Faced with a unique opportunity, museum reaches new funding high.

Large funding campaigns have never been a major concern of the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville. As a state institution established by the Tennessee General Assembly in 1937, the museum receives about $1.8 million annually from the state Legislature for its operations, although it must raise funds for such exhibition-related activities as advertising and receptions, which are not included in the budget approved by the state. A funding arm, the Tennessee State Museum Foundation, has raised some 60,000 each year through memberships and special events to cover these latter areas and has raised additional funds for special exhibitions. However, with the exception of two major shows - Red Grooms in 1986 and the Magna Carta in 1987 - the museum seldom has had to raise more than $50,000. Even on those occasions, when corporations responded to funding appeals, only a little over $100,000 was solicited for each of the exhibitions.

That picture changed drastically last April when the museum was presented with a unique opportunity. Thanks to a fortuitous blending of persistence and timing, the museum was awarded the right to exhibit, for the first time in the United States, a noted collection of 19th and early 20th century art from the Bridgestone Museum of Art in Tokyo. Collected by the late Shojiro Ishibashi, the founder of the giant automotive tire manufacturing company, the Bridgestone Corporation, the collection, including paintings by such masters as Van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse among its 60 works, has traveled outside Japan only once previously, when it was exhibited in Paris in 1962.

The museum director, Lois Riggins Ezzell, had been aware of the important collection since several colleagues had seen it at its home base in Tokyo, where it is maintained by the Ishibashi Foundation, a foundation established by Shojiro Ishibashi in 1956 to promote cultural and educational development. Because Bridgestone has its two largest U. S. plants in Tennessee, Ezzell thought the Foundation might be interested in lending the works to her museum. After several years of discussion, intense negotiations began in 1988 although the Japanese museum indicated its reluctance to part with key works from its permanent collection for any length of time. If you had asked me several years ago," said Ezzell, "I would have said that there was virtually no way we would get the exhibition."