“I signed a cheque to the Inland Revenue for £98mn,” says Dame Vivien Duffield. It was 1980, and this was the stinging 75 per cent death duties then payable on the charitable foundation of her philanthropist father, Sir Charles Clore; she had lost a complicated wrangle with the tax authorities.
But if her tone is regretful, it’s that she continues to think about how much more the foundation could have given away. “We’d have a billion by now.”
Clore, son of Jewish Latvian immigrants, left school at the age of 12 and built a fortune in retail, property and more. He also quickly became a very significant donor to charitable causes in Israel and Britain. His daughter followed in his footsteps: at 21, she created a foundation of her own, with £100,000 given to her by her father.
“My first two donations were to the Royal Ballet benevolent fund, and the Royal Ballet school,” she says. And, to the fury of her father, “I gave £10,000 to the Marie Stopes clinic.”
The relationship with her father was obviously powerful, though not always smooth: “He didn’t talk to me for about four years because I married a non-Jew.” But she grew up with museums, theatre and opera, surrounded by the beautiful things her father loved to collect, investing her with a love of art and a powerful belief in cultural education.
When Clore died, Duffield was just 33. “So I was lucky — or unlucky — to find myself running both those foundations, at an early age.
“He’d started in 1964, and he mainly gave to Jewish charities at the beginning; the first really big donation was to Tate.”
Duffield is referring to the Clore Gallery, a modern building adjoining Tate Britain which opened in 1987 and houses the world’s largest collection of works by JMW Turner: it cost Clore £6mn, added to £1.8mn from the UK government. These sums are recorded in tiny neat handwriting in one of the small notebooks she shows me: these were all Clore used to run his huge foundation.
We are talking in the offices of the Clore Duffield Foundation (in 2000, she amalgamated the two) in a former art studio in Chelsea, west London, where she runs everything with just a director, Kate Bellamy, and a secretary.
There’s nothing flashy here: propped against one wall is a copy of Graham Sutherland’s portrait of Clore on display in Tate Britain, on the walls are some family photographs — one of him with a young Queen Elizabeth II, opening the lions’ terraces at London Zoo (which he funded). And there are modest photos of some of the foundation’s hundreds of projects, including a museum, a clinic and a football pitch in Israel for Jewish and Arab children.
A couple of contemporary artworks on the wall were acquired at degree shows at the Royal College of Art (for many years, Duffield’s life partner was Sir Jocelyn Stevens, then rector of the RCA). Does she have the same collecting urge as her father? “I can’t afford anything that I want,” she says. “I never really did collect modern art.”
Instead, a great love is opera: “I’ve loved the Royal Opera House for ever” — the Clore Studio there was opened in 1999 — “and I can’t believe how we manage to do what we do with next to nothing. Our grant has gone down, in real terms, for so long.
“The Tories have really screwed everything to do with the arts and culture,” she says, feelingly. “All the signs coming from the Labour party are good, but who knows . . . ”
You can’t go far in Britain’s cultural landscape without encountering the Clore name, but the full range and scale of the foundation’s activities is staggering. Apart from significant contributions to just about every major cultural institution, there is a plethora of smaller projects.
One example is Eureka!, the children’s museum in Halifax, West Yorkshire, which Duffield was inspired to build after visiting a similar museum in Boston in the US with her two children. A conversation with Nicholas Serota, then director of Tate, about the lack of diversity in museum leadership led to the establishment of the Clore Leadership programme, a training course for professionals; more than 500 of its graduates are now in prominent positions in the arts world.
The learning centre at a museum in Jerusalem led to the creation of the Clore Learning Spaces that are now in galleries and museums across Britain, from the tiniest (a telegraph museum in Cornwall) to the grandest. As the foundation celebrates its 60th year, the total has reached a remarkable 70.
One anniversary project, however, seems especially close to Duffield’s heart. She describes it as her “last big project” (she is 78), though seeing her energy and conviction, I doubt that.
“I always thought that, at Tate [Britain], we never got the garden right. And now, the space [in front of the Clore Gallery] has become a dangerous, murky place. I love what New York has done with the riverbank, I love the Bloomberg cycle path: I’d love to do something like that in London. It’s so sad, that bit of the Embankment [in front of Tate Britain]: it’s ghastly. Other cities use the water: we’ve done nothing in London.”
The plan, therefore, is to create a green space that stretches right across the front of the museum. “I’m fighting for the taxi rank [in front of Tate Britain’s main doors], then that whole space can be green. And I’m dying to get a cycle path.”
The Clore Garden will be designed by landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith, in collaboration with architects Feilden Fowles and the Royal Horticultural Society. “I am very much hands on with that one,” she says.
Given Duffield’s long-standing connection to Israel, our conversation can hardly fail to touch on the war in Gaza. She has been outspoken, especially in the Israeli press, about her strong disapproval of the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.
“I’d been going to Israel with my father since 1956,” she says. “It’s become a different place to 50 years ago.”
The foundation funds a range of multicultural projects — she tells me about a walking path for Muslim women and the rebuilding of the swimming pool at the YMCA in Jerusalem, also to include the Arab population. But I have to ask: does it really work? Do Jewish and Arab people truly mix at these facilities?
“It did work — until October 7. I have not been there since. I’d be lying if I told you it’s the same: it’s not. Everybody’s terrified — on both sides. It’s a horrendous situation.
“I’ve no desire to go back. I feel I’ve seen enough horrors.”
In London, Duffield’s commitment to the Jewish community led to the creation of JW3, a social and cultural centre in north London. Again, the inspiration came from New York — the famous 92nd Street Y — coupled with Duffield’s evident love of building. Is it what she envisaged it to be? “It’s getting there,” she says, and “it costs a fortune”.
And what of the future? Both her children seem to have inherited the philanthropic tendency: her daughter Arabella is deputy chair of Save the Children, and chair of the (Clore-funded) Weizmann UK; her son George set up the Blue Marine foundation to save the oceans. Even so, “their interests are not mine. It’s a different generation — and so it should be.”
I ask the crude question: how much has the foundation given away to date? She hesitates before estimating, “close to half a billion?”
However much the largesse, it seems there’s always room for aspiration. “Did you see the news about that woman Ruth Gottesman?” she asks eagerly. “Giving $1bn to a medical school [in New York] so that no one has to pay fees any more?
“If we’d had the full billion,” she says, “we could have done something like that.”
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