Museums: Giving and Naming ... by David A. Doheny

David A. Doheny served as vice-president and general counsel at the National Trust from 1985 to 1996. He was a corporate and real estate lawyer in Chicago and Miami, where he also served as Assistant State and U.S. Attorney. He is the author of "David Finley, Quiet Force for America's Arts" the fascinating story of the founding of Americas National Gallery of Art.

In the current debate over the possibility of renaming our Miami Art Museum after a local donor, another museum gift of seventy years ago should be recalled, especially in this gift giving season.

Andrew W. Mellon

Seventy-five years ago, on December 22, 1936, Andrew W. Mellon, the Pittsburgh banker, statesman and art collector, wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his letter, which FDR received on Christmas Day, Mellon offered to build and endow a National Gallery of Art on the Mall in Washington, D.C., to which he would donate his entire art collection, consisting of many masterpieces from the Italian renaissance, plus iconic Flemish, Dutch, British and American paintings from the 15th to the 19th centuries and 31 pieces of classical sculpture. The value of the whole gift is estimated at $80 million, or least $10 billion in today's dollars.

It may well be the largest gift ever made to a government from any single individual. The gift came with one major restriction - that the gallery must not bear Mellon's name, but be named simply the National Gallery of Art.

In that way, Mellon said that he hoped his collection would act as a nucleus to attract other collections to form a great national art museum. His wisdom proved true; by the time the great Tennessee marble structure was completed and the Gallery was opened in March 1941, it had already attracted the great Samuel Kress collection of some 400 Italian renaissance works and its director David Finley was well along in persuading Joseph Widener, Chester Dale and Lessing Rosenwald to give their collections to the National Gallery of Art.

Hundreds of other donors have since given their artworks to add to Mellon's nucleus Andrew Mellon was not present at the opening of the National Gallery. He had died in August 1937 just as construction of the gallery building was underway.

Nowhere on the exterior of the West Building, as it is now known, does the name of Andrew Mellon appear. Nor does his son Paul Mellon's name appear on the East Building of 1977, which he in turn funded. Only inside the buildings are to be found inscriptions recording the generosity of the Mellons, father and son.

In 1952, David Finley raised the funds to erect a modest memorial to Andrew Mellon, a simple fountain in a small park at the apex of the Federal Triangle across Constitution Avenue from the National Gallery. In monumental Washington, it is the only structure that bears the name of Andrew W. Mellon. And that is the way the great philanthropist wanted it.