| When most of us receive the envelope emblazoned
“You may have just won $1 million,” we toss it
into the trash. After all, million dollar gifts don’t
just fall into your lap. Or do they? Marcia Ryan, planned
gift administrator of Boston University’s Office of
University Development and Alumni Relations, may feel as if
they do after receiving word of a $4.4 million bequest to
the University — from someone who appears to have no
connection to BU.
“We’ve received donations before from people not
connected to the school,” Ryan says, “but the
largest has been about $10,000.”
The donor is as mysterious as the gift. Yvonne Dane Backus,
an artist who spent the last twenty years of her life in Brewster,
Massachusetts, passed away on August 21, 2001, at the age
of ninety-one, leaving the donation to be used for a general
scholarship.
Backus was born and raised in Germany, and she spent much
of her life traveling in Europe. She studied art at both the
University of Florence, Italy, and the Emil Orlik Berlin Kunst
Academie, becoming a sculptor. For many decades, she spent
several weeks a year working in the studio of Pericle Fazzini
in Rome.
Her art was delicate, figures of dancers created in wax and
cast in bronze, each piece between three and ten inches tall.
She was inspired by her passion for dance, having studied
with Mary Wigman, who is considered the founder of the German
Expressionist dance movement. Backus’s first exhibition
wasn’t until 1956 at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery in Seattle.
Others followed at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Ward Eggelston
Gallery in New York, and elsewhere.
While much has been written about Backus’s art, little
was published about her personal life. One announcement referred
to her marriage to Count de Pazzi, a fact omitted from other
society articles. When the Countess de Pazzi, as she was called,
married LeRoy M. Backus, a man thirty years her senior, she
had to forgo her title.
The 1941 wedding to Backus was a surprise to their friends,
an event hasty enough to require a court order waiving Washington’s
three-day waiting period. The two had met just the previous
winter when LeRoy Backus was on a business trip to New York,
where she was living. Not much else is known; Yvonne Backus
managed to keep her private life private. Even in a 1941 social
column in the Seattle Times introducing her to society, she
deflects the attention lavished upon her: “I’d
rather talk about Seattle than myself,” she said, “for
I love it here — doesn’t everyone?” By 1948,
Backus was a mother and a widow.
Jonathan Strong was Backus’s lawyer during the last
decade of her life. He describes her as “always impeccably
dressed and enjoying of the finer things. She had a continental
air about her.” Her speech had a subtle accent, “just
enough to make you think she had a European background,”
Strong says.
Late in life, Backus moved to Cape Cod, although nowhere is
there evidence that she had any relationship with Boston University.
“The bottom line question is, how did it come to pass
that she wanted to favor Boston University?” Strong
says. “I have to confess, I can’t answer the question.
She was a woman of no uncertainties when she made up her mind
to do something.”
After many attempts to discover a tie between BU and Backus,
Marcia Ryan has given up and is simply grateful for the gift.
“It would have been nice if we could have done something
more specific with the money that she would have liked, but
she didn’t leave instructions,” Ryan says.
The reason for the gift may remain a mystery, but what it
will be used for is not; the donation, to be known as the
Backus Scholarship Fund, will help students pursue their education
at Boston University. As Backus herself said in 1941, “It’s
the future that’s important — not just the past.”
— Jenny Brown
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