Art Museum Has Finalist for Director : Search: Newport Harbor board is to vote tonight on the candidate. Filling the post is crucial to the $50-million campaign to build and endow a facility.

The Newport Harbor Art Museum has come up with a finalist in its 13-month search for a new director. The museum board will vote tonight on the candidate, who has not been named.

The director’s job is especially crucial as the museum’s $50-million campaign to construct and endow a new building has been stalled since Kevin Consey left the post in November, 1989. Without staff leadership, the project has attracted only $10 million in cash and pledges.

The projected new building, on 10 acres at East Coast Highway and MacArthur Boulevard, would be three times the size of the present 23,000-square-foot structure on San Clemente Drive.

In a further complication last summer, the museum’s trustees fired internationally renowned architect Renzo Piano--Consey’s choice--who had unveiled his plan for the building in summer of 1989. For the past few months, the museum has been negotiating with Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, a New York architecture firm that has supplied only a rough general plan.

The board offered the museum directorship to James Demetrion, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gardens in Washington in March. But he turned down the post, citing his reluctance to get involved in a major building program.

Four other museum professionals have told The Times privately that they were approached about the job and declined it. Some said they were concerned that the trustees had been consulting Kohn Pederson, rather than waiting to hire a new director. Typically, a director sets the tone for a building campaign.

For the last several months, the board has been using a search firm, Korn-Ferry International.

Consey, who received $85,000 annually, left Newport Harbor, which concentrates on art from the post-World War II period, to become director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

During the past year, the museum also has weathered two key staff departures. Chief curator Paul Schimmel became chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in April after more than eight years at Newport Harbor. Associate curator Lucinda Barnes left last fall after just a year on staff, to pursue independent projects.