The family of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton pledged to give $800 million to his daughter Alice Walton's new art museum in Arkansas, the largest cash donation ever made to a U.S. art museum.
The gift from the Walton Family Foundation trumps the $660 million in oil stocks that J. Paul Getty bequeathed to his namesake Los Angeles museum more than three decades ago. It's also larger than the roughly $500 million cash gift that Texas philanthropist Caroline Wiess Law bequeathed to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
Donations of artworks to museums, such as Walter Annenberg's bequest to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, also have been valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The gift reflects the outsized ambitions the retail-chain family has for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a complex of eight gallery pavilions it has helped build around a pair of ponds in the company's northwestern Arkansas hometown of Bentonville (population 35,301). The museum, designed by architect Moshe Safdie, is named for a nearby spring and its bridge-like architectural elements.
The 201,000 square-foot museum, which opens to the public Nov. 11, aims to chronicle the entire story of American art from the Colonial era of the late 1600s to contemporary pieces made by American artists a few months ago—an encyclopedic sweep reminiscent of the ambitions of the robber-baron museum builders in the Gilded Age, but rarely attempted by new museums today. Billionaire Eli Broad, for example, has pledged nearly $340 million to build and endow a new museum for his collection in Los Angeles, but his vast holdings only cover the past few decades of U.S. and international art.
The guiding force behind the museum—and the gift made Wednesday—is Ms. Walton, 61 years old, a well-known player in the art world who conceived the museum six years ago and has spent lavishly to build up its collection from scratch. In 2005, she outbid the National Gallery of Art to buy Asher B. Durand's Hudson River School masterpiece, "Kindred Spirits," from the New York Public Library, paying around $35 million.
