Don’t Close the Books Yet

“Everything we hoped would happen internally at the Huntington has happened. That’s the success story,” said Robert A. Skotheim, reflecting on his 12 years as president of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Now 67, he recently announced plans to retire on June 30, 2001, when he will return to his longtime home in the Seattle area. He still has 11 months to go at the venerable institution in San Marino, but it’s already clear that the Huntington Skotheim will leave behind is not the one he found.

Now--as then--the 207-acre estate founded in 1919 by Los Angeles developer Henry E. Huntington looks so graciously luxuriant that visitors think they’ve died and gone to “Masterpiece Theatre.” And it’s much more than a beautiful period piece. With its world-renowned research library, its premier collection of 18th and early 19th century British art, a burgeoning holding of American art and 130 acres of gardens containing 14,000 kinds of plants, the Huntington has been a major cultural and botanical resource for many years.

But when Skotheim arrived, in 1988, the Huntington was drastically underfunded, making it difficult to carry on operations and keep up appearances, much less to thrive. Maintenance had been deferred for far too long, and 52% of the staff were earning $14,400 or less a year--a sum that qualified them to receive food stamps if they were heads of households.

“It was a plantation,” as Skotheim declared in a 1995 interview. By then, the Huntington’s financial picture had improved, but its leaders were embarking on an uncertain effort to increase support so that plans for growth and development could move forward.

Today, many of those plans have been realized. The next president of the Huntington will have plenty of challenges, but the benefits of Skotheim’s leadership can be measured in impressive numbers. As he has shaped a new vision of the institution, set its broad agenda and inspired others to provide the financial support, the Huntington’s endowment has increased from $62 million to $170 million. The annual budget has grown from $9.8 million to $34.8 million, and the books have been balanced for the past seven years.

At the same time, membership has grown from 3,000 to 18,000, the volunteer corps has expanded from 500 to 900, and the Board of Overseers has doubled, from 30 to 60 members. Among physical additions, the new MaryLou and George Boone Gallery provides a space for traveling exhibitions, and the first part of a $43-million Botanical Research and Educational Complex--including a library, laboratory, classrooms, demonstration gardens and a conservatory of plants in simulated climate zones--is expected to open early next year.

Skotheim attributes these achievements to “a rallying around” of “people who care about the Huntington and now realize that the institution is really dependent upon them.” This has come about partly by casting supporters as “Huntington successors,” he said. “The idea is, if you are a donor or an overseer, or if you work at the institution, you really play a role as a successor to Mr. Huntington.”

Skotheim--who came to Southern California after serving as president of Whitman College, a private liberal arts and sciences school in Walla Walla, Wash., for 13 years--says he could never have predicted what has transpired at the Huntington in the past 12 years. Nonetheless, as an American cultural historian as well as a seasoned administrator, he is fascinated with the social climate that fostered the changes, what they mean--for better and for worse--and what they might portend for the future.

“When I arrived here, the issue was: Could this great institution and its collections somehow become more viable or activated and interesting to people? But I was looking at it from the inside, as an isolated challenge. It certainly never occurred to me that something large in the environment was going to take place,” he said.

Even as recently as 1995, when the Huntington launched plans to finance its rising aspirations, the Getty Center, the Skirball Cultural Center, the Japanese American National Museum, the California Science Center and the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach had yet to open, and the Norton Simon Museum was only beginning its renovation. Those now-completed projects represent phenomenal growth, he said, noting that two other major additions to the local scene--the construction of Disney Hall downtown and the expansion of the Getty Villa in Malibu--are underway.

“The recession of the early ‘90s either came to an end or was replaced by prosperity of a new type,” he said. “So even though Los Angeles has lost its corporate headquarters, we see this explosion of cultural institutions and a general intellectual and aesthetic success. The public has shown an interest that we never anticipated.

“But the terms of existence for cultural institutions have changed,” he said. As former bastions of art scholarship and preservation have reached out to the public and attempted to broaden their bases of financial support, the line between educating and entertaining an audience has been redrawn. “Whether you use really benign examples like welcoming exhibits that are so pretty to look at and so interesting to see--such as the Lincoln, Washington and Bloomsbury shows at the Huntington”--or the wildly popular but controversial exhibition of motorcycles at the once-staid Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Guggenheim’s global expansion under the direction of Thomas Krens, the art world “will never be the same again,” Skotheim said.

Unlike some other cultural centers, the Huntington hasn’t been publicly criticized for turning itself into an entertainment center or theme park. But it has kept up with the times by revising its mission statement “with education as the umbrella theme,” Skotheim said.

The original mission statement focused on “research into the ideas of the English-speaking peoples,” with only a brief mention of “exhibits and displays, insofar as it is practical,” he said. The revised statement says the Huntington “encourages research and promotes education in the arts, humanities and botanical sciences through the growth and preservation of its collections, through the development and support of a community of scholars, and through the display and interpretation of its extraordinary resources to the public.”

It’s a powerful change, but not as alien as it may seem, he said. “Obviously Mr. Huntington meant to contribute to the education of Southern California. But his idea was that people would make reservations and get dressed up and no children would be admitted in the galleries. People who are attracted to the Huntington now, who care about it and financially support it, want it to do more than just present things to the educated elite. They want to feel they are making a contribution to a larger public.”

Speculating about reasons for the current “hyperactivity” in cultural institutions, Skotheim wonders if museums, zoos and aquariums are “filling in where schools no longer do things” and, if so, why. “Is this another function of the coming of age of a more individualistic demographic group that really doesn’t want to sit still in a school, but wants to wander around? I don’t know, but it’s a very interesting thing,” he said.

The rise of cultural tourism has certainly contributed to mushrooming audiences, he said, but so has new wealth. “I think there is something to the very unusual boom psychology of the ‘90s. Everything has exploded--our expectations, our affluence, our consumption habits. Why are there sports utility vehicles? In a way that’s as much a puzzlement.”

David Brooks’ new book, “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There,” argues that bourgeois bohemians, or Bobos, have merged two historical opposites--bourgeois businessman and countercultural bohemians--into a new ruling class of educated elite, explained Skotheim.

“They carry over the rebelliousness and individualism of the ‘60s,” he said, “so that they don’t defer to established patterns in all kinds of ways, but they don’t have any of the historic bohemian’s antipathy to affluence or the trappings of success and wealth.” Among other things, this phenomenon has spawned “an inexplicable reveling in aesthetically superior things” including fine art.

No matter how one accounts for the boom in cultural institutions, it has brought new challenges, Skotheim said. The brouhaha over “Sensation,” an exhibition of works by young British artists from the collection of advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, at the Brooklyn Museum, provoked a national discussion of the pitfalls of self-interested private and corporate sponsorship of the arts.

But that is part of the fallout of rising costs and expectations, Skotheim said. “Ed Nygren [director of art collections at the Huntington] estimates that $300,000 is about the minimum it will take every time we redo the Boone Gallery for a show. That’s so much money compared to the old days at the Huntington, when a curator would get an idea and put it together in old cases, using expense accounts and supplies on hand.”

These days, Americans seem to expect almost the same growth rate in the arts that corporations expect, he said. It may not make sense that demands for an ever-greater rate of return on investments have somehow been translated into a passion for bigger and better exhibitions, but “it seems as if the appetites are unending, and apparently there is no turning back,” he said.

Like other institutions, the Huntington must reconcile public expectations and its own mandate for better access and increased outreach through education with the need for quality control. The Huntington spends $1 million a year on acquisitions of books and manuscripts, serves about 100 visiting scholars each day and continues to build its art collections, so its traditional values are being protected, Skotheim said. Nonetheless, he receives calls and letters from devotees of the Huntington who are disturbed by every wayward blade of grass and chip of paint, and worry about possible detrimental effects of expansion and democratization.

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What’s at issue is not so much “a grand vision” as “the management of tensions,” he said. The challenge isn’t to shape the Huntington “as a haven unlike anything else in Los Angeles. Instead, it’s to manage a haven that Mr. Huntington created, in a world in which we want little children and poor people as well as educated and wealthy people to come and benefit.”

It isn’t easy. The staff is overwhelmed on the first Thursday of every month when admission is free and when mobs of people visit, not always on good behavior. At best, their numbers tax the facilities and grounds; at worst, children throw rocks at the turtles and men urinate in the parking lot.

“The question is: Do you have the courage to declare the limits?” Skotheim said. “We all like to cite evidence of growth, and it makes people feel good to be associated with activity. It’s hard to say this is all we can do.”

Looking ahead to his departure, Skotheim said the committee charged with finding his successor “probably will not be looking for a Tom Krens.” The Huntington “probably will not be engaged in show biz; probably we will not do the bizarre things,” he said. “But probably we will do expanded education.”

A 1995 survey revealing that more people come to the Huntington to see the gardens than to visit the galleries or use the library led to an initiative for the new Botanical Complex. Not surprisingly, it has been designed to accommodate children and families, with a strong educational component.

“It might seem odd that the gardens became the conduit, the avenue for reaching out to the public here, but education is the imperative of the support group,” Skotheim said. And if anything has been proved by the Huntington’s new vigor it’s that, “if you don’t have a group of supporters who share the values of the institution, you aren’t going to thrive,” he said. “It’s up to the human beings who rally around and get things done.”