Intensifying the Search at LACMA : Art: Robert T. Buck, director of the Brooklyn Museum, and Michael Shapiro, chief curator of the St. Louis Art Museum, are reportedly among those interviewed for director.

The County Museum of Art’s search for a new director is being conducted so quietly that many art-scene watchers have wondered if anything is happening. Indeed, the museum is likely to be headless for several months--following former director Earl A. (Rusty) Powell’s recent departure for the National Gallery of Art in Washington--but there is action on the search front.

At least two candidates have been interviewed for LACMA’s top job, according to sources close to the search. The pair who have been identified are Robert T. Buck, director of the Brooklyn Museum, and Michael Shapiro, chief curator of the St. Louis Art Museum.

Although Buck, 53, is a prominent figure whose qualifications match the profile painted by the County Museum of Art’s search committee, Shapiro, 42, who has not held a high-level administrative position, is said to be the leading candidate. Buck has been interviewed at least twice, but Shapiro has made several visits to Los Angeles and has looked into housing and schools for his children, the sources said. Buck and Shapiro were on vacation and could not be reached for comment.

“A number of candidates are being interviewed,” LACMA public information officer Pam Jenkinson said. She declined to specify how many applicants are under consideration and when a decision is likely to be made.

Buck has directed the massive Brooklyn Museum since 1983, after serving 13 years at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, including three years as assistant director and 10 years as director. Like Powell (and other art-world luminaries), he earned his bachelor’s degree at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. Upon graduation in 1965 from New York University with a master’s degree, Buck served as a lecturer and researcher at the Toledo Museum of Art, from 1965-67, and an assistant curator and art instructor at Washington University in St. Louis, from 1968-70.

Buck’s rise in the museum world has been documented in the press. When he moved from the Albright-Knox to Brooklyn, he outlined an ambitious program to increase membership, build corporate support and create a new identity for the venerable institution that has languished far behind its high-profile competitors in Manhattan in terms of financial support, audience and visibility.

Buck told a reporter he went to Brooklyn “because I needed to stretch my muscles.” During his tenure there, newspaper articles have described him as “the only true connoisseur among museum directors in New York” and as having “a flashing temper, a smooth charm and a devotion to contemporary art.”

Although he has been quoted as emphasizing that art, not business, is the point of art museums, he became known for masterminding a $250-million renovation and expansion project to double the Brooklyn Museum’s space and for launching an architectural competition that landed Arata Isozaki (the architect of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art) and James Stewart Polshek (who guided the renovation of Carnegie Hall). Buck defied skeptics by raising $31 million for the first phase of the project, an extensive renovation of the museum’s west wing, but the rest of the plan has been put on hold due to the lingering recession.

Indeed, like many other cultural institutions, the Brooklyn Museum has fallen on hard times. In fiscal 1992, New York City decreased its support for the museum from $6.5 million to $4.5 million, dealing a severe blow to the $16-million to $17-million annual operating budget. About $500,000 of the cut has been restored in fiscal 1993, but the museum is still struggling, according to Sally Williams, head of public affairs. Having lost 60 positions through layoffs and attrition, the museum now has a staff of about 250, and it operates on a reduced schedule--open five days a week instead of six, and with some galleries closed on a rotating basis.

In contrast to Buck, Shapiro is relatively unknown outside museum circles. His credentials bear striking similarities to those of Powell when he arrived in Los Angeles, except that Powell--who was six years younger--had more administrative experience. Shapiro earned his bachelor’s degree at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., then went on to Williams College and Harvard University, Powell’s alma maters. Shapiro earned one master’s degree at Williams and another at Harvard. He was graduated in 1980 from Harvard with a Ph.D., having written his dissertation on “The Development of American Bronze Foundries: 1850-1900.”

Specializing in 19th- and 20-Century painting and sculpture, he served as guest curator at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, from 1980-81, and assistant professor of art at Duke University in Durham, N.C., from 1980-84. He became curator of 19th- and 20th-Century art at the St. Louis Art Museum in 1984 and has served as chief curator since 1987.

During his St. Louis tenure Shapiro has organized many exhibitions, including a show of 19th-Century American painter George Caleb Bingham’s work, which traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He was co-curator of “Modern Art From the Pulitzer Collection,” an exhibition of 91 paintings, sculptures and drawings that traveled to Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum.

Shapiro is also a champion of Frederic Remington, an exacting painter and sculptor of cowboy themes whose work enjoys popular success but has not won wide critical approval. When he organized the 1988-89 traveling exhibition “Frederic Remington: The Masterworks,” an interview in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch portrayed Shapiro as making a strong case for Remington against mighty opposition. “I’m standing by my guns here, but I think it’s going to be a shootout with some critics,” Shapiro told his interviewer.

The Los Angeles competition is not the first for Shapiro. He was a candidate for the directorship of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which went to David Ross after a search guided by Malcolm MacKay, the adviser to LACMA’s search committee.