Randy Lerner knows the requests will soon start landing, the begging letters
and invitations to lunch. To be outed as a major arts philanthropist just as
the Arts Council prepares to swing the axe will mark him out. “I’m not sure
how I’ll respond,” he says. “I think I’ll run like hell.”
For Lerner, his gift of $10 million (£5 million) to the National Portrait
Gallery is not about a love of art so much as a result of years of
friendship between him and the NPG’s director, Sandy Nairne, and a group of
their arty acquaintances. “This is a one-off,” says the American owner of
Aston Villa very firmly. But I’m not so sure: given the secret, aesthetic
leanings that he reveals this may well be just an opening salvo.
He is not the first arts supporter to come from football. Fabio Capello, the
new England boss, was unmasked as a collector in the most recent edition of
The Art Newspaper, owning works by (among others) De Chirico,
Chagall and Cy Twombly. His collection is estimated at £7.4 million. John
Madejski, OBE, chairman of Reading, who has many treasures (including a
Degas bronze) and who mounted a Ferrari Testarossa as a work of art in his
home, gave £3 million to the Royal Academy in 2004 and has a suite of rooms
named after him there.
At the National Portrait Gallery, the ground floor galleries will be renamed
the Lerner galleries, which Lerner professes to be hugely embarrassed about.
So he didn’t stipulate it as part of giving the NPG its largest ever gift?
“No,” he says, mortified, emphasising, slightly semantically, that the money
comes from his family’s trust, not him.
He’s a tricky one: blunt but friendly, handsome and fit (he runs in Hyde Park)
with mournful grey eyes. And he hates talking about himself: “I think that
what goes on, goes on out and around you. The ‘you’ part is dangerously
distorted and overrated.” I joke about how odd it was for Tom Hanks to
parade around with an Aston Villa scarf at the recent London premiere of Charlie
Wilson’s War. “I honestly didn’t think anything of it,” he says
crisply. So it’s not part of a Hollywood recruitment drive? “No, no,” he
says tersely. His default setting is an abrupt, slightly robotic monotone.
Lerner, 45, met Nairne through the Canadian curator and writer Bruce Ferguson
and has since met many artists, art students and curators. He says this so
passionlessly I remark that £5 million is an awful lot of money to pay even
in respect of a strong friendship. “I probably am a fan of portraiture, but
not by any means knowledgeable, more reasonably familiar,” Lerner says. “I
like to look at paintings, to read. When somebody says, ‘Did you study art?’
they mean schooling. I probably wandered in and out of art classes, but I
would say my education has come much more through my appetite to read, going
to galleries, shows, knowing artists, museum directors.” He says he knows
“what’s going on the museum world”, particularly with the transfers of large
collections.
But this still doesn’t explain the huge sum. “I don’t think the amount was a
great sticking point. Museums need what they need. They propose gifts to
their supporters and in this particular case we thought we’d like to be
helpful on that level.”
The money, Nairne says, will go towards the long-term development of the NPG’s
Portrait Fund (for commissioning and acquiring works) while also bolstering
“programme development” – in research, digital activity and “outreach work”
into schools and hospitals. What excites Lerner most is that the money is
being used “within the current appetite for thinking very hard about
contemporary portraiture, asking very difficult questions about portraiture
and performance and the wider way portraiture is being interpreted by young
painters and art-makers.”
Begging letters in mind, he says again that “it is not part of a larger
campaign” and adds sharply that he has “no opinion” about government
funding. Nor does he think sport and art are linked by filthy lucre, despite
the mutual cachet one bestows on the other: “But many football players will
become buyers of art, that’s a reasonably predictable progression.” He
points to celebrity culture, and the NPG piece by Sam Taylor-Wood showing
David Beckham sleeping, as an example of another intersection.
Lerner didn’t grow up in an arty household in Cleveland, Ohio. Both his
parents were from New York. His father, ex-military, made it big in banking,
setting up the MBNA credit-card empire, and bought an American football
team, the Cleveland Browns, whose ownership now rests with Lerner. What kind
of boy was he? “Oh God, completely nondescript,” he scoffs. What was your
favourite subject? “Maths.” Did you like sport? “Yeah, no, yeah, I loved
it.” Did you play it a lot? “No, yeah, I was perfectly average.” What did he
want to be? Here he pauses and looks serious. “A teacher. My interests were
around history.”
At university he studied “mainly history” and left his American alma mater to
study at Cambridge. For the first time in our interview, his eyes dance. “I
had no plan to go back to the States. I wanted to stay here, but it didn’t
work out. Oh God, I loved being on a bicycle, not in a car. Cambridge was
beautiful. I met great friends and it was a great place to concentrate, a
real sense of academic immersion.”
Is he at heart an academic? “Accidentally, yeah,” he confesses with a
heart-lurching expression that screams roadless-travelled. But he went back
to the US and law school, though never practised as a lawyer, and entered
the world of finance, working as a financial analyst. He married and had
four children. His father “wanted things handled properly” after he passed
away, which, disentangled, means he wanted Lerner to become head of his
business empire. His fortune is estimated at $1.6 billion.
It seems there is a tension between academic manqué and businessman, I say.
“I’ve been feeling that for a very long time,” Lerner admits ruefully enough
to make me want to spirit him off immediately for an afternoon mooning
around the V&A. So did he want to be an academic? “Yeah, I did yeah,” he
says forcefully. So what stopped him? “I probably felt the influences
suggesting more of a professional life seemed to be more persuasive than the
influences suggesting an academic life, which begs the question, ‘Why can’t
I make a decision for myself?’ and the answer is ‘Personal weakness’.
Absolutely. The influences saying ‘You should have a proper job’ I couldn’t
resist.” Your parents? He laughs. “I can’t answer that question because my
parents will come right out of that little machine (he points at my digital
recorder), saying, ‘You made up your own mind’.”
At that moment, this wistful turn in our conversation is accentuated when a
gentleman walks past the café wearing a Clare College scarf – his Cambridge
college.
Lerner bought Aston Villa last year for nearly £63 million and relishes the
business challenges of running two football teams. The big difference
between here and the States is that here you can get promoted and relegated
(this makes his stomach “churn”); over there, you pay to be in a league that
never changes. He talks the talk of branding and strategy, and, at Aston
Villa, of “maintaining the player population”; he has reportedly spent £40
million on transfers. He won’t confirm if he has actually bought Jermain
Defoe as has been rumoured, but “Who wouldn’t want Jermain Defoe?”. He
fiercely prizes his team’s manager, Martin O’Neill, recently rumoured to be
in the running for the England manager’s job, preCapello’s appointment. Of
the prospect of the same thing happening in the future, Lerner says: “I
would be significantly more than sad. I would probably be holding on to his
[O’Neill’s] ankle as he dragged me down the street. He cannot go. He
must not go.” Lerner seems genuinely respectful of Villa’s heritage.
He has homes on Long Island and in Kensington, and as for being a high-living
billionaire, he confesses: “I like to think I’m not immune to a certain
appetite for niceness, but I haven’t become addicted to the narcotic.” He
fell in love with art in his twenties in London, with lost afternoons at the
National Gallery and Tate and, later on, the Serpentine. Géricault, Mondrian
and Brice Marden bewitched him.
No, he isn’t a collector, he says, “I just own some pictures” – including
works by Humphrey Ocean (“his reactions to life are magically transferred to
the canvas”), Stephen Chambers and David Austin; all bought “between impulse
and recklessness”, he says. “In this day and age you look, react and there
you go. There are no strict rules for how to look at things. For me it’s
about movement, motion, the amazing convergence over decades between easel
painting in the traditional sense, and photography and film.”
And again, the passion button is suddenly on. “I very much love to look at
paintings. I think they make the world better. They help you get outside
your personal concerns and issues. They’re an amazing filter of how the
world looks at a moment in time. They address an amazing part of our
imagination that observes colour, space, light, people and shape.”
There is at the very least a frustrated academic inside you, I say. “That’s
what yousay,” Lerner mugs, looking like a schoolkid who’s been
busted. “I may have a very thin and hopefully not too poorly written book
inside me.” What about? “I have no idea.” Cat and mouse again. Would it be
history? “I don’t know.” Has he written anything before, started a novel?
“Yeah. No, no, no. Yeah, I’ve got a wastepaper basket filled with things,
just scraps and scribbles.” Would he write a novel (“no”), poems (“NO!”),
autobiography (“GOD NO!”) You would have control, I say. “There’s nothing
worse than control. It would probably be biographical.” Who interests him?
“Isaiah Berlin. A great figure, great painter, great writer, friend,
essayist, portraitist.”
Are the football teams really satisfying him creatively, I wonder? “That’s a
good question,” he says with an expression that suggests the internal answer
is another screaming and heartfelt “NO!” It might actually be an excellent
moment to send him a begging letter.
Art’s biggest private donors
1985 J. Paul Getty Jr donates £50 million to the National Gallery,
aiding the acquisition of several Old Master paintings, including
Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard, The Balbi Children
by van Dyck, and A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling by Holbein.
1991 The Sainsbury brothers fund the £35 million extension to the
National Gallery.
1998 The philanthropist Vivien Duffield donates £7 million to establish
education facilities at the British Museum, Tate Modern (£2.5 million each),
the Natural History Museum (£1 million) and regional museums and galleries.
2003 An anonymous donor, widely thought to have been Getty, commits
£12.5 million to the Tate to prevent Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait
of Omai from being sold overseas.
2004 The entrepreneur Tom Hunter pledges £5 million to the Kelvingrove
in Glasgow.
2000 The Canadian financier Christopher Ondaatje gives nearly £2.75
million to the National Portrait Gallery.
2005 After his RA donation, see article, John Madejski gives
£2 million to the V&A to create the John Madejski Garden.
2007 John Studzinski, the head of a US private equity group, gives Tate
Modern £5 million, its largest single donation.
