What is the most significant museum donation this year?

The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation distributed approximately 63 artworks to three institutions. The Brooklyn Museum received 29 of the works, the Museum of Modern Art in New York received 28, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art received six. The donation includes many modernist treasures, including paintings by Paul Cézanne, Amedeo Modigliani, Vincent van Gogh and Édouard Manet. An exhibition dedicated to the gift will open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in July 2026 before traveling to the Brooklyn Museum

International investment banker Artur Walther and the Walther Family Foundation, which operates exhibition spaces in New York and Germany, donated more than 6,500 photographs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in May, the most significant donation of its kind in the institution’s history. The collection ranges from 19th-century vernacular photography to contemporary photography and video, and represents artists from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, including works by Malick Sidibé, Zanele Muholi, Ai Weiwei, Thomas Struth, Bernd and Hilla Becher, among others.

Australian collectors Simon and Catriona Mordant have gifted 25 works of art to the Newcastle Art Gallery in Newcastle, Australia. Highlights of the donation include interactive digital works by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Make out (Shadow Box 8)2008, which contained thousands of Internet videos of couples kissing and inspired the idea of ​​surveillance; Janet Lawrence’s liquid green (2003), which denounces the impact of human behavior on the environment; and two works on paper by Ngarrindjeri painter Ian Abdulla, which depict vivid childhood memories on the Murray River. An exhibition is scheduled for 2026 to commemorate the donation and celebrate the doubling of the gallery’s square footage.

Chicago Top 200 collectors Anita Blanchard and Martin Nesbitt donate work by Julie Mehretu Nine Women, Part 6 (2023) is on display at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, South Africa this February. “Over the past 35 years, Marty and I have built an art collection that includes African and African diasporic artists who have defined themselves in their practice and developed a complex understanding and appreciation of Black identity,” said Blanchard. “We are very proud to contribute to a contemporary art museum in Africa and to bring Julie Mehretu’s work back to the continent in a variety of ways.”

Real estate developer Jorge M. Pérez and his wife Darlene made a major gift of art to London’s Tate Modern, including Joan Mitchell’s monumental triptych “Iva” (1973). The 20-foot-long painting, dedicated to Mitchell’s dog, is one of the artist’s most important works and features her signature bold color fields and gestural brushstrokes. Perez’s gift also includes a multi-million dollar endowment for curatorial research at the Tate, as well as upcoming gifts of works by artists from Africa and the African diaspora, such as Yinka Shonibare, El Anasuy and Malik Sidibe.

Vancouver real estate mogul Bob Rennie has gifted approximately 61 works worth $16.8 million to the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa. The most famous of these is the work of Yinka Shonibare American Library (2018), consists of approximately 6,000 books wrapped in Dutch wax-printed cotton, approximately 3,200 of which feature immigrants or their descendants who influenced North American culture. Other works include pieces created by Mona Hatoum during her residency on Vancouver’s Western Front in the 1980s, which speak to the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and 40 works by the late Vancouver artist Rodney Graham spanning nearly four decades. The gift exceeds the $9.6 million Rainey gave to NGC in 2017, bringing his total to 260 gifts since 2012, with an estimated value of $25.7 million.

Jeffrey and Carol Horvitz have given the Art Institute of Chicago approximately 2,250 works of French art from the 16th to 19th centuries, which the museum says is the largest collection of its kind in an American private collection from that period. The gift included 2,000 drawings, 200 paintings and 50 sculptures. Among the gifts were works by the Rococo painter François Boucher, the Romantic painter Theodore Jericho and the neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David. The Horwitzes pledged additional funds to preserve the works.