The Haskell Co.’s Preston H. Haskell III has made a leadership gift toward the creation of the new Princeton University Art Museum, to be recognized with the naming of a new education center in that facility. He is also making a gift of art that is one of the most significant gifts in the museum’s history, including eight canonical abstract paintings from his private collection.
Haskell is founder and chairman of the Haskell Company, an engineering, architectural and construction firm in Jacksonville that he established in 1965. Haskell graduated from Princeton in 1960 with a degree in civil engineering and received an MBA from Harvard in 1962.
Haskell’s gift is one of several major alumni commitments in the Venture Forward campaign that have enabled the construction of the new Princeton University Art Museum, located at the heart of the Princeton campus on the site of the previous museum, roughly doubling the space for the exhibition, conservation, study and interpretation of the Art Museum’s collections. While the museum’s expansive collections include more than 114,000 works of art from cultures spanning the globe, no more than 2% of these could be on display at any time in the former building.
Construction on the museum, which began in 2021, is expected to be complete by late 2024. Additional major gifts to the museum will be announced over the next year.
When the museum reopens, it will include eight masterpieces of abstract painting from Haskell’s collection, constituting one of the most significant gifts of art in the museum’s history, including:
