A Little Historical Context, Please: It’s Never Been Easy

The saga of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s recent misfortunes has assumed enormous importance in the local art scene, but this is only the latest chapter in the history of an institution that bears the weight of the region’s cultural aspirations.

The museum got its start in Exposition Park, as part of a county-funded showcase for science, history and art that was founded in 1910 and opened three years later in the current home of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

The fledgling museum’s art collection got its first big boost in 1938 with a gift of 19th- and early 20th-Century French and American paintings. William Randolph Hearst, the publishing mogul and a passionate traveler, in 1942-56 presented the museum with a wide range of art gifts. Oil baron J. Paul Getty was an important benefactor in the late 1940s.

William Valentiner directed the art component of the museum with distinction, but it was the arrival, in 1954, of chief curator Richard Fargo Brown that signaled change. Encouraged by the late industrialist and collector Norton Simon, Brown spearheaded a move to give the art collection a home of its own.

Edward W. Carter, then president of Broadway-Hale Stores Inc., agreed to raise money for a new building if the county would donate land, underwrite the museum’s operating expenses and authorize an independent, self-perpetuating board to manage the museum. His rationale was that collectors would be more inclined to donate art to a privately managed, publicly supported museum than to one completely controlled by the county.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn initially opposed the venture, charging that it would prove too expensive, but a contract that met all of Carter’s conditions was signed on Dec. 9, 1958. The Museum Associates, which had been established in 1938 to support the art component of the old museum, was authorized to raise money and manage the new museum.

Carter, who in 1960 became president of the board he envisioned, had his eye on a seven-acre site in Hancock Park that had been granted to the county by G. Allan Hancock in 1915 and was valued at $8 million. Carter hoped to open the museum in 1961, but it took that long for the supervisors to approve the site. Ground was broken in May, 1962.

By all accounts, Carter was a vigorous fund raiser. Financier Howard Ahmanson kicked off the fund drive with a gift of $2 million, Anna Bing Arnold contributed $1 million, and the Lytton Foundation gave $750,000. More than 175 benefactors donated $25,000 or more apiece. During the course of the campaign, the goal was raised from $5.5 million to $8 million to $10.75 million. By opening day, $12 million had been raised.

Local pride ran high in the spring of 1965, before the museum’s opening. “This is the largest new art museum to be built in the United States since the National Gallery was completed in Washington, D.C., more than a quarter-century ago,” Carter said when a complex of three buildings designed by William L. Pereira & Associates was turned over to the county.

“Los Angeles faces the most exciting year that art-minded citizens of this community have ever experienced,” Times art critic Henry J. Seldis wrote in his 1965 New Year’s column. “At last, a fairly old dream, the establishment of a separate art museum, is becoming a physical reality as the handsome museum building complex in Hancock Park nears completion.”

James L. Rorimer, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, wrote one of many congratulatory articles in a special magazine published by The Times for LACMA’s opening. Although no one said so in print, the implication was that the city finally had its Met.

The museum was already troubled by the egos of some of its supporters, however, and it would soon have a reputation as a place where trustees fought with each other, interfered with directors and curators, and put their own agendas in front of the museum’s health and welfare. The single event that solidified this image was the abrupt departure of Brown, who was LACMA’s founding director but was forced to resign about six months after the museum opened.

In answer to an outpouring of support for Brown, Carter said he was removed because of “administrative inadequacies and his unwillingness to supplement them by sufficient delegation of authority and responsibility to others.”

Brown, in turn, cited “irreconcilable policy and operation difficulties that developed between the professional staff and the private board of trustees” and charged that the trustees had interfered with his professional duties.

The exact nature of their differences was never explained. The only issue that came to light was that Brown had wanted Mies van der Rohe, an internationally renowned modern architect, to design the museum, while Ahmanson had lobbied for Millard Sheets, the Los Angeles-based designer of Ahmanson’s Home Savings and Loan buildings. The selection of Pereira as the project’s architect was a compromise that Brown accepted reluctantly.

That Brown became director of the Kimbell Art Foundation in Ft. Worth, Tex., and worked with architect Louis Kahn on a new building that is considered an architectural jewel only made his departure more bitter for his Los Angeles supporters.

One of those supporters was Simon, who originally pledged $1 million to LACMA’s building fund but reduced his gift to $100,000 when he learned that the museum’s three structures were to be named for major donors--a move that he believed would discourage contributions from others. Simon’s collection filled several galleries of LACMA when it opened. Indeed, many of the best works on view there for several years were loans from Simon, leading to hopes that he would donate his collection to LACMA.

But he increasingly distanced himself from the museum, resigned from the board of trustees in 1971 and eventually turned the bankrupt Pasadena Art Museum into his own museum, which opened in 1975. Simon never made public his reasons for pulling out of the museum he had helped to establish, but in a 1990 Times interview he said LACMA “had too many bosses” in its early years.

Relations between the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the museum’s private management were also strained. A few months after the museum opened, the supervisors demanded the right to appoint representatives on the museum board. The trustees refused but agreed to a series of meetings.

Antagonism blew up in 1966 when the board tried to close an exhibition of Edward Kienholz’s work. LACMA trustees rejected the appeal as an infringement of the museum’s obligation to exhibit artworks “that represent an honest statement by a serious artist.” In retaliation, Supervisor Hahn threatened to strip top museum officials of supplemental county-paid salaries, but nothing came of the threat. In art circles, the whole affair came to be viewed as a watershed that ended the supervisors’ attempts to interfere with museum programs.

Kenneth Donahue, a scholar of 17th-Century Italian painting, became director of the museum after Brown’s departure and held the post until 1979, when health problems forced his retirement. His tenure was marked by the turmoil that might be expected of a youthful institution in a major city and by discontent with the museum’s contemporary art program, but LACMA gained a large presence. On the museum’s 10th birthday, in 1975, Times critic Seldis lauded the museum’s progress in collections, membership, exhibitions and other programs, while noting that the $1.9-million endowment was “regrettably small.” The “most troubling aspects of the museum,” he wrote, were its disappointing architecture and the board’s “unfortunate inheritances” of meddlesomeness and secrecy.

During the Donahue years, the museum’s collection grew significantly. The Ahmanson Foundation (which continues to fund acquisitions) provided hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for Old Master paintings; Anna Bing Arnold was a consistently generous angel who donated such wonders as a set of five massive Assyrian reliefs; Joan Palevsky gave money for the Nasli M. Heeramaneck collection of ancient art from the Middle East and Asia, which remains one of the museum’s greatest treasures. It was too late to find bargains by European masters, but not for works of Indian and Southeast Asian art, where curator Pratapaditya Pal oversaw the growth of a remarkable collection.

Pal served as acting director of the museum until 1980 when Earl A. (Rusty) Powell III, an administrative curator at the National Gallery of Art, was appointed director. Powell arrived at a less-than-propitious moment--after the passage of Proposition 13 had threatened the museum’s county funding--but he presided over a period of unprecedented growth at the museum.

By the time Powell resigned in 1992 to return to the National Gallery, this time as director, LACMA had gained 281,000 square feet of new or renovated exhibition space, including the Robert O. Anderson Building for modern and contemporary art and the Pavilion for Japanese Art. Acquisitions included more than a dozen large collections, such as the Robert Gore Rifkind collection of German Expressionist prints, drawings and books and the Proctor Stafford collection of pre-Columbian art.

Upon Powell’s arrival, annual attendance had fallen to about 500,000 from more than 2 million, in 1977-78, when a King Tut exhibition drew record crowds. Admission fees, introduced after the passage of Proposition 13, were largely responsible for the sharp decline, but annual attendance rose to nearly 1 million during his 12-year tenure and membership grew from about 40,000 to 90,000.

Under Powell’s direction, the museum also gained a national presence, becoming the preeminent host for major traveling shows west of Chicago and the originator of such major exhibitions as “A Day in the Country” (a show of French Impressionist art), “The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910-1930: New Perspectives” and “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany.”

Powell’s departure coincided with a downturn in Southern California’s economy and ended an era of prosperity and growth at the museum.