Jennifer Eagle, whose husband, John, is president of the museum’s board, contrasts the donation with what she has seen in cities such as Miami, where the Rubell, de la Cruz and other families have founded their own mini museums. “Here, everyone is building our one museum,” she gushes. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
When asked to describe the thought process that went into giving it all away, Cindy Rachofsky says the story is so brief that it might be disappointing. It begins in the Napa Valley, where the Hoffmans and the Rachofskys always spend New Year’s Eve together. “We were there sitting by the fire, drinking great wine, and Robert looks at us and says, ‘Would you ever consider donating your collection to the museum?’” recalls Cindy. “We said, ‘Absolutely.’ It was as simple as that. There was no background.”
Later that evening, Howard, a retired hedge fund manager, announced that he also wanted to throw in their 1996 Richard Meier–designed house on acres of lawn dotted with sculptures. When the two couples told Deedie their plan, she signed on too. Cindy jokingly describes the scene as a “kumbaya” moment, while Howard concedes that the decision appears almost impulsive. But looking back he says he’s satisfied that it was “unequivocally the right thing to do.”
“It’s collaboration,” adds Howard, who has a showman’s charisma and often includes purple in his elegantly offbeat attire. “It’s working together to accomplish something that individually you couldn’t do as well.”
This collaborative spirit was forged as early as 2002, when the Rachofskys and the Hoffmans made the unconventional move of jointly buying a Gerhard Richter with the museum. “I call it our time-share,” says Marguerite, who with her late husband, a Coca-Cola bottling magnate, amassed a collection of luminous paintings (Diebenkorn, Twombly, Doig) and major sculptures (Judd, Whiteread, Gober). “It was expensive, but we really needed it here in Dallas.”
The Richter now hangs in Marguerite’s bedroom (the museum has first dibs), while a Gabriel Orozco currently installed chez Rachofsky is partially owned by the Roses. “We both have too much stuff,” says Deedie, who lives in a monumental modernist bunker by Antoine Predock that is stuffed with richly textural works by Robert Ryman, Piero Manzoni, Sol LeWitt and Gordon Matta-Clark. “Neither one of us can show everything that we’ve got; therefore we buy together,” she continues. “Sometimes we’ll get a piece that’s more expensive than what I might buy or he might buy alone. We’ll say, ‘Let’s pool our resources.’”
Deedie, who also serves as chairwoman of the DMA, has her hand in arts organizations all over town, but the true spiritual leader of Dallas cultural philanthropy is 98-year-old Margaret McDermott. Together with her late husband, Texas Instruments cofounder Eugene McDermott, she established an art-buying fund in 1960, and over the years Mrs. McDermott, as she is universally known, has dipped into it to pay for major gifts across nearly every
