Phyllis Wattis, one of the nation’s most influential cultural philanthropists whose generosity over five decades established her as San Francisco’s patron saint of the arts, died June 5. She was 97.
A great-granddaughter of Mormon leader Brigham Young, she contributed $150 million to cultural institutions in northern California, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Opera and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Her gifts shaped the institutions and raised the city’s arts profile.
For many years she and her husband, Paul Wattis, a construction and mining magnate whose company was the primary builder of the Hoover Dam, had channeled their philanthropy through a foundation they founded in 1958. Her husband died in 1971. In 1988, Ms. Wattis, to the astonishment of San Francisco’s cultural organizations, dispensed all of its $26 million in assets.
Then she began giving away her capital–more than $100 million.
That included more than $20 million to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to buy important works after critics said its collection was unworthy of its striking new building. Among the acquisitions she made possible were 14 works by Robert Rauschenberg and others by Eva Hesse, Mark Rothko, Wayne Thiebaud, Anselm Kiefer, Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian.
“She was someone who saw that it was possible to transform a collection,” said Janet Bishop, the museum’s curator of painting and sculpture.
Ms. Wattis did not give much thought to art when she was growing up in Salt Lake City, one of six children of a sugar company executive and a homemaker. She had music lessons that “didn’t take” and could not remember ever visiting a museum as a child.
She attended the University of Utah, then switched to the University of California, where she completed a degree in economics. She married and, when the headquarters of her husband’s company, Utah Construction and Mining, moved to San Francisco in 1936, she moved with him to California.
After her husband died, she sold their company to General Electric, vastly increasing her wealth. Her children showed little interest in philanthropy, so she ran the foundation virtually by herself for the next 17 years. Worried about the management of the fund after she was gone, she decided in 1988 to give all the money away.
Then she dug into her own purse for more. In one year alone she gave out $70 million.
“I just love calling up someone to say, `I’m sending you $2 million’ and watching their jaw drop,” she once told the San Francisco Examiner. “They get so befuddled. . . . “
