IT WAS during a lunch at the Harvard Club in 1988 that Alvin Lane first invited Russell Panczenko, director of the art museum at UW-Madison, to visit Lane’s house in New York City and see his art collection. Panczenko would recall that Lane described the collection as “modest.” When Panczenko actually saw it, some months later, he used another word. “It was awesome,” he said.
The two were lunching in the first place because Lane, who died in Manhattan last week at 89, had thought enough of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and its art museum to have made several cash donations to the museum over the years.