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Perhaps, Drewe thought, it was time to pay her a visit.

Drewe and Myatt drove north in the blue Bristol for three hours, until they reached the tiny two-pub village of Durham. Drewe had called beforehand and introduced himself as a patron of the arts who was writing a book on the history of the ICA. Jane Drew had immediately invited him up.

As soon as they walked into the house, Myatt was in awe, for he considered the seventy-eight-year-old woman a living, breathing part of Britain’s culture. Before long they were chatting about her work with “Corbu,” her role in the Modern Movement, and her friendships with Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller, who had invented the geodesic dome and coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth.” At Drewe’s prompting, she reminisced about her involvement in the postwar celebration dubbed the Festival of Britain and her work as a pioneer in tropical architecture and public housing.

She spoke with affection about some of the artists she had met through the ICA, particularly Ben Nicholson, a jaunty character who wore a beret and talked in a high-pitched voice. She remembered his uncanny penchant for design and his beautifully composed vegetarian dishes, with a red radish placed slightly off center, a fistful of asparagus laid out in a curve on the edge of the plate.

Drewe was in top form, and Myatt noted his effect on the aging woman. When the professor suggested that it was high time she wrote her autobiography, she seemed flattered. Then he offered to finance the project himself. He was certain her memoirs would reach a wide audience.

Within weeks of the meeting, Jane Drew had prepared a detailed outline of her life, and when Drewe returned north to pick it up, she asked him for a favor. Would he use his contacts in London to act as her representative in the sale of a small Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture she owned? Drewe had seen the piece and knew a dealer who might be interested. He said he would be delighted to handle the sale.

After several more visits to Jane Drew’s country home, Drewe began systematically widening his circle of art world acquaintances by dropping her name and inviting members of the establishment to lunch with them. He reserved tables at Claridge’s or at L’Escargot in Soho for such eminent Londoners as the former head of the Tate Gallery, Alan Bowness—Ben Nicholson’s son-in-law—and the art critic David Sylvester, who had once had his portrait painted by Giacometti.

Through Jane Drew he also met Dorothy Morland, the former director of the ICA. Until a few years earlier, he learned, the bulk of the ICA’s archives had been stored in Morland’s garage for safekeeping. She had eventually returned them, and they were now in box files in a small room on the ground floor. The cache consisted of forty-five years’ worth of memorabilia and personal papers, stacks of letters, sketches, and programs in no particular order, with huge chronological gaps. There were letters from Picasso, the art critic Herbert Read, and the surrealist painter and poet Roland Penrose, along with dozens of catalog and texts of forgotten lectures by W. H. Auden and Buckminster Fuller. By and large the archives had been ignored for decades. Dorothy Morland felt that she had saved them from destruction. She told Drewe that Bill McAlister, the current ICA director, wanted very much to put the material in order but that the institute was always short on funds.

She suggested that Drewe give the director a call.

Bill McAlister was a busy man. Normally his secretary screened his calls thoroughly, but this one was from a gentleman who was so persistent and seemed to know so many of the institute’s longtime supporters that McAlister took it.

Dr. Drewe got straight to the point. He said he was a scientist and a businessman, and that in his capacity as chairman of Norseland Industries, which had a large collection of modern art, he was considering a substantial donation to the ICA. He spoke knowledgeably about the institute