Which way, LACMA?

Ten years before the Los Angeles County Museum of Art reached its current crossroads, an outsider named Andrea Rich took her first inside look at the place. It was hers to run, and it wasn’t pretty.

In fact, as Rich remembers it, the halls were dirty, the phones faltering, the ceilings leaky and the computer network -- there wasn’t one. The institution’s last director had resigned after a mere 10 months, and tight money had forced LACMA to close two days per week instead of the usual one. Surveying her inherited staff, Rich found five high-level, non-curatorial managers “incapable of adequate performance” and wrote as much in an appraisal for trustees.

Yet plenty of the nation’s leading art professionals thought Rich had no business trying to fix the place. A career UCLA administrator, she had no training in art history, not even a LACMA membership card. Rich’s idea of rescue, they warned, could ruin everything.

Today, as LACMA searches for a successor to the 61-year-old Rich, who will retire as director in November, certain facts are clear.

On the upside, despite that wary welcome from the museum world and a spinal disease that has curtailed her professional networking, she has lasted about twice as long as the average American museum director. The museum has stable finances, longer hours, grand plans and, yes, fully operative telephone and computer systems. With star architect Renzo Piano poised to lead an expansion and reorganization of the crowded, confusing campus, the $130-million projected cost of phase one is already in the bank. These facts alone, many museum professionals say, should qualify Rich as a triumphant turnaround artist.

But the closer you look, the more complicated that picture becomes. It was a power struggle with $60-million donor Eli Broad that apparently hastened her departure, and tending to that relationship will be job one for the next director. Though Rich has won praise in many quarters for boosting LACMA’s Latin American and Asian holdings and programs in an explicit nod to the city’s evolving demographics, the museum’s art-acquisition spending has slowed in recent years, as has its exhibition schedule.

And before Rich turned to the current Piano expansion plan, she and top board members spent enormous energy in the early 2000s on a plan to have Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas demolish the current campus and rebuild from the ground up. Broad said he’d put up $50 million if other big donors would follow, but none did. Eventually Rich pulled the plug, came up with Plan B and found money for it.

“I’m done,” she says, sitting for an interview. “You know what I mean? I don’t feel guilty walking away now.”

Over the last decade, Rich has trimmed the museum’s staff from 404 to 291, while boosting visitor numbers by about a third. LACMA collects dues from about 10,000 more members than in 1995. Its $48.5-million annual budget -- up from $25.4 million in 1995 -- is in the black, though music lovers are still smarting from the museum’s June 1 move to cut back programming in that area. The museum’s endowment, which still trails those of older East Coast institutions, has grown past the $100-million mark.

But as Rich and others are quick to agree, a museum is a difficult territory to measure, as lively and as resistant to quantification as a Bruegel country fair or a Bosch brawl.

“You’re looking at an institution now that’s at a critical crossroads in its history,” says Richard Koshalek, president of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art. In the middle of the scene stands Broad, surrounded by blueprints and waiting to be reckoned with. Along with the fun of rehanging the collection as the LACMA campus expands, the new LACMA leader will have the job of collaborating with Broad, the home-building and insurance billionaire who is the museum’s biggest donor.

Though Broad has pledged the money for the building, named it the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and chosen Piano as its architect, he has stopped short of permanently donating his much-coveted collection, which is to be displayed there. It’s unclear exactly how the contemporary museum will fit with the rest of LACMA.

Broad insists it’s a straightforward arrangement: The deputy director in charge of the contemporary museum, he says, “is going to report to the director of the museum. It’s part of LACMA.” With Rich leaving, Broad adds, it “would make sense” to hire a LACMA director before hiring a deputy. (Broad is one of eight trustees on the search committee, which is led by education activist Nancy Daly Riordan and software mogul and arts patron Peter Norton.)

“Andrea’s done a magnificent job. LACMA is a far better place today than it was when Andrea joined it,” Broad says. Still, he goes on, “We’ve not created a sense of excitement. I think LACMA’s board should be the most prestigious board in the city. It’s getting there, but I think it needs to have more excitement, more events, more electricity.... I think we can do better.”

Of all Rich’s moves at the museum, suggests Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown, the most significant is “that the Broad collection has both been brought into -- and is apart from -- LACMA.”

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Quantifying a mission’s success

With more than 100,000 items in its collection, the institution is the largest encyclopedic art museum west of the Mississippi River. Its mission -- broadened by trustees in 1997 at Rich’s urging -- is not only public service through the collection, conservation, exhibition and interpretation of art, but “translation” of the collection into meaningful experiences for a broad public. Until that adjustment of mission, says Rich, too many LACMA curators and trustees had the idea that the place was theirs alone.

But even with an amended mission of public service, the institution’s leaders still face the same challenge as their peers nationwide when it comes to measuring success: Sometimes numbers do the job, and sometimes they don’t, and everybody has his own favorite numbers.

For instance: Despite the many troubles Rich found upon arrival, the LACMA staff then was in the habit of mounting 30 to 45 special exhibitions per year, some organized by LACMA’s 30 curators, some imported from other institutions. Today, the museum’s curatorial staff still numbers 30, but the museum is offering about half as many shows, about 20 per year.

This is a deliberate reduction, Rich says, not only to save “huge dollars,” but to focus more on quality, less on quantity. The museum’s 2000-01 “Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000” show, for instance, was among the most ambitious curatorial projects ever undertaken by LACMA; and the 2003 traveling show “Old Masters, Impressionists, and Moderns: French Masterworks From the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow,” drew 216,915 visitors, landing in the 10th spot on the museum’s all-time top-crowds list.

But some observers aren’t so sure about quality in LACMA’s shows these last few years. “The program has been cautious, lacking in commitment and conviction,” says Art Center’s Koshalek, who labels content and collaboration as two top challenges on the museum’s horizon.

“There has to be a major commitment to the research,” he says. Further, he suggests “the new collaborative order” of the museum world demands that the museum make far more institutional friends worldwide than it has now.

At the moment, “I think the relationships between LACMA and other major museums around the world are minimal,” he says. “You have to go see these people, you have to spend time with these people, you have to introduce them to the trustees.... That kind of cultural diplomacy, institutional diplomacy, is important for the future.” Without it, he adds, LACMA “is going to remain sort of a provincial institution”

The museum board’s chairman, Wally Weisman, first notes that a museum’s success “is not quantifiable in sort of a mathematical sense.” But when he looks back over the last decade, he adds, “it’s very clear, the extraordinary progress that’s been made on a whole set of levels. And some of those are quantifiable.”

When Rich arrived and took the title of president and chief executive in 1995, art professionals nationwide raised alarms. The museum’s top-ranking art professional, once she hired him, would rank second in command, a structure that at least three major Eastern museums had already experimented with and abandoned. She might balance the books, skeptics warned, but she might well see art as an educational tool, a means to an end instead of an end in itself.

Nevertheless Rich and the museum’s trustees hired Director Graham W.J. Beal and set out to renew the museum. Rich started with the budget.

“She took on an absolutely monumental task. The museum was failing,” says Selma Holo, head of USC’s museum studies program.

By 1999, the museum had reaped net profits of more than $7 million from the visiting blockbuster show “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs” -- its biggest box-office attraction in more than a decade -- and invested most of that in infrastructure improvements. Rich had set in motion several educational programs, including a Maya mobile to visit schools, the experimental LACMALab space and the Boone Children’s Gallery in the LACMA West building.

She’d faced the opening of the Getty Museum on its Brentwood hilltop in 1997 and she’d also overseen creation of a LACMA Institute for Art and Cultures, in which ringmaster Paul Holdengraber, aiming to “make the museum a bit less of a mausoleum,” presided over provocative public conversations with artists and intellectuals, such as David Hockney and Susan Sontag. And though the museum remains chronically short of money for acquisitions in comparison with Eastern counterparts, Rich and Beal tried to talk trustees into ponying up money to buy Latino and Asian collections that would resonate with those booming populations.

When that idea seemed to stall, Rich found another way to push it forward: She took money out of the institution’s operating budget. The move was startling for such a rigorous budget-watcher and an unorthodox move for any museum director, but it yielded two notable acquisitions: the Bernard and Edith Lewin collection of more than 1,800 paintings and works on paper by Latin American modernists (acquired in 1997) and the Robert W. Moore collection of Korean art, 250 works including ceramics, textiles and paintings spanning 2,000 years (acquired in 1999).

Even some of Rich’s detractors in the museum world -- most of whom are unwilling to criticize her publicly -- call that a “gutsy” move to push the museum toward a noble goal.

“As people began to know her, and realize her intelligence and commitment, they started feeling quite different about her,” says Mimi Gaudieri, executive director of the New York-based Assn. of Art Museum Directors.

Then in 1999 Beal left to take another position, and Rich delivered her second shock to museum traditionalists: Instead of looking for another director, she simply added that job to her portfolio, with the board’s blessing. Among the items on her front burner: hiring five curators to fill open jobs.

“We were really moving,” she said later. “There wasn’t a need at that time for a hiccup.”

Rich “is obviously a different type of director than most museums have. The thing that impressed me about her is this unbelievable grasp of the financial and organizational aspect of things,” says Carter Foster, a 39-year-old curator of drawings who was recruited to LACMA from the Cleveland Museum in early 2004.

He left 11 months later to take the same job at the Whitney Museum in New York, a move that he says had more to do with the Whitney’s charms than any problems with Rich or LACMA. “I never really saw her question curatorial practice,” Foster says. “She was very much a big-picture person.”

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Accomplishments and complaints

The years since 1999 have brought stumbles along with successes. As leaders struggled with expansion plans, gradually turning away from Koolhaas and toward Piano, several highly regarded staffers have taken jobs elsewhere, including Foster; photography curator Timothy Wride, who left last year to take over a foundation that makes grants to photographers; and Holdengraber, who now runs public programs at the New York Public Library. Since Holdengraber’s departure last year, the much-praised institute has dwindled to nearly nothing -- its website lists just one public event this year.

Also, acquisition spending has sputtered. IRS disclosure forms show the museum has averaged $6.3 million yearly on art acquisition over the last two years (ending June 30, 2004) after averaging $11.3 million over the previous five. High-profile additions have included the Madina Collection of Islamic art (more than 750 items from the 7th through 19th centuries, acquired in 2002) and the Carter Collection of Dutch paintings (12 works, mostly from the 17th century, acquired in 2003).

“It’s an odd place,” says Thomas Lawson, dean of the School of Art at CalArts in Valencia. On one hand, says Lawson, he has enjoyed several eye-opening exhibitions in recent years. But he’s also been disappointed by the museum’s contemporary offerings and “put off” by its blockbusters.

“That’s what blockbusters do,” Lawson says. “They write off the core constituency to get a wider public. It’s a strange sort of pact with the devil.”

And another blockbuster is about to land. The visiting King Tut show that opens Thursday will likely fill the galleries with visitors, but has attracted criticism -- for its record ticket prices of $15 to $30 per person and its partnership with the show’s for-profit packagers, which include AEG, the sports-and-entertainment company that developed Staples Center.

Rich dismisses those complaints and says she took the show because she sees the museum’s financial risk as relatively low and because “I believe the people of Los Angeles ought to have an opportunity to see this show. Period. And that’s our job. To ask ourselves that question: Is this something the people of Los Angeles would enjoy?”

Like them or not, Rich does not shy from making decisions. Even skeptics concede that at least twice, when faced with pressure from donors to make moves that could have compromised institutional integrity, Rich said no.

When trustee and prospective donor Arthur Gilbert asked for guarantees on the display of his decorative arts collection in 1996, Rich turned him away and Gilbert took the collection to England.

Again last year, when executors of the estate of longtime LACMA trustee Ray Stark sought guarantees about display and timing before they would donate the late film producer’s sculpture collection, Rich demurred. Stark’s trustees took the collection instead to the Getty, which has taken criticism for giving up too much autonomy in the deal.

You can’t talk about standing up to trustees, Rich’s critics and backers agree, without coming back to Broad. The wariest observers, inside and outside the museum, warn that by giving him such leeway in the expansion plan, she may have opened the way for an institutional coup, beginning with the influence he’ll have over the trustees’ hiring of her successor. Others say her abrupt retirement is one more case of Rich daring to say no.

Either way, finding a successor will be tricky -- as many as 18 other major U.S. art museums are said to be hunting for new leaders right now -- and for the next occupant of the LACMA director’s office, there will be no honeymoon.

“As a director,” says Rich, “when you’re working with lots of different forces that have different values, different tactics and techniques, it’s really important to have that little spot of ground that you stand on and feel comfortable on.... It’s important to know what you stand for. And stand right there.” Otherwise, she adds, “you’re the shuttlecock in a badminton game.”

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Contact Christopher Reynolds at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.