From the Archives
Robert O’Byrne on the POTUShosting Annenbergs and their art collection at Sunnylands, CA
Earlier this year, Californian media grew excited at the possibility that Sunnylands, otherwise known as ‘the Camp David of the West Coast’, might soon play host to President Biden. Since it was built in the mid 1960s, no fewer than eight American presidents have spent time on the Coachella Valley estate. It’s only strange that Donald Trump was not among that number, since Walter and Leonore Annenberg, the couple who commissioned Sunnylands as their winter retreat, were ardent Republicans. In 1969, for example, in return for their support, Richard Nixon appointed Walter United States ambassador to the Court of St James’s; while in London he and his wife carried out a lavish overhaul of their official residence, Winfield House in Regent’s Park.
Thirty years ago, the July 1991 issue of Apollo carried a long article by Elspeth Moncrieff, assistant editor at the time, about Sunnylands, its owners and the art collection they displayed there. Walter Annenberg, who three years before had sold a large part of his media group to Rupert Murdoch for a record $3bn, had just announced plans to leave an outstanding collection of more than 50 predominantly Impressionist and postImpressionist paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The news led to worldwide headlines, not least because some had expected that another museum of art, that in Philadelphia, where the Annenbergs lived when not in California, would be the beneficiary of his largesse.
The donor was keen to explain how he had made his choice. ‘I happen to believe in strength going to strength,’ he told Moncrieff, ‘and I thought for permanence the Met would be the proper repository.’ To his mind, the Met was ‘the foremost museum in our country by far’. As for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Annenberg insisted he had never given that venue any indication it would receive his pictures. Furthermore, ‘I have been very generous to the museum. I gave them the Cézanne sketch book [in fact, two of these were presented in 1987] and a good deal of funding so I have not neglected them.’
Nevertheless, Moncrieff tellingly noted that the Annenbergs, despite their great wealth, had been ‘excluded […] from the dying but tightly closed echelons of smart Philadelphia society’. Similarly, they had not been well received in Washington, which may explain why the National Gallery of Art also failed to secure the artworks: had piqued pride been a motive in the decision-making? Furthermore, the author pointed out, the donation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art had been made at precisely the time when the Washington institution was celebrating its 50th anniversary, and focusing on two great founding donors, Andrew Mellon and Samuel Kress. ‘Now,’ Moncrieff observed, ‘Walter Annenberg too will be assured his place in the immortal ranks of the great and good.’
In this instance, as Moncrieff suggested, a desire to vindicate the family name probably also acted as a spur. In 1939 Walter Annenberg’s father, Moses, founder of a successful publishing business, was indicted for tax evasion and bribery, fined $8m and sentenced to three years in prison, dying of a brain tumour a month after his release. His son accordingly told Moncrieff that he wished to be remembered for trying to be a good citizen. ‘I’ve had a lot of enjoyment over accomplishing things in the business world but that to me is second only to responsibility and the proper distribution of wealth.’ Annenberg, Moncrieff remarked, followed ‘in a long tradition of wealthy Americans who have turned to art to bring them moral and aesthetic respectability’.
Perhaps this was the reason why, unlike many collectors today, his preference was always for well-established names. Moncrieff pointed out that Annenberg had never shown any interest in contemporary art, ‘but was quickly drawn to the romantic and easily appreciated images of the Impressionists’, while ‘Two recent outstanding purchases’ – a Picasso and a Braque – ‘bring the modern movement into the collection’. However, not all the works on Sunnylands’ walls were of equal merit. ‘There are several outstanding masterpieces against a background of some rather dull Renoirs and Monets,’ Moncrieff noted. After reading that judgement, one wonders if Annenberg might have regretted inviting Apollo’s representative into his home, although she did allow that the collection had not been formed ‘by someone merely acquiring names’.
Walter Annenberg died in 2002 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art duly took possession of the pictures, his widow replacing them at Sunnylands with digital copies seemingly so realistic that the difference was hard to detect. Meanwhile, during her husband’s lifetime the estate had been vested in a charitable foundation, its first mission being to act as a venue where the US President and Secretary of State could ‘bring together world leaders in order to promote world peace and facilitate international agreement’. In its new guise, Sunnylands became the venue for a different kind of art: that of diplomacy.
In the September issue Right royal Rubens, the visions of Joseph Gandy, Botticelli in bits, and the Phillips Collection at 100. Plus previews of TEFAF Online and Art Basel