You Know A Cultural Institution Is In Trouble When Its Accounting Is More Inventive Than Its Collection

Because it’s not like you think about Glenn Lowry’s salary — sorry, shadow salary — when you plunk down $20 to visit the damn place:

Glenn D. Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art for nearly 12 years, has long been one of the highest-paid museum officials in the country, with salary, bonus and benefits totaling $1.28 million in the year that ended June 30, 2005, the most recent period for which figures are publicly available.

Yet for more than eight years, his income was even higher than the museum reported in its tax forms, thanks to a trust created by two of the museum’s wealthiest trustees, David Rockefeller and Agnes Gund.

Mr. Rockefeller, Ms. Gund and Ronald S. Lauder, another trustee, made tax-deductible gifts to the trust, the New York Fine Arts Support Trust, as did Mr. Rockefeller’s brother Laurance, who donated a Bonnard painting valued at $800,000 that was later sold. The trust used the money to make payments to Mr. Lowry.

Between 1995 and 2003, that trust paid him a total of $5.35 million — in amounts ranging from $35,800 to $3.5 million a year — aside from the compensation supplied by the museum.

. . .

Asked for comment, Mr. Lowry and the museum referred all questions to Kim Mitchell, a MoMA spokeswoman. Pressed for details, she said in an e-mail message that the trust had been created as part of the effort to recruit Mr. Lowry to take over the museum in 1995.

For example, while the museum covered the down payment Mr. Lowry made on an apartment he bought in Gracie Square that year, the trust reimbursed him for all his mortgage payments.

Then, in 1999, the trust bought that apartment for MoMA in a $3.4 million purchase from Mr. Lowry. Mr. Lowry pocketed the $1.3 million in profit on the sale, Ms. Mitchell said, “in lieu of any deferred compensation the museum would have had to provide in the future.”

Ms. Mitchell said Mr. Lowry paid income taxes on all the money he received from the trust.

And in 2004, the museum purchased an apartment in Museum Tower on the MoMA campus on West 53rd Street, where Mr. Lowry, 52, now lives rent-free.