Times described it as “the greatest maisonette ever constructed in New York… [though] to call it a maisonette at all is rather like calling a Bugatti a runabout.”12
Sackler now had four full-time curators working on his Asian collection. By 1980, they had compiled ten volumes of photos, descriptions, and provenance of 90 percent of his art. The following year Sackler initiated talks with the Vatican about exhibiting some of its historic collection in the U.S., what Arthur called an “art and faith” tour. The Metropolitan and the National Gallery had initially agreed to underwrite it jointly. Then the Metropolitan changed course and negotiated its own deal for a Vatican show. Sackler was furious.13
Carter Brown, the National Gallery’s curator, saw an opportunity in the growing rift between Sackler and the Met. Washington, D.C.’s, Freer Gallery of Art began wooing Sackler in earnest. The Freer had been created at the start of the twentieth century after industrialist Charles Freer donated his significant collection of American and Asian art.14 The Smithsonian Institution had taken over just before it opened to the public in 1923. As the first American museum funded by taxpayers, it was restricted from raising funds by borrowing money or striking lucrative arrangements with private donors in exchange for naming rights. In the 1960s and 1970s those restrictions made it difficult to compete with private museums in acquiring important private collections. The Freer was also desperate for more exhibition and storage space. Its fifty-year-old design was showing its design limitations.
“In effect, like Miss Havisham’s mansion in Great Expectations, the Freer was frozen in time,” noted Karl Meyer, who wrote a history of one hundred years of American interest in Chinese art.15
Congress approved an extra $500,000 in 1980 for the Smithsonian to start construction on two buildings to house African American and Asian art on the National Mall’s Quadrangle. The Smithsonian put that project on hold the following year because it was short of funds to care for its existing buildings, much less oversee an expansion.
Sackler saw an opportunity in their problems. He asked Michael Sonnenreich to negotiate a deal. In 1982, Sackler stunned Montebello and the Met by announcing a $4 million donation to the Freer and the donation of a thousand of his most prized collectibles, valued at $50 million. In return, the Smithsonian agreed to create the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery directly on the National Mall, adjacent to the Freer. It would be the first modern structure on the Mall to be named after a private person. Congress, with its oversight of the Smithsonian, held hearings on the bequest. Ultimately, no one in government wanted to be responsible for stopping the deal.
A month later, Sackler gave another $7.5 million for the Sackler Museum to be built at Harvard (eventually $10.7 million).16 It was intended to complement Harvard’s existing art museums, the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger.
I. Author Michael Gross reported in Rogues’ Gallery, his 2009 social history of the Metropolitan Museum, that another factor that aggravated Sackler during this time was that he was “particularly vexed by the preponderance of homosexuals on the museum staff.” A former business colleague of Sackler told the author that “Arthur didn’t care one way or the other. If he liked you, it didn’t matter what you were or did. If he didn’t like someone, everything about that person was subject to criticism.”