The Courtauld gets a £30mn boost
Gift from the billionaire Reuben brothers’ family foundation will be ‘transformative’ for the London arts institute and gallery
London’s influential Courtauld Institute and Gallery today reveals a £30mn donation from the Reuben Foundation, the charitable arm of the family of billionaire brothers David and Simon Reuben. The gift is the latest philanthropic boost to the UK’s struggling cultural sector, coming on the back of the National Gallery’s record-breaking £375mn donations, led by Michael Moritz and Harriet Heyman’s Crankstart foundation and the Julia Rausing Trust.
The Reuben Foundation’s gift is equally transformative for the smaller organisation, says Lord Browne of Madingley, chairman of the Courtauld’s board. “It is enormously significant and the biggest in our history, since Samuel Courtauld’s gift of a building and paintings.” These founded the institute, with its enduring “art for all” mission, in 1932.
The Courtauld is a rare combination of a specialist arts university (the Courtauld Institute) and a museum (the Courtauld Gallery), which is the appeal to the Reuben Foundation, says Lisa Reuben, a trustee and the daughter of Simon Reuben. This year has seen acclaimed exhibitions such as Monet and London: Views of the Thames and Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, while notable Institute alumni include Gabriele Finaldi, director of London’s National Gallery, and Naomi Beckwith, deputy director and chief curator of New York’s Solomon R Guggenheim Museum.
The Reubens’ donation means that £115mn has now been raised for a major redevelopment of the Courtauld’s buildings in Somerset House on London’s The Strand, to include a new library and display rooms for contemporary art. “The crucial thing is that it will enable us to start welcoming students back,” says Mark Hallett, director of the Courtauld since 2023. The faculty is currently in temporary premises near King’s Cross with students and staff due to return from 2029, he says.
As well as the immediate financial boost to the Courtauld, there is the juicy prospect of access to the Reuben family’s art collection. Lisa Reuben, who previously worked in Sotheby’s contemporary art department and is responsible for building the collection, says this comprises more than 50 works, ranging from Vincent van Gogh to Jenny Saville, and with a significant holding of 20th-century artists such as Pablo Picasso, René Magritte and Francis Bacon. Such works would fill a gap in the museum’s collection, whose core is from medieval Europe through to Samuel Courtauld’s collection of impressionist and post-impressionist works. “Our collection essentially begins where the Courtauld’s ends,” Lisa Reuben says, adding: “It would be an honour and pleasure to loan works.”
The Courtauld’s move deeper into modern and contemporary art mirrors the National Gallery’s decision, announced alongside its £375mn investment, to add art made after 1900 to its collection. Such shifts forward in time reflect the tastes of the latest philanthropists, many of whom have boosted the art market in recent years with their interest in postwar painting.
That they are now turning to the institutions that research and show art is something of a relief, as the funding environment becomes more of a challenge. “Museums, as trusted institutions, are under enormous pressure because they are expected to perform a public service, in terms of preservation and education . . . but also increase visitor numbers, engage local and more diverse audiences, and become more accessible, while receiving diminishing public funding,” writes Gareth Harris in his latest book, Towards the Ethical Art Museum.
Lord Browne says: “It is a little difficult at the moment. There are reports of high net worth individuals leaving the UK. People do still give, but there are fewer than there used to be.” Corporate sponsorship is also tougher to bring in, he says, while scrutiny of sources of income is much higher on the public agenda, something he is more than aware of having been chief executive of the fossil fuel business and arts sponsor BP between 1995 and 2007.
Individuals don’t escape the media spotlight, however. Harris’s book looks at concerns raised around the Ukraine-born businessman Leonard Blavatnik, who gave £50mn to a new Tate Modern building in his name, which opened in 2016, and has since received some scrutiny of his past links to a Russian tycoon who was later sanctioned in the context of the Ukraine war. (Blavatnik has stated that he has never had any connection to the Russian government or any connected political spheres, Harris writes. There is no suggestion he was being considered for any sanctions.) The Courtauld Institute too has rooms in Blavatnik’s name.
The Reuben family, whose £27bn fortune pipped Blavatnik to the second spot in the UK’s latest Sunday Times Rich List, made their money in post-Soviet aluminium deals, though since 2000 their focus has been on the less mysterious UK commercial property sector. Their holdings also include a 15 per cent stake in Newcastle United Football Club (majority owned by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund). They formed their charitable foundation, which primarily supports healthcare and education, in 2002, with projects including the launch of an Oxford graduate college.
In 2019 the Reubens, through their company Guzzini Properties Ltd, were among the entities to sue the convicted fraudster Inigo Philbrick over the ownership of a $6mn painting by Rudolf Stingel, found to have been sold to multiple parties. “I am happy to say the case has been amicably settled”, Lisa Reuben says.
“We have to worry about a lot of things,” Lord Browne says. “The track record of a donor, whether what they’re doing is true to your existing values [as an institution] . . . There’s always an argument that no money is acceptable — it comes down to common sense and a balanced approach.”
Other UK museums are focused on raising endowments, in the mould of US institutions. Tate has recently announced plans to raise £150mn by 2030 while the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead has launched a £10mn fund, kick-started by a “major donation” from the musician Sting. The Courtauld’s endowment sits at £80mn, “a lot for the UK but probably not enough”, Lord Browne says. Hallett says that forthcoming government funding cuts, such as to PhD scholarships, means “we have to become a bit more American in terms of attitudes to philanthropy.”
For Lord Browne, the Reuben Foundation donation sends an important message. “The up-and-coming wealthy generations have yet to decide what to do long term and this should encourage them to fund arts and culture, which are the glue of the nation. The fact that the Reubens have done this shows there is a lasting strand of philanthropy in the UK.”