THE $1 MILLION BEHIND THE HOCKNEY SHOW

When AT&T; decided to underwrite the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition of David Hockney’s work to the tune of $850,000, some observers raised their eyebrows at the high cost of doing business with an art museum.

Insiders didn’t blink. In the days of $2 ice cream cones, $100 theater tickets and $40,000 cars, the $1-million art show has become almost commonplace.

In fact, AT&T;’s funding doesn’t cover all costs of the Hockney show, scheduled to open at the museum Feb. 4 and run through April 24. With organization and tour expenses estimated at $580,000, a catalogue expected to ring up a bill of $250,000 and the museum’s in-house costs projected at $175,000, total price tag for “David Hockney: A Retrospective” is $1,005,000, according to museum director Earl A. Powell.

“The budget for Hockney is not lean,” but neither is it “excessive,” Powell said, noting that budgets of $750,000 to $1 million are standard for comparable exhibitions.

Pulling out catalogues from his bookshelf, Powell ticked off exhibitions in the same price range: “The Spiritual in Art,” “A Day in the Country,” “The Avant-Garde in Russia”--all organized by LACMA since 1980.

While shows of photography, crafts or local collections generally cost less, those involving ancient treasures from distant places run from $4 million to $6 million, he said. Hockney’s part-time residence in Los Angeles makes his retrospective easier and cheaper than it might have been, but the expense of borrowing artworks from London (his other home) and foreign collections offsets that saving.

“Any large exhibition that goes to more than one place is costly and complicated,” Powell said. Hockney’s retrospective of about 250 paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, stage sets and illustrated books will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (June 18 to Aug. 14, 1988) and the Tate Gallery in London (Oct. 26, 1988, to Jan. 3, 1989). Expensive as they are, such prestigious tours help attract important loans.

The “big-ticket items” in arranging and touring large exhibitions are crating, transportation and insurance, Powell said.

Every piece of art loaned to the museum arrives in its individually built, form-fitted box, which can cost $700 to $1,000, depending on the size, value and fragility of the work. Each of these containers, described by Powell as “a crate within a crate,” is generally made of wood and lined with paper and foam, set inside another box.

(While crating Hockney’s work presents no extreme problems, the seemingly mundane matter of packing artworks safely for travel can hamstring an entire show. A LACMA exhibition of German paintings--particularly fragile because they are painted on wood panels--has been postponed indefinitely while Berlin authorities satisfy themselves that an ingenious system devised by Pieter Meyers, head of conservation at the museum, will stabilize humidity inside crates and prevent the wood panels from pulling away from the paint during transit.)

Transportation costs include trucking and air fares, customs clearance fees--and the price of having a human being travel with the art. The use of couriers has become common “after too many incidences of paintings left on the tarmac in the rain,” Powell said. “For foreign loans, couriers are a given.” Though museum lore is full of stories of curators trying to parlay brief courier trips into all-expense-paid vacations, the stand ard arrangement is for museums to pay for travel and two days of expenses for couriers delivering and picking up artwork, he said.

To minimize shipping costs, Powell hopes that all the English loans can be collected at one point and sent on a single cargo plane. But if the value of the works exceeds the $12.5 million allowed per conveyance under federal indemnification regulations, additional planes must be used.

Insurance for the Hockney show at all three museums will cost about $200,000. That figure is based on the value of the artworks, established by market records and appraisals.

While the total Hockney budget is in line with major traveling exhibitions, Powell said, the $250,000 catalogue is relatively high priced. “The unusual thing about the show is that we’re doing all new photography for the catalogue (instead of depending upon lenders to provide transparencies of varying quality),” he said. “David is an artist whose work is so much about color, and color is so important to the life of his catalogue that we hired three photographers to photograph all the work”--at a cost of about $50,000.

The museum will co-publish the catalogue with Harry N. Abrams, which will distribute the book throughout the United States and Canada. “In general, we are very fortunate to break even on a catalogue, extremely fortunate to make a profit,” Powell said, noting that the museum often subsidizes catalogues to keep them “affordable,” around $20.

AT&T;’s $850,000 contribution covers the catalogue’s budget as well as costs of organizing and taking the exhibition to the two other museums without “the usual $40,000 to $100,000 participation fee,” Powell said.

That leaves the museums with in-house expenses. At LACMA, they include the publication of post cards, posters and hand-out brochures; travel for curators who need to see works before deciding if they should be in the exhibition; educational and handicap programs, and a lecture series.

Powell estimates it costs $400 to $500 for the staff to process each work loaned to an exhibition. Registrars, for example, handle loan forms and condition reports, preparers mat and frame the work, art handlers unpack and hang it.

Another in-house cost is exhibition design and installation, which often amounts to “building a house within a house,” Powell said. Each “house” is different and generally constructed from scratch. “Sometimes we can reuse cases, but usually all new ones are needed,” he said.

Instead of retaining a designer on staff, the museum takes the less expensive and more flexible route of hiring independent practitioners according to their talents and the institution’s needs. Working with the artist and curators, the yet-to-be-named designer for the Hockney show will decide how the space should be divided, what display cases are needed and determine graphics and colors.

All this money and effort will produce a show that has been in planning stages for two years and on the museum’s “active exhibition list” several years longer. Curators “Maurice (Tuchman) and Stephanie (Barron) have been keen on the idea, but David wanted to wait until he was 50,” Powell said. Hockney, who celebrated his 50th birthday in July, considers the show “a journey, not a retrospective or a mid-career survey,” according to the director.

Selected from an international array of collections, his “journey” will lead from works done in England in the ‘50s and ‘60s to portraits, paintings of California landscape and life style, photographic collages and examples of his theater work.

“Originally the exhibition was to be seen only in Los Angeles and London, the two communities David is part of and feels close to,” Powell said. “Then the Met entered. It has new galleries for contemporary art and (curator) Bill Lieberman has an aesthetic and friendly relationship with David.”

Museums’ reputations rest, in part, on the exhibitions they initiate. “A good balance is to organize as many shows as you take from other sources,” Powell said. “It’s prestigious to organize shows but also very beneficial. It brings scholarship and resources to the museum and allows curators to use their skills and knowledge.

“But it’s not getting easier or cheaper,” he added. “One wouldn’t want to organize a Van Gogh exhibition now” after one of the Dutch master’s “Sunflowers” paintings sold at auction for almost $40 million.

“That’s why an AT&T; is so important. If art wasn’t good business for them, we would be out of business.”