Limpert then made the switch to international advertising and marketing, working at prestigious New York firms McCann Erickson and Ted Bates & Co. In Manhattan he regularly attended lectures at the Harvard Club, and made a contact close to the MoMA board of directors. He was approached in 1973 and offered a position as director of development and fundraising for the museum.

“I said, ‘Goodness gracious, I don’t know that much about modern art.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of people who know about that,’” Limpert recalls.

Despite his naiveté, his professional determination and a sense of civic duty compelled him to accept the position—even though “every important and sensible person that I knew said, ‘Whatever else you do, don’t take this job.’”

And as a New Yorker born, raised, and schooled in Brooklyn, where his father worked making extracts for ice cream, Limpert says he wanted to improve the city’s cultural institutions.

“I joined [the MoMA] because I felt that at the time New York City really needed help, and the Museum of Modern Art was one of the jewels of the city,” he says. “If you helped it you might be helping the city.”

Cowperthwaite notes that the college-aged Limpert could be “very self-effacing,” and the trait has proved useful in his professional pursuits. Limpert underplays his role in the fundraising process, choosing instead to offer his thoughts on the utility of the institutions he has helped benefit.

But Limpert declines to describe himself as a philanthropist.

“You do the job for the time you are involved and then...people come along and they hopefully build on what you’ve done and they improve,” he says. “None of these nonprofit organizations would survive without these volunteers who spend a lot of time on their boards.”

Yet Limpert’s contribution to the museum has continued to stand out. Membership at MoMA shot past 50,000 during his tenure, annual giving rates more than tripled, and the museum raised more than $50 million for its 50th anniversary capital campaign.

“I was in the right place at the right time,” Limpert says.

AT THE VANGUARD

Limpert’s specialty is cultivating corporate sponsors, an innovative approach in an industry that had long depended on individual benefactors. Fundraising, among other industries, became more media-savvy after the 1960s, employing the sophisticated marketing techniques of Madison Avenue to attract new donors. Limpert, with his background in advertising and public relations, was the perfect man to merge the fields.

In the mid-1970s, during what Limpert calls “the golden era” of corporate involvement in the arts, he began to develop strong relationships between New York’s cultural and commercial sectors. Limpert says that he pulled together a group of charity-minded Fortune 500 CEOs to promote corporate investment in the MoMA. The committee generated over $3 million in gifts.

The same approach led to continued success after Limpert left the MoMA in the mid-1980s. As vice president for development at Lincoln Center, he helped to generate a major sponsorship deal with General Motors, and his work at the New York Botanical Garden resulted in the first substantial gift dedicated to renovation and expansion of the garden’s buildings.

Despite his success with corporate donors, Limpert cautions that there are potential problems with a heavy reliance on gifts from businesses.