An individual walks by the Sainsbury Wing of the Nationwide Gallery, London.
In Photos Ltd./Corbis by way of Getty Pictures
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In Photos Ltd./Corbis by way of Getty Pictures
LONDON – Hidden in a pillar he funded but despised, Lord Sainsbury lastly acquired the final phrase.
“TO THOSE WHO FIND THIS NOTE,” wrote John Sainsbury, a member of the Home of Lords who’s often known as the Proper Honorable Baron Sainsbury of Preston Candover. It was July 1990. He was 62. His letter was typewritten, in all-caps.
Sainsbury, whose household based the Sainsbury’s grocery store chain within the late nineteenth century, was then chairman of his household’s conglomerate, which additionally owns Shaw’s supermarkets in america.
A billionaire lover of wonderful artwork, he and his brothers had in 1985 pledged to fund a significant extension of London’s Nationwide Gallery. (The fee was undisclosed, however reportedly within the tens of thousands and thousands.) The household additionally donated work to the museum, together with works by Degas, Gauguin, Monet and Rousseau. The Sainsbury Wing was inaugurated by Queen Elizabeth II in July 1991.
However a yr earlier, throughout its development, Lord Sainsbury soured on its design. He was notably irked by two columns flanking the lobby of the brand new wing. They have been decorative, not structural. He thought they have been ineffective, and ugly.
Sainsbury funded them nonetheless, however typed up his dissent in that 1990 letter.
Greater than three a long time later, the Sainsbury Wing is underneath renovation once more. Final winter, demolition staff took down these two columns, and found Sainsbury’s letter hidden inside considered one of them, in a plastic folder.
It reads: “IF YOU HAVE FOUND THIS NOTE YOU MUST BE ENGAGED IN DEMOLISHING ONE OF THE FALSE COLUMNS.” He goes on to name the columns “A MISTAKE OF THE ARCHITECT.”
“LET IT BE KNOWN THAT ONE OF THE DONORS OF THIS BUILDING IS ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTED THAT YOUR GENERATION HAS DECIDED TO DISPENSE WITH THESE UNNECESSARY COLUMNS,” he wrote and signed, on Sainsbury’s letterhead.
Sainsbury died in 2022, aged 94.
His son Mark Sainsbury informed the BBC that his father’s brother and fellow donor, the late Simon Sainsbury, cast a “compromise,” convincing John Sainsbury to go forward with their donation, in change for registering his dissent in regards to the design, within the type of this secret letter.
“He was never one to say I told you so, but he would raise an eyebrow and a wry smile that finally we’d all seen sense,” Mark Sainsbury mentioned in regards to the letter’s latest discovery.
When the Sainsbury Wing was initially constructed, the director of the Nationwide Gallery was Neil MacGregor. In an interview revealed this week with The Artwork Newspaper, an business publication, MacGregor recalled this dispute between Sainsbury and the wing’s architects, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. However MacGregor says he finally permitted the design.
“I felt that, on balance, we should let the architect be the architect,” he was quoted as saying.
Sainsbury’s widow Anya, a former ballerina, was current when her husband’s posthumous letter was eliminated to the museum’s historic archives, for safekeeping.
“I was so happy for John’s letter to be rediscovered after all these years,” she informed The Artwork Newspaper. “And I feel he would be relieved and delighted for the gallery’s new plans and the extra space they are creating.”
The newly refurbished Sainsbury Wing is because of reopen subsequent yr — with none columns.
