David Thomas: Philanthropist

Posted: 30 Jun 2011  |  By: Patricia Anderson - Editor

Patricia Anderson: When you established the Thomas Foundation in 1998, what were your initial intentions?

David Thomas: Initially our interest was in education, the arts and nature conservation. Then we reviewed what we did at three-year intervals. I sensed an opportunity to make a substantial change in one area, and to do that we needed to be more narrowly focused. That area was nature conservation and as a consequence we phased out some of our involvement in the arts.

P: Yes, but nonetheless, you've funnelled a significant amount to the arts. Your foundation has donated well over one million dollars to arenas in the art world.

D: Well, my interest in the visual arts is pretty broad. It ranges from painting and sculpture to decorative arts and jewellery, and I chose to work with glass, because it was an area of Australian excellence which was not well known and was not supported at all philanthropically, unlike opera and ballet.

P: They do appear to get the lion's share of philanthropy!

D: Well, they've got plenty of supporters — and so has the National Gallery in Canberra. Although we have worked with them and other state galleries.

P: Yes, your foundation gave the classically inspired translucent cast glass work Dress 4 by Karen LaMonte to the National Gallery of Australia.

D: We did.

P: People who establish foundations are focused and talented, and they've made a lot of money, but what happens when they come up against the slow-grinding wheels of bureaucracies? I'm wondering how you found it — dealing with art bureaucracies for example?

D: We didn't deal with them! I don't think foundations generally do. I think that's one of the main appeals of direct philanthropy. Usually philanthropists have a passion and a vision, and rather than just, say, write cheques once a year, they have a view which I'd call ‘informed giving'. It's essentially strategic, they have an objective in mind.

We were not always as focused as we have become. It's quite common to start out doing what's called expressive giving. In other words …

P: So some of it comes from the heart without necessarily having a business plan written up initially?

D: Exactly. I support the National Gallery because I believe in what they're doing, and that is not strategic. But I do choose to operate indirectly. People I'm engaged with are involved with lobbying, but not me personally.

P: You keep a safe distance from the scrum?

D: Well … someone from the Rockefeller Foundation once said: “Pursue your passions with dispassionate analysis.” Well, that suits me very well because I'm that sort of person. But having decided what I wanted to do and how I was going to get there … when a role for lobbying became apparent, I realised others could do that. I'm not trying to do everything.

P: Back to the arts. I first encountered you when you walked into the Contemporary Jewellery Gallery in the mid-1980s and started buying quite vigorously. This was clearly a personal thing for you and you were one of the gallery's best clients. You were also informed, you had an eye for certain sorts of objects and you commissioned pieces. This was quite surprising to me because at the time, jewellery, like glassware, had no real support structure. The state galleries collected it and the gallery sold fifty-eight pieces to state galleries around Australia, but bringing a public audience with you was very difficult. So your collecting patterns were of great interest to me. And you've had a similar involvement with glass.

D: Yes, that's true.

P: And as you've suggested, no-one was considering glass seriously at all. Galleries weren't specialising in it, but when certain kinds of support raise its profile, word gets around and then incrementally you find commercial galleries taking it seriously, such as Sabbia and Quadrivium (now closed) in Sydney and of course the Wagga Regional Gallery. You've undoubtedly played a role in that.

D: Well, to go back to jewellery for a moment. I became interested in jewellery because I walked past the Contemporary Jewellery Gallery every morning on my way to work! I'd always had an interest in design and architecture and when I first saw this contemporary jewellery — I hadn't been aware of it before — to me it seemed sculptural. I thought, “This is sculpture you can collect on some scale, and you can wear it too.”

P: And you can display it any way you wish.

D: Well, these drawers were all designed — they're electrically locked and felt lined — for jewellery. So I collected it and developed a collection. I saw Helen Drutt [the director and owner of the Helen Drutt Gallery in Philadelphia] in New York where she then was, and later in Philadelphia, and bought a number of pieces from her.

P: And you also came across New Zealand jewellers in that period.

D: Yes, over the years I have developed a substantial collection of Warwick Freeman's work — probably thirty pieces. I see Warwick regularly. And after the foundation was established in 1998, we supported some jewellery initiatives — I think we funded a catalogue for his exhibition at Gallery Ra — and I wanted to fund a jewellery prize in New Zealand. And at the same time I was simultaneously getting involved with glass.

When I first went to New Zealand, all the artists I met were talking about the Dowse Museum on the outskirts of Wellington. I went to see it and it was an extraordinary experience. I hadn't encountered a museum with such a wonderful decorative arts collection and I spent days there looking at jewellery and ceramics. Some years later I had the idea of funding a jewellery prize. I went to the Dowse and I asked them — and a lot of jewellers, because I got to know the members of the Fingers cooperative — for their ideas.

I believe New Zealand jewellers have developed a highly individual and coherent expression of their culture and the cultures of the Pacific region through their work. I found that very engaging.

P: Yes, I did too, and the Contemporary Jewellery Gallery presented a number of solo shows by New Zealand jewellers such as Alan Preston, Kobi Bosshard, Paul Annear, and Warwick Freeman.

D: It was Warwick who suggested that most jewellers would like to work in gold, but they couldn't afford it. So we made the prize $5000 worth of gold for an invitational show. We offered that prize every two years, and in the alternate year we funded an acquisition of a glass work.

One of the things we've done in the Foundation is fund things in order to demonstrate to others that these areas are worth supporting. And the logical consequence of that is that we phase out of it after three, four or five years.

P: And let others pick up the reins after a momentum was generated.

D: Yes, that's a working principle we've always adopted. We did some work with Object galleries too.

P: And moving onto glass, you've had some involvement with the American scene, and I found that interesting because the American culture of collecting is often a lot about self-promotion.

D: Oh very much so! I went to an annual collectors' weekend in Wheaton Village in New Jersey — very rural, very pretty — and they have a very fine glass school there. Our foundation funded fellowships for glass artists to go to Wheaton Village to explore new ideas and to provide support of a handful of very senior glass artists. So … this big weekend for collectors [laughter] … it's terrifying.

P: It would take a lot to terrify you wouldn't it … you've been in the business world for a good part of your working life.

D: When you see a forty-eight-year-old American woman dripping in gold and dressed in Giorgo Armani, bearing down on you because she's heard there's an Australian collector there and she wants to know “do you have a Chihuly?” or “which Chihulys do you have?” … then it's cause for alarm. When American collectors come to Australia, they come with a list of artists.

P: How dull, no room for discovery!

D: Someone has told them “for your collection there are ten people you should consider”, and that's not my way of looking at art.

P: You want to be surprised.

D: Exactly. In 1992 I was in Prague, after going to Vienna to look at the Secessionists and the Jugendstijl movement. And interestingly, the freest expression which continued through the communist years was jazz — there were jazz clubs everywhere.

P: A touch of anarchy!

D: Yes, and the other thing was glass. I knew nothing about Bohemian glass or its history. There was an exhibition on called The Inaugural Prague Glass Prize, and I just happened to stumble into it — in a cubist building on the river. It was a sensational exhibition and what immediately captured my interest was how sculptural it was. So I bought a couple of pieces and some books and started to read about the glass art movement there.

It wasn't the studio glass art movement that we know now, where back in the late 1960s and seventies the idea started that an artist could actually make his own glass — maybe starting in a garage. The exhibition had been sponsored by the Heller Gallery in New York. Doug Heller, who was very well established in the field and still is — a terrific bloke — asked me “which Australian glass artists have you got in your collection?”

P: Aha!

D: And I said “Australian glass artists?” At that stage there were probably only half a dozen glass artists in Australia, and they were selling 90% of their work in America.

P: So a serendipitous moment for you two to have met.

D: So when I sold my company in 1997, I used some of that money to start the foundation. I saw a strategic opportunity and I was very influenced by the excellent planning advice of the Australia Council. A focus on glass followed. And I thought, “How will we measure success if we support glass artists?” Firstly, those working professionally with glass would see their income grow, because their works would increase in value. This is exactly what a commercial gallery would do for them — but there weren't any commercial galleries. Secondly, I wanted to see more artists graduating from art schools take up glassmaking professionally.

P: So how did you go about that?

D: We got involved with Ozglass, the glass artists' organisation and we funded things with them. We funded a lot of travelling scholarships, we funded exhibitions, we funded catalogues, we funded creative writing, we funded artists to go to conferences, and commissioned writers to write proper critical material — and we did this in New Zealand as well as Australia.

We also funded the acquisition of works, such as the aforementioned Helen LaMonte and Jun Kaneko's fused glass called Clear blue, yellow and red slabs for the Museum of Modern Art in Brisbane.

I'd seen his work at SOFA, the annual art fair in Chicago and Miami, which showcased the applied arts.

If you could imagine an oversized door made of glass — four of them side by side — in three primary colours and white, just standing against a wall. The effect of this is quite extraordinary. You're not just looking at panels of colour, you're also asking yourself “what is this material, and how is this expression achieved?” And when you get close you see that it's glass — we're talking about five millimetres thick.

P: There's enormous expressive potential with this material.

D: Yes, so we asked Doug Hall at the Queensland Art Gallery — where we had funded other things — if he'd be interested in having this kind of expression there.

P: Anything else?

D: Yes, one last venture, which saw the creation of the Canberra Glass Works. That, I think, will become a major tourist destination. It cost six or eight million dollars to restore the building. It's a very exciting venue, you can see glass artists at work and we have created a capital fund there, the earnings from which are to subsidise young glass artists who have recently graduated.

P: Glass is an expensive medium, isn't it?

D: Yes, if you're going to work with a hot glass studio it's going to cost five hundred dollars an hour just to keep the hot shop running.

P: A bit like a sculptor working in cast bronze.

D: It's even worse because you've got to have your own casting facilities, while a bronze caster can go along to a bronze foundry. So we're funding that sort of thing there.

We're also funding a cottage for a visiting glass artist, which is working well, and we funded a book on Australian glass to coincide with the Glass Artists Society Conference (GAS), which was held in Adelaide around 2006.

P: So you've had a very focused yet very wide-ranging involvement in this arena.

D: Yes, that's where a million dollars goes.

Images from top:

David Thomas at home in Noosa.

Warwick Freeman, Heart Brooch nephrite largest dimension 65mm

Warwick Freeman, Leaf Pendant, 24 carat gold, paint, fibre, largest dimension 60mm

Warwick Freeman, Star Brooch, mother of pearl, sterling silver, largest dimension 75mm