O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Newport Harbor: The Boom Years

When Kevin Consey arrived in September of 1983 to begin his term as director of Newport Harbor, museum supporters were hungry for strong leadership, a quality they didn’t perceive in former director Kathleen Gallander.

At the tender age of 31, Consey had already been a museum director for six years, first at the Emily Lowe Gallery at Hofstra University in New York, his alma mater, and subsequently at the San Antonio Museum of Art.

Recalling his decision to come to Newport Harbor, Consey once said it was the museum’s potential that attracted him.

Timing played a role, too. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the museum was wrestling with the issue of whether it was a volunteer or professional organization, Consey said. But by the time he arrived, the issue had been settled.

“The trustees were accepting the fact that they had to invest more confidence in the director and the professional staff because they couldn’t stand to lose a director very quickly again.”

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A big bear of a man with a stern profile--you could easily imagine him a Renaissance courtly portrait--Consey cultivated a stiff, even pompous manner in public, perhaps to mask his comparative youth. Discussing his relationship to museum staff, he would invoke the phrase “dispassionate distance.”

But in private, he was a feisty conversationalist with a dark sense of humor--he once lent this writer a tongue-in-cheek book picturing “road kills”--and a warm heart. Hours after a memorial service for Betty Winkler, one of the museum’s founders, he was still visibly shaken as he presided over an exhibition opening.

Most important to the museum, however, was his belief that a capable staff performs best without directorial interference.

When Consey arrived, Schimmel had been chief curator for two years, Ellen Breitman was in charge of education, and Richard Tellinghuisen headed museum operations. In short order, Consey assembled the remainder of an unusually able, committed and congenial staff that numbered more than three dozen in the mid-’80s.

“It was a good period for both of us,” Schimmel--who is now chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles--recalled recently. “While he was focused on building a new institution, I was charged with . . . bringing the level of Newport’s programming up to what would be suitable for a new world-class facility.

“Kevin saw what I had initiated with ‘Action/Precision’ (the first of three major exhibitions investigating aspects of Abstract Expressionism) before his arrival--it was completed under him--as being an important direction from a scholarly standpoint. He pushed for that kind of program--looking at the history of American art--and he continued to embrace the longstanding tradition of the institution’s involvement in California art.”

During Consey’s first year, the museum’s chronic financial problems were his biggest headache. When he arrived, the deficit was about $59,000, almost 10% of the annual operating budget of $600,000. A year later, the deficit was history and the budget had shot past $1 million.

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Consey achieved this coup with an aggressive pursuit of the business community, despite heavy competition from the Orange County Performing Arts Center building campaign.

“We basically used the strategy that we had a proven product, a history, and the Performing Arts Center had none,” Consey said. “If you’re going to fund a center based on promise, you should be willing to fund an art museum based on a clear record of service and performance.”

Major gifts to the museum during Consey’s tenure included a $300,000 National Endowment Challenge Grant, $250,000 from the Harry and Grace Steele Foundation, and a 10-year, $1-million exhibition grant from the Irvine Co.--a windfall that, in retrospect, may have marked the beginning of a costly form of indentured servitude.

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Riding high on his financial success during a period of major economic growth in Orange County, Consey immediately began planning to expand the museum, housed in a 23,000-square-foot building in Fashion Island that no longer seemed adequate to show off the permanent collection as well as traveling exhibitions. In 1987, Consey commissioned a feasibility study.

Given the green light, the museum’s building committee set about identifying a short list of internationally known architects, including Mexico’s esteemed Ricardo Legoretta and Italy’s Renzo Piano, who designed the Menil Collection museum in Houston and the Pompideau Centre in Paris.

“The board of trustees, which I had always heard was so difficult and controlling in terms of their own agenda,” Consey says, “(was) for the vast time I was there extremely supportive and willing to make changes to bring greater recognition to the institution.”

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Yet Consey was not to get his building. The museum board fired Piano in July, 1990--eight months after Consey resigned to become director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, where he remains today. By early 1992, the economy had hit the skids and the whole project was axed.

Though Consey remains highly circumspect about his relationship with Irvine Co. Chairman Donald L. Bren, and though some deny it, persistent rumblings indicate that the developer’s wishes were a key factor in plans for the 10.5-acre parcel he donated at south Pacific Coast Highway and MacArthur Boulevard. (The $15-million building--soon re-budgeted at $20 million--also involved raising a $20-million endowment.)

Bren, a museum board member famous for his unwillingness to make public statements, never commented publicly on the design. Yet, sources say, when Irvine Co. Vice Chairman Thomas H. Nielsen was appointed board president in June, 1989, the balance of power in the museum “family” can be said to have shifted decisively toward the development company executive.

Piano’s earliest schematic designs featured a wave-like series of roofs on six long structures (“fingers”) linked by a glass “street.” By August, 1989, when the 75,000-square-foot plan was unveiled to the public, the fingers were stuck together compactly and the wave roofs were replaced by a single, barrel-vaulted version.

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As Piano later told a reporter, Bren was “quite persistent” that the finger design was too open and too expensive.

After numerous other difficulties and disagreements--to be discussed later in this series--the museum fired Piano. By then, Consey had been in Chicago for the better part of a year. He bridles when asked about the belief--held by some museum supporters--that the plan lacked sufficient board enthusiasm during his directorship.

That notion is, he says, “a remarkable bit of revisionist history. . . . Hiring Mr. Piano, the conceptual plan, design and development--every aspect was approved by the board for the almost three years I was involved. For someone (after I left) to decide it’s too expensive (is like saying), ‘We didn’t know what we were doing for three years; we were hoodwinked by a silver-tongued devil.’ ”