Inside Vancouver
The Philanthropist
By Michael Harris published Mar 1, 2009
As CEO of Polygon Homes, Michael Audain made a fortune. As the head of the foundation that bears his name, he’s giving much of it away. Every visitor to the Vancouver Art Gallery is deeply in his debt
Last year, on a Sunday morning, Michael Audain and his wife, Yoshiko Karasawa, discussed something they'd just heard. The Vancouver Art Gallery's director, Kathleen Bartels, was organizing a solo show of Jeff Wall's photography and wanted to amass the largest public collection of his work in the world. Audain and Karasawa thought that was a splendid idea, and within the hour, they decided to give over three of their own Jeff Wall pieces. (At auction, a Wall can go for upward of a million dollars.) That gift pushed the gallery over the edge-with 11 in its collection, it's now the global leader. Eating lunch at his usual table at Bistro Pastis, Audain (dressed to the nines in a black suit, white pocket square, and gold-rimmed bifocals) said, "It really didn't take much thought."
The Audain Foundation is chiefly concerned with stewardship over British Columbia's visual arts, and through it, Michael Audain has given more to the Vancouver Art Gallery than any other individual ($6,467,890, to be precise). He has issued a constant stream of gifts in recent years to various institutions: $2 million to the VAG for an emerging-artists acquisitions fund last year; $2 million, also last year, to UBC for the education of curators; $2 million in 2007 to the Gallery of Canada, to create an indigenous-art curatorship; $2 million in 2006, again to the Gallery of Canada, to create the contemporary Canadian art curatorship. And so on. To visual-arts institutions in Canada, Audain has given nearly $17 million.
Over a glass of white wine ("Any one," he told the server. "You pick") he described his plans for the foundation and for his extensive art collection. "Ideally, it will all be gone by the time I die." Like Warren Buffett, he finds the notion of family dynasties distasteful. His own two children stand to inherit just a few family favourites. "Everything else goes to museums. I'm just a temporary custodian of these works." A sip of Chardonnay. "You know, a significant estate tax in this country would be a very good thing."
