Frank Hodsoll Leaves Endowment as Advocate for Arts

It was, as Frank Hodsoll later phrased it, his “last gig on behalf of the arts.”

As he prepares to leave the office he has held for the last seven years, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts was at the Otis Parsons Institute Thursday to announce the 68 arts organizations nationwide who are this fiscal year’s recipients of the federal agency’s $19 million big-buck challenge grants.

“It’s always a great pleasure to be anywhere, on any occasion where I bring something other than words,” Hodsoll said grinning.

He did not mention, as the papers had that morning, that in two to three weeks, whenever the “orderly processes” are complete, he will leave the Arts Endowment and become the No. 3 official at the Office of Management and Budget. But he did note that “the Arts Endowment is viewed very, very favorably by the Bush Administration at the very highest levels.”

Hodsoll’s appointment came through so quickly that no decision has yet been made on an acting agency head, prior to President Bush’s nomination of a new chairman. Hodsoll said he has already been consulted by Bush aides about a successor. “They’ve asked my opinion (about candidates) but I think I’d better leave it between me and the White House,” and he laughed, “or they’ll never talk to me again.”

Leading contenders, The Times has learned, include Barnabas McHenry, co-vice chairman of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, chairman of the Empire State Plaza Art Commission, who had been a college roommate of Secretary of State James A. Baker; Schuyler Chapin, former dean of the School of Arts at Columbia University and Lois Burke Shepard, director of the Institute for Museum Services, former head of Republicans Abroad, who represented Bush on arts issues during the campaign. Other names that have surfaced include Beverly Sills and Lynne Cheney, chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The departure of Hodsoll, the fourth chairman in the endowment’s 24-year history, was not mentioned Thursday until the Mark Taper Forum’s Gordon Davidson got up to thank Hodsoll for his leadership in difficult budget times. “Your willingness to hear new voices and provide the possibility of growth has been very important to all of us.”

Whoever in the arts community would have thought that Ronald Reagan’s appointee would have earned such praise? Here was Hodsoll--a lawyer, a career foreign service officer, the former head of a corporation representing British firms doing business with the Philippines, a former assistant political adviser to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe at the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, a deputy assistant secretary for energy and strategic resource policy in the Commerce Department, a deputy U.S. special representative for nuclear nonproliferation, and a deputy assistant to then-White House Chief of Staff Baker.

It did not seem to bode well for the arts community that in his first year Reagan had proposed slashing the arts and humanities budgets in half on the advice of Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman.

Hodsoll said in an interview following the challenge-grant ceremonies that he requested the endowment chairmanship because of Stockman’s proposal. “At that point I didn’t know what the appropriate amount for the arts endowment should be, but I didn’t think it ought to be cut,” he said, recalling that when he first proposed going to NEA, Baker suggested he was nuts “or something like that . . . You can say he rolled his eyes.”

At the endowment Hodsoll developed key initiatives on arts education to make it a “basic” in education, “a serious, sequential course of study” from kindergarten through the 12th grade so that when “young people graduate from high school they have a degree of cultural literacy--and I just don’t mean European or an African or an Asian or a Latin American (literacy) but all of them.”

He also proposed a National Medal of Arts to give visibility to the nation’s leading artists. With the American Film Institute, the endowment helped establish the National Center for Video and Film Preservation for which the endowment was in part awarded a special Oscar in 1985. And Hodsoll changed the focus of the challenge grants from institutional support to funding projects of “national artistic significance.”

And, significantly, he was a strong advocate for the arts. In his last budget, Reagan for the first time proposed raising the endowment’s budget to $170.1 million from its present $169.1 million--the extra $1 million to be earmarked for Hodsoll’s primary project, arts education. To date, Bush has not changed Reagan’s budget request for the arts.

Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.), who as chairman of the House subcommittee overseeing the arts budget consistently upped Reagan’s requests, credited Hodsoll with persuading the Administration of the arts’ significance. “The fact that the Administration finally recognized the importance of the arts is in great measure testimony to his efforts,” Yates said.

Anne Murphy, executive director of the American Arts Alliance, said that Hodsoll took “initiatives where he felt he could . . . he accomplished what he set out to do.” Jonathan Katz, director of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, believes Hodsoll did “a terrific job of gathering support from the field that was at first skeptical of his appointment.”

“Like any chairman of an agency, I recommended a budget (to OMB) I felt could help us move forward significantly,” noted Hodsoll, “and I put my best effort into it, recognizing of course that there were a lot of agency heads recommending budgets that would help them move forward. But I felt that my job was to recommend the best possible shot for the arts endowment.”

He insisted that essentially level budgets in the arts during the Reagan years have not hurt, because private giving to the arts and humanities has doubled in eight years while state arts agencies themselves have gone from about $101 million to $269 million this year--or nearly 60% more than the endowment’s budget.

As for the state of the arts nationally, Hodsoll talks about the new burst of activity in opera and musical theater and a lessening of preeminence for visual artists. “Every single opera company including the Metropolitan Opera has commissioned or is about to commission one work. When I came on board--I don’t take credit for this--opera companies were moribund, not doing any new work. In the meantime, in the visual arts, while American artists remain vibrant, they are no longer almost exclusively preeminent as they were during the great period of Abstract Expressionism after World War II. We see extraordinary Germans like Anselm Kiefer, Italians are coming to the fore. . . .

“I have to say that the big downside to me,” Hodsoll continued, “is that the arts that we support, all the cultural heritage and most of the contemporary expression, aren’t really part of the lives of most Americans. In part it’s a question of (lack of) education and understanding and comfort level going out of the schools, and in part due to the extraordinary power of the entertainment industry in capturing our leisure time.”

As he leaves the NEA, Hodsoll is pleased that more than half of the 50 states are now involved with the endowment in programs to improve arts education. But he worries that there is “a greater division today than ever before in history between popular culture and the cultural heritage.”

“Rock and roll builds on Bach,” he said noting that the best in the arts is all part of the same “cultural stream.” “Andy Warhol builds on Coca-Cola, and vice-versa. One of the great art works of the 20th Century has to be ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and the new preserved version, which put back what the director, Sir David Lean, wanted to have in there. It’s as good, in my view, as some of the famous paintings in museums.”

He hopes his successor will concentrate on “first, arts education, and second, building bridges between the commercial and noncommercial sides of the arts.” He noted that the challenge grant of $150,000 to American Cinematheque that was accepted by director Sydney Pollack, its chairman, is one of those bridges because it will “showcase in curatorial ways some of the great art from film.”

Hodsoll also is concerned that “this whole country is entirely too fixed on celebrity status, in everything, from what automobile you’re going to buy, to detergent, to who gets the Nielsen rating on television, to where the cameras go. And that percolates into some of our greatest conservatories. I have dance artists in the not-for-profit world telling me they’re very discouraged by some of the young dancers coming into the community because they want to be a star, they don’t want to be a dancer. I get this also from people (in music). The head of Juilliard recently wrote that everyone wants to be a solo recitalist, an Isaac Stern.”

In his new role at Management and Budget, wrestling with incompatible federal accounting systems, military procurement, and “selected issues” of national security and international affairs, Hodsoll will not play a role in determining the arts budget. “That will go to the other part of OMB,” he said with a laugh, “the B part. I’m responsible for the management side.”

And for what it’s worth, he takes with him a new appreciation of performance art and works such as Robert Wilson’s “Einstein on the Beach”: “I wouldn’t have been able to imagine anything like this before I got to the endowment.”