NEWS ANALYSIS : For New NEA Chief: A Brush With Disaster : Arts: The latest crisis for the arts endowment turned into a crash course in the political ways of Washington for chairman John Frohnmayer.

The scene was a crowded basement press conference room in New York City a week ago today. The occasion was an appearance by the principals in the political drama that had unfolded around an art show focusing on AIDS at the Manhattan gallery Artists Space.

The National Endowment for the Arts rescinded a $10,000 grant to defray part of the $30,000 expenses of the show. Then, to explain the murky logic of this decision--taken more, probably, because of fear of what the New Right would do with the content of the show, which includes at least one photographic image of an erection--NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer offered at least three different explanations for why he lifted the grant.

First, Frohnmayer said it was because the show, “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing,” was “political.” Then, he explained that in his home town of Portland, Ore., political means something different than it does in Washington or New York and that it wasn’t really what he meant. Then later, he said he took the grant away because the show--or at least its catalogue--lacked artistic merit.

So by the time Frohnmayer got to the press conference, he clearly recognized that he had a great deal of explaining to do--quickly, before the arts community deserted him and the endowment’s future, political and otherwise, was doomed.

“I came here to listen and to learn,” said Frohnmayer after a quick walk-through of the show. “The last thing that I thought I would be in is a situation where we were potentially crosswise with our constituency.”

And finally, at the press conference a week ago--10 days after the crisis had first broken--Frohnmayer turned to the central element that should have been the focus all along. That is the endowment’s political fix after the summer funding controversy that saw conservative politicians score political points with two sets of ostensibly indecent, endowment-supported photographs.

The result: a 1990 appropriation bill containing anti-obscenity provisions. If the Artists Space situation had not arisen politically, the collision with artistic reality would have come somewhere else, with some other grant. Frohnmayer had come to see this reality. It was, he said, “a situation none of us really wanted, under a law none of us feels is really necessary.”

He was clearly bidding for maneuvering room. The next day, he found a way out of the dilemma. Four members of the National Council on the Arts, the endowment’s advisory board that has in recent years been reduced to a largely ceremonial function, appeared at Artists Space and viewed the show.

Then the quartet went outside, jammed into the automobile of New York state Sen. Roy Goodman (one of the council members) and conducted a conference call with Frohnmayer over Goodman’s cellular telephone. They found, they said later, that Frohnmayer had already reached the same conclusion: Give back the grant.

Later that day, he did.

Although the crisis has been eased, perplexing questions remain: How did it happen? How could Frohnmayer, the experienced litigator and First Amendment lawyer, have reached the conclusions he did? How could Frohnmayer, who managed two politically astute state attorney general campaigns for his brother, Dave, have stepped so quickly--the crisis occurred only weeks after he took office--into such deep quicksand?

The politically militant wing of the arts--an element that seems to be growing--quickly saw in the situation a conspiracy, maybe started by President Bush, to sacrifice the arts in an attempt to quiet the conservatives, most notably Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.)

By the beginning of this week, the answers were by no means clear. Frohnmayer has, judiciously, fallen silent, hoping for the clouds to blow over. At Artists Space, the show has gone on. In the arts community in Washington, it was clear by Friday afternoon that there would be no groundswell of support for Frohnmayer’s resignation.

It was also clear that Frohnmayer’s reversal had been influenced by the start of a trickle--with great flood potential--of defections from his camp. On the same day as the press conference, it was disclosed that conductor Leonard Bernstein had turned down recognition, at a White House luncheon hosted by President and Mrs. Bush, in the endowment-administered National Medal of Arts program to protest the Artists Space situation. The chief of the endowment’s literature program and a key member of the expert panel that reviews grants for arts organizations--including Artists Space’s applications for 1990 funding--deserted the agency as well.

But most officials of major arts groups say they still support Frohnmayer, wish him well and hope for his success--despite a nearly calamitous series of blunders in the Artists Space case. On Capitol Hill, there was nearly universal puzzlement about how Frohnmayer stumbled so badly--but a great deal of sympathy for his political predicament and apparently no desire for his head.

Experienced politicians were puzzled by how it happened and searched for answers, just like everyone else. The theories are varied, but most of them reject conspiracy and have a sort of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” flavor.

By training, suggested one key Washington arts lawyer, most attorneys tend to be loners, conditioned to make and trust their own judgments. Frohnmayer went to Washington ill-prepared for the political and media crucible of the nation’s capital. He obviously hoped to be able to keep the Artists Space dilemma out of the press until he could reach a behind-the-scenes accommodation with the gallery. He didn’t realize that keeping the situation quiet--possible in Portland, perhaps--would be inconceivable in Washington.

By all accounts, Frohnmayer sought little counsel on the political ramifications of the operation he was conducting until it was too late: After he had already written to Artists Space to demand voluntary return of the grant, the gallery had refused and the situation had been brought to public attention--first in The Times, but within a day afterward by the Washington Post and two days later by the New York Times.

It is a sequence of events that suggests an attitude reducible to: “Shut up and trust me.” It was an unrealistic strategy in a town where no one trusts and no one shuts up.

The voices that at week’s end called for Frohnmayer’s departure have significantly quieted. Hundreds of people signed petitions demanding his resignation at the Artists Space opening, but the group did not include the gallery’s executive director, Susan Wyatt, who had joined the battle with Frohnmayer in the first place.

An influential official of one of Washington’s most prominent private arts groups suggested in an interview that Frohnmayer has 60 days or so to show strong evidence of consolidating his leadership position. “He’s had a terribly rocky time,” said this official. “But it is tragically self-defeating to direct one’s ire at Frohnmayer. The long-term problem ain’t John Frohnmayer. He’s part of the long-term solution.”

The endowment will survive, at least until the legislative hearings next year on extending its life for another three to five years. That donnybrook may make everything that has befallen the endowment this year seem like the cheers at a minor league baseball game. Frohnmayer will not be sent packing back to Portland, but he has had a hard, quick lesson in how to survive in Washington.

To his arts constituency, he said a great deal about the future at the press conference. “It is my hope we can work our way through this,” he said.