Muriel Gluck, 97; arts, education philanthropist

Muriel Gluck, a philanthropist who gave millions of dollars to support the arts and education, primarily in Los Angeles and San Diego, has died. She was 97.

Gluck died June 27 at the Rehabilitation Centre of Beverly Hills of complications after suffering a stroke, said her great-nephew, Dr. Jon Kaswick. She had been a resident of Beverly Hills and San Diego.

From the early years of her marriage to retail magnate and race horse breeder Maxwell H. Gluck in the late 1940s, she was an art collector who also appreciated classical music.

The couple established the Maxwell H. Gluck Foundation, and when her husband died in 1984, Muriel Gluck continued the tradition of giving.

Over the years, she was a major supporter of the opera companies in San Diego and Los Angeles, the San Diego Museum of Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art and music programs at UCLA, UC Riverside and the Juilliard School in New York City.

For the most part, Gluck was an arts patron who stayed in the background.

“It’s all Mr. Gluck. I’m just an agent carrying out his wishes,” she said in a 1986 interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune.

More accurately, Kaswick said this week, “Muriel would disperse attention away from herself. She did not want anything named after her.”

She once canceled a plan to give $5 million for a new children’s library in San Diego after information about her donation was made public.

Her most highly publicized gift was a $3.75-million donation to support “Young at Art” in 1988. An arts education project that involved San Diego public schools and the San Diego Museum of Art, it combined an art mobile to tour schools and a classroom component. Local artists worked with students to create video and environmental art as well as paintings and sculptures.

Gluck later gave $1.2 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a touring art mobile.

Born Muriel Schlesinger on Sept. 30, 1910, in New Jersey and raised in New York City, she worked as a kindergarten teacher before she married her husband in 1948. The couple had no children.

They settled in New York City and Maxwell Gluck built his business, the Darling Stores for women’s clothing, into a chain of more than 100 shops.

In 1948, he bought Elmendorf Farm in Lexington, Ky., a horse-breeding farm that produced a number of Kentucky Derby winners.

“Maxwell was interested in horses and sports,” Muriel Gluck said in 1986. “I had to be the outlet for culture.”

In 1957, the couple moved to Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, after Maxwell Gluck was appointed U.S. ambassador to the country by President Eisenhower. Maxwell Gluck had been a major contributor to Eisenhower’s presidential campaign.

He gave up his ambassadorship after one year for personal reasons.

“It was a marvelous experience but I wouldn’t take a million to go back,” Muriel Gluck said in 1986. “If there’s anything fun going on, you can’t take part in it,” she said of her life as a diplomat’s wife.

The Glucks relocated to Southern California in the 1960s.

mary.rourke@latimes.com