Long in Latitude : Given Ample Elbow Room, Curator Paul Schimmel Put Newport Harbor on the Map in the ‘80s

During the mid-1980s, while director Kevin Consey concentrated on raising money and enthusiasm for a new, $20-million home for Newport Harbor on South Coast Highway, chief curator Paul Schimmel immersed himself in the museum’s main reason for being: producing informative and provocative exhibitions of modern and contemporary art.

“My involvement with the building plan, the choices of the architect and design of the building was very, very little,” Schimmel said recently. “I was working on the exhibitions, and Kevin wanted it to be that way. The building was his passion. In some respects, I was very fortunate because he was so involved with the building that I was able to concentrate my full energies on the exhibition program.”

Beginning with “Action/Precision: The New Direction in New York 1955-60” in 1984 and continuing at two-year intervals, Schimmel’s trio of exhibitions about key issues relating to Abstract Expressionist painting involved significant original research into historical topics.

Not that he neglected contemporary art. One of his major achievements at Newport Harbor was “Chris Burden: A Twenty-Year Survey” from 1988. With its assembly of objects used in Burden’s performances, its inclusion of two massive installations and its authoritative catalogue, the show offered a probing analysis and overview of the work of a seminal performance artist.

Although Burden had received his master of fine arts degree from UC Irvine--and even had a work-study job at Newport Harbor during his student years--the Orange County connection was not the impetus for the retrospective. Schimmel never was one to champion artists simply for geographic reasons, which provoked much grumbling in local studios.

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Other landmarks in Schimmel’s Newport Harbor career included the first Newport Biennial, “Los Angeles Today,” in 1984, a survey of California artists of two generations, including Mike Kelley, Jill Giegerich, Charles Garabedian and Ed Moses. Like virtually all exhibitions at the museum, it was documented by a thorough catalogue, supporting the museum’s growing reputation for serious scholarship.

Schimmel also founded the “New California Artists” series, which spotlighted Los Angeles up-and-comers. The program initially was run by Schimmel and associate curator Tom Heller (best remembered for his California Culture Series, a blend of alternative and avant-garde classical music programming).

After Heller left, “New California Artists” really took off under Anne Ayres, associate curator of exhibitions and collections from 1986 to 1988, when she became director of the Art Gallery at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Ayres, whose background was in university teaching, complemented Schimmel’s more freewheeling personality with a series of meticulous and sensitive brochure essays expressing a keenly intellectual outlook on contemporary art.

During the ‘80s, Newport Harbor became a player in the national art scene as shows were picked up by such major institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.

Attention paid by the major East Coast art press was another sign of major league status. “Chris Burden,” for example, made the pages of Artforum, Flash Art, Arts, Art in America and ArtNews magazines, as well as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

New additions during Schimmel’s curatorship, which more than doubled the collection, encompassed a roll call of such major California postwar artists as John Baldessari, Ed Kienholtz, David Park, Ed Ruscha, John Altoon, Vija Celmins, Robert Irwin, Charles Ray, Allen Ruppersberg, Chris Burden and James Turrell.

Meanwhile, Schimmel’s taste and knowledge helped guide the Acquisition Committee, which raised money to buy works for the museum. When members visited the private collection of Aggie Gund, then president of the board of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “they would know what they were looking at,” Schimmel says. “That was very impressive for a small institution. It also helped me in terms of getting loans. It gave the museum credibility.”

Schimmel and Consey were not always in accord. Their differences came to a boil over the declining amount of exhibition space in the new building when its size was decreased to save money. Schimmel says he was adamant that actual gallery space not be confused with other public spaces “where the art is in fact decorating the architecture.”

Yet Schimmel--who left his Newport Beach post in 1990 to become chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles--is quick to credit Consey with providing a conducive atmosphere for research and acquisitions. “Kevin did not hesitate to get behind something that he believed would be in the interest of the institution, whether de-accessioning art to go out and acquire new pieces or embracing a single exhibition that would cost us as much as the total budget several years earlier.”

For example, “The Interpretive Link: Abstract Surrealism Into Abstract Expressionism, Works on Paper 1938-1948,” mounted in 1986, cost “in excess of $200,000--more than the entire 1980 exhibition budget,” according to Schimmel.

Selling art from a museum collection often raises alarm among donors and others who fear an erosion of institutional value, but in this case it was entirely logical. After the board decided to collect only contemporary California art, works by artists with other geographic affiliations were sold at auction to raise money for acquisitions.

(Consey recalls that the board voted at least four times in six years on whether the museum should have a broader focus or remain dedicated to contemporary art, but the great majority of trustees always favored the status quo.)

In defense of the high costs of shows during his tenure, Consey points out that he was hired “to increase the scope and importance of (the museum’s) scholarly activities.” With the cooperation of the board and the help of “an extraordinarily talented (development) staff and a great economy,” he said, he was able to increase the museum’s budget fourfold. It was $1.7 million when he left, with a surplus of about $30,000.

Hmm. Then how to account for the $552,707 operating deficit that appears on the museum’s September, 1990, financial statement? Consey responds that the museum operated without a director for nearly a year and a half after he became director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, a period when “money was spent on exhibitions and salaries, and money wasn’t being raised.”

Just before he left for Chicago in 1989, Consey was asked what he felt he’d achieved during his tenure at Newport Harbor.

“I think that, to a certain extent, we made it socially acceptable to like contemporary art in Orange County,” he replied. “And if there’s anything I’ll take credit for, it’s being able to do that without for a single beat compromising the cutting edge or the abrasiveness or the controversial aspects of our exhibition program.

“In the long run, you never make a mistake by having excellence as your measuring stick. You may take it on the chin in the short term. You may be charged with being elitist and incomprehensible and not giving the community what it wants, but I don’t think a public educational institution is in the business of giving the public what it wants.”