Mildred Lee, at 89; leading patron of art museums

While not an artist, her passion for the craft, friends said, made her an advocate for those who were so inclined.

Galleries are named for Mrs. Lee and her husband, Herbert C. Lee, at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Harvard Art Museums, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and in Palm Beach, Fla., where they had a home, at the Norton Museum of Art, among others.

"Micki [as she was called] was a real pioneer in the discovery and recognition of mid-20th-century abstract art," said Ted Stebbins, curator of American art at the Harvard museums, which now include The Fogg Art Museum, where the Lees originally donated art.

"She was interested in fine, original prints," Stebbins said. "She was self-taught, but read widely and met the leading dealers and artists of the period. Micki was a small woman in stature, but she had a big personality. She was very smart, very nice, with a wry sense of humor and keen insight into art and people."

Mrs. Lee, who in the 1970s lectured in art history at Radcliffe and Wellesley colleges and taught art history at the Belmont Hill School, died of cancer May 7 at her Boston home. She was 89.

The family lived in Belmont for many years before she and her husband moved to Boston.

To engage young people in art, she set up exhibits at colleges and universities in New England.

At Brandeis, Mrs. Lee began the Friends of the Rose Art Museum, where, family members said in a statement, she "worked tirelessly to assemble a highly acclaimed collection of contemporary art, paralleling the university's own history."

"Over the course of her involvement, she donated more than 500 works of art," the family said.

"Brandeis needed dreamers to become a great university, and Mildred Lee was there for the challenge," Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz said in an e-mail. "The university will remember her for her vision and generosity toward Brandeis from the earliest years onward."

Adam D. Weinberg, director of the Whitney, said she was "a generous donor and a very important print promoter."

"She and her husband donated prints of artists ranging from Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg to Jim Dine and James Rosenquist," Weinberg said.

She was born in Columbus, Ohio, to Robert W. and Rebecca (Lurie) Schiff. Her father, a Lithuanian immigrant, founded Schiff Shoe Co. and built it into a major corporation. In the 1940s, the company was renamed Shoe Corporation of America and eventually diversified. Herbert Lee carried on in the family business.

Mrs. Lee received a bachelor's degree in American Studies from the University of Wisconsin in 1941, the same year she married Herbert. They moved to the Boston area in 1946.

One day in the 1950s, she had a visit to her home from Russian immigrant Tatyana Grosman, said her son, Jonathan Owen Lee, of Brookline. Grosman had been referred to her by the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society. She and her painter husband, Moritz, had settled in Islip, Long Island, where they opened a small lithography workshop, but needed help.

According to a 1997 Forbes magazine article, Mrs. Lee introduced the Grosmans to the head of the drawing department at Harvard's Fogg museum, who suggested they turn their company around by making original lithographs by living artists. It worked.

With Mrs. Lee's support, the workshop evolved into the United Limited Arts Edition, where, Jonathan said, "the most successful and highly sought-after modern artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, perfected their works on paper."

On the day they met, Mrs. Grosman sold a Jasper Johns print to Mrs. Lee for $25, much less that it would cost now, "to pay for her plane trip back to New York," Jonathan Lee said.

Bill Goldston of Bay Shore, N.Y., who inherited the workshop from Mrs. Grosman and met Mrs. Lee in 1969, said she would often purchase prints and donate them to museums.

"Micki had a passion for helping people and also for art," he said. "If you look at her [three] sons, all of her boys ended up with art in their lives."

Another son, Thomas Haskell Lee, of New York City, was featured in a 1997 Forbes magazine article when he paid $3.96 million for Arshile Gorky's 1994 abstract landscape, "Scents of Apricots in the Fields."

"The man has a genuine eye," it said, "inherited - or learned - from his mother."

"You either have the eye or you don't," it quoted Mrs. Lee.

The article described her as "an art collector and dealer who helped bring abstract expressionism to Boston in the mid-fifties." When she married and moved to the Boston area, it said, "Micki became a housewife who collected paintings."

The third son, Richard Schiff Lee of Martha's Vineyard, is a painter. Her other sons work with private equity and serve on museum boards.

Mrs. Lee's instilled her passion for art in her grandchildren, too. Granddaughter Suzanna Cole Lee, of Aspen, Colo., said she taught them "a reverence for modern art."

"She was the type of independent women unusual for her generation, a rare instance of a Jewish female who went to college in the 1930s," Lee said. ". . . She was smart, headstrong, self-assured, and pushed us to be the same."

In 1966, when floods ravaged Florence, Italy, Mrs. Lee flew there to help and enlisted Rauschenberg to create a poster that sold in great numbers to raise funds for salvaging the art work in Florence's churches and museums.

Mrs. Lee's legacy is widespread. As for the art world, Goldston, now president of the Long Island lithography workshop, said that the contemporary print movement "would not be as vibrant or vital as it is today without Micki's early and lasting support."

Mrs. Lee stayed active until her health began to fail and, her son Jonathan said, she never failed to greet them with the words, "How's business?"

In addition to her husband, three sons, and granddaughter, Mrs. Lee leaves six other grandchildren.

Services have been held.