A Donor’s Message, Revealed in a Museum Renovation: He Hated This Design

John Sainsbury never liked that pillar. It was structurally unimportant and, he believed, an eyesore to the visitors that would eventually stroll through the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, to which Mr. Sainsbury’s family had reportedly donated tens of millions of pounds.

False pillars were installed in the gallery’s entrance anyway, part of the postmodern construction of the American architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who designed the Sainsbury Wing in 1990. Mr. Sainsbury died in 2022 still never having liked the design, an elite grievance that might have been lost to history.

But he really hated that pillar.

And 33 years later, he got the last word: posthumously, in a letter pulled last year from the rubble as demolition crews began remodeling the wing — sans column.

“If you have found this note you must be engaged in demolishing one of the false columns that have been placed in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing,” said the letter, written on 1990 Sainsbury stationary and wrapped in plastic. “Let it be known that one of the donors of this building is absolutely delighted that your generation has decided to dispense with the unnecessary columns.”

In an era where the petty gripes of billionaires can veer into the outrageous, exorbitant or just plain absurd, Mr. Sainsbury’s successful analog trolling offers a more relatable stunt. We can’t all build competing spaceships or purchase warring social media platforms, but we all have pen and paper. Who among us wouldn’t love such delayed vindication, plucked from the debris of our nemeses?

“He was never one to say I told you so, but he would raise an eyebrow and a wry smile that finally we’d all seen sense,” Mr. Sainsbury’s son, Mark, told the BBC.

For Ms. Scott Brown, the discovery of the letter came as no surprise, and was less a cheeky stunt than an indictment of Mr. Sainsbury’s own privilege.

“They were not used to being treated as people who needed to learn things,” she said of John Sainsbury and some of his family, which started the Sainsbury’s supermarket chain in the United Kingdom.

The two false columns in question were far from the only disagreement between him and the architectural team, Ms. Scott Brown said. Often, despite their careful planning, she and Mr. Venturi were forced to give in.

“I don’t know what he’s going to do about the window seats we allowed for on the steps,” she said, of Mr. Sainsbury. Representatives for the Sainsburys did not respond to a request for comment.

The letter is the latest twist for the museum’s Sainsbury Wing, which critics, plebeians and passing observers have long loved to hate. Its story began in 1958, when the British government acquired a neighboring lot in Trafalgar Square that it hoped to use to expand the famed National Gallery and house its Renaissance paintings.

The wing’s construction saw several false starts in the 1980s, when an initial design plan fell flat (at the time, Prince Charles called the proposal “a monstrous carbuncle”).

A few years later, the effort was revived upon donations from the Sainsbury family, and Mr. Venturi’s design was selected from another round of proposals for the space.

Based in Philadelphia, Mr. Venturi and his wife, Denise Scott Brown, were trailblazers in postmodernist architecture, a style they brought to bear in their plans. The Sainsbury Wing’s foyer and entryway — conservative and compressed, but playful, with light and space — was a creative way to evoke a crypt-like structure, Ms. Scott Brown said, playing with visitors’ senses before they entered the brightness of the gallery.

But not everyone was on board — namely, Mr. Sainsbury. He worried the extra columns would disorient visitors and obstruct their lines of sight.

But, “I felt that, on balance, we should let the architect be the architect,” Neil MacGregor, the director of the National Gallery at the time, told The Art Newspaper, which first reported the existence of the letter.

Overruled by Mr. MacGregor and Mr. Venturi, Mr. Sainsbury wrote the letter as a compromise, his son told the BBC, and dumped it into wet material as the columns were being constructed in 1990. According to Mark Sainsbury, the gesture had been secretly brokered by his uncle, Simon, who was a close friend of Mr. Venturi and Ms. Scott Brown and sought to keep the peace.

The wing was opened in 1991 by Queen Elizabeth II to mixed reviews, and it has remained a subject of architectural and artistic debate since: praised, derided, defended, and now, finally, overhauled. The wing is undergoing a 35-million-pound remodeling that will keep it closed until 2025.

Among the casualties are the two false columns, which were demolished as part of the new design by the New York-based firm Selldorf Architects, which intends to open up the space and deviate from Mr. Venturi’s crypt-like inspiration.

In keeping with tradition, strong opinions abound. The current director of the National Gallery has sided with Mr. Sainsbury’s initial take, and said the crypt-like design was “too unfriendly for modern visitors.” The Twentieth Century Society, which campaigns to preserve historic buildings, initially criticized the destruction of the columns, but has since been placated.

“The final scheme reinstated them in a slightly different position which we felt maintained the overall intention of that aspect of the Venturi Scott Brown scheme,” said Catherine Croft, the society’s director.

“It’s a great story of an eccentric funder enjoying himself,” she said, speaking of the letter.