Rita Hillman, 1912-2007

Rita Hillman, a noted New York City philanthropist and art collector who sold a Picasso painting in one of the most famous art auctions of the last 20 years in order to bankroll the education of hundreds of the city's nurses, died on November 8 at Lenox Hill Hospital. She was 95 years old.

Rita Hillman was the widow of Alex Hillman. They wed in 1932. A noted book industry veteran, Mr. Hillman founded Hillman Periodicals in 1938. In addition to a series of successful true crime and confessional magazines, Hillman published Pageant and a line of comic books. Pageant would go on to play a critical but accidental role in the development of comics in that leverage gained by the cartoonist/editor Harvey Kurtzman when offered a staff position at the higher-end magazine allowed him to change MAD from its original comic book format into the magazine it remains today. Hillman's comics played a more direct role, with over two dozen titles during its run in the 1940s and early 1950s, the most popular of which were probably Western Fighters, Real Clue Crime Comics and Air Fighters Comics, which by the mid-1940s became Airboy Comics. Those last two titles of course featured the character Airboy, revived in the 1980s alongside some other Hillman characters by Eclipse Comics.

Through their publishing ventures, the Hillmans amassed a fortune and began to acquire an impressive collection of fine paintings including works by Picasso, Miro, Degas and Renoir. When Alex Hillman died in 1968, Mrs Hillman set up the Alex Hillman Family Foundation and continued to assemble art for use in helping to fund philanthropic enterprise. In 1989, Mrs. Hillman sold Picasso's "Mother and Child" for $17 million and through the foundation started a scholarship program at the University of Pennsylvania for students willing to work in New York City for two years after graduation. Other targets of her philanthropy were New York University College of Nursing, Phillips Beth Israel School of Nursing, and the place of her passing, Lenox Hill Hospital.

Rita Hillman is survived by a son and five grandchildren.

thanks to Bruce Chrislip and others that e-mailed about this story
 
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