New faces in the frame

THREE days into his tenure as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, at 5 a.m., Michael Govan found the painting to hang behind his desk.

It’s a blue-hued composition from 1992 by artist Mark Tansey, two daring young men on a hilltop with a flying machine about 100 years ago. Except that these guys are not the Wright brothers. They’re the painters who created Cubism, and the work’s title is “Braque and Picasso.”

The 42-year-old Govan was in his bed at the Chateau Marmont hotel at the moment of discovery, wirelessly browsing the LACMA collection on his laptop. Within days, the work had been retrieved from storage and hung.

“Here they are, seeing if Cubism will fly,” said Govan recently, standing before the canvas in his office.

He doesn’t have California license plates yet, he’s still sleeping at the hotel and his family has yet to move west from New York. But in the halls of LACMA, the new guy has arrived.

Since his April 1 start date, Govan has hiked the Santa Monica Mountains with patrons Eli Broad and Dick Riordan and previewed LACMA’s coming David Hockney show in Boston with Broad and his wife, Edythe. He’s been whispering with donors over the prospects of keeping the museum’s coveted but temporary Klimt exhibition in town. He has convinced board members that it’s time to sell the museum director’s residence in Hancock Park and buy another one. And he has tweaked the museum’s expansion plan in a big way, moving a store and cafe aside so art can dominate the new entrance pavilion.

“I want you to look at art the second you cross the threshold,” said Govan. “I’m not going to stop people from walking into the bookstore. But if they walk into the main entrance of the museum, I’m going to let them know what we think is important.”

As for the subtler choice of what to hang in his office, Govan figured it was only right to pick a California artist and a work that comments on art history. And it didn’t hurt that the museum director is a pilot himself.

Govan “has got a tremendous amount of energy and a tremendous amount of imagination,” said county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, whose district includes the museum. “He clearly thinks both inside and outside the box. And he has the reputation that I’ve had from time to time -- doing e-mails at 3 a.m. He doesn’t stop.”

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An art-world history

INSIDE LACMA, board members and staffers say they’re counting on Govan to lead growth and to build the reputation of an institution that hasn’t had an art specialist at its helm in a decade. Outside the museum, arts leaders say the biggest challenge will be winning and keeping donors -- the formidable Broad, for instance -- without handing them the keys to the museum.

A graduate of Williams College in Massachusetts, Govan has spent most of his career in the busy middle of the New York art world. For six years, he served as assistant director and deputy director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, helping steer a large organization with international tentacles and multiple building projects.

From there he went on to the top job at the Dia Foundation, where he spent 11 years focusing mostly on living artists and converting an old factory in Beacon, N.Y., into a vast contemporary exhibition space. In February, he agreed to forsake Dia for LACMA, its $48-million budget, its 320 employees and its pending reinvention.

With the new job comes a $600,000 base salary (about $120,000 from the county, the rest from the private, nonprofit Museum Associates). That figure, which excludes housing and car allowances, puts him about $145,000 ahead of his predecessor, Andrea Rich, and $120,000 to $200,000 behind the top executives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Govan insists that the paycheck isn’t as important to him as the challenge; in some of his first remarks upon being hired, he called the institution “a sleeping giant” with a better collection than most outsiders realize.

“You don’t hire Michael to be a stabilizer. He’s a visionary. He’s a builder,” said William Haines, who worked with Govan as a Dia board member for eight years.

“Dia was a yacht. LACMA is like a big ocean liner. It’s harder to turn, creates more waves,” said John Elderfield, chief curator for painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.

But knowing Govan well, Elderfield said, he has high expectations. And he expects other museum people in Los Angeles to be pleased too.

Shortly before MoMA’s reopening after renovation in late 2004, Elderfield recalled, Govan was convening Dia’s biggest backers for their biggest fund-raising event of the year. Given the perpetual competition for donors in the museum world, some rival museum leaders might have banned him from the event altogether, Elderfield said. Govan invited him to speak to the group about MoMA’s contemporary programming.

It was a move of striking collegiality, Elderfield said, and “things like this are noticed.... It shows an appropriate confidence in what you’re doing.”

Two longtime LACMA insiders, speaking on the condition of anonymity, noted that some curators had hoped for a leader with more academic credentials and more experience with encyclopedic collections; Govan has no graduate degrees, and LACMA is his first encyclopedic museum. Yet both insiders said the newcomer has been winning allies in his one-on-one conversations and applause at curatorial meetings.

Govan “seems to have an incredibly quick mind, in grasping what’s wrong and what’s right. He knows how to talk to people, and he listens,” said one. “He may not have been the person we thought we wanted. But he’s probably the person we need.... If he can raise money, then he really is perfect.”

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Time with a donor

IN his last job, Govan had just one curator to work with. Now he has 30. Getting to know them, he said, has been his biggest time investment. But he’s also met individually with county supervisors and other key donors, including Ahmanson Foundation Chief Executive Lee Walcott and board member Wallis Annenberg. (Govan’s official title, in recognition of a $10-million gift four years ago, is chief executive and Wallis Annenberg Director.)

And as his datebook shows, he’s been spending time with Broad, who has given LACMA $50 million to build a Broad Contemporary Art Museum on its campus and under LACMA’s umbrella. BCAM and the entry pavilion are the key elements in the $150-million first phase of the LACMA expansion and reorganization project that insiders call “the transformation.” That phase, already paid for and in progress, is targeted for completion by December 2007.

Broad’s prominent role in the expansion and the search for Govan has some critics warning that the philanthropist is effectively taking over the institution. Govan dismisses that idea, and notes that “we’ve spent as much time talking about science and education as we have about art.”

But Govan, who has extensive experience with museum building projects, has clearly been thinking hard about LACMA’s campus. In fact, the night before his first official workday found him in Paris with Renzo Piano, the architect leading the makeover.

“We talked a lot about the park and the public. We talked a lot about the communication between the old and new buildings,” said Govan. “And we discussed the trade-offs of fixing up old buildings versus starting fresh here.”

This is tricky territory, given that Piano came aboard only after the museum couldn’t find money to pay for a controversial Rem Koolhaas proposal to basically level the place and start over. But as his Dia track record and his changes to the entrance pavilion attest, the new director is not shy when it comes to building interventions.

The glass-walled pavilion will soon rise where Ogden Street once bisected the museum grounds. The main shop and restaurant, Govan said, will move to the five-story LACMA West building, the former May Co. site whose adaptive reuse is evolving into Phase 2 of the museum makeover plan.

Before April, the main element of Phase 2 was the reorganization and reinstallation of the museum collection, which Govan said will be gradual and ongoing. The LACMA West conversion is expected to cost $40 million to $50 million, all yet to be raised.

“I enjoy raising money. I enjoy connecting with people and seeing what comes of their involvement,” said Govan. “I love that process.”

Govan came in knowing that the building fund-raising challenge was waiting. But now an even bolder, costlier possibility hovers as well.

Since April 4, LACMA has been displaying five Gustav Klimt paintings that were seized by the Nazis in the late 1930s, displayed in Austria’s national Gallery Belvedere for decades, then returned to the owner’s heirs by an Austrian court decision in January.

The chance that the family might sell or donate those works has Govan -- along with many other museum directors and private collectors -- whispering with major donors and skirmishing for position. But the price is so steep -- their value is estimated at $150 million to $300 million -- that art-world veterans say any museum purchase is a longshot. LACMA typically spends about $10 million a year on acquisitions. The Getty Trust, wealthiest arts organization in the world, averaged $80 million a year in acquisitions between 1999 and 2004.

The Klimts “are the 800-pound gorilla of acquisitions,” said Govan, who acknowledges daily Klimt conversations with all sorts of donors and others, including at least one chat with his Getty counterpart, Michael Brand. The heirs -- three live in Canada, one in Northern California and one in Los Angeles -- aren’t talking.

Meanwhile, LACMA’s usual acquisition cycle marches on. On April 22, Govan presided over the annual Collectors’ Committee meeting, where nine curators presented artworks for possible purchase while top donors took notes and fingered checkbooks.

At the end of the day, the five dozen donors came up with a collective $1.2 million -- about twice the amount curators were counting on and enough to immediately buy seven works, including a pair of 18th century painted Japanese screens; a 1,300-year-old decorated drinking vessel from Mexico or Guatemala; a 16th century Persian miniature painting; and a silk-and-steel-tube sculpture from contemporary Korean artist Do-Ho Suh.

It was a great day, Govan said, but he didn’t get to savor it for long. Though he hasn’t added any shows to the museum’s exhibition schedule, he’s been talking to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is collaborating on a 2007 show about colonial Latin American art from 1492 to 1820. He has huddled with LACMA curator Stephanie Barron and artist John Baldessari over a possible role for Baldessari in the presentation of a November exhibition on Rene Magritte and contemporary art.

During a lull one day in late April, he sneaked over to Santa Monica Airport, took an instructor aloft and qualified to fly here. And he lunched in mid-May, for no specific reason, with artist Jorge Pardo, a collaborator at Dia.

In a job that depends on creativity, said Govan, “it’s extremely important to leave room for conversations without goals.”

Between his many conversations here, Govan will be revisiting New York often. He has an 11-year-old daughter there from his previous marriage, and his wife, Katherine Ross, has various East Coast responsibilities as senior vice president for public relations and communication at Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy.

For the moment, Ross and their 1 1/2 -year-old daughter remain in New York. Govan plans to rent an apartment here while the museum sells its 1925 Mediterranean-style residence on Hudson Avenue (asking price: $3.4 million) and looks for another home -- not necessarily a larger one, he said, but perhaps one with more architectural distinction and a design better suited to entertaining.

The museum’s real estate people may want to consider the Santa Monica Mountains.

That 12-mile hike with Broad and Riordan “was a revelation for me,” Govan said. “You park at the end of a road. You walk 10 minutes, and you’re in some whole other world.... You look back across this incredible valley of buildings, and out to the ocean, and Catalina Island. It was a great experience. Made me realize I wasn’t in New York anymore.”

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