“Are you related to Jane Drew?” the auctioneer asked in passing.

A renowned British architect with close ties to the Swiss-born architect and artist Le Corbusier, Jane Drew had helped design the original premises of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, which was founded in the late 1940s as a cutting-edge art gallery and cultural center. Drewe knew about her design work for the modernist Indian city of Chandigarh and her influence on the Modern Movement, a group of avant-garde architects and painters of the 1940s.

The professor was not one to let an opportunity slip by. He told the auctioneer that Jane Drew was indeed a distant relative. Drewe carried on the conversation long enough to learn that the legendary woman was still alive, living just a few hours away, in the northeast.

Perhaps, Drewe thought, it was time to pay her a visit.

Drewe and Myatt drove north in the blue Bristol for three hours, until they reached the tiny two-pub village of Durham. Drewe had called beforehand and introduced himself as a patron of the arts who was writing a book on the history of the ICA. Jane Drew had immediately invited him up.

As soon as they walked into the house, Myatt was in awe, for he considered the seventy-eight-year-old woman a living, breathing part of Britain’s culture. Before long they were chatting about her work with “Corbu,” her role in the Modern Movement, and her friendships with Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller, who had invented the geodesic dome and coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth.” At Drewe’s prompting, she reminisced about her involvement in the postwar celebration dubbed the Festival of Britain and her work as a pioneer in tropical architecture and public housing.

She spoke with affection about some of the artists she had met through the ICA, particularly Ben Nicholson, a jaunty character who wore a beret and talked in a high-pitched voice. She remembered his uncanny penchant for design and his beautifully composed vegetarian dishes, with a red radish placed slightly off center, a fistful of asparagus laid out in a curve on the edge of the plate.

Drewe was in top form, and Myatt noted his effect on the aging woman. When the professor suggested that it was high time she wrote her autobiography, she seemed flattered. Then he offered to finance the project himself. He was certain her memoirs would reach a wide audience.

Within weeks of the meeting, Jane Drew had prepared a detailed outline of her life, and when Drewe returned north to pick it up, she asked him for a favor. Would he use his contacts in London to act as her representative in the sale of a small Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture she owned? Drewe had seen the piece and knew a dealer who might be interested. He said he would be delighted to handle the sale.

After several more visits to Jane Drew’s country home, Drewe began systematically widening his circle of art world acquaintances by dropping her name and inviting members of the establishment to lunch with them. He reserved tables at Claridge’s or at L’Escargot in Soho for such eminent Londoners as the former head of the Tate Gallery, Alan Bowness—Ben Nicholson’s son-in-law—and the art critic David Sylvester, who had once had his portrait painted by Giacometti.

Through Jane Drew he also met Dorothy Morland, the former director of the ICA. Until a few years earlier, he learned, the bulk of the ICA’s archives had been stored in Morland’s garage for safekeeping. She had eventually returned them, and they were now in box files in a small room on the ground floor. The cache consisted of forty-five years’ worth of memorabilia and personal papers, stacks of letters, sketches, and programs in no particular order, with huge chronological gaps. There were letters from Picasso, the art critic Herbert Read, and the surrealist painter and poet Roland Penrose, along with dozens of catalog and texts of forgotten lectures by W. H. Auden and Buckminster Fuller. By and large the archives had been ignored for decades. Dorothy Morland felt that she had saved them from destruction. She told Drewe that Bill McAlister, the current ICA director, wanted very much to put the material in order but that the institute was always short on funds.

She suggested that Drewe give the director a call.

Dr. Drewe got straight to the point. He said he was a scientist and a businessman, and that in his capacity as chairman of Norseland Industries, which had a large collection of modern art, he was considering a substantial donation to the ICA. He spoke knowledgeably about the institute’s inner workings and his wish to help overhaul its legendary archives.

McAlister immediately agreed to meet him for lunch.

The business of donor fishing was at best frustrating for McAlister, like rowing upriver for a week and coming back with minnows. On the rare occasion when he managed to land a contributor, one or another of his department heads would be at the door, cap in hand, with plans for a new play by a Nordic iconoclast, a seminar on chastity in Pop, or a Bavarian film festival. There was never enough money to go around, certainly never enough for what McAlister hoped would be his final project: refurbishing the archives, which had never been properly cared for. Over the years former senior staffers had felt it necessary to remove archival material in the belief that it needed protection or was part of their own private papers. One had even removed a visitors’ book containing sketches and signatures by Picasso and Hockney. This valuable volume later found its way to the British Museum’s library.

McAlister was aware of other such potential improprieties—nothing that verged on the criminal, but there was simply no excuse for the lack of a system to identify and maintain the archives. Thus, he was especially pleased to find someone who shared his concern. “I felt very lonely in that regard,” he recalled.

He and Drewe met at a fashionable Soho restaurant. Drewe was punctual and impeccably dressed. McAlister was a gourmet and mushroom hunter, and they both took their time with the menu and the wine list. Right away, McAlister felt that they had much in common. Drewe was a man of the Left, a former official with the Atomic Energy Authority who had quit after Margaret Thatcher began to privatize government programs. He accused her of wreaking devastation on the arts and sciences with her denationalization campaigns.

McAlister was no Thatcherite either, and complained to Drewe that while bastions of the art establishment such as the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum still enjoyed government beneficence, the ICA got chicken feed.

Cultural historians well understood official Britain’s arm’s-length relationship to the ICA. Ever since its founding in a small L-shaped room on Dover Street in 1947, it had been a constant irritant to the arbiters of art. When cofounder Herbert Read called for public funding, the prickly George Bernard Shaw declared that such funds “would be better spent on hygiene, since hygiene [and] not the arts was responsible for the improvement in the nation’s health over the preceding hundred years.”⁹ But the ICA’s early members, who included Henry Moore, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Peggy Guggenheim, and Dylan Thomas, believed that the institute stood as a beacon to those who wanted to create and debate new art forms. The ICA organized poetry readings and “conversation nights” with Le Corbusier and “Bucky” Fuller, and opened a bar where patrons could buy a snack and a drink and discourse until dawn on the new postwar aesthetics.

“It felt like a railway stop,” Dorothy Morland told an ICA historian. ¹⁰ “People passed one another without realizing that some would one day be famous and some would change the face of art beyond all recognition. But as with every station, everyone was in a hurry.”

Over the years the ICA became a relatively safe haven for avant-garde artists from all over the world. In 1959, during a “Cyclo-Matic” demonstration of the mechanical nature of art, the Swiss Dadaist Jean Tinguely set up a machine operated by cyclists that dumped fifty pounds of drawings on paper onto the street. In the sixties, during an era of sit-ins and protests and the first stirrings of conceptual art, a young Australian artist taking part in a Destruction in Art symposium stood by the roadside waving an animal corpse and spattering the pavement with blood.

That same decade, the ICA moved to one of the more incongruous locations it could have found anywhere in Britain: a Georgian mansion on the Mall, a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace. There, it held symposiums on horror comics, television culture, and rubber fashion, during which someone set off a fire alarm, and when the fire brigade arrived in their bright yellow plastic macs they became a ready-made instant hit.

In the late 1970s, the ICA held a string of “shock shows.” The “Prostitution” show had transvestite guards posted at the door and featured strippers and snake-oil wrestlers. During a subsequent show, in a paean to motherhood, an artist hung tampons and soiled diapers in the gallery.

Predictably, the drumbeat of criticism against the ICA was relentless. The Daily Telegraph fumed that its shows were “publicly-funded porn.” The “Prostitution” show in particular was “an excuse for exhibitionism by every crank, queer, squint and ass in the business.” The Daily Mirror blasted the ICA as the home of “extremist art,” and one member of Parliament denounced the show’s founders as “wreckers of civilization.”¹¹

The ICA’s government subsidies were supplemented by various foundations and philanthropists, but by the late 1970s many of them had ceased to be amused. The mansion on the mall was expensive to maintain and the ICA was in constant financial crisis. The building was an eyesore, often dirty and in dire need of repair. One member quit after complaining that he kept “tripping over hippies in the corridor,” according to ICA historian Lyn Cole. In 1977, Bill McAlister was hired to bring order to the chaos. He spruced the space up, installed a decent bar in the mezzanine, improved the food, and introduced a cheaper membership fee that attracted younger crowds. Over time he reaffirmed the ICA’s trendiness and reached out to new artists. As one reporter for the Guardian noted, patrons could now “read Baudrillard in the bookshop, munch a healthy lentil-carrot cake in the restaurant, and guzzle a Grolsch in the bar” before the show.

During McAlister’s dozen years at the helm, the ICA had seen a sharp increase in ticket sales and membership, but funding remained a constant headache, and his tenure was coming to an end. Before his departure, he wanted to get the archives in good shape, but in case he couldn’t find the money to do it, he opened negotiations with the Tate, which was interested in acquiring the ICA records. However, he felt the Tate was overly fussy in restricting access to its archives to scholars and serious researchers, and it was only interested in the visual arts, not the ICA’s records on film, performance, and literature. He thought the ICA’s complete history should be open to students and youngsters as well as to academics. The negotiations had dragged on painfully and had eventually broken down over the issue of access.

Now McAlister found himself sitting across the table from a wealthy scientist with a strong interest in the arts, someone who wasn’t part of the intellectual mafia and who recognized the ICA’s worth. Dr. Drewe also seemed to have a solution to the archives problem. He told McAlister that he had a team of university researchers, led by his colleague Terrence Carroll at the University of Westminster, who could update the archives and make them universally accessible by using computer technology and digital photography to collate, cross-reference, and store them. The system would change the way art historians worked.

Drewe spoke of heading up an ICA foundation of like-minded wealthy individuals who would promote the institute through a series of gala dinners and celebrity auctions. He mentioned the names of Jane Drew, Dorothy Morland, and Anne Massey, a young researcher who had worked on a history of the ICA.

McAlister was delighted. Drewe reminded him of another left-wing scientist with a penchant for the arts. The molecular physicist J. D. Bernal, a peace activist during the cold war era, had insisted that his fellow scientists were duty-bound to use their knowledge to benefit humanity. Bernal kept an apartment above his lab, where he entertained intellectuals and artists, including Picasso, who during one party in 1950 painted a large mural of a man and woman with wings and wearing laurel wreaths on their heads. When Bernal’s apartment was set to be demolished in 1969, the mural was chiseled out of the wall and given to the ICA. It had been gathering dust for two decades, and one of McAlister’s first tasks at the ICA had been to restore it and install it in the new foyer.

History was about to repeat itself, McAlister thought. Drewe was a latter-day Bernal.

At their next lunch meeting McAlister told Drewe that before he left the ICA he was organizing a benefit auction for the institute. Would Drewe’s company consider donating a work of art, the proceeds of which would be set aside to refurbish the ICA archives? Drewe immediately offered two pieces, and several days later he brought McAlister a Le Corbusier collage and a simple and transcendent Giacometti drawing. McAlister was charmed by the collage and joked that he would love to have one for himself.

“I can get you another one, a very similar one,” Drewe said.

The comment puzzled McAlister, but he let it pass.

A month later the ICA auction at Sotheby’s was a big success, raising about £1 million for the institute. Drewe’s contributions brought in nearly £50,000. When McAlister called to thank him, Drewe brought up the archives project. He said he wanted to familiarize himself with the scope and condition of the archives to prepare for a meeting with his computer software engineer, Terrence Carroll.

The archives had been moved to a small, seldom-used room with a separate entrance. McAlister asked his secretary to find the keys and have them ready for Professor Drewe.

“He’s free to come and go as he pleases,” McAlister told her. “Make him feel at home.”