The donation from a trustee, Oscar L.
Seven years after announcing ambitious plans to rebuild its wing for Modern and contemporary art — which then had to be put on hold because of financial problems — the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday announced that it had finally secured a lead donation of $125 million, the largest capital gift in its history, from its longtime trustee Oscar L.
Schwarzman, for the New York Public Library, in 2008, and a new cultural center at Yale, in 2015; and the entertainment mogul David Geffen, whose 2015 gift went toward the gut renovation of the former Avery Fisher Hall.
The gift represents an important leap forward for the Met project, which is now expected to cost about $500 million and calls for creating 80,000 square feet of galleries and public space with an architect to be announced this winter.
The museum, which last year projected a shortfall of $150 million because of the pandemic, has responded by raising money, cutting expenses and reapportioning costs.
“The Met has a special opportunity to be much more global in the context of Modern and contemporary,” Tang said in a telephone interview.
While Tang, 83, and Hsu‐Tang, 50, have not put conditions on their gift, both said that they were encouraged by Hollein’s inclusive approach to art.
Some have questioned why the Met needs to up its Modern and contemporary game, given that the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim have the territory well covered.
The Met had initially hoped to complete the project while it occupied the former Whitney — then called the Met Breuer — on Madison Avenue.
The wing’s delay had in part been attributed to the Met’s apparent inability to come up with a major lead gift, a theory the museum’s former director Thomas P.
Since becoming director in 2018, Hollein said he has updated the wing project to encourage interdisciplinary work among the Met’s 17 curatorial departments.
Tang in the past has mainly supported the Met’s Asian department; his earlier gifts of art include 20 important Chinese paintings from the 11th to the 18th century.
Pei, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and others to establish the Committee of 100, a Chinese American leadership organization for advancing dialogues between the United States and China.
Born in Shanghai, Tang was sent to school in America at age 11, after his family fled from China to Hong Kong during the Communist revolution in 1948.
Tang also serves as a co-chairman of the New York Philharmonic.
She has advised UNESCO in Paris as well as President Barack Obama’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee, and has worked on international cultural heritage protection and rescue since 2006.