Signs for LACMA Post Point to St. Louis Curator : Directorship Would Thrust Michael Sharpiro Into Spotlight

As the search for a new director of the County Museum of Art goes on behind closed doors, all signs point to the appointment of Michael Shapiro, chief curator of the St. Louis Art Museum.

Members of the search committee, including past and present museum presidents, met with senior members of LACMA’s administrative and curatorial staff early this week and all but announced Shapiro’s selection. Shapiro, 42, has been in Los Angeles all week, meeting with museum staff and trustees, and he has already looked into housing and schools for his two children, according to sources close to the search.

Shapiro seems to be an unlikely choice, both in terms of the county museum’s stature and qualifications established by the museum’s search committee, but he has been interviewed in far greater depth than other candidates, the sources said.

The art world has greeted the news of Shapiro’s candidacy with a combination of shock and admiration. His colleagues in museums across the country describe him as “personable,” “smart,” “energetic,” “diplomatic” and “smooth with trustees.” “He looks right. He’s a guy of a certain age with ‘director’ written all over him,” said one art administrator who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But praise for Shapiro’s personality and professionalism is countered by the stunning news that he might shoot directly from obscurity to one of the nation’s highest-profile museum jobs, instead of working up through administration or taking over the helm at a smaller institution.

“They’re trying to hire another Rusty Powell,” said one source, referring to the former LACMA director who in 1980 came to the museum from a senior curatorial post at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. “But they forget that no big museum director would come to Los Angeles 12 years ago when they finally hired an unknown quantity after being turned down repeatedly by more prominent people. Maybe they want someone they think they can control. Or maybe they’re trying to be creative and spot a rising star, but I just don’t get it.”

Some of Shapiro’s colleagues contend that Shapiro is up to the job, but everyone contacted by The Times expressed surprise that he may be asked to take a single leap from managing a curatorial staff of 12--including himself--to running an entire museum where the curatorial staff alone numbers 35 and the full staff adds up to about 645.

In their quest to fill the position vacated by Powell, who resigned in April to direct the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the museum quickly formed a search committee, composed of museum President Robert F. Maguire and past presidents Daniel N. Belin, Julian Ganz Jr., Richard E. Sherwood, Camilla Frost and Franklin D. Murphy.

With the help of executive search consultant Malcolm MacKay, the committee has screened 50 candidates, narrowed the list to a dozen names and selected four to interview. The other applicants who have been interviewed are all seasoned museum directors: Robert T. Buck, 53, of the Brooklyn Museum; Peter C. Marzio, 49, of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and Richard Brettell, 43, director of the Dallas Museum of Art.

If Shapiro is appointed director, he will take over an institution that differs markedly from his current home base. LACMA attracted close to 1 million visitors in 1991, about twice St. Louis’ attendance, and the Los Angeles museum’s membership of about 100,000 is more than six times the 16,000 members in St. Louis. The 26-year-old Wilshire Boulevard facility is a 500,000-square-foot complex with about 250,000 square feet of exhibition space, while the St. Louis Art Museum--built as the Palace of Art for the 1904 World’s Fair--is a 225,000-square-foot structure, about 95,000 of which is exhibition space.

Finances are equally disparate. LACMA has an annual operating budget and an endowment of about $31 million each, while St. Louis runs on a $10-million budget (plus an annual income of about $8 million from a special property tax district) and a $12-million endowment.

The St. Louis Art Museum is no backwater institution. If Shapiro were director of the museum, his impending move wouldn’t have caused such a stir. The apparent decision also would be less surprising if search committee members had indicated plans to consider curators for the position. Instead, the LACMA directorship has been hailed as one of the top jobs in the country and trustees have suggested that they would pluck Powell’s successor from the ranks of seasoned museum directors.

“The person must have a good track record in museums, a specific record of achievement. That’s key,” committee chair Maguire said earlier this month in an interview about the search. The successful candidate must “have made the transition from a curatorial position to a director’s position,” he further stated.

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An advertisement for the position in Aviso, a publication of the American Assn. of Museums, lists many qualities that Shapiro apparently possesses, but also specifies, “administrative abilities and proven fund-raising skills are requirements.” Maguire has declined to discuss individual candidates and Shapiro has requested that the St. Louis Art Museum release no information about him, but his resume indicates that his administrative experience consists of overseeing a small curatorial staff, while his fund-raising has been restricted to soliciting donations for acquisitions and exhibitions.

What is the rationale for choosing Shapiro? When LACMA staff members met with Maguire, Ganz and Belin earlier this week, the trustees told them that Shapiro’s “people skills” would make up for any lack of experience.

A specialist in 19th- and 20th-Century painting and sculpture, Shapiro began his higher education at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., in 1968. He earned master’s degrees at Williams College and Harvard University and completed his Ph.D. in 1980 at Harvard, writing his dissertation on “The Development of American Bronze Foundries: 1850-1900.”

During his college and graduate school days, he worked as an assistant or fellow at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Collection of Fine Arts and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

He was a guest curator in 1980-81 at the National Museum of American Art, where he organized “Cast and Recast: The Sculpture of Frederic Remington,” an exhibition that traveled to the Denver Art Museum and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. The show was a landmark piece of scholarship, according to James K. Ballinger, director of the Phoenix Art Museum and a Remington scholar. “It was a very, very insightful exhibition that sorted out the complex problems of bronzes, and not only those made by Remington. I go back to the exhibition catalogue all the time,” Ballinger said.

Indeed, that exhibition and a subsequent Remington show and catalogue done at St. Louis have cemented Shapiro’s reputation as an American art scholar who waxes ecstatic over finding Remington’s thumbprint in a bronze and defends the faith of cowboy art. These passions, recorded in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, arouse suspicion among contemporary art aficionados and European art specialists who view American bronzes and Western art as a minor chapter of art history, if not a mere footnote.

But Shapiro is also said to have catholic tastes. During his eight-year tenure at St. Louis--as curator of 19th- and 20th-Century art since 1984 and chief curator since 1987--he has organized small exhibitions of works by contemporary artists Richard Haas, Jasper Johns, Jonathan Borofsky and Peter Marcus.

His more ambitious curatorial efforts include two traveling exhibitions of notable St. Louis-based collections, “The Ebsworth Collection: American Modernism, 1911-1947” and “Modern Art From the Pulitzer Collection.” Shapiro has also organized a traveling exhibition of works by 19th-Century American painter George Caleb Bingham. His publications include books on Remington and Bingham, and articles on Nancy Graves’ sculpture.

Shapiro has won high marks for bringing to America an acclaimed but controversial show of German artist Gerhard Richter’s paintings of the Baader-Meinhof gang, a German terrorist group that aimed to overthrow capitalism in the 1970s.

Curators also praise Shapiro for purchases of paintings by Richter and Anselm Kiefer to complement the St. Louis Art Museum’s stronghold of German Expressionist art, including major works by Max Beckmann. But apart from these recent acquisitions--now displayed in a 4,000-square-foot gallery--the museum’s contemporary art collection is “singularly unimpressive,” one contemporary art specialist said.

Still, several of Shapiro’s colleagues support his candidacy.

“I am surprised a little that the L.A. County Museum of Art would hire a curator as director, but if they are looking in the curatorial ranks, Michael is at the forefront,” Ballinger said. “If he is the one they choose, I think he’ll work out beautifully.”

“Michael sets goals and follows through, whether it’s raising money for acquisitions or organizing an exhibition. He’s very pragmatic. . . . He doesn’t have immediate past experience of being a director, but he has the qualities one would want in a director,” said Roger Berkowitz, deputy director and chief curator of the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art.

“I’m surprised because the choice is unexpected, but I think he has great potential,” said Tom Sokolowski, director of hte Grey Art Gallery at New York University. “It’s good to see that trustees are looking in unexpected cities. Interesting things are happening in St. Louis and Richmond, Va., for example, not only in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.”