Museum of Modern Art’s Lowry Earned $1.32 Million in 2008-2009
By Philip Boroff

Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Glenn D. Lowry earned $1.32 million in pay and benefits running New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the year ending in June, down from $1.95 million the year before, as the museum cut costs amid the recession.

Lowry, 54, took a voluntary pay reduction as he pared spending by 10 percent across departments and froze hiring, said Kim Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the museum.

The prior year, Lowry received a 13 percent raise, according to the museum’s tax return. His $1.95 million in salary, bonus and benefits earned him a place as the best-paid director among the half-dozen largest U.S. museums by budget that have filed returns for 2008, according to Bloomberg research. (Museums have varying deadlines to file based on their fiscal year. Pay figures in this story include benefits and deferred compensation.)

Lowry also topped the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s pay survey for museum leaders for 2007.

Seven-figure pay packages can deter some donors, who say they want their money to promote culture, not enrich executives. Yet Sarah James, a recruiter with the New York executive search firm Phillips Oppenheim, said she believes pay is often deserved because top jobs have become more demanding as museum operations have grown more complex.

Top Dollar

She said trustees are often willing to pay top dollar for directors because they’re essential to fundraising and securing gifts of art.

“If you don’t have the right person leading a cause, no one will give,” she said.

James said salaries ought to increase for people at lower levels, such as curators. In 2000, unionized administrative staffers went on strike. The Professional and Administrative Staff Association of MoMA said at the time that the starting annual salary of about 40 positions was $17,000. The median pay of its members was under $29,000, it said. The museum declined to comment on current salaries.

Lowry, an Islamic art scholar, was named director in 1995. He’s balanced MoMA’s budget every year since then, the museum said. An $858 million capital campaign funded an expansion of exhibit space by 50 percent, to 125,000 square feet.

In 2004, general admission to the museum was raised to $20 from $12. Annual attendance has roughly doubled, since then, to 2.8 million. In the same period, the number of visitors at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was little changed, at about 4.8 million.

Best Director

“I can’t think of a better museum director in the United States, or perhaps even the world,” said Eli Broad, a Los Angeles-based collector and MoMA trustee.

Lowry’s 2008 compensation included salary and bonus of $956,682, a “retention bonus” of $191,182, “performance bonus” of $200,000 linked to fundraising goals and $262,725 in pension and health benefits, according to the tax return and a museum statement. The director lives rent-free in the 52-story Museum Tower, the Cesar Pelli-designed condominium over MoMA, an annual benefit valued at $336,000.

In all, Lowry’s 2008 compensation was $2.7 million. That included $764,000 in retention bonuses since 2004 that accumulated with interest that he hadn’t collected. MoMA disclosed the bonuses in previous returns.

Government Support

MoMA is the seventh-largest U.S. museum by budget. As a private non-profit organization, it received $281,000 in government support toward its $160 million operating budget, according to a financial disclosure. The Metropolitan Museum, based in a New York City-owned building, received about $35 million in government funds in the year ending in June 2008. The Met paid Philippe de Montebello, its outgoing director, $818,935, up 7 percent from the year earlier.

At the J. Paul Getty Trust, President and Chief Executive Officer James Wood -- who joined in early 2007 --made $1.1 million in the year ending in June 2008. Last month, it increased its daily parking fee 50 percent to $15 to cope with its declining endowment. Wood also took a 6 percent pay cut and the Getty Center began free parking on Saturday nights and at weekday evening events.

The Art Institute of Chicago compensated President James Cuno $626,175, up 46 percent. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts paid Director Malcolm Rogers $719,621, up 23 percent.

Too Noisy

The increased popularity of MoMA under Lowry hasn’t pleased everyone. “There’s never a quiet moment,” said Frank Stella, the 73-year-old American artist, speaking at a packed opening last month for a retrospective of designer Ron Arad.

Stella said the gradual expansion of the museum to artists such as Arad -- who works in various media -- has de-emphasized painting, sculpture and architecture.

“That was the focus of the museum,” Stella said. “Now it’s just a couple of floors in the department store.”

Stella said he nonetheless admires Lowry’s leadership. In the past year, as the Met and others cut staff to compensate for dwindling endowments, MoMA said it avoided both layoffs and a deficit.

Said Broad: “At a time when other museums are having all kinds of problems, he has control over that budget.”

Chief Operating Officer James Gara, also listed as assistant treasurer, made $758,074, up 17 percent in the year ending in June 2008. Patty Lipshutz, general counsel since 1998, saw her compensation increase 5 percent, to $357,600.

Jason Klein, the chief investment officer until he left for a job at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, made $867,549, up 28 percent. He oversaw a portfolio that declined 2.4 percent from the previous year, to $718 million as of June 30, 2008, according to the museum. (The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock Index lost about 13 percent in the same period.)

Beginning last month, the museum said it instituted a pay freeze for staff earning below $150,000 a year. For those earning more than $150,000, there are reductions of 2 percent to 10 percent on a sliding scale, “with the director taking the largest percentage cut,” according to the museum.