Changing Face of Patrons Cited as Museum Dilemma

“I didn’t get from being rejected for a museum studies program to being director of the Whitney (Museum of American Art) by sitting in the back of the room,” says Thomas N. Armstrong III.

“I knew how to hustle. I knew about patronage.”

He knew, perhaps, a little too much.

Tonight at 7:30, Armstrong tackles the subject of “Patronage Patterns: The Director’s Dilemma” in the San Diego Museum of Art’s Copley Auditorium. Armstrong’s is one of three presentations in the museum’s series of Balboa Lectures.

As boisterous as he is astute, Armstrong, 58, was dismissed from his position heading New York’s Whitney Museum early last year after a power struggle with the museum’s board of trustees. He had directed the museum for 16 years, nurturing it through its “family stage” to its current complex form as the nation’s leading museum of American art, currently operating on an annual budget of more than $10 million. During his tenure, the Whitney’s permanent collection grew by more than 2,000 works of art.

Patronage helped Armstrong gain his position at the Whitney, Armstrong said in a recent telephone interview from his home in New York. But it also helped him lose it, when he was put in the sticky position of reining in patrons whom he suspected of “misusing” the museum for their own gain.

That’s a subject that he considers himself an expert on, Armstrong said with a deep laugh, and one he will address in his lecture tonight.

“People at different periods of time who achieve wealth view institutions as a component of an expression of their wealth in different ways. You have to be aware of this and sensitive to it in order to attract them and discipline them. The dilemma is that the attractiveness of an institution is vulnerable to people’s ambition or sophistication.”

Despite their reputation as static monoliths, art museums are actually quite delicate institutions, their internal security ever susceptible to external factors. New donors of art and money are constantly being sought by museum directors, but older, more established sources of patronage--such as foundations and government agencies--must be attended to just as avidly, according to Armstrong.

“The nature of those donors is extremely dynamic over time. There’s a necessity to adjust to that. For instance, the character of the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1970s (was) completely different than it is today.”

The NEA, which was founded in the mid-1960s to support the nation’s art institutions, programs and artists, has recently been embroiled in controversy over the funding of work deemed obscene. Though now partially resolved, the controversy has made many museum directors reluctant to schedule shows that could be interpreted as offensive.

Corporate sponsorship of the arts, a mainstay for museums of the ‘80s, is another form of patronage that Armstrong believes is shifting.

“The relationship between museums and corporations is drying up. The corporate world is threatened. Corporate managers today are so consumed with internal problems, the survival and profitability of their corporations, that, consequently, they have had to turn away from considerations of community and quality of life.”

At the same time, many in the museum world also now attempt to operate their institutions much like corporations. Many museums now have directors that boast advanced degrees in both art history and business.

Though Armstrong dismisses that trend as “overplayed,” he agrees that knowledge of the business world is essential for museum directors. Before he entered the museum field, he worked for eight years as an assistant to the chairman of the board of a large group of companies. He then studied art history at New York University (where he was rejected admission to the school’s museum studies program) and, in 1969, became associate director of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection in Williamsburg, Va. Two years later he was made director of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and in 1974, he settled in at the Whitney.

“Museum directors have to be educated in business methods simply because of the growth of the institutions,” he said. “They’re dealing with large sums of money.”

But knowledge of the material addressed by the museum remains the director’s most important qualification in Armstrong’s eyes.

“You have to have someone who is passionately involved in the subject of the museum. You can’t have a financial person in control of an art institution or it will go down the tubes. It would become a function of the business community. Museums are not businesses. They are precious and extremely vulnerable. They depend upon other people’s wealth and endorsement.”

Since leaving the Whitney, Armstrong has been writing a bit, giving talks, but mostly “thinking a lot about life.” Though initially he said he was very hurt by the circumstances of his dismissal and thought he would never want to work in a museum again, he has recently decided that he wants to stay in the field and is now looking for a new position.

One lesson of his tenure at the Whitney that he will take with him to his next post and that he shares with all other museum directors is that of flexibility and diversity when it comes to patronage.

“You’ve got to be creative in generating sources of patronage. You’ve got to be tolerant of the fact that the characteristics of these sources of patronage are constantly changing. You will be in great difficulty if you become overly dependent or complacent about patronage. If you put all of your energy into one type of patronage, that will invariably change and you will have no other resources.

“One whole category of people who were patrons of contemporary art in New York City in the ‘80s were real estate people and financial people. They don’t exist now, so if the whole thrust of your institution was to attract real estate developers, you’re out in the cold. If they were the only business people on the board, or on the social committee, you’re in trouble. And this could happen.”