The Good Old Days Are Now

“When I left in 1974, I didn’t think Los Angeles could get something like this going,” said William C. Agee, surveying the vast space at the Geffen Contemporary of the Museum of Contemporary Art, where the Sam Francis retrospective he organized is attracting critical praise and crowds of appreciative visitors.

An independent curator who teaches Modern and Contemporary art history at Hunter College in New York, Agee watched with amazement when about 3,500 people turned out for the opening festivities of “Sam Francis: Paintings 1947-1990.” Wandering through the galleries, they perused about 90 examples of the artist’s abstractions--ranging from small, dark meditations on landscape to enormous white canvases splashed with vivid color.

Agee did another double take on a recent Sunday afternoon, when his informal talk on the show drew about 100 eager listeners. Nearly an hour after the event had officially ended, several people still clustered around him, chatting and asking questions, while others requested his autograph on their exhibition catalogs. In the early ‘70s, when he lived in L.A., a similar curator’s talk would have brought a handful of people, at best, he said, shaking his head in astonishment.

Agee, 62, hasn’t been in a New York vacuum for the past 25 years. Indeed, he has made many trips to Los Angeles during the last few years while arranging the Francis retrospective. But he can’t get over how much the local art scene has changed since his departure. And he has a good reason.

No ordinary guest curator, Agee was the last director of the ill-fated, under-funded Pasadena Art Museum. He moved on to a far more promising position as director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 1974, shortly before industrialist and collector Norton Simon took charge of the Pasadena institution--along with its art collection and $1.5-million debt.

Simon transformed the museum into an elegant showcase for his own collection of European and Asian art, and--to a lesser degree--the Modern and Contemporary holdings he acquired from the defunct institution. While the Norton Simon Museum has long since become a major cultural asset, the demise of its predecessor still dredges up painful memories for those who tried to keep it afloat.

“The trustees had built a building they couldn’t afford. It was as simple as that,” Agee said, recalling his stressful years at the Pasadena Art Museum. “They couldn’t maintain it or pay off the mortgage.”

A Princeton- and Yale-educated scholar who held curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York during the late 1960s, he came to Pasadena in 1970 as director of exhibitions and collections, a few months after the museum had moved from its longtime home in a Chinese-style building on Los Robles Avenue to the sleek new facility on Colorado Boulevard.

“With the opening grand galas and all, they had run up enormous expenses,” Agee said. The museum’s administration was also in trouble. After the loss of three directors--Thomas Leavitt, Walter Hopps and James Demetrion--in a six-year period, Thomas G. Turbell, a local banker and vice chairman of the museum’s board of trustees, had been drafted as acting chief. “That situation wasn’t working out, so I reluctantly became director,” said Agee, who took charge seven months after his arrival.

“I didn’t understand fully what I was getting into,” he said. “I was young--at 34, I think I was one of the youngest museum directors ever--and I didn’t know the questions to ask. But also, it was the end of the go-go ‘60s when all things were possible. If you asked about money, the response was, ‘What’s that? Don’t worry; we’ll raise it.’ So there were rude surprises.

“Within a year or so of the opening, it was clear that the museum was just going to sink. So we went into a hunkered-down mode, just to meet the payroll. There simply was no money. We had to find a size where we could operate. I think we were running the museum on about $450,000 a year, with the help of an enormous number of volunteers, primarily drawn from the Pasadena Art Alliance. I just plain told them, ‘Look, if the bookstore volunteers don’t show up, we don’t have a bookstore.’ ”

The situation called for drastic changes, he said. “I had this idea that we could back moving trucks up to the museum, load the collection into the trucks and move across the street to an old El Rancho supermarket. If we couldn’t afford the building we had, we should have given it up and done something we could afford. But no one else took that idea seriously.”

With cutbacks in staff and public hours reduced from six to four days, the operating deficit was stabilized, but there was no hope of paying off the mortgage. And the exhibition program inevitably suffered. Agee is proud of a landmark exhibition of Russian Constructivist Kasimir Malevich’s paintings in 1974, drawn from the collection of the Stedlijk Museum in Amsterdam and organized with the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The Pasadena museum also provided a much-needed forum for accomplished local artists, he said.

“The Malevich show was one of the best shows on the West Coast during the time I was in Pasadena, but nobody came. Attendance was always a problem,” Agee said. And he was bitterly disappointed when he couldn’t rally support for a memorial retrospective of the work of Eva Hesse, an influential conceptual sculptor who died in 1970, at 34. He had hoped to organize the show with the Guggenheim, but it became the Guggenheim’s project.

“Eva has rightly become a kind of icon, accorded major status, but not everybody understood that she was a great artist then,” Agee said. “And any money we raised had to be used to keep the lights on. We couldn’t do any long-range programs of any real heft.”

Agee has no regrets about taking on the challenge of the Pasadena Art Museum, and he has fond memories of the “extraordinary bunch of people” who helped him. “But after a while it just wears you out. So it became time for me to move on,” he said. He became director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, succeeding Philippe de Montebello, who had been named director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Agee stayed in Houston for eight years, then moved to New York, where he has been a research fellow at the Archives of American Art, taught art history and pursued independent projects. Among many other credits, he has organized major exhibitions of the work of American artists Arthur Dove, Stuart Davis, Kenneth Noland and Fairfield Porter.

While Agee’s career evolved in New York, Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art rose--at least in part--from the ashes of the Pasadena Art Museum. Former supporters of the Pasadena museum, including collectors Marcia Simon Weisman and Robert Rowan, joined other aficionados of contemporary art and civic leaders in an effort to establish MOCA in downtown Los Angeles. Founded in 1979, the museum opened in 1983 at the Geffen (then called the Temporary Contemporary) and launched its main building in 1986.

A Francis show is a natural for MOCA. The artist not only had strong connections to Southern California--where he maintained a residence for 32 years before his death in 1994--he was one of the museum’s founding trustees, served on the board for nine years and, in 1993, gave the museum 10 of his paintings. MOCA director Richard Koshalek approached Agee about organizing the show four years ago, but it had been under discussion almost since the museum’s inception.

The invitation not only revived Agee’s association with Los Angeles, it offered an opportunity to rekindle his long-standing interest in Francis. “I had always admired his work deeply and respected him enormously. With Richard Diebenkorn he really is the dean of California painting, and he’s one of the great painters of his generation,” Agee said. “I first saw his work at Martha Jackson’s gallery in New York in the late ‘50s, when I was in college. I got to know him when I was in Pasadena in the ‘70s, but not well because he was traveling, spending a lot of time in Europe and Japan.”

Agee had written extensively about the Abstract Expressionists, but not Francis. Taking on the project “meant getting on a learning curve again,” he said. “One of the reasons I wanted to do it was I really felt that he’s been unjustly overlooked in the last few years. I’m a great believer in the art of painting. It’s just not true that painting is dead or no longer relevant. No one makes that clearer than Sam, so I felt a little bit of a cause. There was a point I wanted to make.”

What’s more, he said, “Sam is one of those people who is both famous and unknown--especially back East, where he cultivated a kind of anti-New York stance, and his work has never been appreciated.” After closing at MOCA on July 25, the exhibition will travel to the Malmo Konsthall in Sweden, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea ex Stabilimento Birra Peroni in Rome--but not to New York.

A citizen of the world with an inquiring mind and a generous spirit, Francis essentially bypassed New York and put down roots in Paris, Tokyo and the Bay Area--as well as Los Angeles. But he tends to be remembered rather superficially as a larger-than-life character or taken for granted as a familiar veteran.

“So many people knew Sam that he was mythologized,” Agee said. “I still hear people say, ‘You can’t write about Sam in an ordinary art historical way.’ I say, ‘Why not? It’s the only way I know.’ I wanted to get back to the essential Sam Francis. This man was a working painter, and he kept at it for over 50 years. The older I get, the more I understand and appreciate how hard it is to do anything well, especially over that long a period.”

Agee said his basic approach to modern artists is to show how they develop from a tradition. Francis’ work falls halfway between first- and second-generation Abstract Expressionists, among artists who “inherit a vocabulary, but also add to it,” he said. “One of the points I wanted to make is how innovative a role Sam’s art really played during the ‘50s and later. He’s one of the artists who announced the switch to a more reductive kind of painting.”

The major challenge in organizing the show was to locate and study an immense body of work. “I’ve never traveled so much for an exhibition. And I don’t know of a more prolific artist. The man worked compulsively,” he said. “You hear people say that Sam needed a good editor. But to say that is to deny who he was. That’s how color painters work. They have to keep loose and keep moving for the work to flow. One reason I wanted to work on Sam’s show is that his work really does tie in with a long tradition of color abstraction. I’m particularly interested in that.”

Nonetheless, just getting through the work and making sure he hadn’t missed anything was difficult, Agee said. “And then I had to back off. At one point I had made the show so huge, I had gotten away from my original proposal, and I had lost something.” Regretfully, he eliminated prints. “My sense was that they had been seen, but there hadn’t been a good overview of his best work. We needed to restore to Sam that fullness, the essential quality,” he said.

Finally seeing the show installed at MOCA and renewing old friendships in Los Angeles has been satisfying, Agee said. But the experience has also caused him to reflect on his past. “I was thinking, this is one of the shows we could have done and should have done in Pasadena, if circumstances had been different,” he said. “But there is a continuity to things. Without Pasadena, maybe there would be no MOCA.”

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“Sam Francis: Paintings 1947-1990,” the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 N. Central Ave., Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. (213) 626-6222. Tuesday-Sunday,11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Ends July 25. Admission: $6, students and seniors $4.