Feature
The New Face of Patronage
Suzanne Mcgee
12/01/2005

Robert Rosenkranz is quite adept at acquiring art created by long dead, often anonymous, artists. By all accounts his collection of Chinese finery is exquisite; its highlight is a prized series of rare Ming Dynasty paintings. But Rosenkranz’s assemblage lacked a certain vitality, an au fait aspect—that is, until he met Mu Xin about six years ago.

GEESE ARRIVING Over a Pavilion by Mu Xin from the Rosenkranz collection.(Photograph by John Bigelow Taylor, N.Y.C.)
In 1982, Mu Xin fled political imprisonment in China, carrying his series of 33 small ink and gouache landscapes, bleak scenes that drew as much from the Dutch landscape masters of the 17th and 18th centuries as from Chinese tradition. Rosenkranz, who met Mu Xin through a mutual acquaintance, was stunned when he saw them. “I thought they were the best works of Chinese ink painting I had seen produced in the 20th century,” he says. “And yet, Mu Xin was a complete unknown, even to many in the field. I wanted to change all that, to put this guy on the map.”

Mu Xin had completed the paintings in the late 1970s, after his release from a people’s prison (a converted air-raid shelter). He painted at night to avoid detection by the police, who kept him under house arrest. After arriving in New York via Hong Kong, he ceased producing art, working instead with other Chinese artists and scholars to educate members of the Chinese diaspora about their cultural heritage. Soon after they met, Rosenkranz set about persuading Mu Xin to resume painting, his first step toward becoming an art patron.

9TH-CENTURY marble Tang Dynasty Luohan from the Rosenkranz collection. (Photograph courtsey of Li Yin Oriental Art Co., Ltd.)
In an era of growing wealth and a concomitant rise in appreciation for all things cultural, perhaps it is inevitable that art aficionados—art in the broad sense, both performing and visual—would bring a sharp, entrepreneurial instinct to their passions and strive to show the world something new. Today, the main thrust of this trend seems more commercial than cultivated. Every affluent theatergoer and museum maven has been hounded by pleas offering patron status in return for a five-figure donation. Many of the country’s large ballet companies reflect— some would say uncomfortably—the Renaissance style of patronage by serving up their principal dancers as open to sponsorship. Contemporary writers are the sole group that is wholly averse to such merchantry, many of them fearful of being perceived as the voice of a wealthy patron.

A TANG period horse sculpture.
That cozy personal relationship in which a patron commissions works to his own taste is the way this tradition operated from the days of the Medicis until the 19th century. Yesterday’s patron class was comprised of royalty, aristocrats and wealthy merchants, who inhabited a world wherein they and their peers were the primary audience for the works that they commissioned.

Today patronage is back en vogue for devotees such as Rosenkranz, but their motivations appear to be more enlightened. They desire a face-to-face relationship with the artist that revolves around discovering the best channels to create a reputation for the art, in an increasingly crowded aesthetic marketplace. It is also a marketplace filled with experts—critics, theater directors, museum curators and literary editors—who may not take kindly to the opinions of people they view as dilettantes with more cash than taste.

Yet opportunities exist to not only become a patron to a visual artist, but to work with new organizations that have sprung up to connect visual artists, musicians and composers with respective patrons. (See “Match Makers” below.)

Self-Dealers
Patronage began to fall out of favor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for good reason. Art patrons-cum-dealers frequently promoted artists in order to drive up the market value of their own holdings. Theo van Gogh is perhaps the best remembered of these men, but many operated in this fashion. In 1912, modernist art dealer and collector Henry-David Kahnweiler structured a formal contract with Pablo Picasso, under which the Parisian dealer would pay the artist a monthly stipend in exchange for a certain number of new works.

TOP VIEW
Anyone can acquire a piece of art or write a check to a cultural institution that offers paid access to a patrons circle. But few art devotees possess the motivation, vision and capital to become true patrons. Unlike their classicist Renaissance counterparts, today’s art patrons focus on gaining recognition for artists and their works by providing financial and
career support. But patronage is not without its risks. Patrons sometimes conflict with art experts who view them as moneyed dilettantes, and they must avoid the perception that they are promoting budding artists for their own financial gain.
This trend of self-dealing reached its zenith (or its nadir, perhaps) in the 1990s in the personage of advertising executive Charles Saatchi. He became known for buying the works of promising young British artists—sometimes entire collections in bulk—at discount prices, the artists hoping that Saatchi’s interest would ignite their careers. Saatchi suffered a much-publicized rift with one of these artists, Damien Hirst, who felt that his work was being exploited as a tourist attraction at Saatchi’s gallery. Hirst eventually reacquired his art from Saatchi, reportedly for hundreds of times more than Saatchi originally paid.

Rosenkranz, chairman of insurer Delphi Financial Group, and manager of hedge fund Acorn Capital Management, is determined to make sure that no one perceives his efforts as motivated by financial self-interest, fearing that if it happens, no one will take Mu Xin or his work seriously. First he purchased Mu Xin’s entire series for his private foundation. Then came the hard work of cultivating academia. Rosenkranz provided funding to Yale University and other institutions to have scholars study Mu Xin’s art. From his efforts grew an exhibition of the ink series compiled by the Yale Art Gallery and the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum. The show traveled to the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Asia Society in New York in 2003. Underwritten by the Rosenkranz Foundation, the two university galleries published a lavish 150-page catalog of the landscapes and 66 calligraphic sheets Mu Xin had done in prison.

SHONNA VALESHA'S photography from Alexandra’s Garden. Top: Jack in the Pulpit V.1. Bottom: Oriental Poppy. (Photography by Shonna Valeska 2005.)
Rosenkranz estimates his total outlay on the venture reached $450,000. “It was a pretty serious undertaking, but worth every penny,” he maintains. “Today, anyone interested in contemporary Chinese art knows of Mu Xin and his work.”

After the exhibition, Rosenkranz donated the works to Yale. Although Mu Xin has recently begun to produce a new series of smaller images, too few have reached the market to gauge the impact of Rosenkranz’s patronage on the value of Mu Xin’s work. But boosting the artist’s worth was only a small part of Rosenkranz’s objective. “The bigger issue is the feeling that you are playing a role in helping the artist create their best work, and you learn more about their thoughts and work processes as well,” he says.

A Discerning Ear
Kathryn Gould, general partner at Menlo Park, Calif., venture capital firm Foundation Capital, is an avid amateur violinist. She was driven to become a patron as she became exasperated with contemporary symphonic works that to her were “unlistenable.” She started walking out of performances that irritated her, “without even waiting for the Brahms!”

Gould sees an artistic blockage in today’s orchestral works. “Too much bad music is being commissioned; the audience cringes and the works are never performed again—it’s a vicious circle,” she says. “It used to be that composers made their living within conservatories or by composing, and nowadays they are a bit more distanced from their audiences; they work for universities that see arcane work as not necessarily a bad thing.”

She is particularly impatient with atonal music, or music produced by minimalist or serialist composers such as John Adams or Philip Glass. “Suddenly the biggest criticism anyone can make is that something sounds like movie music, but there is nothing wrong with melody, harmony or rhythm.”

SHONNA VALESHA'S photography from Alexandra’s Garden, Jack in the Pulpit, V.4. (Photograph by Shonna Valeska 2005.)
When her 50th birthday arrived in 2000, Gould decided to search for composers whom she liked and work to advance their careers. Her quest took her to a nonprofit organization called Meet the Composer, where Heather Hitchens, the group’s president, was also looking for a method for making patronage viable in the music world. Together, Gould and Hitchens worked to identify three orchestras in the Bay Area—the Santa Rosa Symphony, the Marin Symphony and the Oakland East Bay Symphony—that were receptive to the idea of having a patron commission work and play an active role in selecting which composers would be chosen.

“Initially, I think they were very skeptical and wary of having a patron give them anything but money,” Gould says. “The major orchestras simply don’t want this kind of involvement, and there is a general feeling that patrons getting involved in artistic decisions is kind of risky.” The three conductors, Gould and Hitchens hammered out a model for collaborating. They would each listen to the work of all the commission candidates and decide jointly on nine winners, each of whom would be asked to produce one work. Three works would be commissioned for each orchestra—one per season—and all three orchestras agreed to play each other’s commissions during the season.

MU XIN paintings Sunset in
the Yellow Mountains and Cicadas Drone in Summer Trees. (Photography by John Bigelow Taylor, N.Y.C.)
Gould found that her views did not always mesh with those of the conductors. “Some composers I really liked, but someone else on the panel vetoed. Still, I’ll find ways to work with them later,” she explains. Sometimes Gould emailed or phoned Hitchens, looking for guidance. “She’d ask me what she was missing, then go back and listen again,” Hitchens says. “This is the kind of engaged patron that music needs. While we don’t want the kind of situation where the music is just what the donor wants, we may have gone too far in the opposite direction, to the point where there is no dialogue between the donors, the musicians and composers.”

Gould has spent about $500,000 funding this particular project, which she has dubbed Magnum Opus. Thus far, the returns on her investment are impressive. Kenji Bunch’s work, Liechtenstein Triptych, premiered in Santa Rosa during the 2003–2004 season. One of the conductors, Alasdair Neale, programmed the work for a concert with the Sun Valley Symphony in Idaho this past August, and Jeffrey Kahane plans to conduct it and a second work, Vespertine Symphonies by Kevin Puts, at the Colorado Symphony in February.

“The bigger issue is the feeling that you are playing a role in helping the artists create their best work—and you learn more about their thoughts and work processes as well.
More important, perhaps, is the fact that Gould’s patronage has become an impetus for others. An anonymous patron has commissioned a series of works in memory of Daniel Pearl, the slain Wall Street Journal reporter who was also a talented violinist. The first work, by composer Steve Reich, will premier at the Barbican in London in October, then be performed at Carnegie Hall. In spite of her organization’s name, Hitchens is equally amenable to patrons who want to work directly with performers; she recently helped donors sponsor new works for cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Midori.

TOP: ROBERT Rosenkranz among pieces of his collection. (Photograph by Shonna Valeska 2005.) Bottom: Kathryn Gould started working with musicians after she tired of performances that she found boring or irritating. 
Midori may agree to play a salon concert for a patron, but the copyright of any musical work belongs to the composer; hence music patrons do not actually have the opportunity to profit in the way that visual art patrons do. “You just have to figure out what kind of relationship and contact is OK with the donor, the performer and the composer, and make sure that no one pushes those boundaries too far,” Hitchens says. Gould, who does receive private recordings of the works she has commissioned as well as copies of the scores, says she is not interested in financial rewards, but in her connection with the world of music. Ultimately, however, she hopes to find a way to fund recordings of the works she has commissioned to keep them alive. Such ideas are typical of the 21st-century patron’s way of raising the ante, scaling the business.

Rosenkranz has also expanded his level of patronage by adding two other artists to his coterie. One of them, Liu Dan, is the artist who introduced him to Mu Xin. Rosenkranz has asked him to complete a 35-foot-long ink painting in scroll format on a famous theme in Chinese art and literature. Branching out from his passion for Asian art, Rosenkranz also decided to support the fledgling career of photographer Shonna Valeska after being captivated by her extreme close-up images of flowers that she then digitally manipulated. He asked Valeska to create a series of photographs in a similar style in the garden adjoining his East Hampton, N.Y., home. He brought the resulting works to the proprietor of a garden reserve and gallery in the area. “The photographs ended up as the gallery’s major display this past summer,” an obviously elated Rosenkranz says.

“Too much bad
music is being commissioned; the audience cringes and the works are never performed again—it’s a vicious circle.”

The level of involvement that today’s patrons take on varies greatly. Not all patrons are prepared to dedicate the amount of time, effort and capital that Gould did to her Magnum Opus project—hundreds of hours of meetings, hundreds more of listening to tapes. A fledgling patron might start by commissioning a single four-minute solo violin work for Midori for a few thousand dollars, for example. In Rosenkranz’s case, a busy business life means he has less time than he might like to spend talking to artists about their work, but he has not ruled out finding new ways to support artists in the future. “When you commission work from living artists, you are able to try to put them on the map or stimulate a great and ambitious work, something that will last for centuries and become part of art history,” Rosenkranz says. “The immense satisfaction that comes with that is hard to describe.”

Match Makers

Artadia is a nonprofit network that was set up to secure financial support for artists, arrange introductions to visual artists and channel donations from patrons into cash grants.
www.artadia.org
210 Eleventh Avenue, Suite 503
New York, NY 10001
212.727.2233

Meet the Composer seeks support from individual patrons for its global network of both composers and performing musicians in all styles of music, and introduces their work to interested patrons.
www.meetthecomposer.org
75 Ninth Avenue, 3R Suite C
New York, NY 10011
212.645.6949

Suzanne McGee is a New York–based freelance writer who reports on topics such as finance and the art world.