COVER STORY : Still Leaderless at LACMA: New Good News, Old Bad News : The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s curators are doing quite nicely without a director, thank you. But art world realities demand that the top slot eventually be filled.

Fact No. 1: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been without a director for a year and 10 months.

Earl A. (Rusty) Powell III left the directorship in 1992 to take charge of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. His successor, Michael Shapiro, resigned under duress in August, 1993, after less than a year at the helm. A search for a new director is under way with no visible signs of progress.

Fact No. 2: The museum appears to be in surprisingly good shape.

Having survived a countywide fiscal crisis in 1992-93 that cut budgets, staff and programs and sent morale into a tailspin, the museum is on a rebound. LACMA’s county funding--once threatened with a complete cutoff--was stabilized 18 months ago, albeit at a reduced annual level of $14.2 million. The operating budget had plummeted from a high of about $30 million to $25 million, but in the last two years it has risen to nearly $28 million.

The museum’s trustees--long criticized for supporting only capital campaigns and their pet projects--have increased their donations from $803,937 in 1993-94 to $2.2 million in 1994-95 and have dipped into their bank accounts to help finance the museum’s less glamorous needs.

Cash gifts from other donors have risen from $165,416 to about $250,000 during the same period, while donations of $10,000 or more have jumped from $4.3 million to $7.1 million. The museum’s endowment is still a tiny fraction of those at comparable and even smaller institutions, but during the last two years it has grown from $21 million to $25 million.

In a widely celebrated move that unites two local arts institutions and promises to revive a landmark building, LACMA last month announced a plan to lease its recently acquired May Co. space nearby to Otis College of Art and Design, gaining both a prestigious tenant and welcome revenue. Rent from Otis will help the museum pay off a $25-million bond--$18.3 million to buy the property and the remainder for construction.

Two top staff positions, heads of the education and development departments, are awaiting appointments by the new museum director, but most other vacancies are being filled.

All this has taken place more or less behind the scenes. But from a public point of view, the museum also is looking better than it has in several seasons.

The Wilshire Boulevard facility has been operating at a full six-day schedule since November--after a 14-month period when it was closed for an extra day each week to cut operating costs.

Attendance and membership haven’t recovered, but that situation reflects a nationwide trend. LACMA’s attendance stands at about 565,000--roughly half its annual average from 1986 to 1992. Membership is down to 61,000 from a high of 90,000 in 1991, but LACMA still claims the largest number of resident members of any art museum in the country.

The best news for those who judge museums by their programs is that the museum has a bumper crop of summer exhibitions, including stellar international attractions, scholarly achievements, avant-garde revelations and celebrations of local talent.

Not surprisingly, William A. Mingst, president of the board of trustees, is trumpeting all these accomplishments.

“Things have dramatically changed,” he says. “We’re just going forward.”

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What hasn’t changed is that the museum still has no director.

There is no single authority who speaks for the institution, promotes its mission and projects an image of being in charge of its entire operation--from public programs, financial affairs and personnel matters to care of the collections and facilities.

The search officially began in February, 1994, after the county funding crisis had been resolved. Mingst, a general partner in the Oriole Group, an investment management firm, is heading a 14-member trustee committee with the help of Korn Ferry, an executive search firm that helps identify candidates and evaluate their credentials.

Many candidates have been considered and interviewed, Mingst says, but he has declined to name contenders or detail proceedings. Various names have run through the art world’s rumor mill, but only one candidate--Evan Maurer, director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, who bowed out of contention in November--has been confirmed. Maurer cited family commitments and satisfaction with his current job as reasons for his withdrawal.

Mingst says delays in the search have been caused in part by competition from two more prestigious institutions--the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which named Malcolm Austin Rogers as director in September, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which ended a two-year search in November with the appointment of Glenn D. Lowery. Mingst also says museum directors’ daunting travel schedules often force his committee to wait a long time for interviews.

But despite the seemingly endless process, Mingst says that the search is proceeding and that the task is too important to rush.

“We’re still enthusiastic,” he says. “We’re still talking to a lot of exciting people who are interested in coming to Los Angeles. It’s just a matter of timing.”

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LACMA’s problems are particularly disconcerting because the museum looms so large in the local art community.

“It’s the hub,” says John Walsh, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “It’s our one general art museum, and we all expect tremendous things of it. . . . It ought to generate energy for everybody.”

L.A. City Councilman and art collector Joel Wachs calls LACMA “the one institution that crosses all generations and cultures and links the past with the present.”

He also believes that it has been unfairly criticized: “It’s a very young museum that’s just beginning, but it’s getting better and better.”

While LACMA has made gains on many fronts, Mingst says the recovery is being driven by “a schedule of internationally important exhibitions” that are “bringing the museum’s energy level back to where it was in the ‘80s.”

The popular favorite on the summer agenda is certain to be “Gustave Caillebotte: Urban Impressionist.” Opening Thursday, the major traveling exhibition of more than 100 paintings and works on paper is expected to create an enthusiastic new audience for the relatively little-known French Impressionist, as it did last fall at Paris’ Grand Palais and this spring at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The show will provide a full picture of a painter who has been primarily known for two striking compositions: “Paris Street; Rainy Day” and “The Floor-Scrapers.” Caillebotte, a keen observer of late 19th-Century Paris and a close friend of painters Claude Monet and Pierre Auguste Renoir, was also an important patron of Impressionist art who bequeathed his collection to the French national museums.

The Caillebotte show joins three other major exhibitions at LACMA: “Kandinsky: Compositions,” a critically acclaimed landmark assembly of Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky’s greatest work; “Emil Nolde: The Painter’s Prints,” an extensive exploration of the German Expressionist’s graphic art, and “Annette Messager,” the first major American presentation of the renowned contemporary French artist’s work.

Also on view are “Sam Francis: The Last Works,” an installation of the late Los Angeles-based artist’s final paintings, and four shows largely drawn from the museum’s collections of textiles and costumes, German Expressionist art and African material.

And there’s more to come. “P.L.A.N.” (Photography Los Angeles Now), offering an eclectic, contemporary perspective on local photographic activity, will open on July 6.

Two exhibitions of costumes and textiles, “From Fashion to Fantasy: Dressing the American Bride, 1830-1990” and “The Fabric of Life: Japanese Folk Textiles,” will close July 16 and Aug. 20, respectively, but they will be replaced by “Adrian,” presenting the work of film costume designer Gilbert Adrian (Aug. 17-Jan. 7). At any given time throughout the summer, visitors will have a choice of at least nine special exhibitions--not to mention related lectures and educational events.

No leader. Encouraging recovery and dynamic program. If you put these facts together, you have to ask: Who needs a director?

Of course, every large institution needs a figurehead to articulate its vision, shape its future and speak on important issues. Internally, the museum would surely benefit from a central authority who can set priorities, weigh the needs of various departments and rally forces behind a common goal. But is the public better served by a museum with a director than by a staff that is going like gangbusters without one?

The question elicits pained expressions from those in the trenches.

“We do need a director precisely because we want to do so well,” says J. Patrice Marandel, LACMA’s curator of European painting and sculpture. In a miracle of timing and international diplomacy, he snagged the Caillebotte exhibition as a last-minute substitution for a long-planned show on Pissarro and Cezanne that fell apart when loans of key works couldn’t be secured.

Marandel considers himself fortunate to have landed a popular exhibition, and he is delighted that Los Angeles-based investment bankers Cantor Fitzgerald stepped up with funding. But plugging holes in the schedule is not the normal way of doing business.

“To keep up this level of programming is very taxing,” Marandel says. “It’s very demanding on the staff. Not that our work should not be demanding, but psychologically it’s draining to be without a director. You need a director for moral support, also for financial support. If something goes wrong, you want to have a director who backs you up.”

Stephanie Barron, curator of 20th-Century art and coordinator of curatorial affairs, concurs. The staff takes justifiable pride in presenting such a varied, high-quality slate of events, but it hasn’t been easy, she says. In the absence of a director, she has overseen the complex process of proposing and scheduling exhibitions--which involves the effort and cooperation of many departments.

Most exhibitions are in the works for four or five years before they come to fruition, but some emerge as fortuitous opportunities requiring quick action. When you get down to cases, each show seems to have its own story.

“The Caillebotte exhibition definitely was able to come here in great part because of the professional rapport that Patrice Marandel enjoyed with his colleagues in Paris,” Barron says.

As for “Kandinsky: Compositions,” which was organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and not intended to travel, Barron pulled off a coup of her own by initiating negotiations to bring it to Los Angeles. She began pursuing the show in January, 1994, and put it on LACMA’s books last July.

“The exhibition was such a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that when I realized MOMA was doing it and it didn’t have another venue, I asked if it would be possible to extend it,” Barron says.

“They were initially responsive but cautious as to whether the key lenders would in fact be willing to extend their loans,” she says. “When I approached the museum, they were still very delicately involved in their own negotiations and didn’t want to jeopardize the show in New York. So we very carefully and in partnership approached the key lenders. . . . Some were extremely difficult. One was impossible to convince. Other institutions were supportive. But it required the active involvement on the part of LACMA and MOMA. . . . We took it picture by picture to try to build this show for Los Angeles. I’m delighted that we had such little attrition.”

The only important loss was “Composition V,” which is represented by a smaller version of the painting.

Still other shows have proceeded at a deliberate pace for several years but have changed in the process.

“Annette Messager” evolved from an idea that occurred simultaneously to two LACMA curators into a joint project with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Carol S. Eliel, associate curator of 20th-Century art at LACMA, became interested in Messager’s work in 1989 while working on the museum’s exhibition “Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art.” It turned out that Sheryl Conkelton, then the museum’s associate curator of photography, shared her interest. So they joined forces, proposing a show during Michael Shapiro’s tenure. Conkelton resigned at LACMA in 1993 to join MOMA’s curatorial staff. But instead of upsetting the project, her move added luster to the show when MOMA signed on as a co-organizer.

“Emil Nolde: The Painter’s Prints” is also a serendipitous joint venture, but--oddly enough--it involves two director-less museums. LACMA curators Victor Carlson and Timothy O. Benson were doing spadework on a show of Nolde’s color lithographs six years ago when they heard that Clifford S. Ackley, curator of prints, drawings and photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was planning an exhibition of Nolde’s etchings.

Concerned that they might be working at cross-purposes, Carlson called Ackley to inquire.

“At first I think he was somewhat wary of teaming his venerable institution with such a young, brash museum as LACMA,” Carlson says of his Boston colleague.

But when Ackley visited Los Angeles and saw that America’s largest concentration of Nolde graphics outside of New York’s Museum of Modern Art was here--LACMA has the Robert Gore Rifkind collection, a major assemblage of German Expressionist graphics, while UCLA and the Norton Simon Museum also have Nolde holdings--he agreed that a joint project made sense. Ackley took charge of the etchings, while Carlson handled the lithographs and Benson organized the woodcuts.

Both museums lost their leaders while the show was in process. Alan Shestack, the Boston museum’s director, left his post in December, 1993, to become deputy director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He wasn’t replaced until last September, when Rogers came aboard, but that gap in leadership--plus the LACMA vacancy--caused no problems for the exhibition, the curators say.

The void became apparent when forms requesting loans of artworks were sent to museums and collectors, Carlson says. Directors typically sign the forms, so other administrators had to be pressed into service, but all the loans were granted.

Other LACMA staffers are slogging away equally hard to keep the museum’s exhibition program going at full throttle.

In organizing “P.L.A.N.,” photography curator Robert Sobieszek says he is fulfilling part of a long-held commitment to broaden the museum’s audience by representing a wider range of artists. The show is the culmination of a 2 1/2-year effort to find new talent, see a broad spectrum of contemporary photographic work and winnow it down to a survey of 67 artists.

In another section of the museum, Nancy Thomas, curator of ancient and Islamic art, is completing a six-year effort on “The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt,” scheduled to open Nov. 5. The show, co-organized with the American Research Center in Egypt, will feature more than 200 objects from American collections and will reveal American scholars’ little-known contributions to the understanding of ancient Egyptian culture.

The curators are just doing their jobs, they say, with or without a director. Although none of them report upsets or delays due to the lack of leadership, museum professionals across the country say it is difficult to maintain momentum with a vacancy at the top.

Without a director, funds for exhibitions are harder to raise, complicated projects are more likely to be postponed or rejected and proposals for the future can seem too tentative to stir up support and enthusiasm.

“The director gives overall shape to the exhibition program and balances projects that have high popular appeal with shows that have a scholarly kick to them and that do a service to the artists and pieces exhibited,” says Brent Benjamin, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ deputy director of curatorial affairs, who worked with acting Director Morton Golden during the museum’s search for a new chief.

“If a wonderful show comes along, it’s easy to say yes. If something more esoteric is suggested, [a museum without a director] may want to defer,” he says.

Marandel expresses a similar concern. “I was extremely lucky with Caillebotte,” he says. But French Impressionism is a safe subject. “When you want to be a bit more adventurous--and, after all, we as a museum should try to open new vistas and try to find subjects that have not been explored yet--that means another leap.

“That’s where we really need a director,” Marandel says. “I have lots of ideas, but I’m a bit shy, because if I start something and a director comes, and he or she doesn’t like those ideas, I might have to scratch the project completely. . . . I have some very ambitious projects with other museums, but they are so big that I even hesitate to bring them to the board because I’m afraid that the board will . . . say this is perhaps too ambitious for the time being. We have to wait.”

When Rogers arrived at Boston, one of the first things he did was to review the exhibition schedule, Benjamin says. No commitments were broken, but many adjustments were made. “He put his stamp on the program from the very start,” most notably in the advertising and installation of exhibitions, Benjamin says.

So far, LACMA’s headless state apparently has not deterred other museums from cooperating on exhibitions.

“Institutions have a certain life of their own,” Benjamin says. “If an American paintings curator at Boston is working with an American paintings curator at LACMA on a show of American paintings, I wouldn’t think there would be a problem.” But other administrators say skepticism is inevitable, and it could damage collegial relationships.

Another danger of being director-less is the lack of a representative who travels in elevated art circles.

“Really important exhibitions are rarely offered through the mail,” Barron says. “They are discussed years before, casually or at a meeting or at a conference, or at an opening. Really important exhibitions have their tours set by the time anybody hears about them. A director is important in terms of being in the circuit to both proffer important exhibitions and to be responsive to them, or to suggest to colleagues that exhibitions be done jointly. This isn’t only the director’s responsibility, but it is certainly something that a director can be actively involved in, and it can certainly help the museum.”

Although curators typically propose and organize exhibitions, they do so in concert with a director. “A director is central to the artistic vision of the institution,” says National Gallery Director Powell. Fund-raising is often said to be a director’s top priority, but that is not necessarily the case, he says. “Exhibitions and acquisitions are my primary responsibilities. Fund-raising is third, and it’s often done to raise money for exhibitions or acquisitions.”

As for LACMA’s situation, Powell says: “I think the curators have been wonderfully entrepreneurial in filling the exhibition schedule. I take my hat off to them. But at a certain point a director must be appointed, and I think that time is coming. You can do a program, a very good program, without a director for a while. But beyond a certain point, I think it’s a case of diminishing returns.”

When Powell left LACMA in 1992 after a 12-year tenure characterized by unprecedented growth and vigor, he appeared to be vacating a plum position. The following year, after Shapiro departed, acknowledging that the museum needed a stronger administrator, the situation was entirely different. The museum’s financial picture had darkened and, indeed, grown quite ominous. The board of trustees--an unwieldy body that currently has 39 members--had a reputation for being meddlesome or only pursuing their own agendas. Six talented curators had jumped ship.

Not so long ago, the museum seemed hopelessly tainted, and many art museum veterans asked: “Who would want that director’s job?”

But now, with recovery in evidence, the question becomes ever stronger: Why is it taking so long ?

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The Not-So-Rosy View

Some things have been going well at LACMA, but being without a leader has taken a toll in other areas:

* Fund-Raising

The museum’s operating budget fell from $30 million to $25 million during a countywide fiscal crisis, but now it has edged back up to about $28 million. In the meantime, trustee giving and cash donations from other donors have risen. Yet, in the face of a nationwide recession, not having a director is just one more obstacle.

* Strategic Outlook

There’s the vision thing--no director means no cohesion. While curators can work on individual projects, some of them even long-term, they are hesitant to tackle large, adventuresome undertakings without the support and approval of a leader. Further, there is no unifying sense of where the museum is going as it faces the next century.

* Prestige

LACMA has retained a respected curatorial staff and important collections, yet its failure to find a director has induced skepticism. Says National Gallery Director Earl A. (Rusty) Powell III: “You can do a program, a very good program, without a director for a while. But beyond a certain point, I think it’s a case of diminishing returns.”

* Morale

Budget cuts, reduced programs and staff departures all contributed to a depressing environment in 1992-93. Now, even while spirits seem to be rising as the museum overcomes some of its most pressing problems--notably its relationship with the county--a leadership vacuum continues to create a climate of uncertainty.