With Void at Top, Newport Museum Seeks New Image : Arts: Suing the NEA was an unusual move for the museum, which has been without a director for a year, and is in the midst of conflict over designs for a new building.

The Newport Harbor Art Museum took an unusual step for conservative Orange County in recently choosing to take the National Endowment for the Arts to court.

Consider the recent climate for arts in Orange County:

As the nationwide furor over freedom of expression and the NEA raged, a nude photograph of John Lennon was yanked from a Fullerton exhibition in April, then reinstated.

More recently, a handful of irate Costa Mesa residents condemned a community-theater production of the 1979 satire “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You” as “anti-religious bigotry” that shouldn’t get one cent of city arts money.

Nevertheless, the Newport Beach museum called a crowded press conference two weeks ago to announce its suit against the NEA over the federal agency’s controversial anti-obscenity oath. The museum seeks an injunction barring the federal agency from requiring grantees to certify they will not produce or exhibit work that the NEA might consider obscene. The museum claims the anti-obscenity requirement violates its First and Fifth Amendment rights.

Newport Harbor officials proclaimed that their action placed them squarely “in the mainstream of the American arts community,” where numerous institutions have opposed the NEA funding restriction.

Behind the press conferences and lofty pronouncements, however, lurks a museum badly in need of an image boost. Now more than a year without a director, the small but nationally respected 27-year-old institution has encountered a series of troubling events in the last year, some of which may be seriously impeding its search for new leadership.

While some art-world officials dismiss these developments as something that happens to any major organization at some point, others express fear that the void at the top could result in the corporate co-opting of Orange County’s most adventuresome art institution.

The first plateau in the museum’s remarkable five-year growth curve came in August, 1989, when director Kevin E. Consey resigned to take a similar post at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. By Christmas, chief curator Paul Schimmel had handed in his resignation to take over curatorship of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Then last May, next-in-line curator Lucinda Barnes left, at the time citing personal reasons.

Subsequently, in a move some viewed as a power play by billionaire trustee Donald L. Bren, the developer hired an architect to provide alternatives to designs by famed Italian architect Renzo Piano for the museum’s new $30-million-dollar building--reportedly without Piano’s knowledge and without a board vote or any public announcement.

Not long after that, trustees--still acting without a director’s guidance--voted unanimously to dismiss Piano and replace him with a man who had never applied his talents to a museum.

Museum officials say the appointment of a successor to Consey is not imminent. They don’t even have a short list.

Prominent museum curators and directors across the country say Newport Harbor’s staff resignations cast no aspersions on the museum, noting that both Consey and Schimmel landed bigger and better assignments.

And even 18 months can be considered an average length of time before finding a new director, some museum experts say.

But the fact that museum trustees fired Piano and engaged a new architect for their building without a director on board raised red flags for some museum professionals, one of whom turned down a preliminary inquiry about the job because of the way the architect switch was made.

At least one other prominent museum official believes a damaging perception persists: that a single trustee--Bren--is “calling the shots.”

Donald L. Bren is chairman of the mighty Irvine Co., a Newport Beach development firm that owns one-sixth of Orange County’s land and has pledged 10.5 acres to the museum for its new 75,000-square-foot building in Corona del Mar.

Trustees wanted a bigger, more prominent building than the museum’s current 23,000-square-foot site, one where permanent collections and temporary exhibitions may be shown simultaneously.

Also aiming for a higher-profile image, a unanimous board chose architect Renzo Piano for a new building design. Piano had won international acclaim for such projects as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Elation marked last summer’s unveiling of Piano’s preliminary designs. But, soon after, enthusiasm began to wane. Some trustees became concerned that Renzo’s plans couldn’t provide hoped-for facilities at a hoped-for price tag.

Piano had told the board his design could be adapted to their needs and had been working with trustees to modify his plans.

Still, later in the year, without a board vote or public announcement, Bren hired William Pedersen, partner in the prominent New York architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, to provide trustees with alternatives to Piano’s design.

Bren has declined to be interviewed, but an Irvine Co. spokesman has said the developer dipped into his own pocket for Pedersen’s sketches only after he was approached by other trustees.

But speculation had spread that Bren was personally dissatisfied with Piano’s design. That the entire board had not approved nor even known of Pedersen’s hiring, “was exactly the kind of individual power play that can really upset the equilibrium of an institution,” said a museum expert who declined to be identified.

Finally, however, the full board did vote to drop Piano and to hire Pedersen.

That trustees would select an architect for the new building without the guidance of a director doesn’t bother some.

Michael Auping, chief curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., discussed the director’s job with board members this summer. He made it clear he was happy where he was before a formal offer was made, and none of the events in the museum’s recent past colored his response, he recently asserted.

Others who rejected inquiries didn’t cite the architecture switch as among their reasons.

Mark Rosenthal, an independent curator who works at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, said no to Korn-Ferry International, the Los Angeles-based search firm hired by the museum--but only because he doesn’t want to be director of any museum.

Others point out that competition for directors may have lengthened Newport Harbor’s quest. Director searches at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (though that post was recently filled) have undoubtedly made the task more difficult.

But Julia Brown Turrell, director of the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, had grave concerns. When the former MOCA chief curator was approached “in a very preliminary way” by Korn-Ferry, she immediately ruled herself out.

“It was troubling to me that the very vital question of who the new architect would be appears as if it were decided without a director,” Turrell said. It seemed that trustees did not want “the input of their artistic leader in something that would set the artistic course of the museum for years to come.”

Hugh Davies, director of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, said he had received no job inquiry from Newport Harbor. But he brought up the perception that Bren is “calling the shots.”

“In any arts organization, you have individuals on the board who end up having a disproportionate amount of influence,” Davies said. “But to have one person so clearly identified with the decision-making of the institution is unhealthy, and it will definitely deter potential candidates for director.”

Another museum insider charged that Bren’s active participation “tragically documents the takeover of an independent institution by a corporation (Irvine Co.). The Newport Harbor Art Museum is one whose quality was driven on its individuality and independence and it clearly is not independent any more.” Because Bren has refused interviews, it is difficult to gauge his reaction to such criticism.

But Irvine Co. spokesman Larry Thomas said that Bren and his firm had approved Piano’s design and that “whoever is saying Bren was personally unhappy with Piano’s design is inaccurate. . . . The only initiatives (Bren has) undertaken on behalf of the museum have been at the request of the museum leadership,” he said.

Trustee James V. Selna has said that initial contact with Pedersen was not the result of a board vote, nor was the entire board aware of the move. But Selna said that process was democratic and in no way domineered by Bren.

Divisive management battles--real or perceived--are not new to museums, especially those embroiled in building projects, and some observers believe that everything will ultimately come out in the wash for Newport Harbor.

Others view the situation as indicative of a broader crisis in the art world.

Kathy Halbreich, who will become director of the Walker Art Center in March, believes that the problem is “reflected in the numerous openings and searches and questions regarding who shall lead and what they shall lead and how.

“In certain situations, the business of running a museum has overshadowed the mission of being a museum,” said Halbreich, director of contemporary art at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, who was not approached for the Newport Harbor job.

“I think the role of many museum directors has been something akin to a blind man in the subway holding out a tin cup. One is constantly raising funds for something that’s getting more and more remote to one’s experience, because someone is always riding somewhere to ask somebody for something. And the (director’s) relationship to the artists and the audience and the object is becoming more distant.”