TASTE MAKERS : STEPHANIE BARRON

Calendar’s choices of Taste Makers--people who move and shape our arts and entertainment in 1988--run the gamut. If the eight faces on the cover form a rather curious collection, it’s because creative abilities come in many forms.

As a result, our group’s pursuits range from directing the distinguished PBS series “American Playhouse,” to fronting the hard-living, hard-rock band Guns N’ Roses. All eight individuals have been significant players in 1988 and we feel will continue as leaders and creators in the future--as have the Taste Makers of previous years.

In this fourth annual survey, we hope to present an insight into what stimulates and influences these people of influence.

Curator at the County Museum of Art including the current German Expressionist exhibit. Her concern: To bring craggy mountains of art to people who prefer soft fields of flowers.

Elegantly dressed but unceremoniously draped across two chairs in her office at the County Museum of Art, Stephanie Barron was doing three things at once: answering a reporter’s questions about her success as a curator of modern art, preparing to lead a tour through her latest exhibition of German Expressionist art and awaiting the imminent arrival of her first baby.

“Learning to say no is important,” says Barron, anticipating the difficulties of juggling time after the birth of her son, Max. But, for the moment, she was still saying yes to all the demands of a career that has set her at the forefront of museum curators.

At the County Museum of Art since 1976, Barron took a big step in a 1980-81 collaboration with senior curator Maurice Tuchman on a landmark exhibition, “The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New Perspectives.” Critics hailed the team’s insightful exhibition of material gathered from sources outside Soviet Union. For Barron, much of the thrill of accomplishment came from establishing connections between visual art and a dramatic production, a fashion show, films and lectures, all offered in an educational package.

Subsequently, she set out on her own in the field of German Expressionism, always attempting to present difficult art in a broad, understandable context. Encouraged by her husband, Robert Gore Rifkind (a major collector of German Expressionist art who has given a splendid cache of prints and books to the County Museum of Art), Barron presented a ground-breaking show, “German Expressionist Sculpture” in 1983 and the current “German Expressionism: The Second Generation, 1915-1925” at LACMA.

Now she is working on a complex project that seems certain to attract international attention: A re-creation of the infamous Nazi exhibition of “degenerate” art, staged in 1937 in Munich. True to her goal of fulfilling what she calls the museum’s “educational mandate,” she will supplement the visual art with “degenerate” literature, music and film.

Baron tracks her passion for showing visual art in a cultural continuum back to a hostile confrontation at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio. As a young employee in the museum’s education department, she was charged with delivering public lectures. “Why is this art?” one listener demanded after a talk on Hans Hofmann’s Abstract Expressionist painting.

“I had to admit it was a valid question,” Barron says. “It is unfair to expect the public in all cases to understand why a thing is hanging in a museum. Making art accessible and interesting to the public is the responsibility of the curator. We have to provide a context and an explanation.”

If the question jerked Barron out of an art historian’s ivory tower, it also fueled a desire to make museum-going as meaningful for others as it had been for her. As a museum child, she toddled off to her career as soon as she was old enough to take classes at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. “It was great. For 10 years--from the time I was in second grade until I was 18--I took classes every Saturday. I had my own little pass to the museum,” she recalls. Even better than the “wonderfully unstructured” instruction was the chance to get to know modern art and feel at home in an institution that kids might be expected to find intimidating or boring.

European jaunts with her art-conscious mother and publisher father reinforced Barron’s predilection for museums. When she enrolled at Barnard College she naturally gravitated to the art history department.

Art historian and author Barbara Novak was Barron’s professor, adviser, role model and first in a star-studded cast of mentors. Meyer Schapiro, who talked about art as part of culture, in seminars at Columbia University, provided additional inspiration.

When she embarked on her first job, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, during her junior year at college, Barron met director Thomas M. Messer, who taught a course every few years at Barnard. Barron had already taken the class when his rotation came up, but through her museum contact she landed the job of organizing slides for his Barnard lectures.

“I will never forget the day he said, ‘My secretary is leaving in two days for 2 1/2 months. I want you to replace her,’ “Barron recalls, still savoring the memory.

She plunged into “a great opportunity to see how a museum runs.” Intrigued with the “public-ness” of the institution, she completed graduate work at Columbia, then set out to try her skills in Toledo.

Pressed to itemize the forces that shaped her direction, Barron cites Andre Malraux’s book, “The Voices of Silence,” which offers a cross-cultural experience of art in “beautiful language,” and an exhibition of Gertrude Stein’s collection at the Museum of Modern Art. She was so impressed with the quality of the art, the personality of Stein and the reconstruction of a pivotal, bygone era, that she took the subway from Barnard to the museum twice a week and memorized every detail of the exhibition.

Two other Barron-esque journeys took place in France. With a copy of Van Gogh’s letters in hand, she once took a train to Pontoise and walked to Auvers-sur-Oise, the village where the Dutch artist died. On another occasion, she trekked through Cezanne country with Impressionist scholar John Rewald as her tour guide. “When Mont St. Victoire became a mountain I could climb, I had a much better appreciation of Cezanne’s paintings,” says the curator who likes nothing better than to bring craggy mountains of art to people who prefer soft fields of flowers.

This project was edited by David Fox, assistant Calendar editor.