A University Thinker in LACMA’s Halls

When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art launched a search for a chief curator of American art, Bruce Robertson was on the short list of potential contenders, but he wasn’t interested. He was happily ensconced at UC Santa Barbara, where he has taught art history since 1991. What’s more, he says, as a member of the art faculty, “I got to do the shows I wanted without dealing with the hassles at a museum.” Even if life at the university wasn’t exactly hassle-free, he didn’t see much point in moving from academia to a metropolitan art museum.

“But then the curators who were running the job search started talking about Andrea Rich’s plans for revamping the museum,” he says, “and that struck me as very interesting.” Particularly intrigued by the LACMA president and director’s concept of “centers” for European, Asian, American, Latin American, and Modern and contemporary art--intended to foster collaborative ventures among the museum’s traditional departments and to stimulate interchange with other organizations--he scheduled an interview with her.

Robertson was primarily a teacher, but he was engaged in an extensive study and exhibition of UC Santa Barbara’s collections. Rich is a former UCLA administrator who took charge of the art museum in 1995. When they got to talking, Robertson discovered that they “speak the same language” and see many similarities between universities and museums.

“On the one hand, universities tend to forget that academic disciplines grew up around physical evidence,” he says. “We think of the library, but we ignore our collections. Conversely, museums--which concentrate on objects--tend not to think of themselves as producers of ideas and centers of knowledge production.” But both kinds of institutions are involved in “the dilemma of how you learn from things” and “what kinds of experiences you get from looking at some kind of object.”

Robertson was delighted to find that Rich “thinks about museums in ways that step outside the box.”

What’s more, he says, LACMA is “on a path to rethink itself in terms of its collection, how to display it, how to reach its audience and what to say to that audience.” It was an opportunity he “just couldn’t pass up.”

Robertson joined the museum’s staff--as chief curator of the Center of American Art--at the first of the year, but he hasn’t left UC Santa Barbara and doesn’t intend to do so. His appointment inaugurates a relationship between the museum and the university that allows him to divide his time between the two institutions and establishes a student internship program at the museum. Curatorial interns will spend about half their time working for the museum and the rest on individual projects.

Robertson is only one of five new curators at the museum whose appointments were recently announced. Kevin Salatino, former curator of graphic arts at the Getty Research Institute, has taken charge of LACMA’s department of prints and drawings. Ilona Katzew, a former independent curator, is associate curator of Latin American art. Leslie Furth, who is completing her doctoral dissertation at Boston University, is assistant curator of American art. And Wendy Kaplan, associate director for exhibitions and curatorial affairs at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami, will become head of LACMA’s decorative arts department at the end of the month.

Still, Robertson’s appointment is particularly notable because it signals the affiliation with UC Santa Barbara and the museum’s new emphasis on American art in the permanent collection, special exhibitions and the planned Center of American Art.

*

A native of New Zealand, Robertson went to college and graduate school in the United States. He earned a bachelor of arts from Swarthmore College in 1976, then enrolled at Yale University, where he earned two master’s degrees and a doctorate over the next decade.

During his career, he has moved back and forth between universities and art museums. He taught art history at the University of Delaware in 1983 and at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1984. He was a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1987 to 1991 and taught at Case Western Reserve University there in 1987.

Robertson did his dissertation on British art but eventually specialized in American art while working with a broad spectrum of material. “I taught Baroque art at Oberlin,” he says. “In Cleveland, I was curator of historical American paintings, but I was in the Old Master paintings department and I ended up running that department. I was responsible for Renaissance and Baroque, just as much as for American. What it meant was that American art had the same standards as European art, and I still feel that you shouldn’t make excuses for American art; you have to use the same standards.”

That philosophy will be applied at LACMA, he says. “In a sense, what I’m hoping to do here is absolutely traditional: acquire great paintings, make the galleries look good. We need more fabulous, grade-A paintings. That’s why people come to the museum. We need to put serious attention into building the collection, challenging the community to help with that and thinking through how the collection might be developed.”

But Robertson also hopes to stir things up.

“The museum has hired Wendy Kaplan, who is the smartest curator in American decorative arts out there. I am really looking forward to working with her on a re-installation of paintings and decorative arts,” he says. “The American decorative arts collection here is as strong as, and potentially stronger than, the American paintings collection. I want the best examples I can possibly get in the galleries. If that means furniture, then let it be furniture. If people want paintings, we have to find the means to get paintings.”

Traditional departments will continue to operate at LACMA, and certain galleries will be devoted to objects in specific media that require special lighting or present technical problems. But Robertson’s vision of the American art galleries calls for displaying photographs, drawings, textiles and a wide range of decorative arts with paintings.

He also views the proposed Center of American Art as “a place where you stop thinking in terms of separate departments, a platform or a theater where the media and outsiders might mix. It’s a place where I can call on American studies faculty in Southern California and make connections to community organizations.

“That ultimately gives me a platform to reach other American art historians as well,” he says. “The view from the West Coast is very different from the view from the East Coast. I’m always amazed at the way my colleagues on the East Coast don’t quite realize how diverse their communities are. New York people are often oblivious to issues that are absolutely front and center in L.A.”

*

Likening the proposed LACMA centers to university multi-campus research units, Robertson says these fluid structures “break a kind of logjam as to ‘this is the way things have to be done’ and make all sorts of things possible. The big conceptual revolution is to think of the centers as points of gathering where you don’t limit who might gather.”

He plans to spend the next six months consulting with fellow curators, museum supporters and UC Santa Barbara faculty, among many others. The challenge of conceptualizing and facilitating a program is to make 19th and early 20th century American art relevant to today’s audience, he says. In part, that means dealing with cultural and political issues that are as lively today as when the artists were working.

Many pieces in the American art collection were donated to the museum as examples of contemporary art, but they are now part of the historical holdings. The same thing will happen to today’s contemporary art, so Robertson views the American collection as a conceptual hub where the new and the old come together, as well as a way to connect with artists in the community.

Just as university art history courses are limited by time, museum exhibitions are circumscribed by space, he says. But there are ways to extend those limits. One possibility that interests him is Web-based programs, similar to those he has used at the university.

“It’s difficult for visitors who come with little experience to know what to look at,” he says. “Specialists know how artists made choices, how a particular work fits in historically, and you can replicate a lot of that on a computer program. Art history is not rocket science. I think it’s very easy for museums to make the visitors’ experience much more meaningful. People want to learn at museums. My experience with the public is that they should never be underestimated. They are as smart as you are.”

He has high expectations of the museum as well. “One of the interesting things about LACMA is how young it is and how willing it is to experiment,” he says. “It has accomplished an extraordinary amount in a short time. I really think it could become a model for the way in which a metropolitan museum is situated in relation to its community.”