St. Louis Curator Expected to Head L.A. Art Museum

Michael Shapiro, chief curator at the St. Louis Art Museum, is expected to be appointed director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art today after a meeting of the museum’s board of trustees. If named to the high-profile position, Shapiro will succeed Earl A. (Rusty) Powell, who resigned in April to become director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The museum’s search committee has attempted to conduct its quest for Powell’s successor in secrecy, but sources close to the museum have revealed that Shapiro, a specialist in 19th- and 20th-Century art, is the committee’s choice.

The trustees are expected to vote to select Shapiro today. The appointment also requires ratification by the county Board of Supervisors. It was not clear Tuesday whether the supervisors had already approved the selection.

Shapiro, 42, was in Los Angeles last week to meet with museum staff and trustees. He returned Monday to meet Los Angeles County supervisors and to be on hand for the public announcement of his selection, the sources said.

Shapiro’s candidacy has taken the art world by surprise because he does not fit the profile painted by museum President Robert F. Maguire and outlined in advertisements for the position. When Powell resigned after presiding over a period of extraordinary growth at the Wilshire Boulevard facility, Maguire said the museum would choose its new chief from the top line of experienced administrators and fund-raisers.

The three other candidates interviewed for the job are all museum directors: Robert T. Buck of the Brooklyn Museum, Peter C. Marzio of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Richard Brettell of the Dallas Museum of Art. But as the competition reached the final stages, Shapiro, who supervises 12 curatorial positions at the St. Louis Art Museum, had edged out more experienced applicants, sources said.

Although Shapiro’s colleagues across the country have expressed surprise about his impending appointment, he is praised as a first-rate scholar of 19th- and 20th-Century art who has strong leadership qualities.

“Michael’s a superb curator,” said James K. Ballinger, director of the Phoenix Art Museum and, like Shapiro, a scholar of Western artist Frederic Remington. “He has catholic tastes and a broad background. I think he’ll work out beautifully.”

“He’s really solid,” said a St. Louis colleague who declined to be identified. The source also noted that Shapiro had been surprisingly successful in raising funds during the recession to buy works by German artists Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer for the St. Louis museum.

Other museum professionals have surmised that the museum may be attempting to duplicate its experience with Powell, who was relatively unknown when he came to Los Angeles in 1980 from his post as executive curator at the National Gallery.

If appointed head of the County Museum of Art, Shapiro will be catapulted into the national spotlight and will be called upon to make an enormous career leap. Instead of moving up through the ranks of museum administration, as is customary, he will suddenly head the largest art museum in the nation’s second-largest city.

“He’s the kind of guy trustees like. I expected that he would be a director one day. I just didn’t expect it to happen in one move,” said an art administrator who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The 26-year-old Los Angeles County Museum of Art has a staff of about 645 and an annual operating budget of $31 million, about half of it provided by the county and the remaining portion from private and other government sources.

LACMA’s membership is close to 100,000 and the museum attracted nearly 1 million visitors in 1991. During Powell’s tenure, the museum also generated such crowd-pleasing and critically acclaimed exhibitions as “A Day in the Country,” which presented a new interpretation of French Impressionist art, and a retrospective of David Hockney’s work. By contrast, Shapiro’s home base is a venerable Midwestern museum about half LACMA’s size.

Shapiro graduated from Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., in 1968. He earned master’s degrees from Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., and Harvard University. He completed his Ph.D. in 1980 at Harvard, writing his dissertation on “The Development of American Bronze Foundries: 1850-1900.”

He served as guest curator in 1980-81 at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, where he organized “Cast and Recast: The Sculpture of Frederic Remington,” a traveling exhibition that explained the complexities of bronze casting.

At the St. Louis Art Museum, he organized exhibitions of contemporary art and a large traveling show of the work of 19th-Century American painter George Caleb Bingham.

The search committee is composed of museum President Maguire and past presidents Daniel N. Belin, Julian Ganz Jr., Richard E. Sherwood, Camilla Frost and Franklin D. Murphy. Working with Malcolm MacKay of Russell Reynolds Associates, a New York-based executive search firm, the committee screened about 50 candidates and selected four for interviews.