Her first priority in Houston will be to help secure acquisitions and loans of works from the Islamic world.
The museum will receive loans of "works of art of great significance and cultural importance," the statement said.
His interests and collecting extended to a broad range of art, including European paintings and Greek and Roman art, and over the years his benevolence toward the Met touched those and many other areas in significant ways, from important gifts and loans of works of art to support for exhibitions, acquisitions, curatorships, gallery renovations, and other activities.
In other long-term loans of works from the Met's storage areas, 15 pieces of armor — swords, helmets, gauntlets— are currently at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and 212 casts, primarily Greek and Roman, are at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta.
Few receive major loans of works from abroad because of financial constraints, substandard facilities, and security issues, and they tend to present mainly regional art and traditional crafts.
The Fed's collection is still not large enough to allow for a big loan of works without the risk of bare walls in Washington, she added.
Aéroports de Paris, the public company that runs the airport, and Artcurial, an auction house, created an endowment fund to manage the space and negotiate the loan of works of art from institutions.
Unlike a loan of works from one museum to another, which does not guarantee reciprocity, a collection exchange is best described as a barter benefiting both institutions and their audiences.
In addition to the loan of works by Willem de Kooning, Anselm Kiefer, Cindy Sherman and Alexander Calder, "the family will make a very generous gift that will go toward the expansion of the museum and to the endowment," said Mr. Benezra.
Writers are remunerated for loans of their work through public libraries under the Public Lending Right PLRR), which will distribute a total pot of £6.1m to authors for 2013/14, a fall of 4.7% from £6.4m in 2012/13.
