NEWPORT ART MUSEUM MAKES ITS MARK IN WORLD

The Newport Harbor Art Museum is a low concrete building hidden among office parks and hilly country clubs, next to the local library. A first-time visitor has trouble imagining the museum has any prominence in the contemporary art world. Yet the museum does get noticed. A recent show, “The Interpretive Link,” probing relationships among American artists between 1938 and 1948, moved to a Manhattan gallery managed by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Beginning Saturday, the Newport will display “Flemish Expressions: Representational Painting in the Twentieth Century,” the most extensive exhibition by any American museum of modern Flemish art.

Both shows reflect the ambitious intelligence of the museum’s chief curator, Paul Schimmel, a stocky and gregarious 33-year-old who spends vacations combing remote Pacific islands for anthropological artifacts. He also seems steeped in the general know-how of museum work, which requires art scholarship, an ability to explain it and a knack for forming contacts with artists, dealers, collectors and other museums.

In his five years with the museum, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, Schimmel has assembled six major exhibitions and numerous smaller shows. Not all his work has won unqualified critical praise. Some of it has been “trendy” and has lacked sufficient depth, in the view of Times art critic William Wilson. But Wilson said “The Interpretive Link,” and 1629499705Schimmel is maturing into “one of the few good young curators to emerge in Southern California in a long time. . . .”

Schimmel is both serious and casual in a way that was once called hip. He speaks with fondness of growing up in the 1960s, when he wore his hair long and adopted the anti-establishment attitudes of the time. But these days his black hair is infallibly clean-cut and he keeps a tuxedo in the closet for openings and fund-raisers.

“I’ve been sort of zapped with some sort of weird art light that makes me look at things in a way that’s different,” he proclaims, sipping Chardonnay in his rented home in Laguna Nigel, where modern paintings hang next to masks from the New Hebrides. “I know how small the Newport is. I try to know my limits, to be thoughtful. . . . I don’t have to go for broadest ideas to be successful.”

An example of breadth, he said, would be the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s current show called “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985,” which includes 241 works. Schimmel said the ideal Newport exhibition achieves its impact through a visual “chamber music,” seeking to establish unexpected relationships among a limited number of works. For example, “The Interpretive Link” used 135 drawings to show how the psychologically suggestive patterns of Arshile Gorky and other abstract Expressionists grew from the erotic and natural imagery of Abstract Surrealism.

Raised on Manhattan’s East Side, his father an accountant who collects rare books, Schimmel chose his career after a visit to New York’s Modern Museum of Art at age 15. Researching a school paper on Gertrude Stein the writer, he became intrigued by Stein the art collector. He still remembers visiting the Modern shortly before it mounted a large show of the Stein family collection:

“The curators took me down into the vault where they kept the paintings on racks,” he recalled. “I was getting to see the works by themselves, before they were hung on the walls, before the public got to see them. I had never felt so close to works of art. . . .” Completing a special museum studies program at New York’s Syracuse University and graduate work at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, Schimmel went to Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum, where he became senior curator at 23. His shows there demonstrated an interest in art of the present and the immediate past that has not waned since he arrived in Newport Beach in 1981.

In fact, contemporary art is generally the Newport’s mission. Its vault holds a permanent collection of 1,800 works, mostly of post-World War II California artists that Schimmel says he wants to build into the finest of its kind in the country. A museum’s permanent collection largely determines what it can lend to other museums. And what it has to lend is one of the enticements a curator wields when trying to borrow art for an exhibition.

With each show, the curator must weave a web of contacts and lobby them with a polished alloy of tact and persistence. The upcoming Flemish show (through Feb. 22), the largest the Newport has assembled with a budget of $320,000, is an example of how this cultural diplomacy works.

It all started in late 1983, when Schimmel and museum director Kevin E. Consey, Schimmel’s boss, discovered a mutual interest in Flemish art. Schimmel approached Andre Adam, then the Belgian consul general in Los Angeles, who liked the idea of a Flemish show in America. Adam introduced Schimmel to a Belgian-American businessman with particularly close ties to the Belgian minister of culture. Schimmel then went to Brussels in March, 1984.

A curator from a small museum in California, he was asking the Belgians to lend national treasures. He also wanted them to help underwrite the show. The Newport Beach museum had never worked with a foreign government on such a scale. “I can’t say they were leaping through hoops at the first meeting,” said Schimmel, sitting in his smallish book-cluttered office at the museum. “They liked the idea of attention from an American museum . . . but we had to convince them that we were the one to do it.”

There was no immediate decision and Schimmel concluded that the minister wanted to consult with Belgian museum officials. So he toured the country for two weeks, visiting curators and appealing to their scholarly vanity by describing the elegant catalogue for which they could write.

“I was for it right away, but I had a hard time persuading my colleagues in my own house,” said Jean Buyck, chief modern art curator with the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, who is in Newport Beach for the opening. “One worries that an exhibition will be scientifically underbuilt, that transportation and conservation will not be what they should. There was discussion in the (museum’s administrative) committee of, you know, these American people who want to come and take our paintings. It is a conservative committee. But they were impressed by the seriousness of Paul’s approach. It was strange to see an American who knew so much about our art.”

After a few weeks, the minister gave a tentative go-ahead. Schimmel studied hundreds of paintings and drew up a wish-list. He wanted works by James Ensor (1860-1949), the most famous 20th Century Flemish painter, and others who are not well known beyond Belgium but are among the country’s cultural heroes. Works by Paul Delvaux, a Flemish painter now in his 80s and quite well known in this country, were also on his list.

Many of the works Schimmel wanted defy easy labeling, although some clearly share the highly wrought emotionalism of German Expressionism. Many draw on traditions going back to Van Eyck, Bosch, Bruegel and other giants of pre-20th Century Flemish art. Schimmel was introduced to the Belgian ambassador in Washington, Herman Dehennin, who, the curator says, had his own helpful connections. He also worked closely with Hilde van Leuven, an exhibition coordinator with the Belgian culture ministry. In the end, the museum borrowed about 140 paintings In the end, the museum borrowed about 140 paintings by 22 artists from 34 different museums, galleries and private collections, mostly in Belgium.

During the past few weeks, large crates containing the paintings have been arriving at the museum. At the same time Schimmel and other staffers have been finishing a redesign of the museum’s exhibition space. For every new show, they pull down walls and build others. Last Monday, the paintings were taken from their crates. A sensuous life-size picture of a woman in armor, executed in silvery chalk, seemed to rise from the dead as workers slowly lifted her from a long coffin-like crate.

Waving his arms and pointing, Schimmel directed two staffers who wore white gloves as they carried paintings worth millions of dollars from wall to wall. He was trying to find the best sequence for the paintings. He tries to put each picture in a place where it stands out yet joins other works that are stylistically compatible. He also wants the work to fit into the show’s historical chronology. Inevitably, there must be compromises. Schimmel tries one painting in six different places, before finding a place he thinks will work.

Through it all, he says, he still feels the same sense of privileged discovery as when he entered the vault of the Modern Museum as a teen-ager--but with a difference. “That was a one-dimensional feeling of intimacy with the art,” he said. “You still have that, but now there is also a sense of a responsibility to protect it and put it into the eyes of the audience through your own.”