Collecting Art Is Easy. Running a Museum, Not So Much.
Every single-collector museum ultimately faces the same uncomfortable truth: a fixed collection, however extraordinary, can make a place feel like a one-and-done destination.
Dolores Olmedo was a prominent art collector and close friend of Diego Rivera who, over the course of her lifetime, acquired more than 140 of his works and 25 paintings by Frida Kahlo, many directly from the artists themselves. When it came time to consider her own cultural legacy, rather than donating her holdings to a museum, she opened Mexico City’s Dolores Olmedo Museum in La Noria, a 16th-century hacienda in Xochimilco, making clear that she wished the collection to remain there “for the Mexican people.” Olmedo died in 2002, having seen her museum, which holds the world’s largest collection of works by both Rivera and Kahlo, become a beloved cultural hub.
In opening the Dolores Olmedo Museum, she joined the exclusive club of private museum founders that includes Albert Barnes, Henry Clay Frick, Eli Broad, Peter Brant, Norton Simon, Christian Levett, Henry Walters, Raymond Nasher, David and Carmen Kreeger, Sterling and Francine Clark and Emily and Mitch Rales.
Many other high-net-worth art collectors have also taken this path, though not all of them successfully. Chicago businessman and President Reagan’s ambassador-at-large for cultural affairs Daniel Terra (1911-1996) founded a private museum—actually two museums, one in Chicago and the other outside of Paris—to showcase his 750-work collection of Hudson River Valley and American Impressionist painting. Both closed, the result of a failure to achieve financial viability. The Terra Foundation for American Art then donated the bulk of its collection to the Art Institute of Chicago and shifted its focus to grantmaking. Donald and Shelley Rubin, collectors of Himalayan art, opened a museum to display 1,000-plus objects in the Manhattan building that had been the department store Barneys, but 20 years later, they shut down the venture due to budgetary shortfalls. The Rubin Museum of Art now operates as a “museum without walls,” lending objects to institutions that seek to display and research Himalayan art.
Another cautionary tale is the Hammer Museum, opened in 1990 by Occidental Petroleum Corporation chairman Armand Hammer (1898-1990) three weeks before he died. His large collection of Old Master and 19th-century European paintings and drawings was acclaimed, but by 1992, those in charge of the museum negotiated with the University of California, Los Angeles, to take over the whole thing. Running a museum cannot be just a vanity project for someone with money and ego.
Having your name on the door of a museum is one thing; keeping the place open and financially sustainable is quite another. The Barnes Foundation was established by Dr. Albert Barnes (1872-1951), who set up his collection of 2,500 works of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modern art in a museum in the town of Merion, Pennsylvania. He required strict adherence to his often unwelcoming rules. The museum was available to visitors by invitation only, open just two days per week. Prospective visitors needed to apply for permission to come, swearing to certain art theories held by Barnes. In the 1960s, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office prodded the Barnes, as a tax-exempt educational institution, to be more accessible to the public, but entry was still quite limited—100 visitors per day. As a business model, it hardly looked promising.
By 2002, the Barnes’ board, facing a rapidly declining endowment, petitioned the courts to amend the institution’s charter to permit a move to Philadelphia, where several foundations and philanthropists had pledged $150 million to erect a new building and endow the transplanted institution. That new building opened to the public in May 2012, without those restrictions, and could not have been further from the wishes of Dr. Barnes, who wanted nothing to do with Philadelphia society—but continuing the course Barnes had originally set was no longer possible. Today, there is a lot of engaging programming at the Barnes, including a monthly First Friday evening program featuring music and access to the collection, a film series, a lecture series and classes and workshops. Highlighting Barnes’ commitment to racial equality and social justice, exhibitions and films celebrate artists who are Black, indigenous, people of color and women, many of whom were “overlooked during Dr. Barnes’s time,” said a spokeswoman.
The experience of these single-collector museums has taught other wealthy collectors to plan ahead and perhaps be a bit more humble. In 1955, 68-year-old socialite and philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973) bought a 36-room Georgian-style mansion on a 25-acre estate in the northwest section of Washington, D.C. to showcase her collections of Russian Imperial art, Sèvres porcelains, vases and chalices, as well as English and French paintings, sculptures and tapestries. Her initial plan was to donate her entire collection to the Smithsonian Institution, and the Smithsonian did hold onto the collection for four years, but in 1977, the estate reclaimed everything and set up her house and grounds as a museum. “Making Hillwood into a museum was Plan B,” Kate Markert, executive director of Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, told Observer. That pivot required a complete rethinking of what should take place there and how it should be supported.
Post left a $10 million endowment that covered the operating budget of Hillwood into the 1990s, but at some point, interest on the endowment could no longer keep pace with the costs of maintaining the building and grounds. The museum began fundraising, seeking memberships, holding special events, charging admissions and producing exhibitions that not only displayed objects Post had collected but also others borrowed from institutions elsewhere. Most importantly, Hillwood dropped its admissions policy that had limited the number of visitors—110 in the morning, 110 in the afternoon—who were required to make prior reservations, in the style of the Barnes Foundation. This new business model helped it earn more money and more repeat visitors.
Every single-collector private museum ultimately faces the same uncomfortable truth: a fixed collection, however extraordinary, can make a place feel like a one-and-done destination. There needs to be something new and different to see every time, even if the permanent collection largely remains the same. It’s a lesson that some museums founded by art collectors never learn; others think about sustainability from the get-go.
Which brings us back to the late Dolores Olmedo and her museum, which is set to reopen in May after closing during the COVID pandemic. She did everything right: she kept her art collection together, she gave it a beautiful home and she made her wishes known. What happens next will depend on whether those who steward her legacy have learned what so many private museum founders discovered too late—that a great collection is only the beginning.
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