Rash's Surname Index


Notes for Joseph Richardson DILWORTH

J. Richardson Dilworth, a philanthropist and retired financier who was a former chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., died on Monday at the Princeton Hospital. He was 81 and lived in Princeton.
The cause was complications from heart surgery, said Fraser P. Seitel, a spokesman for the Rockefeller family, to which Mr. Dilworth was senior financial adviser for 23 years.
At his death, Mr. Dilworth was on the board of directors of AEA Incorporated, a private investment company which he had helped to found.
He discovered the Metropolitan Museum as a little boy growing up in Manhattan. "I used to live on 82d Street," he said in 1984. "I would wander across the street to the museum in the afternoon and look at the armor and the Egyptian collection. There used to be a brass turnstile, like the turnstiles on subways, which was as high as my head."
As an adult, he became chairman of the finance committee of the museum's board of trustees, and a vice president and then vice chairman of the board before becoming chairman. In 1963, he and Douglas Dillon, the financier and diplomat, were named as additional vice presidents, bringing the total to three, under a major change in the museum's bylaws by its president, Arthur A. Houghton Jr., to give it "greater strength and effectiveness."
When Mr. Dilworth became chairman in 1983, he succeeded Mr. Dillon in that post. Mr. Dilworth said at the time: "I regard myself as far less competent and far less prominent than Douglas Dillon, who has been Secretary of the Treasury, Under Secretary of State and Ambassador to France. There are periods of great accomplishment and periods of consolidation. I think this will be a period of finishing as well as we can what has been started."
By early 1984, although Mr. Dillon was still on the board's executive committee, museum executives were saying that Mr. Dilworth was clearly running the show. "Dillon really has turned over the stewardship to Dilworth," said Philippe de Montebello, the museum's director. "Dilworth is not looking over his shoulder." Mr. Dilworth said then, "My style may be different, but that does not mean I do not let people know what I think."
Mr. Dilworth's time as chairman has been called something of a transitional period for the museum, following Mr. Dillon and the era of Mr. de Montebello's predecessor as director, Thomas P. F. Hoving.
Among the museum objectives that Mr. Dilworth pursued was adding new spaces for putting art on view. In late 1986, excavation began for a wing for European sculpture and decorative arts. In 1987 the Lila Acheson Wallace wing for 20th-century art opened.
Other policies he instituted included making the museum's large social functions inclusive, rather than exclusive, and having its curators accessible to advise, guide and answer questions from outsiders.
Mr. Dilworth resigned as chairman in 1987 because of illness. His successor was Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, then chairman of The New York Times Company and now its chairman emeritus. In 1990, Mr. Dilworth left the museum's board, which he joined in 1961.
From 1981 to 1986, he was also chairman of the Institute for Advanced Study, the renowned center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. He was the institute's president from 1970 to 1981 and a trustee from 1964 to 1986.
Mr. Dilworth was also a member of the Yale Corporation -- Yale University's board of trustees -- from 1959 to 1986. For the last 13 of those years he was the board's leader, with the title of Senior Fellow.
From 1960 to 1991, he was a trustee of what is now Rockefeller University. As treasurer and chairman of its finance and investment committee, he presided over a quadrupling of the endowment.
From 1952 to 1958, he was a partner and then a managing partner in the Manhattan-based investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, and he went on to be associated with the Rockefeller family, and with various Rockefeller interests, in a variety of roles, from 1958 to 1994.
Mr. Dilworth was the senior financial adviser to the Rockefeller family from 1958 until 1981. And he was a longtime director of Rockefeller Center and from 1966 to 1982 its chairman. Speaking for his family, David Rockefeller said, "Dick Dilworth was an extraordinarily wise and trusted counselor, always thoughtful, straightforward, knowledgeable."
He was also a director of Chrysler Corporation, R. H. Macy & Company, the Squibb Corporation and more than a dozen other companies and financial institutions.
Mr. Dilworth was a collector of 18th-century English art, and he included the Metropolitan Museum and Yale among the beneficiaries of his philanthropy. In 1964, he and his wife, Elizabeth, gave 577 drawings and 3 sketchbooks by the 18th-century English painter George Romney to the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven. That gift made Yale the owner of the largest collection of Romney drawings in the nation.
In 1986, Mr. Dilworth helped to underwrite the $1.5 million cost of creating a new curatorship in the Metropolitan's department of European paintings, named after Sir John Pope-Hennessy, a former head of the department.
Mr. Dilworth was also president of the Community Service Society of New York for a time, after being named a life trustee of the organization in 1955. He was on the boards of a variety of other educational institutions and museums over the years.
The honors he received included the creation of the J. Richardson Dilworth Professorship in British History at Yale.
Joseph Richardson Dilworth was born in Hewlett, N.Y., on Long Island, the son of Dewees Wood Dilworth -- an investment banker -- and Edith Logan Dilworth. He was a nephew and near-namesake of Richardson Dilworth, the Mayor of Philadelphia from 1955 to 1962. He attended the Buckley School in Manhattan and St. Mark's School in Southborough, Mass. In 1938, he graduated from Yale College, where he belonged to Phi Beta Kappa, and in 1942 from Yale Law School. During World War II, he was a Navy staff officer in the Pacific and elsewhere.
Mr. Dilworth is survived by his wife, the former Elizabeth McKay Cushing; two sons, Joseph R. Jr. of Sagaponack, N.Y., and Charles Dewees Dilworth of San Francisco; a daughter, Alexandra Cushing Dilworth of Montalcino, Italy; seven grandchildren and a sister, Diana D. Wantz of Manhattan.
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