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It's being billed by the Art Gallery of Ontario as a "trail-blazing donation."

This would be the $4-million that veteran Toronto philanthropist David Campbell and his wife, Vivian, are donating this week to the $276-million Frank Gehry redesign of the Toronto art museum, opening to the public next month. In exchange for this gift - and a donation by the Campbells of $1-million in June, 2005 - the AGO's venue for contemporary art on the fourth and fifth floors of its new south wing will be called the Vivian & David Campbell Centre for Contemporary Art. The announcement is to be made tomorrow.

What's makes the gift special is that it is time-limited. Corporations generally buy limited naming rights - last year Sony of Canada bought the rights to name Toronto's Sony Centre for the Performing Arts for 20 years, and the Toronto International Film Festival's new headquarters will be called Bell Lightbox through 2018. But among individual arts philanthropists, naming rights are generally granted in perpetuity.

Until now. As a condition of their gift, the Campbells have said the AGO's contemporary-art space can carry their name only until 2020, whereupon the gallery is free to have another big-bucks philanthropist pay to have his, her or their names added to the centre. It's a first for the Transformation AGO fundraising campaign.

In an interview, the 88-year-old Campbell, who's a member of the AGO's board of trustees and a former chairman, said his gallery colleagues "nearly fell off their chairs" at this codicil "because, of course, everybody wants their name forever. But I said, 'No, no, what interests me now is the future of this organization, besides what I'm doing right now. If you have real estate that you can attract other people to contribute to, you'll encourage a new generation of benefactors.'"

Cultural organizations like the AGO need "flexibility," added Campbell, who's the founder and president of Tricaster Holdings Ltd. He also believes "institutions should be able to renew themselves every 10 or 15 years.... There's always a group of young people that they're trying to make a part of an organization. So what are their opportunities? What kind of real estate will they have left to name?"

Campbell hopes other philanthropists will emulate what he's done. "I've had a lot of phone calls from board members saying, 'What an interesting idea,' " he admitted. But have some already-committed donors decided to retroactively apply a sunset clause to their gifts? "I can't tell them what to do," Campbell said with a chuckle. "If they've given in perpetuity, they've given in perpetuity."

The Campbells have not only donated money and time to the AGO. They've also backed the Royal Conservatory of Music, the University of Toronto's Massey College, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Music Garden.

In the last 25 years, they've made gifts of more than 60 art works to the AGO, including pieces by Willem de Kooning, Edvard Munch and Bruce Nauman. Next year the AGO will mount a selection of contemporary German photographs that the Campbells have been collecting since the early 1990s. Several pieces from this collection - they include pictures by such prominent artists as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff - have been promised to the AGO.

Said AGO director Matthew Teitelbaum: "The Campbell family's extraordinary financial support, combined with art works gifted to the gallery, places them among our most generous supporters."