From the Prairies to Picasso: USask alumnus adds to legacy of philanthropy

This week, Mulder returned home once again bearing gifts, donating three more Pablo Picasso prints to the University of Saskatchewan (USask), enhancing the collection of six Picasso linocuts that he gave to his alma mater back in 2012.

“I have a very soft spot for Saskatchewan, and Saskatoon in particular,” said Mulder, who earned a Bachelor of Arts (English) at USask in 1964. He went on to study in the United States at Brown University where he earned a master’s and PhD in philosophy, completing his Brown dissertation at the University of Oxford in England, where he has lived and worked ever since.

“This is where I did my first degree and it’s wonderful to come back. I have known several of the (USask) presidents and it’s wonderful to come back and see some of the (Picasso linocuts) that I have given before and have a chance now to make another presentation. So it’s very special to me.”

USask’s collection of seven linocuts among nine total Picasso prints now donated by Mulder is a tremendous source of pride for President Peter Stoicheff.

“We are extremely honoured to receive these three works by Picasso, after initially receiving the six linocuts that he donated to the university back in 2012 when he was visiting here to give a talk called ‘From the Prairies to Picasso,’” said Stoicheff. “These works are very valuable for students to see, as well as for visitors of the university, and we try to ensure that students can study them. This gives our university the largest collection of Picasso linocuts of any university, certainly in Canada, and probably any university in the world …

“I love telling the story about the Picasso linocuts and the fact that an alumnus of ours from the 1960s went on to become the world’s preeminent dealer of Picasso linocuts.”

While spending time over the past week in both Saskatoon and his childhood home of Eston, Sask. – population 972 – Mulder also delivered the annual Mendel International Lecture on Sunday, Sept. 29, to a sold-out audience at the Remai Modern, home to the world’s largest collection of Picasso linocuts, carefully assembled by Mulder. It’s a remarkable story, as Mulder described in his lecture, A Kid from the Prairies: how Remai Modern came to have the world’s greatest collection of Picasso linocuts, and other tales.

“The last thing I could have imagined when growing up, very rarely seeing even the Saskatoon paper, was that one day I would be involved with someone with the fame of Picasso, who I had never heard of,” he said. “And indeed that one of the most significant projects of my life would involve Picasso, and in particular the compilation and sale of what is now the Remai collection of Picasso linocuts.”

“The linocut collection was a very special project,” he added, “and I can’t think of a place where I would sooner it end up than Saskatoon, the Paris of the Prairies, and a place where I thought the collection would be appreciated and indeed noticed.”

USask 2023 honorary degree recipient Ellen Remai certainly took notice back in 2012. Saskatoon’s celebrated businesswoman, community icon, and philanthropist travelled to London to view the collection with Mulder and complete the purchase of the over 400 prints by Picasso valued at $20 million and donating them to the museum that is named in honour of her and her late husband Frank.
 
“This kid from the Prairies turned up with a wonderful collection of Picasso,” said Mulder, who was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws by USask in 2017. “She found herself interested and fascinated. Talk about willing buyer, willing seller. It was kind of a match made in heaven, I think.”

As one of the museum’s prized collections, the Picasso linocuts – carefully assembled by Mulder and his associate Anne-Françoise Gavanon over the course of a decade – along with a collection of 23 Picasso ceramics donated by Mulder, helped put the Remai on the map.

“The Picasso collection of Remai Modern is extraordinary and we’re so honoured and proud to have it here,” said Johan Lundt, co-executive director and CEO of the Remai with Aileen Burns.

“I think it’s fantastic that Fred Mulder brings them back to Saskatoon, back to an audience who wouldn’t necessarily otherwise have them to see,” said collaborative master printer Jillian Ross, who grew up in Saskatoon and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at USask in 2002. “When I tell people about the Picasso linocut collection here at the Remai Modern, they’re gobsmacked. They say, ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’ And I think when you meet Fred, you can understand. It’s the contributions really to society or community, too, that make all the difference. The generosity in giving, also in supporting, nurturing, collecting. There’s a value in all of that.”

It’s that passion for philanthropy that has marked Mulder’s career to this day. Raised with a commitment to tithing – donating at least 10 per cent of one’s income to charity – Mulder has made it his life’s work to give back. In 2007 in New York, Mulder sold a Picasso piece for $3.5 million and donated 75 per cent of the proceeds, and later gave $10 million to his charitable foundation from the 2012 sale of the Picasso linocut collection to the Frank and Ellen Remai Foundation.

So how did a young man from small-town Saskatchewan, having never visited an art gallery until into his 20s, wind up being one of the world’s leading dealers of Picasso prints? Mulder’s fascination with fine art was sparked almost by chance overseas in England, while studying at Oxford in the late ’60s.

“I got interested in prints then and started to buy them,” he said. “I found out there was a Rembrandt coming up at a sale in Oxford, where I’d gone to buy a heater for my room because there was no central heating. That got me started on looking at prints, buying prints. I started going to Sotheby’s and Christie’s (auction houses) and started hanging out at The Ashmolean Museum, looking at the collections. I had a very generous Canada Council grant, which allowed me to play a bit, really. Well, maybe not to play, but to buy wonderful prints.”

While attending Oxford, Mulder bought his first Picasso print for the tidy sum of $35 CDN, the start of what would turn out to be his profession and his passion.

“It was the ability to do research to the standards belonging to academia that being a student teaches you,” Mulder said. “All of those were very useful in my development of a career as an art dealer.”

Mulder’s lifelong success in the art world has helped him support a variety of charitable causes. In addition to his generous contributions to USask and the Remai, Mulder makes international charitable donations as the chair of the Frederick Mulder Foundation. He also founded The Funding Network, raising awareness and financial support for causes ranging from fighting climate change around the world to supporting sustainability efforts on campus at USask.

“Now what’s always intrigued me and interests me is the whole Fred Mulder story actually is a combination of international and local,” said USask 1976 art history alum Norman Zepp, who along with his wife Judith Varga also donated a world-class collection of Inuit art to the university in 2016. “They’re both two cultural planes sort of working together and Fred just goes back and forth across these very successfully.”

“Fred has a need to share,” Zepp added. “That’s why he went to great lengths, not just to donate, but to make it so that the university or the Remai art gallery could acquire a very significant work, and Saskatchewan could be a player in the art scene. The Picasso really is a great way to give us authority and give us some prestige in terms of Saskatoon and the university and the gallery scene. That’s very important that Fred is basically helping us all appreciate ourselves even more.”

Mulder’s celebrated charitable contributions and donations have earned him global acclaim. He was awarded the Beacon Fellowship Special Judges’ Prize in 2004 for his “contribution to pioneering innovative approaches in the field of philanthropy” and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by the Queen in 2012.

Now 81, Mulder continues to contribute globally and locally, including the three new prized Picasso pieces donated to USask this week:

– Harpy with Head of a Bull, and Four Little Girls on a Tower Surmounted by a Black Flag (Etching on paper, from the Suite Vollard, 1931)
– Profile of Jacqueline with a Scarf (Linocut on paper, 1955)
– Balzac (Lithograph on paper, 1952)

“To be able to give three good things that will find a good home here, that’s a privilege for me,” said Mulder, noting he was donating the three new Picasso prints to USask in honour of President Stoicheff and his wife Kathryn Warden.

Mulder’s generous contributions to USask’s art collection serve as a teaching tool for young arts students on campus, according to jake moore, director of university art galleries and collections at USask and a faculty member in the new School for the Arts.

“It’s really exciting for our students to have access to these kinds of works and for us to be able to not just talk about them, but to say, ‘Well, they’re right here. We can pull them out for you. You can see these,’” moore said. “When someone like Fred Mulder gives us a gift such as this, it also shines light on our institution, let’s others see it as something of value, and that’s what he’s bringing us here, is that this place in the middle of everywhere matters a great deal. It matters enough to bring this gift back.”

Stoicheff said the latest donation to the university is yet another example of Mulder’s enduring commitment to community and philanthropy that continues to this day.

“It’s a great privilege and a great honour,” said Stoicheff. “But it’s also a testament to the vision and the success and the entrepreneurialism of a great graduate of ours who we gave an honorary degree to, to indicate how highly we thought of him.”

For Mulder, who has dedicated his life’s work to the celebration of art and the propagation of philanthropy, the donations to USask and the Remai have brought his profession and his passion together, here in his home province.

“It’s been a wonderful profession to be a part of and it’s lovely to bring some of the fruits of it back to Saskatchewan.”

Article originally published at https://news.usask.ca