ART : Leap of Faith : Is little-known Midwestern curator Michael Shapiro the best person to lead the L.A. County Museum of Art into the 21st Century?

The good news about the surprising appointment of Michael E. Shapiro to the directorship of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is that the 42-year-old Midwesterner has strong curatorial priorities. After a dozen years in which physical growth and program expansion were

the principal goals for the Wilshire Boulevard museum, it’s important that someone whose first love is the presentation and interpretation of art has now assumed the helm. LACMA’s new breadth could use some depth.

The worrisome news about Shapiro’s appointment is this: A wide gulf separates him from the profile of a new director trumpeted as desirable by the museum’s search committee, when it began the hunt in May for a successor to Earl A. (Rusty) Powell III. The consensus is that Shapiro is smart, gregarious and a gifted curator. Still, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks he’s even a loose fit, never mind tailor-made, to LACMA’s published job description.

How could this be? What happened between the time the search began and the time a relatively obscure chief curator from a mid-size museum in St. Louis emerged as the leading candidate for the job? Why the apparent last-minute switch?

These are difficult questions, but they’re certainly worth pondering. First, some background.

The search for a new director began after a heady moment of euphoria in LACMA’s board room. Rusty Powell was a dark-horse candidate who had won the coveted position of director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He had arrived at LACMA in 1980 from the post of executive curator at the National Gallery, a mid-level administrative position of no particular distinction, and 12 years later he was departing to run the prestigious institution from whence he had come. Needless to say, there was a good deal of hometown pride at having been the crucible in which had been forged the director-designate of the National Gallery.

If pride does indeed goeth before a fall, note that hints of a rather pronounced case of Swelled Head began to turn up at LACMA. The signs came into sharpest focus when the search for a new director began in earnest. Powell’s replacement, it was enthusiastically said, would be plucked from the highest echelons of the museum world. For not only would the new director follow a man who had been transformed into the leader of the nation’s official art museum, but he would also, in taking the helm of LACMA, be assuming the rudder of “one of the leading museums in the world.”

That description comes from the job-listing advertisement placed by the LACMA trustees’ search committee in Aviso, a trade publication of the American Assn. of Museums. Now, it’s certainly true that LACMA is a lot better museum than it used to be--so much so that it has outpaced many others that once surpassed it. Furthermore, one might expect a bit of advertising honey to sweeten the lure to Los Angeles, especially in the immediate aftermath of a torrent of negative publicity about a burned and looted city.

But one of the leading museums in the world ? LACMA can’t even claim the best collection in Greater Los Angeles--an honor that goes to Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum of Art--never mind elbow its way onto a list of the world’s greatest. Fueled by a decade of civic boosterism incessantly touting “world-class-this” and “world-class-that,” the search committee had gotten a wee bit carried away.

On a more mundane level, the difference between the new director and the advertised position is marked. The Aviso ad is clear: “Administrative abilities and proven fund-raising skills are requirements.” The declaration echoes repeated statements to the press concerning the need to substantially bolster the museum’s woefully small endowment and to make the institution less reliant on the vagaries of county funding. The museum is said to be fiscally sound, but all that growth and building during the expansionist 1980s have caused the operating budget to balloon nearly 400%, to $31 million annually.

Administratively, LACMA is a dizzying labyrinth. A mix of government bureaucracy and privately funded staff, which together totals nearly 650 employees, it is also a teeming bazaar of competing constituencies: donors, collectors, artists, various factions of the public. The job demands an unusually adept administrator, someone who is part politician, part diplomat, part schmoozer, part entertainer and part serious colleague to the museum’s professional staff.

In an interview with The Times barely three weeks before Shapiro was named to the post, search committee chairman Robert F. Maguire explained: Any formidable candidate for such a daunting task would already “have made the transition from a curatorial position to a director’s position.” Shapiro, of course, had not.

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Not that he isn’t “a guy of a certain age with director written all over him,” in the words of one prominent art administrator. Shapiro is impressive. He’s energetic, personable, thoroughly professional and, in the two brief instances I’ve seen him in action on his home turf, plainly someone with a bright future. Had he been director, rather than chief curator, at St. Louis, no one would have raised an eyebrow about the LACMA nod.

However, given the fact that in his first year at LACMA Shapiro will likely have to raise more money just to keep the doors open than he has raised during his entire career to date, never mind deal with all the other challenges facing this troubled time, people were mighty startled. According to sources, the surprise has already been met with tentative discussions inside the museum about possibly hiring an additional person to assist with administration and fund raising.

In addition to Maguire, the search committee included past board presidents Julian Ganz Jr., Daniel N. Belin, Richard E. Sherwood, Camilla Frost and Franklin D. Murphy. Could they simply have been blown away by Shapiro’s scholarly capacities? Perhaps. Curatorial credentials were also given high priority by LACMA, and Shapiro’s are more substantial than his predecessor’s. Powell did beef up the museum’s exhibition schedule and he made a number of important acquisitions during his tenure, but you always had the feeling that his real passion was for the ambitious and exhaustive building program.

Like Powell, Shapiro was educated at Williams College and Harvard University, and his primary field is likewise 19th-Century American art. From his list of publications--multiple articles on historical figures George Caleb Bingham and Edgar Degas, and on contemporaries Jim Dine and Nancy Graves--he has catholic if conservative tastes. His most extensive scholarly work has focused on the sculpture of the wildly popular--and decidedly minor--cowboy artist Frederic Remington.

Professionally, Shapiro has held positions in two noteworthy institutions: curator, since 1984, and chief curator, since 1987, at the St. Louis Art Museum, where he was responsible for 19th- and 20th-Century European and American art, as well as for coordinating a staff of 11 other curators; and, from 1980 to 1984, assistant professor of art history at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

Shapiro has won a variety of research fellowships, including a 1979-80 stint as a Kress Fellow at the National Gallery of Art. John Wilmerding, curator of American art there during Shapiro’s fellowship, and later deputy director, apparently emerged as a vigorous champion of his LACMA candidacy. Wilmerding, now a visiting curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and on the faculty at Princeton University, had organized a National Gallery show of the 19th-Century American art collection of search committee member Ganz and his wife, JoAnn. Relative to favored European painting and sculpture, American art before 1945 often holds stepchild status in museums. Americanists often form tight bonds.

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In response to the widely registered surprise at the appointment, LACMA has tried to put a particular spin on the news. It’s a riff that might have been borrowed from the Democratic presidential campaign: Shapiro, it is now being said, is one among a bold new generation now moving into museum directors chairs. The baby-boomer crew, which encompasses first-time museum directors in their 40s, includes James Cuno of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, Kathy Halbreich of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Ned Rifkin of the High Museum in Atlanta.

This tack might work for the new directors, whose past careers do bear comparison with one another. But it just doesn’t wash for the institutions they direct. LACMA stands out like a sore thumb from the rest, in terms of size, budget and complexity. For example, its annual operating budget is more than three times the Walker’s, but its endowment is less than half as large.

So what could explain it? Consider this: Perhaps the decision is not so unusual after all. The surprise was created not by the choice of the candidate, who is certainly promising, but simply by its startling divergence from expectations that had been built up by the museum. For the hard truth is that LACMA’s board has never, in its 27-year history, hired a director with formidable credentials for the post.

Part of the reason is that, in the past, directors with formidable credentials wouldn’t work for LACMA. The directorship had gone begging for a year and a half when Powell finally took the job in 1980. The last time it had been open, in 1965, Kenneth Donahue was quickly moved up from within the museum’s curatorial ranks. The job was only open then because the previous director, who was the most talented and visionary of them all, had been fired in a messy battle with trustees.

Richard F. Brown had come to Los Angeles in 1954 as chief curator of the county museum in Exposition Park, and he was named the first director of the independent art museum when it branched off in 1961. Before that, he had been a visiting professor at Harvard and a research scholar at New York’s fabled Frick Museum.

Shortly after LACMA’s glitzy new palace opened on the edge of Hancock Park, Brown was forced out. He had tangled with trustees determined to call the administrative and curatorial shots. One struggle had focused on an architect for the new building, with Brown favoring Mies van der Rohe over the preferred candidate--Home Savings Bank designer Millard Sheets--while another concerned contractual obligations about whose name would go where on what buildings.

Brown went on to Ft. Worth, where he developed the extraordinary Kimbell Art Museum and hired Louis Kahn to erect what may be the most beautiful postwar museum building in the country.

Donahue, who had come to LACMA from the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Fla., only the year before, was a substantial scholar, and he had a long run at the museum. But rather like the city, with its setup of a weak mayor and a strong council, LACMA’s reputation as a place where the board ran roughshod over the director, and where trustees vigorously feuded among themselves, was set in stone.

When Donahue stepped down in 1979, LACMA found itself up the creek. Offers were made to candidates, offers were turned down. Directors elsewhere wouldn’t take the job. Months passed, then a year, then another six months. Finally, when Powell signed on, he was a virtual unknown in the museum field.

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A likely explanation for the surprising turn of events now is that, true to its history, LACMA’s board didn’t want a formidable director. Make no mistake: Shapiro is a very talented guy with enormous potential who just might be able to pull it off. And it’s always better to have a curatorial partisan in the director’s seat than a hard-core administrator (although deciding between the two doesn’t have to be an essential choice). As a director, though, he’s in many respects a replay of Powell, when many thought Powell had been a turning point.

Today, the museum is a very different place than it was in 1980, never mind 1965. It’s a major institution with a high profile in a complicated city facing great challenges for the immediate future. The search committee’s hyperbole aside, the expectation was that LACMA would be a plum for a director of a mid-size museum elsewhere, someone with that proven, difficult-to-find combination of scholarly vision and significant administrative experience, who was ready to take the next step.

The new director hasn’t just taken a step, though; he’s taken a leap. What looms below is a deep and dangerous abyss. Fingers are crossed all over town in hopes that he’ll land with agility and grace on the other side--and that LACMA’s board of trustees will help him get there.