STILL BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE

The walls are bare in County Museum of Art director Earl A. (Rusty) Powell III’s spacious office. Gone is the Kline that used to hang over the couch, gone an adjacent Miro. No more Picassos are stored in the recesses of a hollow wall.

But Powell is not complaining. With the opening of the new Robert O. Anderson Building, the director’s office no longer need serve as a temporary storeroom. And until Powell himself moves offices to the new building he can look out the glass wall framing construction work on the coming Pavilion for Japanese Art.

Powell, who came to the museum from Washington’s National Gallery of Art, talked about the new Anderson Building and the museum’s full master plan (see box on Page 6):

The museum’s 20th - Century collection today consists of more than 800 art objects. How has that collection grown from when you arrived in 1980?

I would estimate that almost half of the work on display in the inaugural installation has been acquired or promised since 1980. Building on such acquisitions as Kienholz’s “Back Seat Dodge ‘38,” we’ve tried to fill gaps and add major pieces that would represent major moments. For instance, the Braque “Still Life With Violin.” We had no Cubist painting of that (1914 era) at all. And we went after it directionally.

We acquired at auction (in Amsterdam) a few weeks ago, on a real quick move, a Rietveld chair we thought would be absolutely sensational to show with our Mondrian masterpiece. That’s in a way a fleshing out of collections, and we’ll integrate aspects of 20th-Century design where it serves to illustrate a moment in art history. The response we had when we opened the Ahmanson addition in 1983, where we did integrate some decorative arts with paintings, was so positive, we’re trying it to a degree here as well.

You’ve said many acquisitions and gifts came about as a result of people knowing that there would be so much new space to show them?

The magnet for both individual works of art and collections certainly has been the expansion program. Most were gifted, solicited or purchased, based on the fact we were going to have great new gallery space.

But you were saying that the Anderson Building has been a more general catalyst as well?

Yes. Certainly the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies wouldn’t exist today if Bob hadn’t been interested in the Anderson construction and being a part of the museum’s expansion. Our Fearing collection of pre-Colombian art came to the museum because we were going to have additional gallery space. Joe Price’s Japanese collection probably wouldn’t be here if we hadn’t been of interest to him as an expanding institution.

Aside from money raised over the years for smaller, specific projects, isn’t this the first capital campaign since $12 million was raised to open the museum in 1965?

Yes. The catalysts were the Arco grant of $3.62 million announced in June, 1979 (for the Anderson Building), and the Ahmanson Foundation grant of $4.5 million, announced in December, 1979, (for the Ahmanson addition in 1983.) The capital campaign that began in the fall of ’80 has now raised more than $70 million, in phases, and we’re going to go to $82 million. That would finish the program of construction as it’s outlined under the master plan.

Have you stuck rigidly to the master plan?

Part of the beauty of having a master plan is that in a way, it’s a menu. And it was done at a time when (the Japanese Pavilion) wasn’t a gleam in anyone’s eye. But having it both made my discussions with Joe Price possible and interested Joe in the museum, because it was clear from the master plan we could do a Shin’enkan and make it work. As opposed to my saying, “Well, now, that’s a really interesting idea, let’s look into it.”

Unexpected funds speeded up a few things, didn’t they?

There were things we knew we wanted to do, that the board had approved in the master plan, that were not funded. And were given lower priorities. The major priority was to the Anderson Building.

The J. Paul Getty Trust grant (of $3 million over three years) made possible the library and education center. And there was Dorothy Collins Brown’s additional gift of $1 million for a new auditorium, and the Doris Stein Foundation came in with close to $1 million to support the construction costs of the Costume and Textiles Research and Design Center.

Another example is the Times Mirror Central Court. We could have built the Anderson Building without building the Central Court, but clearly it was to everyone’s interest to see both be built together as one project. And we were fortunate that that was possible.

You were telling me how changes throughout the museum illustrate your domino theory of cultural growth.

Because the Anderson Building is really in many ways a culmination of a major growth phase, it really has affected all of the curatorial departments, many of the collections and, I think, the attitude of collectors toward the museum. All of the gallery spaces for all the departments have changed very dramatically with the opening of the Ahmanson addition in ’83. That provided European paintings, decorative arts and American art new galleries and a new context. Prints and drawings and photography will move to the third level of the Hammer Building (where 20th-Century art used to be).

You’ve said that this is the fastest-growing museum in the country?

I think it is important to say that it’s been a planned growth. It’s not one of these things that kind of popped out of the hat like a magic rabbit. And you know, even the building programs go back to our contract with the county. Our board went in and said, “Listen, it is important that the museum expands. And we would like to do this, but we need you to agree to accept operational support for the buildings when they’re completed.”

And even before we began thinking about it, we had to have the county’s agreement. It was forthcoming, with both Anderson and the Japanese Pavilion, but private fund-raising couldn’t have begun without that understanding.

What about the problems associated with that kind of rapid growth?

Well, the inconvenience of living in construction is something that has been with most of the staff ever since we began this. And I’m sure I would speak for all of them in saying that they’re going to be more than happy to get into the new office areas. There are the problems of keeping an exhibitions program going, keeping yourself, institutionally speaking, before the public as a museum that’s still alive and moving forward as opposed to closed. In a way, you have to pretend nothing’s happening.

That it’s business-as-usual?

When your front yard’s a construction site, one tries as hard as one can to pretend it’s business as usual, although everything in the museum is adjusted to account for the vagaries of construction schedules.

Is it correct that the Anderson Building alone is the size of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art or the Guggenheim Museum?

It’s bigger. Both in total and exhibition space.

How would the museum rank nationally?

We aren’t as large as the Metropolitan, and we will never be as large as the Metropolitan. But I would say in terms of the range and quality of our collections, we would rank in the top 10 museums in the country. In membership, we are second to the Met, although in resident membership, (our 80,003 members) make us larger than the Met. I was looking at their annual report for 1986, and they had 76,000 resident members. Their non-resident members bring them up to 103,000.

What do you think all of this says about the Los Angeles art community?

I think it’s a pretty eloquent testimony to the interest of not just a specific segment of our city and not just people interested in modern and contemporary art. These are people and institutions interested in the development of a very major visual center devoted historically to the whole history of art.

What about your relationship to the Museum of Contemporary Art ?

Our relationship to MOCA, I hope, is going to continue to be a good one. I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be. We’re a historical institution and will show contemporary art as well as modern art, as well as ancient art, which I think gives resonance and meaning to the whole spectrum of art history. You can look at a Rothko (in the Anderson building), then go look at a great Venetian painter like Veronese (in the Ahmanson) and wonder about the development of light and color.

That kind of thing is possible in a general museum. MOCA, I think, is going to make a wonderful counterpart to the County Museum, because our combined programs are going to make a much richer environment for everyone.

Any plans for a joint show?

There are no plans at this point, but I certainly wouldn’t exclude that eventual possibility. We’ve done joint shows with the Getty. And I think from time to time that’s an exciting thing to effectively joint venture an exhibition that would perhaps not otherwise make sense.

What per cent of the museum collections will be on view when the master plan is done?

I would guess more than 50%. The reason you wouldn’t probably ever see (100%) is because in Asian art, costumes and textiles, prints, drawings, photography and certain paintings, you’re dealing with ephemeral works that can only be shown under very controlled circumstances of light for very short periods of time. So those are constantly changing. The whole endeavor here is to build gallery space and not keep (art) in the basement, but there will always be works in storage.

But the idea, I think, of a permanent collection is to change it from time to time, to make it a fresh, new experience, and we’ll certainly be doing that. The (Anderson Building’s) whole third and fourth level gallery configurations are really designed for the collection as it is now. While it would not be an easy task, and I certainly wouldn’t want to do it, you could rip all those walls out and build new spaces inside.

What’s next?

The completion of the Anderson Building doesn’t represent the conclusion of construction activity at the museum. With the Rifkind Center and the Japanese Pavilion still under construction, and other phases of the master plan yet to be implemented, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art could easily be considered, in artistic terms, a work in progress.