Emily Rauh Pulitzer has a feeling her late husband, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., would have approved of her decision to give 31 works of art from the couple’s private collection to the Harvard Art Museum last fall. After all, he had been an avid art collector and had made scores of such donations to his alma mater throughout the years.
However, Mr. Pulitzer, who
| | Emily Rauh Pulizer (No. 36) Total committed in 2008: $47.5-million Key recipient: Harvard Art Museum
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died in 1993, might have been taken aback by the other part of the donation: $45-million.
“He would be astounded by the financial gift, which would not have been possible if we had not sold the company when we did,” she says.
Mrs. Pulitzer, along with other family members, sold Pulitzer Inc., a media company whose flagship newspaper was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to Lee Enterprises in 2005, in a deal worth $1.46-billion, according to newspaper reports.
As the company’s largest shareholder, Mrs. Pulitzer received more than $400-million from the sale, according to James V. Maloney, chief financial officer at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, a St. Louis institution she founded.
Mrs. Pulitzer described the sale of the company, which had been in the Pulitzer family since the 1870s, as an emotional experience. “This has not been an easy process or decision,” she told the Post-Dispatch in 2005.
But financially the timing could hardly have been better. Newspaper companies’ stock prices have plummeted in the years since. Lee Enterprises’ stock, which traded at nearly $44 a share at the time of the sale, was worth just 37 cents a share as of mid-January.
Long-Term Commitments
The gift to the Harvard Art Museum, the largest charitable gift she has made, typifies Mrs. Pulitzer’s philanthropic interests and approach.
She and her late husband’s commitments to a handful of institutions span decades, and she expects those relationships to continue. She prefers making gifts now, she says, so that she can meet society’s needs and see things happen in her lifetime.
Thomas W. Lentz, the Harvard museum’s director, says her generosity stems from a “lifelong belief in the transformative power of works of art.”
“Especially in times like this,” he adds, “works of art are a refuge. They represent solace, inspiration.”
About $40-million of her latest gift to the Harvard museum will support a major renovation project, and $5-million will endow the museum’s department of modern and contemporary art. The three components of the Harvard Art Museum — the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum — will be housed under one roof when the project is completed, in 2013.
Mrs. Pulitzer’s experiences at Harvard as a student, curator, collector, and philanthropist contribute to what Mr. Lentz considers her “deep, almost intuitive understanding of what we do,” he says.
As chair of one of the museum’s advisory committees, Mrs. Pulitzer is in regular contact with Mr. Lentz, and the two took trips to visit other arts institutions around the country to do research for the Harvard museum’s renovation plans.
She cares about details, he says. It’s not unusual for him to receive e-mail messages from her commenting on the look of one of the museum’s brochures or the contents of its Web site.
Such a pragmatic approach is the norm for Mrs. Pulitzer, says her friend and former museum colleague Marjorie B. Cohn.
“She’s an idealist, she’s a principled person, but she then gets down to brass tacks very quickly about what she can do or what other people can do in order to get from point A to point B,” says Ms. Cohn, who is writing a book about Joseph Pulitzer Jr.'s life.
Mrs. Pulitzer has already paid nearly half of the gift and will pay most of the balance over the next two to three years, says Bradford Voigt, the museum’s director of institutional advancement. A small portion will be in the form of a bequest.
The collection of 31 works of art that Mrs. Pulitzer gave last year is worth approximately four times the value of her financial gift, Mr. Voigt says.
Formative Years
The Pulitzer family’s support of the arts at Harvard, which goes back decades, includes gifts of 43 modern and contemporary works of art donated between 1953 and 2005, according to the university. Although Mrs. Pulitzer would not disclose the total amount the family has given to the museum, the university’s statement says such money has helped the museum purchase 92 other works of art.
Mrs. Pulitzer, now in her mid-70s, grew up in Cincinnati, in a home with parents who favored modern art. She earned a bachelor’s degree in art history at Bryn Mawr College in 1955 and studied at the École du Louvre, in Paris. She was assistant curator of drawings at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum from 1957 to 1964, during which time she earned a master-of-arts degree at Harvard.
Those years at Harvard were formative, Mrs. Pulitzer says, influencing her life as an art curator and collector. “It was a very stimulating time. I hadn’t been particularly interested in drawings before, and that also became a life-changing result.”
Also during that time, she met Mr. Pulitzer, when he and his first wife, Louise Vauclain, visited the museum.
Mr. Pulitzer became editor and publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the newspaper his grandfather founded, in 1955. But art was a passion: He had graduated from Harvard in 1936 with a bachelor’s degree in fine art and began collecting while still a student. In 1939 he made his first gift to Harvard, pledging $6,000 to a fellowship for the study of art abroad.
In 1964, when Mrs. Pulitzer moved to St. Louis to become curator of the Saint Louis Art Museum, she maintained a friendship with the newspaperman and his wife. Mr. Pulitzer was by then active in the St. Louis arts scene, according to Ms. Cohn, the family friend.
Ms. Vauclain died in 1968, survived by her husband and their teenage son, Joseph Pulitzer IV.
Mr. Pulitzer married Emily Rauh, or Emmy, as her friends call her, in 1973. The couple did not have children.
An ‘Unbroken History’
Ms. Cohn says Mr. Pulitzer became known as a rarity among collectors: one who held onto everything he acquired.
Another distinctive aspect of his collecting, she says, was that he collected during many decades in which the art market steadily rose. Picassos that he purchased in the 1930s for $5,000 or $10,000 might be worth 10,000 times as much today, she says.
As Mr. Pulitzer’s career in newspapers rolled on, and the couple’s art collection grew, says his widow, he never forgot his alma mater, establishing an “unbroken history” of support to Harvard.
Mrs. Pulitzer selected the pieces she gave to Harvard’s museum last year. Asked if any of the 31 were favorites of hers or her late husband’s, she politely declined to say, comparing the question to being asked if one has a favorite child.
The donations are certainly studded with gems. Mr. Lentz singles out Richard Serra’s “Untitled (Corner Prop Piece),” from 1969, along with several major Picasso paintings, as helping to make the museum “a much stronger institution.”
One of the most important Picassos, the 1918 “Harlequin,” Ms. Cohn says, was bought by Mr. Pulitzer in 1936 in London.
Among the donated works is an interesting pair of items: Constantin Brancusi’s “Sleeping Muse II,” from 1926, which is a bronze head of a woman lying on its side, and Roy Lichtenstein’s “Sleeping Muse,” from 1983, which is a bronze cutout silhouette of the same image. Having both of those items, Ms. Cohn says, is wonderful for a teaching museum.
Other Giving
Mrs. Pulitzer made other sizable gifts in 2008 to the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, and the Grand Center Arts and Entertainment District, in St. Louis, but, through an assistant, declined to specify the amounts given.
She also founded and serves as chair of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, in St. Louis, which opened its doors in 2001. It does not maintain a permanent collection but displays exhibitions of art. It also provides space for musical concerts, symposia, and other events. She gave $2.5-million to the foundation in 2008, Mr. Maloney said.
Mrs. Pulitzer has extensive board experience at cultural institutions, stretching over several decades. She serves on the Board of Overseers at Harvard University and the Board of Trustees of the St. Louis symphony, as well as on the boards of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Grand Center; and the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
Following the News
In addition to her deep involvement in the arts world, Mrs. Pulitzer keeps a rooting interest in the profession that made her family’s fortune, making gifts to support nonprofit journalism. In 2006 she pledged $1-million to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, in Washington, and in 2007, pledged $500,000 in a challenge grant to the online newspaper the Saint Louis Beacon.
Such gifts follow in the tradition of her late husband’s family. With a $2-million gift he left to Columbia University on his death, in 1911, Joseph Pulitzer established the School of Journalism there, as well as the Pulitzer Prizes.
Ms. Cohn says the Pulitzer family sold the company at “the last moment that a profitable news enterprise could be sold advantageously.”
Mrs. Pulitzer “was surprised and relieved that it could be accomplished and subsequently,” Ms. Cohn says, “everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket. She’s lucky she got out when she did.”