ART MUSEUM DIRECTORS PONDER WAYS TO EXPAND

In search of more space and a more prominent image, directors of the Newport Harbor Art Museum are considering spending from $5 million to $50 million on expansion plans that could include building a larger museum outside Newport Beach.

“Plans are really at a formative stage,” said board president Ray H. Johnson. Museum directors are not expected to decide before early 1986 whether to expand the museum building--a one-story structure next to the Newport Beach Public Library--or to move to larger quarters.

At their June meeting, board members voted to hire the Oram Group, a New York management consulting firm, to research the depth of financial support available to build a countywide art museum.

“We believe that we’re still perceived as a local or area art museum, having grown out of our beginnings in Newport Beach,” said Johnson, who would like to change that image.

Kevin Consey, the museum’s 34-year-old director, agreed. “It’s apparent that our community needs a major art museum much as it needs a major performing arts center. We believe that, at times, we may be far better known in Amsterdam than Anaheim.”

In recent years, the museum has held internationally acclaimed exhibits including a retrospective of expressionist painter Edvard Munch, a show of new German painting and last summer, an exhibit of second generation Abstract Expressionist painters. The museum was the only Orange County institution to host an official Olympics Arts Festival event last year.

In their search for new visibility, board members said they are considering moving the museum next to a freeway and hiring a famous architect to design the new building.

But museum officials are considering a wide range of alternatives. “For $5 million you could get a face lift,” said Leon Lyon, a longtime board member. “For $50 million you could get a site (designed) by an internationally famous architect and get a giant endowment and monies for acquiring art and a sculpture garden.”

So far, museum officials have “looked at 50 individual sites from San Clemente to Santa Ana,” Consey said. He declined to be specific but said museum directors have not ruled out a move to the South Coast Metro development in Costa Mesa to be near the $65.5-million Orange County Performing Arts Center that is expected to open in the fall of 1986.

Museum directors also have not ruled out building on top of the current structure or adding additional buildings on the two-acre site in Newport Beach. Such expansion is favored by board member Lyon, although other museum staffers, he said, favor moving. Consey said that he had come to no conclusion.

Both board members and museum staff agree that the museum has outgrown its current 21,000-square-foot site. One major problem is that the museum, with only 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, is not able to exhibit its permanent collection at the time of other showings.

As a result, when the museum’s 1,400-piece collection of painting, photography and sculpture is not on tour, it is generally stored in the museum vault.

“The public can’t get pleasure out of it. The donor can’t get pleasure out of it. The only one who gets pleasure out of it is our insurance agent,” Consey said.

Potential donors are discouraged from giving anything to the permanent collection, said Lyon, who heads the board’s development committee, because works by Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn and other major California painters--all part of the permanent collection--are usually hidden away.

“And those people who have given to the permanent collection are entitled to have their paintings viewed,” Lyon said.

According to Consey, the present facilities are crowded. He described the offices, built in 1977 when the museum had a staff of five, as “a rabbit warren.” (The museum, operating on a $1.4-million budget, currently has 60 full- and part-time employees.) Consey noted that because the museum has no auditorium, lectures must be held in the multipurpose room that accommodates a maximum of 100 people. And despite the museum’s extensive film library, films are shown on a “temporary screen” and viewers are required to sit on folding chairs.

How much the museum expands will depend on the amount of money directors can raise for such a project. When the museum last expanded eight years ago, it did so in part to provide enough space to display its permanent collection along with new exhibits.

“The board has to decide how ambitious we want to be,” Consey said. Among the considerations: whether major private and corporate donors will give to a new museum when they are already contributing generously to the South Coast Repertory Theatre and to the new performing arts center.

The museum was founded in 1962 when a dozen women held an art exhibition in the lobby of the Newport Beach City Hall. By the fall of that year, the art exhibits had moved to the second floor of the Balboa Pavilion and the women’s committee, headed by Mrs. Richard Winkler, called itself the Fine Arts Patrons.

Six years later, the Fine Arts Patrons gave their museum a name, the Newport Harbor Art Museum. The museum expanded in 1971, when space was rented in a former newspaper plant on Balboa Boulevard. But the big move came in September, 1977, when the museum moved to its present site, on land donated by the Irvine Co.

“This was a very ambitious step 10 years ago when the area (at Newport Center) was growing dramatically,” board president Johnson said. “But in a dynamic community like Orange County, change is almost inevitable.”