TAITMAIL A Victorian arts angel
Alan Grieve, who has died aged 97, was perhaps the last of the new-Victorian arts angels. Or perhaps the first.
Over 30 years he made the Jerwood Foundation, which has given away well over £100m at a rate of £1.5m a year, a key force in cultural support with both judicial contributions and his own projects, not always successful ones. He respected the value of subsidy but despised the bureaucracy that sometimes attends it, so that he turned down a lottery grant because of the red tape strings that might go with it. That is becoming an increasingly familiar attitude, with the National Gallery raising all its Sainsbury Wing’s £85m privately, and the Wigmore Hall withdrawing from Arts Council funding to avoid irrelevant conditions.
Grieve was a 30-year-old lawyer in a Gray’s Inn firm when he was asked to look after a “tricky client”, based in Tokyo with his pearl business. This was John Jerwood and Grieve travelled the world as his business lawyer, becoming his friend and confidant. In the mid-70s he was given power of attorney to create a charitable foundation, the first chief interest of which was Jerwood’s old school, Oakham, to which he gave £8m. “He had no children but he had money and he liked education and the arts” Grieve said. “He did what he wanted to do.”
When Jerwood died in 1991 Grieve was left in control and found an organisation with huge assets but no order. It took him two years just to find out how much there was. He acquired property, principally the handsome Fitzroy Square townhouse that was the Jerwood headquarters until 2021 when he moved it to more economical Shropshire, and invested shrewdly enough to treble the assets. His CBE came in 2003.
There have been failures. Open air sculpture courts in the Midlands were abandoned after 12 years of negotiation. In 1999 David Goldesgeyme was brought from running arts sponsorship for Lloyds TSB and introduced two big new award schemes for film and fashion. “They weren’t right for us” said Grieve bluntly and Goldesgeyme left. The former newspaper executive Andrew Knight was invited to chair in 2003 but two years later had gone, a misfit in what Grieve called the Jerwood family.
Grieve had a Micawber-like respect for good financial management, “It isn’t my money after all”, and an extreme aversion to paying what he considered over the odds. He bought Fitzroy in 1992 for under £1m, sold it for £3.5m.
There have also been successful partnerships, especially with other cultural charities like Weston and Leverhulme, and important interventions with the foundation rescuing the Royal Court Theatre. The Jerwood name became almost ubiquitous in cultural buildings – from the Jerwood Library at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to the Jerwood Vanburgh Theatre at RADA to the Jerwood Hall at LSO St Lukes. When in the mid-90s the Royal Court was near to being closed by health and safety unsafe it was Grieve who stepped in to offer £3m. A news story suggested he wanted it renamed “Jerwood Royal Court” but that Buckingham Palace had vetoed the idea. “Absolute nonsense” Grieve riposted. “Look, the Royal Court was going bust, John Mortimer (the Court’s chairman then) and Stephen Daldry (artistic director) came to us to save it, and we were happy to do so with the biggest grant we had ever given.”
Between 1998 and 2012 he diversified the Jerwood’s support with a series of capital projects, such as Jerwood Space near London Bridge, the prime rehearsal venue for West End shows, and he set up Jerwood Arts to give individual support to artists.
He had a system of “private enterprise for the public benefit” based on sound investment, and he thought business-minded philanthropy would be key to the survival of the arts. One of his last moves was to create the Blue Skies Fund, £1m for freelance artists - “not just the violinist but the bloke that fixes the lighting” – to be shared between Sam Mendes’s Theatre Artists Fund and the Help Musicians Fund (he took advice from ACE’s chair Nick Serota on this).
Perhaps the greatest adventure was the creation of the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings. Grieve had gradually built the foundation’s own collection of British modern art – Brangwen, Bomberg, Sickert, Augustus John, Stanley Spencer, Winifred Nicholson, Lowry, Terry Frost, Maggie Hambling - bought usually on his own volition but never for more than £100,000. The collection cost about £1.5m and is now worth more than £7m. His art historian daughter Lara Wardle was its curator (she is now the foundation’s executive director).
He commissioned his son Tom and his HAT Projects architectural practice - Grieve was an unabashed proponent of “enlightened nepotism” - to build a modest ( £4m) gallery at Hastings. The Jerwood Gallery opened in 2012 with its own board of trustees, and there was a falling out: the management he put in place was not enamoured by his modern collection preferring cutting edge art, and there was a parting of the ways. It became Hastings Contemporary, paying Jerwood a market rent of course.
Grieve saw arts funding bend in the economic winds that blow from different directions, with the cutting of subsidy to the growth of philanthropy to the end of business sponsorship to the burgeoning of the fundraising industry. Some may be critical of his willful avoidance of committees and superfluous paperwork, but without his decision-making hegemony many important projects would not be operating today. He thought that subsidy and philanthropy could work together, but that government’s purpose should be to kick-start ideas and hand them over to well-run arts charities to develop. The Jerwood Bursaries, supporting arts professionals from low socio-economic backgrounds, originated with Margaret Hodge when she was arts minister but wanted it out of the ministry machinery where it would get clogged up, so she handed it on to Jerwood and Weston.
“You’ve got to be nimble, got to be fleet-footed, got to be on top of your funding” he told me. “The wind blows in a certain direction and you have to be able to respond. That’s why independence is important - and good fund management is essential.”
Alan Grieve could be curmudgeonly, stubborn, super self-confident, sometimes wrong, pragmatic, flexible, never dull. If he was a Victorian we need more like him.