ART / CATHY CURTIS : Ambition and Acrimony : Cathleen Gallander Helped Newport Harbor Build a National Reputation, but There Were ‘Growing Pains’

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

The period 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.

This installment looks at the early 1980s, when chief curator Paul Schimmel began establishing the museum’s nationwide reputation for its inventive contemporary and modern art exhibitions, under the short-lived leadership of director Cathleen Gallander.

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Early in 1980, Thomas Garver--serving his second stormy term as director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum--was abruptly dismissed by the board of trustees. Obliged to scour the art world for yet another leader, the board tried once again to lure Oakland Museum curator George Neubert, who instead accepted the post of associate director at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

After a four-month search, the board chose 49-year-old Cathleen Gallander, who had been director of the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi for the previous 19 years. Gallander, a graduate of the University of Texas and the Institute for Arts Administration at Harvard Business School, was Newport Harbor’s first--and to date, its only--female director.

During Gallander’s tenure, the South Texas museum was accredited by the American Assn. of Museums, more than doubled the size of its staff and budget and moved into a new building 10 times larger than the old one. After the move, an administrator who reported directly to the board was hired to lift day-to-day financial matters from Gallander’s shoulders.

It was also during those years that she met Philip Johnson, the renowned architect who designed the museum’s new home. Johnson, ever the high-toned aesthete, was concerned that his building house significant art, so he introduced Gallander to leading artists and collectors, and donated some of his own art to the museum.

Deputy director Marilyn Smith, who has held various positions at the Corpus Christi museum since 1972, recalled recently that Gallander was “very much self-taught in the area of the arts, but if she didn’t know something, she would seek out an expert to find out. . . . She had a desire to bring quality to the community.

“Twenty years ago, some (of her choices) were a little too challenging. One thing that sticks in everyone’s mind was (minimal artist) Donald Judd’s plywood box series. Even the staff had a hard time understanding why are were doing these things. . . . I think she knew (her outlook) wouldn’t always make friends.”

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At Newport Harbor, however, Gallander’s ambitious cultural vision apparently was at odds with her administrative skills.

On a Friday afternoon in May 1981, less than a year after she arrived, Gallander suddenly ordered museum curator Betty Turnbull to resign and leave the building by 5 p.m. Turnbull had been a museum volunteer since 1967, curator since 1977 and acting director in the mid-’70s. Figuring she’d be the next to go, Phyllis Lutjeans, the museum’s curator of education, resigned shortly thereafter.

“Things have been in turmoil for a long time,” Turnbull told a Times reporter after her forced resignation. “I have to take it as the way of the business. People have been very tense since the new regime instigated a lot of rigid rules and regulations. I heard rumors that this might happen, but I didn’t pay attention to them.”

At the time, Gallander said Turnbull’s departure “was best for staff morale.” Asked about the issue in a recent phone interview, the former director--now a private dealer in late 19th- and 20th-Century art in New York--was circumspect.

“Most directors like to build their own team,” she said. “I felt I needed a team, and I wanted somebody with a broad international outlook.”

Most observers agree that Gallander’s major accomplishment was to hire 27-year-old Paul Schimmel as curator of exhibitions and collections in 1981. Before attending graduate school at New York University, he was curator of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston from 1975-78.

Working with Paul was “a wonderful experience,” Gallander said. “I had been told (the trustees) wanted a museum with an international reputation, and I felt Paul was the person to help bring that about.”

In 1982, Schimmel initiated the “New California Artist” series, small one-person shows spotlighting such up-and-comers as painters David Amico and Lari Pittman. The next year, “Edvard Munch: Expressionist Paintings 1900-1940,” from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, was a huge popular attraction, drawing 43,000 visitors in two months.

Schimmel--who would go on to curate a groundbreaking trio of exhibitions related to Abstract Expressionist painting--says that the Munch show was “the point for me when it seemed as if I was going to be able to establish my own program. I did a very elaborate installation--very dramatic--that was extremely well received, and things for me started to open up. There was a sense of confidence in the new curator.”

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For Ellen Breitman, the new curator of education, the Munch show was also a “watershed,” she says. Breitman, hired in 1982 from the Cleveland Museum of Art, was given full rein by Gallander to plan numerous specialized tours, evening and weekend events.

One of Breitman’s inventive ideas was the Contemporary Culture program, run in the mid-’80s by Tom Heller, an assistant curator. The series attracted adventurous types with hip music and performance art programming that included Joan La Barbara, Glenn Branca, Paul Dresher, David Anton and the Rova Saxophone Quartet.

On the surface, Gallander seemed to be holding her own.

In 1982, Newport Harbor won accreditation by American Assn. of Museums. By the following year, the collection was worth $2 million, 4,500 members were signed up and annual attendance was 65,000. (Figures from earlier years are not available.)

Yet the board clearly had lost faith in its director. As Schimmel told a reporter several years later, “I knew there was something amiss when I came out here and was interviewed (without Gallander present) by the entire board of trustees.”

Breitman tells the story of what she calls “Black Monday.” Four days after she began working at the museum, Gallander startled her by suggesting she might want to reconsider moving all her possessions from Cleveland.

Gallander was concerned that she wouldn’t be at the museum much longer, Breitman said, and expressed worry that she had lured her education curator to Newport Beach under false pretenses by painting an overly optimistic financial picture.

Early in 1983, a major fund-raising campaign to plump up the $1.5-million endowment seemed to be at a standstill. In the board’s view, as longtime trustee David Steinmetz says, Gallander “didn’t have the administrative ability for the job.”

Other observers echo this opinion. “She couldn’t inspire leadership in anyone,” says one. “If someone would challenge her, she wouldn’t hold her own. She would hunker down in her office mulling over something, not being able to make a decision.”

Still, as some have pointed out, being the museum’s first female director was not an easy thing in conservative Orange County a decade ago. The corporate mentality viewed a cultural organization--even one founded by 12 women--as essentially a men’s club.

Noting that Gallander “had a very professional vision for the museum in terms of moving it out into a more national and international perspective,” Schimmel cites her support for his 1982 show of the ethereal, organic structures of sculptor Alan Saret, as well as for “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper 1954-1976,” a 1981 exhibition from the Dia Foundation in New York that actually had been scheduled earlier by Turnbull.

“From the standpoint of the collection,” Schimmel says, Gallander “was thinking of having it focus more on works on paper, but with an international scope.”

In Gallander’s recollection, the board had seriously entertained her idea of broadening the strictly California focus of the collection, a step she believed important for “the artists as well as the viewing public.”

In fact, her concern for artists was paramount. During the opening for a 1983 show of drawings and prints by Richard Diebenkorn, she spent the entire evening in her office calming the ill-at-ease, party-shy artist (and his wife and their dog). It was a lovely gesture, but as the museum’s director, her place was in the public eye, meeting and greeting museum supporters.

Although the board fired Gallander in June, 1983, then-president Ray H. Johnson put a bland public face on the situation, telling The Times that the decision for her to leave the museum was “mutual” and that “she leaves in place a very fine staff.”

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In July, however, when Johnson announced the hiring of 32-year-old Kevin Consey from the San Antonio Museum of Art, his remarks made clear just why Gallander didn’t work out.

“What we needed at this time,” he said, “is more aggressive leadership and stronger relations with the community and the board and staff. . . . (Consey) has a very fine track record in interfacing with the corporate supporters and all the communities served by a museum.”

A decade later, Gallander says she is reluctant to “point fingers” or “dredge up that old stuff,” but she offered a spirited defense of her record.

“What I brought to the museum,” she said, “was an interest in bringing the very best and the most exciting art to the institution. I put in place the mechanisms, the professional staff to accomplish that.

“In terms of the negatives, what a museum is about is art. Certainly it has to be well run, but the tail doesn’t wag the dog. . . . This trend toward the business and MBA approach (to museum directing) as opposed to the art approach is not creating the most exciting museums.

“The board was not unified as a whole. . . . They never agreed on what they wanted. There were various ideas of what the museum should be--local as opposed to international, (for example)--and what the role of the museum in the community should be. This is a fairly typical thing for a new museum in a (non-urban) area. I think it was going through a lot of growing pains.

“A contemporary museum is, by and large, a very sophisticated concept. For a new institution to start out with that concept is a very brave thing. It takes a lot of education and it takes a lot of time to do. Things like that evolve slowly.”