His giving to the arts enriched all our souls
Denis Adam started his art collection with an assortment of postcard reproductions bought at museums and galleries as a young boy.
They would adorn the walls of his room till he was able to afford the originals many years later.
Indeed, the collection he accumulated with his wife, Verna, grew into the thousands.
It was never about investment, he once said, but rather the simple beauty they offered. The byproduct of accumulating their vast collection was the support the couple gave to emerging artists over the years, not just in the visual arts but in music and literature.
Through the foundation he and Verna started in 1975, they became the bedrock of artistic philanthropy in Wellington and throughout New Zealand, contributing millions of dollars through the establishment of venues for art and music as well as spearheading competitions and other artistic endeavours.
Adam’s long, rich life took him from pre-war Germany to the Blitz in London, where he would go on to fight his former fellow countrymen in the skies above Europe. The New Zealand men he fought with sewed the seed for the next chapter of his journey as a businessman and philanthropist extraordinaire half a world away.
Adam, a German Jew, spent his early years in Berlin.
His father played the piano and his mother had an artistic eye for the visual arts.
While his siblings – two brothers and a sister – all inherited varying talents in the arts, he admitted he was born without any talent for music or the visual arts but an appreciation for them both.
He recalled happy and informative Sunday visits to museums in Berlin with his father where he began his humble collection of postcards.
He had never been conscious of being ‘ethnically Jewish’ until the newly elected Nazi government began to ‘Nazify’ his school in the mid-1930s.
Teachers with any Jewish ancestry were replaced with Nazi teachers wearing SS or Brown Shirt uniforms, Adam recalled in his 1996 memoir. Many of his fellow pupils joined the Hitler Youth and came to school with daggers in their socks.
Adam recounted one of them picking a fight with him when he was nine years old. ‘‘By nature I have been fairly pugnacious; I do not know whether I was born that way . . . At any rate, I hit back at my attacker,’’ he wrote.
In 1933, Adam’s father was arrested and eventually put under house arrest. Realising that the rule of law in relation to Jews was rapidly dismantling, they decided to leave an increasingly dangerous Germany. The family, including some of his aunts and uncles, fled to England, settling in London the following year.
He lost six uncles and aunts in the camps during the Nazi persecution.
But he recalled one cousin as a nationalist with Nazi sympathies. Herbert Adam formed a close
‘‘By nature I have been fairly pugnacious; I do not know whether I was born that way.’’ Denis Adam
friendship with Baldur von Schirach, founder of the Hitler Youth. It was said that most of the organisational and philosophical blueprints of that group were the work of Herbert.
Having fled certain peril, the Adam family arrived in England virtually penniless, other than a few gold coins his mother smuggled out and later used to establish a guest house. His father set up an import-export business. He died when Denis was only 11.
Schooled in Edinburgh and London, Adam studied accountancy before taking on work in an insurance firm.
By this time war had broken out and while his family had been declared refugees on their arrival to England and identified as ‘‘friendly aliens’’, the young Denis had been too young to be classified. When the government later declared that all those of Austrian or German nationality who had not been screened should be interned, Denis was on the list.
Not long after his 16th birthday he was arrested and spent a month incarcerated on the Isle of Man before, with the help of his eldest brother, he was released.
At 17 he volunteered for the RAF but was unable to formally enlist for another year. Eventually, all three sons went into the air force during the war and miraculously all three survived. He believed he and his brothers were the only Germans fighting on the other side.
In 1942 Adam was sent to what was then Rhodesia for air training. Here he learned to fly Tiger Moth biplanes and Harvards.
Once he got his wings he was stationed at Port Tufic on the Suez Canal and then in Sicily, where he met the war head on.
Returning to England, he went to advanced training school, where he learned to fly Typhoons (which were so big the diminutive Adam required a cushion to fly) before being posted to the 183 Squadron of the 123 Wing in Holland with his brother’s unit.
Older by three years, Ken, who went on to earn two Oscars for his set design on several James Bond films, was a senior pilot with the wing, memorably commanded by a Kiwi. It would be the start of a warm association with New Zealanders.
After the war, Adam was keen to seek his fortune abroad. In 1946, with a job offer from a rainwear factory in New Zealand that was owned by relations on his father’s side, he used his service gratuity on a ticket and set off for a better life in the New World.
Knowing few people, he sought the company of fellow air force folk.
He joined the Wellington Aero Club, where he could indulge his love of flying Tiger Moths, and, years later, gliding and hot air ballooning clubs.
But as he ensconced himself in Wellington life, he began acquainting himself with those in the art and music scene – the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s Paul Gnatt and (Sir) Jon Trimmer, chamber music and opera aficionado Fred Turnovsky.
It was at the Majestic Cabaret that Adam, by then 29, met a ‘‘beautiful and serious’’ girl who would become his wife. He and Verna Finlayson wed during a visit to Adam’s family in London in 1953. The marriage would last more than 64 years.
After a few years in his family business, where he reached the position of assistant manager, he began nurturing a hunger for his own business. He had spotted opportunities in the insurance industry but needed capital to start up so he and Verna bought a service station in Petone to support them while Adam began his venture into the world of insurance.
The service station was hard work and not without its perils.
A close call with a bunch of drunken Hungarian freedom fighters holding him at gunpoint was a doozy. During his time at the service station it went from being a loss-making enterprise to the most profitable service station in the region. Adam had the Midas touch.
Within two years his insurance career was booming too and he was able to rent office space in Wellington, making the transition from agent to broker under the name Adam & Adam.
The insurance business is where he really made his fortune. He once admitted he was simply in the right place at the right time. He saw opportunity, did the hard graft and reaped the rewards.
He enjoyed the finer things in life and was a familiar sight driving an enormous Rolls-Royce around Wellington. As well as investing in property, Denis and Verna began buying original art. The first piece of New Zealand art they bought was Bush Scene by John Snadden. Works by Don Binney, Mervyn Williams and Colin McCahon followed, among other artists. It was the beginning of a long association supporting New Zealand artists, sculptors, musicians and writers.
By 1976 they had established the Adam Foundation to consolidate the ownership of their growing collection. By 1983 the collection had outstripped their capacity to store it all so they bought a neighbouring property to the house they lived in on The Terrace.
During its refurbishment it was struck by the ‘‘Kelburn Arsonist’’ – a man who had held a grudge against Victoria University, which owned several neighbouring properties. Police later used the Adam house to secretly observe the suspect, who was eventually nabbed. The day after the fire, Adam instructed his architects to start again.
The couple’s beneficiaries over more than 45 years were many and varied. They included Victoria University, the National Portraiture Gallery, NZSO National Youth Orchestra, and the Wellington City Gallery.
In 1999, Denis was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the arts and the community, and he was awarded the OBE in 1993.
He and Verna did not have children.
Once asked why he supported the arts with such gusto, he responded: ‘‘I’m not a religious person but I believe that art gives something to the soul. It nurtures the finer instincts of human beings.’’ – By Bess Manson