Leaked emails from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) to Sony executives shed light on the relationships between celebrities, senior Hollywood figures and the art world.
The correspondence reveals that Barbra Streisand has promised to donate a portrait by John Singer Sargent to the museum. The singer, who served as a trustee of Lacma from 2007 to 2014, made the pledge to give the work—Mrs Cazalet and Children Edward and Victor, 1900-01—at a board meeting last year.
“Before even beginning our campaign [to secure anniversary gifts of art]… Barbra Streisand leapt forward with a major promised gift,” wrote Michael Govan, the museum’s director, in a trustee newsletter emailed to Michael Lynton, the chief executive of Sony Entertainment, on 25 February 2014. “The dazzling portrait [which is nearly 2.5m tall] will add incredible depth to our Sargent holdings and will greatly enhance our already strong collection of American art from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
The email is part of a cache leaked online by hackers last autumn after a cyber-attack on Sony. In April, Wikileaks published the Sony material on its own website with a searchable database.
The donation, which is intended to mark the museum’s 50th anniversary celebrations this year, will be made as a bequest. “It is a piece that needs breadth and space…It needs to be displayed on a museum wall, and Lacma fits the bill,” Streisand told the Los Angeles Times.
Streisand collects in many fields and has a particular fondness for furniture, collectibles, and American art. In 1994, she sold a collection of Art Nouveau and Art Deco works at Christie’s in New York before teaming up with the auction house again in 1999 to sell American Arts and Crafts, Frank Lloyd Wright furniture and works by Louis Comfort Tiffany, among other items.
In 2012, a journalist for Time magazine visited Streisand at home in Malibu and reported being “led… to a stately room overlooking the ocean that was filled with paintings by John Singer Sargent, Chippendale furniture and a disturbing number of dolls.”
Negotiations revealed
The Sony emails also reveal Govan’s ongoing negotiations with the New York-based philanthropist Ann Ziff over the display of her art collection in the museum. Ziff, the widow of the late publishing executive William B. Ziff Jr and a generous supporter of arts institutions, is the chairwoman of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, to which she donated $30m in 2010. She is also a voracious collector and assembled a wide range of objects with her late husband. “Chinese ceramics, Oceanic, American Indian, pre-Columbian, Art Deco, African… a lot of different things appealed to us,” she told Sotheby’s magazine in March.
The Sony emails suggest that highlights from the Ziff collection will go on show in Los Angeles, possibly as a prelude to an eventual donation of the works to Lacma. On 8 June 2014, just days before the museum announced that Ann Ziff had been appointed as a trustee, Govan wrote in an email to Lynton that he was “heading to New York for the day tomorrow to work on the Ziff collection negotiation. Very exciting.” On 16 July 2014, Govan told Lynton that he had just arrived “back from Aspen with a team of curators working on the Ziff show. Wow. It’s going to be amazing.”
Sony lobbies for Lacma
The leaked emails also show that Michael Lynton, himself a trustee of Lacma, lobbied Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor, on behalf of the museum. The institution needed Ridley-Thomas’s support to secure $125m in county funding towards its $600m expansion.
Before a lunch meeting between Lynton and Ridley-Thomas in July 2014, Govan sent detailed briefings to both Lynton and Keith Weaver, Sony’s executive vice-president, putting the case for county funding.
“Lacma has momentum and the buildings are really in need of repair… if we don’t get going on this, Los Angeles could find itself with its museum closed in 2023 while the new subway stop opens,” Govan wrote. Describing the expansion as “the most significant cultural building in the US in the coming decade”, Govan added that “the private and public dollars will create very significant economic impact during construction (around a billion dollars) and significant ongoing increases in tax revenue due to significant new destination visitors to the improved cultural attraction.”
In November, the Los Angeles County supervisors voted unanimously to provide funding of $125m from county taxpayers’ money. A spokeswoman for Lacma declined to comment.