O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Newport Harbor’s Tumultuous Times

This column is the third in an occasional series looking back at the history of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, which marked its 30th anniversary last year under a cloud of staff layoffs, postponed building plans and severely reduced programming.

The decade between 1972 and 1983--when Newport had a succession of four directors, including one who returned five years after his rancorous departure--marked the museum’s major period of turmoil.

On the positive side, the institution acquired a building of its own in Newport Center (moving from storefront space on West Balboa Boulevard), held some locally significant exhibits and began to define itself specifically as a museum of contemporary art.

Today we’ll take a look at the second half of the ‘70s, the revolving - door years. When beleaguered director James Byrnes resigned at the end of 1974, the trustees began to realize how hard it was to find a good administrator willing to come to a small, low-profile art museum in out-of-the-way Newport Beach.

One potential candidate who wanted the job had a Ph.D. in art history but was “horrified,” says longtime board member David Steinmetz, at being asked to help with fund raising.

Another candidate balked at the museum’s small annual operating budget, then less than $100,000. When the board approached Oakland Museum art curator George Neubert (now director of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska), he opted to stay in Northern California.

Finally, nearly running out of options after more than a year of searching, the board decided to hire Harvey West, the director of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. In July, 1976--four months before the foundation was laid for the museum’s new building in Newport Center--West arrived in Newport Beach.

“We liked Harvey,” a former staff member recalls. “He was aggressive, good looking--like a movie star or a corporate executive. He had a gift for gab.”

West said recently that he, unlike Byrnes, believed “the curatorial heart of Newport Harbor was contemporary California art.” But West was accustomed to working in an academic setting. “In terms of ownership and programming, (university galleries) are made up of people from all over the world,” West noted. “You get spoiled. You get so used to having the world at your fingertips.”

On the other hand, he continued, a regional museum such as Newport Harbor is “very territorial. The ownership, the fiscal responsibility, the clientele have a geographic definition.”

West had overseen a construction program when he was acting director of the Penn State University Art Museum. He still dismisses Newport Harbor’s current, 21,000-square-foot concrete structure--built under his administration but conceived before his arrival--as little more than a “warehouse.” But the majority of the trustees wanted a modest building and prevailed over board member John Kelsey--a principal with Ladd and Kelsey, which had designed the Norton Simon Museum--who had envisioned an international architecture competition.

As Steinmetz says, the trustees were “a pretty damn fiscally conservative group” who wanted “a simple, functional, hopefully attractive” structure. And that’s what they got for their frugal half-million-dollar investment (the budget actually rose to about $750,000 with furnishings), plus a $1-million endowment.

The building, constructed on two acres donated by the Irvine Co., essentially was a gift from the community. Ernie Wilson of Langdon and Wilson--which designed the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu--donated the firm’s design services. Don Koll agreed that his construction company would charge no contractor’s fee and bill only for budgeted costs. Air-conditioning and lighting experts also contributed their services.

When the new building opened in September, 1977--with 7,714 square feet of exhibition space, about one-tenth the size of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--Times architecture critic John Dreyfus announced that “poor is beautiful . . . the rooms are almost totally functional.”

The opening exhibit was a landmark retrospective of paintings by the first-rate Bay Area figurative artist David Park, organized by Betty Turnbull, the museum’s curator. She recalls that some trustees pooh-poohed the show, saying Park wasn’t “flashy” enough for the occasion.

In any case, amid all the hoopla, West was nowhere to be seen. To the utter amazement of the staff, he had left in June to return to the Henry Art Gallery--where he had never resigned in the first place.

West had told the search committee he wasn’t sure he wanted to leave the academic world. Steinmetz says the board knew West essentially was on leave from the University of Washington, where he had been given a sabbatical and retained his retirement and fringe benefits.

The job he had come to do--overseeing the construction of the new building--was completed. It was time to get back to Seattle (where, coincidentally, Bruce Guenther, Newport Harbor’s current chief curator, had been serving as acting director.)

In fact, the board was not terribly sorry to see West go. Steinmetz claims the director was “fighting with our free architect” about such non-artistic details as lighting in the offices. While West says one of his biggest accomplishments at the museum was raising salaries to a more professional level, Steinmetz remarks dryly that West was “very good at drawing up budgets and spending money.”

Even the elaborate art symposium West planned to coincide with the opening came under trustee fire because some of the events were scheduled to take place at UC Irvine. West apparently didn’t realize he was dealing with a group of people whose overriding desire was not to marvel at intellectually dazzling programming, but to celebrate the new building they had nurtured from concept to concrete.

Desperate for a director to open the new museum, and loath to spend another year adrift without staff leadership, the board once again was in a bind.

James Demetrion, then director of the Des Moines Art Center, had turned it down, saying he preferred to build a collection that wasn’t limited to post-World War California art.

Meanwhile, former NHAM director Thomas Garver, who had served as a consultant on the new building, had told Steinmetz he was disenchanted with his current job and eager to return to Newport Beach.

The board was still smarting over the angry letter Garver wrote upon his departure, but there were no other likely candidates. Offered the job, he agreed to come a few weeks before the new building opened.

Garver’s second tenure at Newport Harbor was not a happy one, however. He blames the problems on fiscal stinginess (the operating budget remained about the same in the new building) and increased board hostility toward him.

“A couple of (board members) who were extremely manipulative had gained great power,” he says, refusing to name these people. “One man in particular, for whom I harbor a particular loathing, set out by creating a ‘star chamber’ personnel committee that . . . had an announced public agenda but another secret agenda.”

One longtime museum observer who requested anonymity says that Garver frequently could be heard quarreling loudly with his wife, Natasha Nicholson, whom he wanted to hire as bookstore manager, against the wishes of the board. During December and January, 1979-80, she set up an elaborate doll house in the museum, which also met with trustee disapproval.

A former museum employee remembers that Garver, in contrast with his earlier years at Newport Harbor, in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, now “seemed less concerned with (interacting with the) staff and more concerned with what he could get out of the museum.”

Others charged that Garver wasn’t sufficiently productive. Someone wrote a five-page letter to the board president, Garver recalls, “lambasting the staff and me” for being lazy when they were spotted outside the building one day. In fact, he says, they found it impossible to breathe because of the chemical sealant used on a newly installed floor.

Although Garver admits he was “stiff-necked and difficult and on my own high horse” in those days, he also says he “could absolutely never imagine working for a board of trustees again. . . . They simply want control. . . . I think that, clearly, in Newport Beach there was a sense of freewheeling power.”

Garver agrees that this particular kind of power is not unique to Newport Harbor. (“A lot of those parvenu Newport developers might compare to their counterparts in Texas.”) But he did find Newport Harbor’s board more controlling than that of the Madison Art Center in Wisconsin, where he was director from 1980 to 1987.

“If you look at institutions that have a long track record and where families have a tradition of support for certain institutions,” he says, “you will see much more thoughtful management and support on the part of trustees for the executive staff.”

In any case, he adds, board members had become accustomed to getting more involved with the day-to-day running of the museum when Newport Harbor was between directors, and they were not keen on relinquishing that power.

One instance of board recalcitrance Garver recalls involved his plan to buy a sandblasted glass sculpture by well-known contemporary artist Michael Heizer for the glass facade of the museum.

The Acquisitions Council voted to acquire the pieces, but one board member (“a continual troublemaker, but he had just enough money so you couldn’t say, ‘Get off the board’ ”) charged that the windows would be dangerously weakened and threatened to go to OSHA with his complaints. Plans to acquire the Heizer subsequently were abandoned.

Although Garver says there were no big blowups about the content of exhibitions during his second term as director, “there was always a struggle between what I would call ‘quality’ and what the board would call ‘general acceptability.’ ”

Contrasted with the more venturesome contemporary art exhibits during Garver’s earlier years at the museum, shows from the late ‘70s didn’t make too many waves. But high points included retrospective exhibits of the paintings of American abstract painter William Baziotes (in 1978) and the assemblages of George Herms (in 1979).

In early 1980, Garver was in Chicago working on a future exhibition. A board member called him and told him he had to return to the museum immediately. Garver--who had a dinner invitation at the home of the curator of 20th-Century art at the Art Institute that night--said he’d return the next day. The next day would be too late, came the answer. Garver chose to ignore the ultimatum. When he returned to Newport Beach, he was informed that his three-year contract would not be renewed.