Denis Adam announces new art prize

By MICHELE HEWITSON

On the wall of the Wellington office of the Adam Foundation is a cartoon by David Low. It shows an art auction at a fictional gallery called the De Luxe Art Auction Salon. In the foreground a collection of artists including Renoir and Lautrec are staging a protest. The caption reads: "A gang of ghosts attempt to crash a fashionable art auction. It is explained that painting can only be appreciated by rich people."

Denis Adam is resplendent, in a Toad of Toad Hall sort of way. His round stomach is encased in a black-and-white houndstooth, three-piece suit, and he is wearing a crimson tie. His friendly, round face is creased with smiles. He is a rich person who appreciates art.

If he'd been born in an earlier century, he would have received his visitors in palatial surroundings. His chambers would have been ornate, with painted ceilings, and his table would have been laid with fine china and implements crafted by artisans. He would have been revered as a man of power whose patronage could make an artist's name - and give him a decent living.

Adam is a modern day arts philanthropist, who does have about him an air of another, more recent, time. He laughs often, in a distinctive high-pitched giggle as he serves packaged biscuits and filter coffee from slightly chipped white china.

There is nothing flashy about this space from which Adam and his wife, Verna, dispense cash for art. Except that it has rather expensive wallpaper in the form of artworks.

From this unostentatious workspace, the foundation decides where it might spend up to a million dollars a year: sponsoring the National Youth Orchestra, the annual Adam Chamber music Summer School, the annual Adam play-reading season, a creative writing award endowment at Victoria University. They have been involved as sponsors with the New Zealand Festival of the Arts since its inception in 1986.

They are listed in the festival programme as donor patrons and have sponsored a season of lunchtime concerts on The Terrace. They have put up the money for a portraiture competition which will be on show at the National Portrait Gallery during the festival: $5000 for the winner (who will be announced tomorrow) and a further $5000 commission for a portrait.

In the back room of Adam's office is a collection of mounted photographs of the couple at various arty functions. The walls are crammed with the paintings Verna "won't have at home", including a Goldie, an early McCahon and a Peter McIntyre.

The foundation, set up 26 years ago to provide a "home" for the couple's art collection, doesn't accept donations. The chief executive officer of Wellington City Council is always one of the trustees, "to make sure that whatever we do is good for the Wellington region", says Adam.

The collection is valued at between $1 million and $2 million. It has another $1 million in investments. The foundation is one of the main beneficiaries of the Adams' wills, "so in the absence of a Communist revolution, it will probably be quite a wealthy institution one day".

It probably will: last year the NBR Rich List put Adam's personal wealth at $17 million. It is a fortune amassed from his insurance brokerage firm, Adam and Adam. The second Adam is an older brother who had no connection with the firm but was an underwriter at Lloyds of London in the days when such a name was impressive.

He subsequently went on to set up his own firm called Adam and Harvey. Harvey was the name of a large rabbit in a play who was invisible to anyone but the main character.

Adam was born in Berlin in 1924 to an upper middle-class family of secular Jews. At 10, he was sent to boarding school in Edinburgh. In his second term he came top in English.

His parents got out of Germany in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor. His mother took in boarders. "She had enormous willpower. I've inherited some of that."

He became an accountant, loathed it, met some New Zealanders in the Royal Air Force and wrote to his mother: "After the war I shall emigrate to a new country. There are better opportunities."

He and Verna married in 1953. They bought their first New Zealand painting in, he thinks, 1960. It was by John Snadden, whose work they had admired when it was hanging in a Willis St coffee bar.

They were invited to the artist's home. It was the small-scale beginning of the idea of patronage because you can tell, from looking at those photographs, that Adam gets as much out of the giving as the recipients.

He believes his gift was as a businessman. "Without trying to blow my own trumpet, I think here and there I was a bit innovative. But in the arts I'm a member of the audience."

He remembers a conversation with composer David Farquhar, whose Serenade for Strings the foundation commissioned. "I said to him, 'You're a creative artist. I'm not. The genes have passed me by'. And he said, 'For any composer the composition isn't worthwhile unless you can hear it being performed. So audiences in the arts are just as important as the creative artists.' There's probably something in that."

It is never about "ownership," he says. The collection will be left to one of the public galleries eventually, "not as a gift, but on permanent loan [from the foundation]. I've found that when you give things to galleries ... they flog it off." Copyright of compositions remains with the composer.

He has commissioned a piece from Gareth Farr for next year when he and Verna will have been married 50 years. "I think it's a much nicer way of celebrating a golden wedding than having a golden wedding something."

Much nicer, and nice if you can afford it. At the idea that it's an indulgent way to celebrate, he laughs a laugh as loud as a toot on the horn by Toad.

"That's what the arts are supposed to be about, aren't they?"