MILDRED SCHIFF LEE (1920–2009)

Philanthropist, art dealer, and noted collector of contemporary art Mildred Schiff “Micki” Lee, of Palm Beach and Boston, died on Thursday, May 7, in Boston, according to the Palm Beach Daily News. Lee and her husband, Herbert, contributed to the Norton Museum of Art, the Kravis Center, the Society of the Four Arts, and other art institutions. In 2003, the Palm Beach couple gave the one-million-dollar naming gift for a gallery in the Norton’s new Gail and Melvin Nessel Wing. In 2001, the couple gave the Norton five Clyde Butcher photographs.

In the early 1950s, Mildred Lee helped popularize the New York School by organizing exhibitions in the Boston area and other parts of New England. She was a fellow at Brandeis University and began the Friends of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, where she worked to assemble an acclaimed collection of contemporary art, paralleling the university’s own history. She donated more than five hundred artworks.

She was also a major supporter and honorary curator at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, a lifetime overseer at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and a supporter of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where a gallery is named in her honor. In the 1970s, she lectured in art history at Radcliffe and Wellesley colleges and taught courses in art history at the Belmont Hill School in Belmont, Massachusetts.