The £91.2m Question: What the Sainsbury Centre Gift Reveals About British Museums

“I always knew the number would be big,” says Jago Cooper, executive director of the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. “But I didn’t anticipate it being this big.”

Cooper is speaking to The Art Journal following the announcement of one of the largest ever donations made to a UK museum – a gift of £91.2m from Lord David Sainsbury, made through Gatsby, his charitable foundation. 

The size of the donation is significant not just for the security it brings to the centre, but also because it reflects a wider shift in the British cultural sector towards American-style models of philanthropic funding.

The gift follows a raft of mega donations for major building projects in the UK, including the £30m given by the Reuben Foundation to the Courtauld Institute last October and two donations of £150m each given towards a new extension at the National Gallery from The Julia Rausing Trust and Crankstart (Sir Michael Moritz and his wife Harriet Heyman’s foundation) last September.

Photo: Foster and Partners, The Norman Foster Foundation, Neil Hall, Donovan Jones, Andy Crouch and Kate Wolstenholme © Foster and Partners, The Norman Foster Foundation, and Sainsbury Centre

Yet these numbers are still dwarfed by the patronage enjoyed by institutions in the US, where billionaire philanthropy has long underpinned the development of public museums. The Museum of Modern Art in New York reopened in 2019 following a $450m expansion campaign supported by donors, including music magnate David Geffen, while the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has raised more than $700m towards its controversial Peter Zumthor-designed redevelopment, backed by trustees, collectors and wealthy patrons.

Britain is not yet becoming the US, but it is gradually importing American fundraising logic into institutions historically justified through public provision. This shift can already be seen in institutions such as Tate Modern, whose Switch House extension relied heavily on private fundraising and donor partnerships, including from the Ukrainian-born businessman Len Blavatnik. At the Victoria & Albert Museum, expansion projects including V&A East have increasingly operated through a hybrid model of public investment, corporate support and philanthropic giving.

“It’s a mind-bogglingly large figure, but the reality is that, when you get to capital projects, they’re just exorbitantly expensive,” says Cooper, who joined the Sainsbury Centre in 2021 following a career that included museum curation and broadcasting. He is also professor of art and archaeology at the University of East Anglia (UEA), whose campus setting is the centre’s home. “When you are future-proofing things for 50 or 100 years, you really need to think long-term. It is a huge number, but it is what the building will require, and it is what lots of museums across the country need to be thinking about right now.”

Fundraising is more challenging for museums based outside the capital, Cooper says. But, rather than competing directly within what he sees as a London-dominated institutional landscape, the Sainsbury Centre has increasingly framed itself as an international museum that draws on global research partnerships, curatorial collaborations and transnational programming models. Its proximity “has its advantages as well”, he says. “We can get away with doing really innovative and exciting things because we don’t have the same scrutiny as other institutions.”

And it has undoubtedly worked. Cooper’s ‘Living Art’ relaunch in 2023 has seen the annual total of visitors rise from around 95,000 before the pandemic to 170,000 last year, with total visits reaching nearly 1.2m when the sculpture park is included. The centre outperforms Tate Britain, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Design Museum.

“The success of what we’ve done has helped us get the money, because it generated enthusiasm and excitement,” says Cooper. “The Sainsbury Centre was very radical when it was built in the 1970s, and what we’ve deliberately tried to do is capture that radicality and reformulate it in the 21st century. 

Norman Foster, centre, and co-founders of the Sainsbury Centre Robert and Lisa Sainsbury. Courtesy Sainsbury Centre

“We launched the ‘Living Art’ concept, where we understand that artists have an ability to channel the raw aspect of human life force and physically materialise it,” Cooper says. “So visitors are now asked to meet art like they would another human being, rather than an inanimate object.”

Exhibitions are organised within thematic seasons – ‘What is the Meaning of Life?’, ‘Can We Stop Killing Each Other?’, or the upcoming, ‘How Do We Find Love?’ – that are deliberately expansive, existential and question-led, rather than conventional in their art-historical framing. Its last exhibition, Living by the Rule, which opened last week and runs until 4 October, places contemporary works by artists including Ingrid Pollard, Tacita Dean and Elizabeth Price alongside objects from medieval and monastic contexts.

It is an approach that echoes some of the thinking behind the origins of the centre. When Sir Robert Sainsbury, grandson of the supermarket founder, and his wife, Lady Susan, donated their collection of ethnographic and 20th century art to UEA in 1973, they also pledged an endowment for a new building. The location was chosen for its academic setting but also for its distance from metropolitan institutions and conventions. They believed the experience of art should not be reduced to the reverence of objects, but should be seen in many contexts. And so the building – “a gallery without walls” – integrated multiple perspectives, stories and activities within a single, light-filled space.

“In the 1970s, it had trees inside the main space, and the idea was to create a different environment for a museum in which nature and culture fuse and flow,” Cooper says. “The art is both inside the building, in this huge open-plan space, and also out in the sculpture park. You wander as a visitor around these artworks in a way that forces you to have a different choreography.

The newly announced plans continue a longer history of architectural adaptation at the centre. A further gift from the Sainsbury family in 1988 funded the addition of the underground Crescent Wing, providing new exhibition, conservation and conference facilities, while a later programme of improvements completed in 2006 added new education spaces, expanded galleries and upgraded visitor amenities.

The latest gift will be used to renew the centre’s landmark architecture, the first cultural building designed by Norman and Wendy Foster, and the first in the UK using the industrial typology of high-tech modernism. Foster + Partners was appointed to undertake a feasibility study two years ago to determine which parts of the centre should be upgraded or replaced, identifying its ‘envelope [or outer shell], its environmental systems, and some of the key visitor amenities’, says a press statement. 

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 1978. Courtesy Norman Foster Foundation

The grant will secure the future of a building that was considered revolutionary when it opened nearly 50 years ago, and revisit the environmental ethos that informed its design using new technologies. The aim is to halve the amount of energy the building uses by significantly reducing carbon emissions, while photovoltaic panels will be incorporated into the new roof system to allow renewable energy to be generated on site. 

Cooper acknowledges the centre’s good fortune to have the ongoing support of the family upon which it was founded. Does he think that the UK museum sector is fundamentally changing in the direction of American-style philanthropy and mega donors as public funding tightens?

“Lord Parkinson came down to the Sainsbury Centre in my first year, five years ago, when he was arts minister. I said to him, ‘You should give more money to art museums’, and he replied, ‘We’re trying to encourage people to be more American’. And yes, we are being forced into these positions because public funding is not as available as it was. Yet it’s a huge cultural shift to be taken by the country, and we’re not there yet, and it could take a generation before that concept that the government doesn’t fund the arts and museums really beds in.

“We’re in a transitional period now, where the ambition of the government is way ahead of the reality of the donor landscape in the UK. And that makes it very challenging for arts and museums and cultural institutions. So we are incredibly fortunate, but we are rare. There may be another generation of donors that comes through. There’s a lot of new money in tech. But they need to be trained and cajoled into the idea that philanthropy is a great thing to be doing. The arts are in a strong position to do that, but we have to work really hard at it.”