Appreciation : Franklin D. Murphy: A Civilizing Force for the City

He was a man who made things happen. Today this gloriously glitzy Pop Culture Capital of a town has a veneer of high culture in its galleries and museums. If that patina of civilization can be traced to the efforts of any one individual, it was Franklin D. Murphy, who died Thursday at the age of 78.

We have lost him now and more’s the pity. His official positions as UCLA’s chancellor, president of the board at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and chairman and chief executive officer of Times Mirror made him a powerful part of officialdom, but the way he wielded that power was endearing.

One of his endless tasks of fund-raising was to scrape together some $23 million in the 1980s for expansion of the County Museum of Art. Completely baffled by such matters, I asked him how he went about it.

“Well, so far,” he replied, “it’s just been me and (philanthropist-collector) Ed Carter on the phone.”

He cared boundlessly about the legacy of history that lives through art. It is a caring that seems to be dying with him, and more’s the pity still.

His was a remarkable generation. It produced those World War II-type Yanks who walked with a certain swagger and behaved with extraordinary decency. They believed that the System, with its ponderous institutions and rapacious egos, could be made to ennoble ordinary people.

What makes a man with the administrative skills of a Medici banker turn those talents to the establishment of repositories for eloquently beautiful objects, even on those occasions when the objects are still so new they frighten and anger people?

Maybe it was because he’d learned that to do less is simply wrong. In 1936, as a young man, he studied medicine in Germany. Always gifted with a knack for meeting the key people at the crucial moment, Murphy, on different occasions, shook hands with both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler.

One day in Munich he ran across an extravagant official art exhibition called “Entartete Kunst”--Degenerate Art. The show was Hitler’s notorious personal immolation of the advanced art of his time. Murphy looked at the searing expressions of Max Beckmann, E.L. Kirchner and the rest of the rebels of the Expressionist movement.

“Frankly,” he said later, “it was so new I didn’t get it.”

But he did get a clue. Hitler, with even-handed evil, had also included the advanced literature and music of the day. Murphy’s mother, trained as a concert pianist, had imbued her son with appreciation of that muse. It happened that the record being played to demonstrate the immoral quality of modern art was Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Die Dreigroschenoper” (“The Threepenny Opera”).

Murphy instantly recognized the work’s blend of tango, jazz and classical themes as the furthest thing from degenerate.

“I learned you must look hard and think long to grasp the new thoughts such art expresses.”

The lesson served him well. It was Los Angeles’ luck that what served him well did as much for the city. At UCLA in the ‘60s, he established the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden for modern work, fostered an exhibitions program that allowed gallery director Fredrick S. Wight to make a showcase of national significance. By the time he departed UCLA for Times Mirror in 1968, the campus had a new art building, the Elmer Belt Leonardo da Vinci Library, the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and its Museum of Cultural History.

He loved Italy and the Renaissance. He helped save Venice after her disastrous floods. He collected Pre-Columbian art. His activities were multicultural in the best sense.

Murphy never did one thing at a time. It was all very well to lend artistic enrichment to a university but what L.A. really needed in the late ‘50s was a fully fledged, free-standing museum for the general history of art. What it had was a corner of what is today the Museum of Natural History in Exposition Park. There were only a few good things in the collection.

“You cannot,” intoned the local naysayers, “build a collection for such a museum. At this point in history it is impossible.”

Murphy and his fellow museum enthusiasts had an answer for them, and its name was Norton Simon. Despite protean effort, however, Murphy and his forces were unable to gain the Simon collections, as they had hoped, as the aesthetic backbone of the museum. In the short term, it looked like humiliation for Murphy and an egomaniac’s reputation for Simon.

As it turned out, a certain positive shrewdness manifested itself over time. Without the original carrot of the Simon collections, the museum would likely not have been built or renovated into the rather handsome complex it is today.

A similar scenario attaches itself to Armand Hammer, another collector Murphy helped cultivate for the people’s museum. Like Simon, Hammer decamped to build a private monument to himself in Westwood. Today that building is under the stewardship of Murphy’s old school, UCLA.

What goes around comes around. When it comes around well one is likely to ascribe it to a certain tone that’s been set. Franklin D. Murphy set a tone of doing the right thing for the community. When other members of the old guard opposed the establishment of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Murphy said, “There is room in this city for another museum!”

He sat on the board of the Kress Foundation, the Getty Museum and was board chairman of the National Gallery of Art.

He acted as if he believed that if you behave positively and set the groundwork solidly in the right direction, things will work out.

In a way, he wrote his own epitaph. When he first moved to Times Mirror, someone suggested that he should give up his cultural activities lest they appear as a conflict of interest. In one of his crusty moods, he replied that no matter where he worked, “I will never become a cultural eunuch.”

He was brave, constructive, admirable and not to be messed with.