Cultural Envoy Terra Finances $75-Million Museum : Chicago Gets Showcase for American Art

A major privately financed art museum opening next week on busy and fashionable North Michigan Avenue will give Chicago another cultural attraction and put tycoon Daniel J. Terra on the nation’s cultural map.

Terra, U.S. ambassador-at-large for cultural affairs and chief executive officer of an international chemical company, spent $30 million for some of the most expensive urban real estate in the Midwest to house his collection of American art, which he says is insured “for nine figures.”

Beginning Tuesday, he will preside over four days of black-tie dinners and other festivities to celebrate the first exhibit at the Terra Museum of American Art.

‘Paid for All of It’

“I had a guy say to me, ‘Now come on, why don’t you admit it, this is an ego trip for you,’ ” Terra said. “It shocked me. I said, ‘All right, I will get some ego if this thing succeeds and the public supports it 100%. Then I’ll feel egotistical.’ But to date there’s nothing to feel egotistical about. I paid for all of it.”

The new Terra is the first large-scale showcase exclusively for American art to open in the United States in more than half a century. It will join with New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as a center for exhibiting American masterpieces.

The center of the new museum, housed in a pair of recycled buildings, is a five-story white-marble-and-glass structure with a four-story-tall ramp reminiscent of New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The main building was once headquarters for fashion magnate Helena Rubenstein and the fur vault has been converted into a vault for rare art pieces.

Plans for Expansions

Initially the museum will be about as large as Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, but there are plans for two expansions that would eventually spread display areas over two blocks. Terra says he will keep retail space at the ground level and use the rental revenues to help pay museum operating costs.

In all, the total cost of the project is currently estimated at $75 million.

Situated on North Michigan Avenue between Huron and Erie, just a few blocks from Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a 20-minute walk from the Art Institute of Chicago and about 10 minutes from the city’s gallery district, the Terra will be the third major downtown art museum.

Inaugural Exhibition

Sixty major pieces from the Pennsylvania Academy and more than 100 pieces from Terra’s collection will be on display in the inaugural exhibition that will run through June 21. Works by William Merritt Chase, Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, Benjamin West and Andrew Wyeth will be included in the show spanning two centuries from 1750 to 1950.

“We’re going to open with what will probably be the finest exhibition of American art under one roof ever,” said Terra, who speaks in Chicago-style superlatives.

Terra, 75, who began collecting art a half-century ago and American art about 30 years ago, owns one of the finest private collections of works by U.S. artists between 1850 and 1950.

‘Remarkable Collection’

“I think it’s quite a remarkable collection and one that will be able to make the move from essentially a private to a public collection rather gracefully,” said Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., curator of American art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. “It’s got major areas of strength, for example in impressionist paintings, which is one of (Terra’s) great preferences.”

The museum will join some of the biggest names in retailing on North Michigan Avenue, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany’s, Neiman Marcus, Marshall Fields and Bloomingdales.

Trim, dapper and energetic, the velvet-tongued Terra said he picked North Michigan “because we wanted to be where the people are.”

High Pedestrian Count

“There is only one strip in the world that has a higher pedestrian count than North Michigan,” he said. “That’s 5th Avenue from 49th Street to 59th Street in New York. The pedestrian count on this block was 14.5 million people last year.” He expects up to a million visitors in the museum’s first year of operation.

Terra, who headed Ronald Reagan’s 1979-80 presidential fund-raising, used a $2,800 loan 47 years ago to found a company that grew into Lawter International Inc., a specialty chemical company that had earnings of $12.9 million last year.

As U.S. ambassador-at-large for cultural affairs, a post he says President Reagan created for him, Terra has spent the last six years traveling the globe as a relentless salesman for American culture, giving more than 100 speeches last year alone.

“I can tell you that American art is in demand all over the world and that wasn’t true even seven years ago. Now everybody wants to see American art,” he said.