Contents
- 1. Transcript
- 1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE JUNE 25, 1980
- 1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO JUNE 25, 1980
- 1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE JUNE 25, 1980
- 1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO JUNE 25, 1980
- 1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE JULY 2, 1980
- 1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO JULY 2, 1980
- 1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE JULY 2, 1980
- 1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO JULY 2, 1980
- 1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE JULY 9, 1980
- 1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO JULY 9, 1980
- 1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE JULY 9, 1980
- 1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO AUGUST 13, 1980
- 1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE AUGUST 13, 1980
- 1.14. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO AUGUST 13, 1980
- 1.15. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE AUGUST 13, 1980
1. Transcript
1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE JUNE 25, 1980
-
GOODWIN:
- Tom, first I'd like you to tell me about your family background.
-
GARVER:
- All right. My full name is Thomas Haskell Garver, and I was born at 8:35
in the evening in Duluth, Minnesota, January 23, 1934. I am the second
child of three, the second son of Harvie Adair Garver and Hope Foght
Garver. I was born into comfortable, upper-middle-class circumstances in
a town of about 100,000, which was, at that time, a center for iron ore
shipment and bulk grain shipment, with some manufacturing, much less now
than then. My father was employed for almost forty-five years by a
private family corporation, the Congdon Office Corporation. He was the
highest-placed non-family member in this corporation, which was set up
to preserve and increase the assets of the Congdon family. He was
trained as a lawyer at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and in
January of 1921 he came to Duluth from South Dakota, where he [had been]
born in 1894. He met my mother in 1926 on a trip to the West Coast, to
Spokane, Washington, where the Congdons had orchard interests. My
mother, Margaret Hope Foght Garver, born in 1902, was the daughter, one
of five children, of Harold W. Foght, who was an historian, educator,
and at the time [my parents] were married in 1927, president of a
teachers college in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He had been president of
several different schools, as well as work for the Department of
Education in Washington [State] during his career. Of course, my mother
came immediately to Duluth, and my brother was born in 1930. I was born
in '34. My younger sister was adopted in 1939. The early circumstances
of my life were certainly unremarkable. I lived in a very nice house in
this upper-middle-western town. I would say that I was always considered
a dreamer. I certainly know that I was a very erratic student. I went
first to a university—how can I describe it? There was also in Duluth a
state teachers college, now a branch of the University of Minnesota. For
the first couple years of my schooling, I think kindergarten and first
grade, as I remember, I went to this teachers college school, the
experimental preparatory. I can't remember how you really describe that.
-
GOODWIN:
- Laboratory school.
-
GARVER:
- Laboratory school, that's exactly what it is, a lab school. Then I went
to Congdon Park School, which was the local elementary school near me. I
was either liked or despised by the teachers there, depending on their
personality. [laughter] I know that when I was in the fourth grade, I
had a teacher who really disliked me and it was a difficult—it was
really difficult. I guess I was considered not so much a bad student but
maybe a rather undisciplined one. And there was quite a to-do with dear
Miss Ritchie. As a result, my parents encouraged my maternal
grandparents, Harold and Alice Foght, to take me in. They were living in
retirement on Lake Minnetonka, in a big, wonderful old house. So, for
most of the fourth grade, I went to a two-room schoolhouse in Mound,
Minnesota, and lived on Casco Point in this great turn-of-the-century
house, with an attic full of stuff that the Foghts had collected in
their travels around the world, particularly their travels to the Orient
in the twenties. And it was, in retrospect, I think, a very important
experience for me. There certainly had been no direct art influence on
me except that my mother was ostensibly interested in art as an amateur
painter and a dabbler. My father, as a serious businessman and one
raised to the harder aspects of life, having been brought up on a very
poor ranch in South Dakota, found art, I think, to be frivolous—or at
least unnecessary, at best, and perhaps a time waster, at worst. It was
only later that he tended to change his mind, and only because he became
aware of the business aspects of art, at least as they involved me. So I
enjoyed rummaging in the attics, and there was quite a rich mélange of
stuff in my grandparents' house. My grandfather had also worked as, I
think, an Indian agent in the Southwest in the thirties, and of course
he'd acquired some very beautiful blankets and pots and so on, which
were found mostly in his library. But after the fourth grade I returned
to Duluth, and in the seventh and the eighth grades—let's see, I went
back to Congdon Park and went through the sixth grade, the seventh
grade, and the eighth grade. I went back to the lab school, which,
again, I remember was—I don't think of myself as any kind of a
rabble-rouser, but I remember that it was difficult. I think there was a
teacher in the seventh grade and no one liked her, and there were
complaints made by the students to the principal, who told us to clean
up our act and shut up. In fact, in the eighth grade the principal
brought in a teacher who was a real martinet, James F. Mizee. In fact, I
can still see the flourishes in his signature. [laughter] Mizee was a
real hard-nosed southerner, and nobody got the slightest bit out of
hand. In the ninth grade I went to, I guess it was then called, East
Junior High School in Duluth, and I would say I was an average student.
Again, no particular interest in art. I would say that the interests
that were developing then were quite surprisingly different. Like George
Herms, an artist in Southern California, with whom I have recently been
working, my interests seemed to coalesce towards science, except that I
was a wretched math student. So the mother of the sciences I didn't deal
with very well. But what I was intrigued with, and what I have remained
intrigued with, is that whole system of mechanics, machines, energy
systems of one sort and another. And I have a good feel for that, I am a
clock collector. I like the appearance of the clock, the energy of the
clock, the machinery of the clock. There was, I remember, a used
bookstore in Duluth, and I used to buy technical books that were well
illustrated. I had no particular interest in the scientific formulae—you
know, calculating boiler strength or anything like that—but I really
liked looking at these old machines. I would, on occasion, look around
in Duluth, where I found some of the old steam machines still in use.
Steam power, particularly, interested me. I later worked with a
photographer in New York, photographing and tape recording steam
locomotives. I'll get to that a little later. In 1946 it was discovered
that I had some sort of vein condition in my left leg, and on the
recommendation of the doctors in Duluth, I was sent to the Mayo Clinic
in Rochester, Minnesota, in the southern part of the state. And there
what I had was diagnosed as a potentially serious condition called a
cavernous hemangioma which is essentially a birth defect, a congenital
defect akin to, but more complex than varicose veins. Varicose veins
usually come about through just general deterioration with age and
perhaps not caring for one's lower extremities, as the Mayo Clinic
refers to them. Both my parents were very concerned that all their
children achieve to the best of their abilities in school. I think my
mother felt that way because it was the right thing to do, and my
father, that that was the way in which he had gotten away from the ranch
in South Dakota. And it was suggested by one of my doctors in Duluth
that my mother and I talk to Dr. Benjamin Spock, who was then on the
staff of the Mayo Clinic. So at one of those early clinic sessions an
appointment was set up, and I spent about forty-five minutes talking to
Dr. Spock. I think at this point I would have been in the ninth grade,
but I was a little ahead of my class. Having been born in January, it
seems to me that you were either six months ahead or six months behind,
and I was six months ahead; so I was a little young. He suggested that I
go away to preparatory school and that I get away from the schools in
Duluth, but he said he felt that, for me, I should not go to one of the
more traditional schools, Exeter, Andover, Lawrenceville, but should
look for something that was a little more flexible, a little more open
and progressive. Well, he recommended two schools, the Putney School in
Putney, Vermont, in rural Vermont, and the North Shore Country Day
School in Winnetka, Illinois, just north of Chicago. My father went to
visit both schools but found the Putney School to be much too "pinko"
for his taste, [laughter] my father being something of a McKinley
Republican. And on the way back from that trip—it had seemed, at that
point, that the Putney School was where I was going to go. In
retrospect, I think I had no feeling one way or the other: "Yeah, sure.
Why not? Okay." You know, it wasn't, "I'm going to leave." I think that
I really felt not very attached to Duluth. I had one or two very close
friends, who were most probably a little socially odd man out, as I
think I was as well. So, on the way back from the East, my father
stopped at the North Shore Country Day School, and the headmaster, Perry
Dunlap Smith, was a very impressive man. He put on his cape, strolled
around the campus, showed my father around the place, and that's
obviously where I ended up, starting there in the fall of 1948, again
repeating my freshman year. The school was primarily a day school, but
at that time it had a very small boarding department, Leicester Hall,
for boys only. I think there were anywhere from six to twelve boys who
would be living there. A few, like me, were legitimately boarders;
others parked there because there was an incipient divorce, or the
family was taking an extended European or South American tour. Winnetka,
of course, is an unbelievably wealthy, "blonde," elegant suburb. And I
think most probably there I was introduced to the arts in a couple of
ways. I think that in Duluth I had gone to the symphony, such as it
was—and most probably is—for a year. There really was no art museum in
Duluth at that time—there still barely is. In Minneapolis, of course, I
had visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and have fragmentary
memories, primarily of their rather remarkable Oriental bronze and
costume collections. But certainly my interest then, as a kid, was much
more in, I think, sort of mechanical systems, and I was always intrigued
with how things worked. My parents were reminiscing with me recently
how, if the furnace man or the plumber or the electrician would arrive,
I would sort of hang over his shoulder to see what he was doing and
figure out how it worked and so on. I think I have a very good
perception of mechanical systems, and it's been very helpful, frankly,
in my own museum work. So, at North Shore, it was an experience that I
think of as good and bad. I think that there was certainly some problems
of socializing and problems of dealing with myself. In retrospect, I
suppose, looking at the wealth and the way in which kids at sixteen and
seventeen would have their own cars—this in the late forties and early
fifties, I think before it became prevalent—I found this to be rather
difficult to deal with. I went into a sort of low-pressure psychotherapy
at that time, which, in retrospect, most probably didn't do very much.
And I've been in psychotherapy off and on I guess five or six times,
which has been very helpful (mostly not for reasons of crisis but for
reasons of support). So there were four years at North Shore. I would
get in to Chicago, but I don't think I got around to the art scene that
much. I was, again, in high school, as I think about it, a mediocre
student generally, I think. I was always good at test taking, and
particularly those SATs and so on. I would always do just fine on
multiple choice. But I was certainly bad in math. I was quite good in
the sciences. I was about average, or a little better, it seems to me, I
think I was better in English. And I studied three years of German,
where I was marginal. In reflecting on two or three good friends I had
there, we had an interest in old cars. I owned a 1928 Packard. Of
course, this is now 1950, '51, '52. My friend, Victor Lane, had a number
of cars, and we were involved in exotic cars, not as collectors, of
course, but in that [we were involved in] the earlier years of the
Sports Car Club of America and the Antique Automobile Club of America,
AACA. We were members of these organizations, we participated, we
enjoyed cars, we were interested in their style and their appearance and
in working on them, to a degree. Not in, say, hopping up a car but in
sort of keeping it running, restoring it, if we could, on what little
money was available. So my interest in mechanical systems, I think,
continued. When it came time to select a college, I think I felt I
wanted a small school that matched, in character, perhaps, North Shore
Country Day School, a suburban setting, convenience to a large city, but
not a mill. And through the suggestion of the man who was the dormitory
director, or house father, whatever you call him, I applied to both
Swarthmore and Haverford, and was accepted at both. I chose Haverford in
suburban Haverford, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, within the
suburban area of Philadelphia. I would say [it was] there that the
beginnings of my more focused interest in art began to take place. They
took place I think, too, through a couple of individuals. One of them
was the late Richard Max Birnheimer, who taught history of art at Bryn
Mawr College, which was only a mile away. Haverford was a men's college;
Bryn Mawr was a women's college. There were, for that time of the early
and mid fifties, exceptionally free social circumstances, which was very
nice, not that I necessarily took all that great advantage of it, but it
gave a very nice feeling to the campus. Women were there. There was no
hassle about, you know, somebody going into the dormitory room and, "Is
the door open or not?" But, of course, both Haverford and Bryn Mawr, and
Swarthmore, too, for that matter, are Quaker schools, and Haverford was
the most Quaker, the most traditional of the three. One was required to
attend fifth-day meeting (no longer the case) on Thursdays. And in the
best Quaker tradition, art as a historical, formal, functional, creative
aspect of life was very much downplayed. There was one course offered at
Haverford by Dr. Birnheimer, who would walk down from Bryn Mawr with a
tiny little valise of 3-1/4 by 4 [inch] glass lantern slides, and he
would deliver the entire survey class, from prehistory to, say, the
Armory Show, entirely without notes. I once commented on that to him,
and he said, "Give me half an hour in the Bryn Mawr slide library and
thirty slides, and I will give you a first-rate, one-hour lecture on any
aspect of art history." [laughter] He was German, and I thought that was
a splendid example of his "Kraut" sort of academic arrogance. But he was
a very, very fine lecturer. Apparently [he was] also an agent for the
CIA and was murdered under very strange circumstances in Lisbon some
years later. But I took this course as a sophomore, and I was fascinated
by the history of art and by certain aspects of it more than others. At
the same time, I had met a Haverford student who was a year or so ahead
of me, a fellow named Walter C. Kidney. Walter has gone on to become a
writer on architecture, and he was something of a misfit at the college.
He was much appreciated and enjoyed but obviously not a rah-rah type. He
would spend a great deal of time in Philadelphia looking at buildings.
And of course Philadelphia then was an exceptionally rich melange of
eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century architecture.
Philadelphia, of course, like so many other cities, has succeeded in
destroying a great deal of that heritage and has demolished a lot of
fine nineteenth-century building to reconstruct some eighteenth-century
buildings, or to give bigger squares around them and so on. Independence
Square, which is exaggerated (and I think they created an underground
garage under it), destroyed a lot of very fine buildings. I was much
more centrally involved in campus life than Walter. I was active on the
yearbook as a photographer. I think. I should perhaps go back and say
that in high school I had become interested in photography and had
summer jobs to support my buying a camera and equipment It was always
important to my family that I have summer jobs. I never worked during
the school year, but I did work as a bank messenger for a couple of
summers. I worked briefly in construction one summer, where I earned
$1.40 an hour as a common laborer, and I thought that, of course, was
princely. Then in the year between my senior—the year I graduated from
high school, that summer, 1952, I worked as a guide at Tanglewood, at
the Boston Symphony's summer festival in Lenox, Massachusetts. Of
course, that was a great experience. That was six weeks.
-
GOODWIN:
- What does a guide do?
-
GARVER:
- At that time the grounds were not open to the public, so that if you
wanted to visit the grounds, you had to take a guided tour. The guides
also controlled the gates. We would check gate passes for concerts and
so on, to make sure that if students were coming in, they showed their
passes, and that you didn't immediately tell the orchestra members who
lost theirs that they couldn't come in. [laughter] So it was a very
interesting experience for me. There was a student from Yale who was my
immediate boss, and I thought he was a dreadful martinet: Charles W.
Heard. Charles demanded that people be here, right now, on the dot. And
for about the first week I thought this was really grim, and then
suddenly I fell into it. I mean, it became sort of like a Catch-22, and
Charles and I got along famously, and we remain friends to this day. He
lives in New Hampshire now. But he also regarded it as a game, and once
you discovered that, then it was easy to play. But it was a good
experience for me. I was with, I think, interesting, energized people in
the arts. It was, again, sort of a technical, functional job, you know,
"Get to the back gate and don't screw up" and "Check those passes and
make sure there are no gate-crashers. And it was also a job that dealt
with politeness, I can remember George Judd, then the manager of the
Boston Symphony, talking to the guides, and he said, "The grounds are
never closed." And somebody said, "Well, wait a minute. People just
can't walk in here," He said, "Yes, that's right, but you don't tell
people the grounds are closed. You tell them that the grounds are open
for guided tours. You want to see it? Of course. Just wait here and
we'll take a guided tour." They were so—well, it was another era,
really, because women in shorts, for instance, were not permitted on the
grounds. Apparently, it was thought that it was too great a distraction
for the students, I'm trying to remember, I guess the women students
didn't wear shorts. I can't remember. But if people came up in shorts—of
course, at that time, men didn't wear them really—we had wraparound,
sort of yellow canvas skirts that we would supply, and the one size
fitted all. Once I remember chasing after somebody and asked her very
kindly if she would return the skirt, and it turned out to be her own.
[laughter] In fact, she had bought one of the ones identical to those
that were supplied. But it was an interesting experience and a beautiful
experience. I had never spent very much time outside of Minnesota,
really, and of course it's a great vacation area, the Berkshires and
western Massachusetts. It was really a beautiful time. Then, I think, to
return to Haverford and maybe—
-
GOODWIN:
- Well, photography.
-
GARVER:
- Oh, all right, photography. In one of the summer jobs I'd had, I think
between my junior and senior year of high school. It was the summer of
1950; so maybe it was between my sophomore and junior year. I remember
it because it was the year the Korean War was declared. I think that was
June of '50. I was very concerned because I wanted a foreign camera, and
I thought, "Oh my God, here we go again. There's going to be another
world war, and I can't get my camera," [laughter] But I saved my money,
and I bought a German camera, a single-lens reflex, an Exacta, and began
to photograph. At that time I was not processing my own film or printing
my own pictures. So I made photographs for a couple of years for the
high school, as a photographer for the yearbook at North Shore, and then
I began doing that at Haverford as well and began to photograph
independently. I developed a friendship with a man named Peter Moore,
who is now senior editor for Modern Photography
in New York. Through Peter we set up a darkroom, and I began to develop
and print my own work, black and white at Haverford. So I would say that
there were maybe three experiences that began to come together at
Haverford. One was the experience of working more seriously in
photography taking my camera and doing sort of reportorial work, if you
can even dignify it by calling it that, for the yearbook. The other was
taking trips into Philadelphia with Walter Kidney, with my camera,
walking down through these areas, and Kidney disclaiming on the
different architecture, the different architects, on Frank Furness, who
was a particularly vigorous and expressionistic nineteenth-century
architect in Philadelphia, and differences and spaces. I can remember
for Birnheimer's class we had to do a major term paper, and I wrote
it—it was, I think, the second semester—on the Philadelphia City Hall,
which then was regarded as a terrible, terrible excrescence and just
hideously ugly, but it occupied an entire block. It was built in the
1870s. It has a huge tower at the juncture of Broad and Market streets;
the Franklin Parkway centers on it. It's a major civic monument and
fortunately has survived. I think finally they've restored parts of it
after having sort of hacked it up indifferently. But I went in and
photographed the building. I spent a lot of time traveling through it. I
got permission to kind of get behind the scenes, and this was a very
important experience for me. So the paper was illustrated. I did a good
deal of research on Victorian architecture of the period, what was
unique about this building, what was obviously taken from the stylistic
sensibilities of the time. It was a wonderful time. I really enjoyed
that.
-
GOODWIN:
- Was it well received?
-
GARVER:
- As I remember, yes. I think it got an A-minus or a B-plus. I think
[Birnheimer] liked the photographs, too, and so on. He was a tough guy.
I think I still have the paper. I've saved it for the photographs, I
think. I dealt a good deal with the process of the building and some of
the changes that had been made and the way in which it had been used and
misused. You know, there was a splendid sort of ceremonial courtroom
that was used then as a mop closet. They just had no use for it. There
were such wonderful ceremonial spaces. One such space, I remember, they
divided and put in a two-story—they just created two stories of offices
in it, but there was an uproar about taking out these great chandeliers.
I think there were four beautiful chandeliers. So they ended up putting
in this space and just boxing in the chandeliers. I hope that maybe
they've opened that space up again and are appreciating the building
positively as a great civic excrescence, but certainly also a
demonstration of the soul of the time. But I was involved at Haverford
in a number of things. I was manager of the wrestling team, assistant
manager of track, and I used to make the movies for the football team;
so I traveled with the football team. I guess there were other things I
was involved with as well. I remember it as a time when I really didn't
know what I wanted to do. I had no clear fix. I majored in psychology,
which was a department that was embarrassingly bad when I first came
there; but they added a couple of very good people, and when I left it
was really quite respectable. But, again, I was not a very good student.
I think I learned a lot in spite of myself, because the school was so
good. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I interviewed with a
number of companies, with the idea of getting into executive training
programs of one sort or another. I finally took a job with the
Prudential Insurance Company of America. I graduated in 1956, and
started work with them in July of '56 in Newark, New Jersey, which is
not a garden spot. I guess I lived briefly in a rented room in Newark
for a couple of months before moving to Manhattan and moving in with
Peter Moore, my friend who had—I don't know if you could say he flunked
out of Haverford, but he sort of faded out of Haverford. [laughter] He
was then working in New York at a variety, of jobs, and he had been
living with somebody else who moved out. So I moved to Manhattan and
lived first on West Eighty-Sixth Street, and then later for about a year
or so, we lived in a semibasement apartment called The Studio. It had a
terrace, a fireplace, a large room, a small room, a darkroom, and a
bath. It was at 20 Commerce Street in the Village, just off of Seventh
Avenue, just south of Sheridan Square. I remember we were paying $100 a
month rent and really doing pretty well. I worked for the insurance
company for, I think, a little under a year, and it became obvious that
I wasn't interested in that. I began pursuing the idea of going into
conservation, the restoration and conservation of works of art. I quit
the insurance company at which I was making eighty dollars a week, and I
went to work for a commercial restorer, Hiram Hoelzer, who was very bad
and who was a real hacker. At the same time I was pursuing the idea of
getting into a better program at the Brooklyn Museum under Sheldon Keck.
The summer of 1957 I went back to Minnesota and took a basic course in
inorganic chemistry at what had become the University of Minnesota at
Duluth. It was the same place where I'd gone to their lab school when it
was Duluth State Teachers College. I returned to New York in the fall of
'57 and was. accepted in the program at the Brooklyn Museum. I then led,
I think, a very interesting dual existence. I would work at Brooklyn
three days a week, and I would work two days a week for a remarkable
man, a man who I think has had a good deal of influence on my life,
Winston Link. Winston was, and is, an industrial photographer in New
York, a photographer in the old tradition of large cameras, careful
setups, much time spent adjusting and manipulating the lighting, the
spaces. He was, at that time, I think, swimming against the current,
because everyone was out with their Leicas and making, you know, quick
shots and so on. But Winston was, and is, a passionate man, and he was
an extremely fastidious craftsman. No sloppy work ever went out of his
studio. I would do printing, and sometimes I would do it again and again
until I got it. just right. Winston also had a passion for steam
railroads, and at that time about the only steam left in the eastern
United States was on the Norfolk and Western Railway which ran through
primarily Virginia and West Virginia, hauling coal. Of course, the N and
W owned, I guess, a fair amount of coal itself. It also was loyal to the
coal owners, and so it kept steam equipment operating much longer than
most of the other roads. So, on three occasions Winston and I—and on one
occasion we were accompanied by Winston's young nephew—went down to
rural Virginia and West Virginia to photograph and make tape recordings
of the steam locomotives and trains on the Norfolk and Western. Winston
made many more trips than that. I only accompanied him on three. But I
think that, all told, we were there for about a month at different
times. This was, I think, a very exciting and focusing experience for
me, because here we were—we were like anthropologists or biologists
observing a disappearing race. We knew that the replacement of steam by
diesel was inevitable, and in some cases we were chasing the very last
of those locomotives. Well, we went down in the fall—the longest trip
was in the fall of '57, shortly before I started work at the Brooklyn
Museum under Sheldon Keck, and of course it was just exceptionally
beautiful, the foliage, the experience. We were chasing a train that ran
once a day, Monday through Friday, from Abingdon, Virginia, to, I think,
West Jefferson, North Carolina. The distance was about fifty-five miles,
and it went over something like a hundred bridges. It was a mixed train.
There was one passenger car and several freight cars, depending on what
was needed. It was a very casually run operation. They had a schedule,
nominally, but they rarely kept to it. Winston had an old Buick
convertible with no back seat (that just held all the equipment), and so
we would get up in the morning and set up for a shot and perhaps for a
tape recording. The train would come along. We would throw
everything—you know, we'd take the four-by-five cameras down, put them
into the Buick, and rush ahead for another shot. On the weekends we
would go and tape record some of the huge coal freights that were coming
up over the pass not too far away. So, of course, there was lots of
noise, and Winston would photograph and I'd usually operate the tape
recorder. But I think that experience, this kind of focus, this
intensity to get something that was disappearing, to document it well
and carefully, was so important to me. And, as I say, Winston was a
meticulous technician. He also developed a system of large-scale photo
flash reflectors and a firing system, so that he could make very
large-scale photographs at night.
-
GOODWIN:
- What did you plan to do with the train documentation?
-
GARVER:
- Well, I'm coming to that. [laughter] Actually Winston didn't know. He
felt compelled to preserve a record of this train material because it
was going. I think the tape recordings he saw as having a direct
commercial benefit in the production of records, which in fact they did.
I think he's now produced about six of them. They sell well and have
certainly paid off his investment and then some. The photographs, he
really wasn't sure. He started by taking photographs during the day, but
being sort of Germanic in character, the sun wasn't always right or in
the right locations. So he decided, if he did the work at night, the
light would be under his control. He was trained as an engineer, and he
developed a whole power-pack system and lighting system that was all
wired together. It took him as long as a week, in one case, to set up a
single photograph. We did this on a couple of occasions, and I think it
most probably took the better part of the day. And of course you have
one shot, and that's it. He would usually use two or three cameras set
at slightly varying exposures, but he was very, very good at calculating
this. Finally, I am pleased to say, a lot of these rail photographs are
supposed to be published by Harry N. Abrams, [Incorporated], in an
important book. I'm waiting to see. They've said yes, they're
interested, and they've assigned a—Winston found a writer he liked and
so on. But of course that's twenty-three years after the fact. Winston
then, I think, was forty-one. He's now sixty-four. He was younger then
than I am now. He has simply been waiting. Winston has taken on other
projects like this. He photographed the construction of the Verrazano
Narrows Bridge, and he would get up at four in the morning so he could
get the Queen Elizabeth going out and the United States coming in and meeting under the
bridge—you know, that sort of thing. But he is a passionate man and
always had a project. He subsequently bought an old railroad car, which
he spent fourteen years restoring, and he is now restoring a locomotive.
So he needs that kind of a long-term, passionate project. And at times
his business, I suppose, has suffered.
1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO JUNE 25, 1980
-
GARVER:
- To continue with my experiences in New York at that time, in 1956-58.
Working with Winston [Link] was a wonderful experience. I think working
at the Brooklyn Museum was maybe less successful, because I found that I
was not a good conservator. I was not conservative enough. I was most
probably a little too impetuous in what treatments to do and so on. I
also found that I simply could not paint. I can't match colors. Some
people, of course, can do that very quickly, but I found that I just
can't do it. I'm not color blind, but I have a great deal of trouble in
painting, retouching a sky or something of that sort. Just to get the
right color is very, very hard for me. And I found that conservators, as
I say, are very conservative in temperament and personality, and maybe
I'm a little more flamboyant or impetuous. I realized that I wanted to
continue on in the field of art, but I certainly did not see myself as
an academic. I didn't see myself teaching Northern Renaissance Painting
the first semester and Flemish Baroque and French Eighteenth-Century
Painting the second semester. I did not see myself going on to get a
graduate degree in history of art, in that sense. But I was very
interested, I think, in museums in a functional way—and in a very naive
way, as I think about it. So, as the experience with [Sheldon] Keck was
obviously not entirely satisfactory, I began looking around for
alternatives. The University of Minnesota had just begun a program—I
don't even know if they've continued it—that was intended for museum
curators. You would get an M.A. in history of art and have some
experience working in museums, and there would be courses on museum
problems and so on. In thinking about it now, in reflecting on it, it
was a pretty thin program. It was just getting under: way. It did not
deal, of course, at all with any of the business aspects of museums, in
which I've had some additional training later. But I wish I'd had more.
What I've learned has been by experience, and it's come slowly. So, in
August of '58, I returned to Minnesota to live. Of course, I hadn't been
there to live really since I went away to school ten years before, in
August of '48. I set up at the University of Minnesota and began
studying history of art. I was a better student there. The first year, I
lived in a dormitory. Then the second year, my brother, who was also
studying there, and I rented an apartment. I think that I then became
much more conscious of the operations of a museum—I worked as sort of a
student-assistant to the director of the University Art Gallery. I
worked at the Walker Art Center, then in its smaller, original form,
with H. Harvard Arnason, the director. He left shortly thereafter, and
Martin Friedman was then acting director. Of course, Friedman has since
become director and has been there for twenty-two, twenty-three years. I
found that to be a very interesting experience. I liked the technical
[aspects] and the sort of combination of energy, of systems, of
intellectualizing, the consideration of an exhibition, the sort of
marketing or merchandising, the planning of it, the organization of it,
the selection of the works, the preparation of the catalog—the way all
these things would work in a rather cyclic way, culminating in the
exhibition itself. Then [it was] essentially on to the next. It was not
as routine, certainly, as one might think of traditional academe. So I
worked—
-
GOODWIN:
- Excuse me, what was the Walker showing at that time?
-
GARVER:
- The Walker is a museum of modern and contemporary art. They still had—T.
B. [Thomas Barlow] Walker had acquired lots of things, including jade
and old paintings, most of which they've gotten rid of. They still had
one gallery devoted to a Napoleonic collection, and I think one gallery
devoted to some older paintings. And [there was] one gallery devoted to
jade, which I think they may still have. Or maybe finally they've been
able to put it all on loan to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. But it
was certainly primarily current art, and I know that was where I first
saw a lot of—I left something out. I'll have to go back. I had been
introduced to, contemporary art, abstract expressionism, in
Philadelphia. But I had also, as a senior at Haverford, begun taking
history of art courses at Bryn Mawr [College]. I studied with Joe
Sloane, who's recently retired from [the University of North Carolina],
Chapel Hill, and Alexander Soper, who still teaches now at the Institute
of Fine Arts at New York University. My major remained psychology, but I
took a strong minor, I guess you could say, in the history of art. A
suggestion was made that I should see if I could get into the program at
the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, not far from Haverford.
Of course, Albert Barnes had collected primarily nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century art up to, let's say, 1920-1930. He also had
Picasso up to the cubist period, but he had continued to acquire Matisse
much later. Barnes had been killed in an automobile accident in the
early fifties. But the collection was set up as an educational
collection. The collection was very hard to get in to see; now it's
somewhat easier. It was not thought of as a museum. It was a private
educational institution where you could study and courses were taught.
This one Tuesday afternoon course was taught by Violette de Mazia, who
was sort of a wonderful Parisian Bohemian lady who wore thumb rings. The
idea was essentially a scientific, sort of formalist course in the
aesthetics of art. It didn't deal with the moral themes of subject
matter or the uplifting issues of art in that way. It dealt much more
with the formalist approach to art, however, being governed by one's own
particular psyche and the subjective responses that one would very
definitely bring to art. The collection [at the Barnes Foundation] is
phenomenal. There were maybe three or four Haverford students in this
lecture class, and most of the rest of them were main line matrons. So,
of course, for most of the students, Miss de Mazia's lectures were
rather repetitive and slow moving. I think they were most probably about
as fast as the ladies in the class could take, and they dealt with the
collections. As I started to say, a student friend of mine counted
something like sixty-five Cézannes and over a hundred Renoirs and, you
know, major Seurats and Van Goghs and American painters up through
[William] Glackens, pretty much, and some old-master paintings—all of it
arranged in a curious small gallery building with a huge two-story
central space and then one-story galleries on either side of it. As I
say, quite small but jam-packed. In retrospect, I realize their Cézanne
watercolors went practically from the floor to the ceiling, and they
most probably have been hung for forty years, which hasn't done them any
good. They were concerned about condition and so on, and everything was
in very good condition. They also collected iron work, I guess from
medieval up through the nineteenth century. So these hinges and bits of
decorated iron work would be hung in among the pictures. Of course, the
installation had been done by the "Doctor," as he was referred to, Dr.
Barnes. And when he died, that was it. The installations were fixed. By
way of example of the problems, the major Seurat, the Model in Three Poses, and a major Cézanne, The Card Players, and of course the great Matisse, Joy of Life—I think 1906—all of these were hung
inaccessibly. I remember once they put up a ladder so we could go up and
look at the Seurat. And the Joy of Life was hung
in the stairwell, so you [either] looked up at it or you kind of looked
down at it. At that time, anyway, Barnes would permit no photographs and
would certainly permit no color photographs, and it was all very touch
and go to get in and see it if you weren't a student there. But that was
an important experience for me, I think. But I did not agree with their
position that abstract art was bunkum, and it's interesting that as they
dealt with these formal issues, they tended to play down the importance
of subject matter. They, you know, would deal very effectively with,
say, 1918 Matisses, when they had become very—you know, these Matisses
are maybe the most structural and least decorative. There was a big
Matisse lunette painting that he had done. It was, of course, done in
the thirties, when the building was built. It was painted for the
building. But they couldn't deal, really, with non-representational
painting, which I would see at some of the Pennsylvania Academy [of the
Fine Arts] shows and so on. I can remember looking at [Jackson] Pollock
and [Philip] Guston and [Franz] Kline, and [Willem] de Kooning and
[Clyfford] Still. I'm not sure if Still was there. But this was the
vintage period, you know; so many of those people are now dead. And it
was a very exciting experience. I liked abstract expressionist painting
very much. When I returned to the Middle West, when I went back to
Minneapolis, the Walker Art Center was very much involved in showing and
acquiring abstract expressionist painting. I remember one show, "60
American Painters: 1960," and all the—you'd be very hard-pressed to put
together a show like that today for under a quarter or half a million
dollars. I think there was such good stuff; it would be so valuable
today. Yet there it all was. It was a great, great experience to see
this material, and very, very energizing. The Walker was really a very
upbeat place. I also worked at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which
was then directed by, an acting director, a man named Sam Hunter. I'll
talk more about him later. But I did some just very ordinary "cellar"
work, essentially that's what I did at both places. At the Walker I can
remember building a model of the building for the director and working
on planning the installation of an early [Joseph] Hirshhorn sculpture
show. Just odds and ends, that sort of thing. You were very much on the
ground floor, doing some research on, you know, some other material in
the collection, nothing very glamorous. At the Minneapolis Institute of
Arts, I worked there less. At Walker, I worked every weekend as the
person who would come in and unlock and make sure everything was going
smoothly and answer questions and so on. It, of course, then was in a
much smaller building that was subsequently demolished for the new one.
At the Art Institute, again as a student volunteer, essentially, I
worked on cataloguing some of the print collection. They have a very
large collection of Whistler, and I think I was working on that. At the
same time, at the University of Minnesota, I was assistant to the
director, who was then Sidney Simon. I can remember Simon had a very
good eye for modern art. It was an interest of his. He had taken a
doctorate at the Fogg [Art Museum, Harvard University], but prior to
that he had been a product designer and had been studying product
design. I can't remember if he'd worked for Raymond Loewy, but he'd
worked for one of the good design outfits. He organized early
exhibitions—this is 1959—of Jasper Johns. He brought in Device Circle and Flag on an
Orange Ground and Highway and some of
the very great Johns paintings in this one small room. It would be tough
to do' a show like that again today. [The shows included] Robert
Goodnough and a number of other artists. He brought in a collection—the
Galka Scheyer [Paul] Klee collection—from the Pasadena [Art Museum]—came
to Minnesota, to the [University Art] Gallery, and it was so good that
the Walker Art Center said, "After you show it, we'll show it. We'll
give it another venue and a wider view in Minneapolis." And they did.
But [there were] just very good shows like that. I can remember writing
all the labels for a didactic show of William Blake. We borrowed a lot
of Blake prints and some watercolors and so on. And I think, as I
reflect on it, maybe that experience has left me with a lasting effect,
because I think labels are important in museums, and I think labels are
usually very badly written. It's an experience that I had. I think if I
ever teach a course in museology again, I would teach a course in
rudimentary label writing. It's very much like learning to boil water
and make a white sauce in a cooking class.
-
GOODWIN:
- What's your basic opinion of labels?
-
GARVER:
- Well, I think there should be labels. I think you should identify what
you're seeing, particularly if you're moving from one era or area to
another. You can set the tenor of the whole room. So there's that, as
well as specific labels. I think some of the best labels I've ever seen
recently were the wall labels produced for the [Edvard] Munch exhibition
at the east-wing galleries of the National Gallery [of Art] in
Washington. The exhibition dealt with major themes of Munch's—you know,
the figures by the shore, Women by the Shore, Setting Sun, Sick Child,
and some of these themes. For a very uneven painter they had obviously
selected very carefully to get the best of a very uneven lot. But each
theme was dealt with in a large label silk-screened on the gallery wall.
In a few words, it kind of set the character of the whole room, but not
saying, "You will understand that it's this way and that way." It wasn't
too complicated. So often these labels are written in such a florid,
"inside" language that they are very hard to comprehend. And I think
many people do that because they're afraid that if their friends see a
real simple label that they'll think, "Oh, what's happened to old
Charlie. He's writing this stuff at a fourth-grade level." But when
working in San Francisco, I very much appreciated the fact that the man
who was installing and preparing the tribal arts galleries wrote labels
and submitted them to, I think, tenth and eleventh graders in high
school. If they didn't make sense to those kids, he would rewrite them.
So they came out being clear, direct, lucid, and simple. To me, a good
label is information that's available if you. want it. Now, I noticed in
the installation of the new galleries—the Andre Meyer galleries at the
Metropolitan Museum [of Art]—every painting has a label. I have some
criticisms about the labels, but the information is there if you want
it. And if you don't want it, fine, don't deal with it. Some people say,
well, everyone spends time reading the labels, and they never look at
the art. But in fact, I think people look at the art. I think most
probably the perception of art is much faster than the linear act of
reading a label. You can scan and take in more visually and much faster
than you can intellectually or verbally—I guess I would say
verbally—when you have to sit down and read one word at a time, or even
it you are a speed reader and scan ten words at a time. But you can look
at a whole image quickly and with comprehension, I think. A museum—this
is a digression, I suppose—is very much like a library, and certain
things are out and accessible. But you don't go into a library with the
idea of reading every book. And for me to come to a museum or an
exhibition and dutifully give the same attention to every painting would
be ridiculous, because you don't have the energy and you don't have the
physical capacity to remember everything. So I find, in having just been
to the Norton Simon Museum [of Art at Pasadena] last Sunday,
startlingly, there are two or three paintings, not even "the best," that
remain with me. But they are a surprise and a delight to me. I hadn't
seen those. They are, in one case, a portrait by Adolphe Bouguereau; you
usually think of him as painting, you know, cute young peasant girls,
with dirty feet, in a very academic way. Well, this is a very profound,
intense psychological portrait of a young man, I'd say he's in his
thirties. It's a very, very interesting portrait, very, very intense.
And, you know, I'd never seen anything like that, just beautifully,
brilliantly painted. [It's done] as well as Ingres, but a little looser;
obviously it's not an Ingres portrait. In another room up there, the
juxtaposition of things interested me. In a large room, the Manet Ragpickers. is placed very near a number of
Rubenses and near a late-eighteenth-century, very Zurbaranesque or
Murilloesque Goya. I thought these combinations and juxtapositions of
paintings to be very interesting and very individual. I like that. It's
not everything by one artist in one place, and usually, I think, I
believe in that, of putting most everything by one artist in one place.
But that hasn't been done there, and I think it worked very effectively.
I learned a couple of things, you see. The rest of it I enjoyed, too.
There are things I paid my respects to. There are some passages in the
big Tiepolo ceiling there that are wonderful. These are just things that
come immediately to mind, but I can't remember everything. Nor would I
want to. Just as I go back, I spent maybe twenty afternoons, no, more
than that, maybe thirty afternoons of four hours each at the Barnes
Foundation, which is a small place. But when I go back there from time
to time, I find things that I'd completely forgotten, or I refresh my
memory with something that I really remember and see something new. I
think, for that reason, labels give you accessible information and may
help to interlock the object, which, after all, is out of its time and
place, into another system, a verbal system, I don't think that language
is going to replace art, nor do I think that you want terribly long and
longwinded labels, where you essentially end up supplying certain
information. I like it if one can deal in a gallery, for instance, with
labels that refer to, or maybe make comparisons with work in the
gallery. So, if you're reading the label and it says, "The painting to
your left and the painting to your right," or "The painting behind you,"
or "The sculpture here or there," or "Look at this then look up," this
can be effective. I've done this on one occasion at [the] Newport
[Harbor Art Museum], in a show of figurative sculpture in which I wrote
the labels—I did the layout and did the installation in a "model, and
then I wrote the labels. So you could say, "If you look up and compare
this to this other piece which is here and there—" and I think people
like that. It was not a label written. in sort of hot air, as though
things were just left up in the air. So, where am I after that label
discussion? I'm back at the University of Minnesota at the Walker, and I
was, let's see—
-
GOODWIN:
- Actually Minneapolis is quite a lively place.
-
GARVER:
- Minneapolis is an extremely lively place, and they are very generous in
their support of the arts. I think—as it would seem that I'm headed now
for the Middle West, but not Minneapolis—that Minneapolis is really an
exciting place, and Minneapolis has been, I think, extremely generous in
its support of the Walker and the Art Institute, too. You know, they
have a new symphony hall, and they are high-energy folks there. I think
in some cases they are that way because they realize they have a rather
tough climate, and that there have to be certain ameliorative
institutions. One of the problems down here, I think, is that things are
so easy that there's nothing to ameliorate, [laughter] So you don't want
to create a tough institution, something that will create problems. Life
is too easy. I mean, this is the classic complaint about California, and
I think it's much more true in Orange County than it is in Los Angeles.
This is a long fifty miles, between downtown Los Angeles and downtown
Newport Beach, a long distance in terms of the climate of acceptance of
ideas. That, I think, is one of the problems. So, when I was in my
second year at the University, and I was completing my classwork, I
still hadn't figured out what I was going to write my thesis on for an
M.A. A job opening came into Harvey Arnason from the University of
Illinois [at Urbana-Champagne] for an assistant to the director of a new
museum that was just being built. I went down and interviewed for it and
was offered the job, and in September of 1960, having completed my
classwork and taken the general exams and so on for my degree, I went
off to the University of Illinois, in Urbana-Champagne, to be assistant
to the director of the Krannert Art Museum. I would say here, in
retrospect, that I was very naive. I didn't particularly like
Urbana-Champagne, but I liked many of the people at the university. And
I must say, in retrospect, that many of those people have remained
friends, including Nathan Oliveira, who was then visiting artist, much
longer after so many other places where I worked and other friends or
acquaintances have just faded from view. But I didn't particularly like
the place, and one of the vices, I think, of those state schools in
rather small towns is that there is an incredible internal bureaucracy
developed. The director of the Krannert Museum, C.V. Donovan, was a
painter and an advertising designer on the art department faculty who
had been elevated to this position when the money came in to build the
museum. The real director, as it turned out, was the dean of the school,
a man named Allen Weller. Weller was a real university politician of the
old school, you know, people tow the mark. Well, I suspect that I was,
again, maybe a little too outspoken, and so it was obvious that it was
not going to be a happy relationship. I guess about halfway through my
second year there, I began looking around. They, at that time, were
doing a very large biennial show of contemporary American painting and
sculpture, which was selected by three artists on the faculty, or maybe
Weller, Donovan, and someone else. They would go to New York, Chicago,
Los Angeles, and San Francisco; it was a wonderful junket. But I think
they were conservative by taste and maybe not terribly knowledgeable. So
what came out of it was not very strong. Oh, on occasion, sure, there'd
be people like de Kooning and, once, Pollock, I think, and, once, Kline,
but they were getting a lot of second-raters, a lot of second-echelon
people. They were buying out of these shows, and when I think back as to
what they could have been buying and what they bought, it's a real
shame. They were buying, oh, a lot of Philip Evergood look-alikes, and
other artists who "looked like" the stars but were cheaper. Finally, I
think they began waking up to the fact that they could have had de
Kooning and Kline and maybe Pollock and some other people for nine
hundred, twelve hundred bucks. Too late. Somebody described the show
once as having "the wrinkles around the edges of middle age." I remember
it had been going on then, I guess, about twelve or fifteen years and
continued on later. So it was disappointing to me because I saw what the
Walker had done and the missed opportunities in Illinois—both missed
opportunities to exhibit and missed opportunities to acquire, even if
some of the stuff they exhibited was good. And, of course, many of the
faculty were uptight because they didn't want their students coming down
and mucking around in these imported, "too easy" ideas, although at that
point they were very much teaching abstract expressionism at the
university. But anyway, I began looking around and writing letters to
friends to see if I could find another position. I wrote a friend who
suggested that I look into the fine arts department of the Seattle
World's Fair. This would be a much shorter position, obviously; it's a
six-month fair. But they were looking for several people to be assistant
directors who had curatorial rank and experience. This was apparently a
requirement of the insurance company, that there be a curator on hand at
all times when the exhibition was opened, I think it was a foreign
insurance company. I remember that the director of the fine arts
department was an amateur, a volunteer, an Englishman, Norman Davis—who
had lived in Seattle for many years. [Davis] had early on made a fortune
in England, and had moved out of England and bought a foundering
brewery, in the thirties, which he had managed to bring back to life,
and subsequently sold it to the Carling Brewing Company. So he was then
a man, I guess, in his mid sixties. He was energetic, didn't have very
much to do, had a lot of time on his hands, had no financial worries. So
he took over the planning of the fine arts department and did a. very
good job. He also was something of a martinet. But under Davis, there
were three assistant directors employed: Allen Wilcox, who was a Seattle
native and who is now dead, I believe; Jan van der Mark, who went on
from Seattle to a career at the Walker Art Center, and then as the
founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, then the
Hopkins Center Galleries at Dartmouth [College], and now he's in Miami,
Florida, developing an art gallery, a Kunsthalle
exhibition program there. But Jan, Wilcox, and myself were the three. I
went to New York, I remember, to interview for the job with Norman
Davis, who was flying back from England. I got to the hotel and called
Davis's room, and he was in a real swivet. His cab had been rear-ended
on the way in from the airport, and I thought, "Oh my God," and when we
had dinner, I thought, "This is the worst interview I've ever had." I
was in deep depression. I can remember going out to a movie—I was
staying at the Dorset Hotel, which is right in back of the Museum of
Modern Art. I went around to a movie on Fifty-Seventh Street, and it was
something. I think Fernandel was in it, and it was screamingly funny.
Then I called my friend Winston Link. [He] had been out, and Winston was
now in. I went down [to see him]. So the evening ended pleasantly. But I
thought, well, this is a shot in the dark. But, of course, I was offered
the job, took it, left Urbana in March of '62, and drove out to Seattle.
I think, again, I was very much involved in systems and traffic flow,
crowd patterns, getting people through the exhibition. A little over a
million and a half attended in six months. That, to us, was a big crowd.
Of course, Tut ["Treasures of Tutankhanum" exhibit] has surpassed that.
It was never so crowded, and there was never such a crush around the
exhibitions as there was with Tut. It was really, I think, a very good
system set up, but I also learned something else about labeling at that
time. When the fair opened, there were, I think, five exhibitions. There
was an exhibition of contemporary American painting, and sculpture and
an exhibition of contemporary European painting and sculpture. The
former had been organized by Sam Hunter. Sam and I worked on the
installation and worked well together. The European part of the show was
organized by Wilhelm Sandberg, then director of the Stedelijk Museum in
Amsterdam. There was an exhibition of Northwest Coast Indian art, a
beautiful show put together by. a woman named [Erna] Gunther; a show of
"Treasures from the Seattle Art Museum," a smaller show; and a show
called "Masterpieces of Art from American Museums," organized by the
late William Milliken, who had been director at [the] Cleveland [Museum
of Art] before Sherman Lee. So all of these shows had to be coordinated,
had to be installed, essentially with pickup crews. The walls had been
built, but they had to be changed, painted, new lighting installed. It
was in a flat-floor exhibition hall lighted with fluorescent light,
which was really inadequate and so additional light had to be brought in
as best we could. It was sort of a tacked-together operation. But I know
that, for the American paintings, the catalog number and the name of the
artist was given above the painting, and I think the title and so on was
given as well. But Sandberg didn't want to do. that. All he wanted was
the catalog number, the idea being that if you were in an art-viewing
mood, you should not be interrupted with reading this material. Well, we
finally had to label them just with the titles. And it was so
interesting, because people said, "Well, what's it called? What's it
about?" What can you say. There was one painting, I remember, a large
Miro, called Blue Two, and it reminded me of the
morse code signal for "V for Victory," because, as I remember, it had
three black dots and sort of a red slash on a very large blue ground. It
was a very large painting and in a rather uninflected blue ground. When
the title was put up, people said, "Oh. I see he's interested in blue.
It deals with blue." So it was very strange that it seemed necessary to
supply a nugget of words—just that much: the title, nothing else. No
medium, no date—just the catalog number and the artist. I think that I
became very much aware of the public response to art—the way some people
respond very openly. I think frequently, younger people are very much
influenced by their family, by their own environmental experiences. Some
of them can be very, very open; others, of course, ape their parents.
The "Masterpieces of Art" show was only up for four months, and then
there were a couple of other shows that took its. place. One was called
"Experiments in Art," which dealt with early kinetic art and other media
experiments. I remember that was where I first saw Pete Voulkos. He had
some large pieces in clay and bronze. This is the early sixties, long
before clay became sort of the standard art medium and not a craft
medium. [There were] other things, motion sculpture that moved, and so
on. Then [there was] a show of Northwest Coast contemporary artists. I
can remember people used to. come in looking for the "Masterpieces"
show, and they would say, "Where's the real art?" [laughter] And I soon
learned to see these people coming. I mean, quite literally, it was
something of a comedy. There would usually be the very large woman and
the rather slight husband. [laughter] The conversation would go, "Who's
in charge here?" I would be pointed out. She would take charge, and she
would say, "Mr. So-and-So and I are very knowledgeable about art. We're
world travelers. We're very sophisticated. We've been to all the great
museums of Europe and all the great museums of the United States, and
this is a terrible put-on. This is not art. We've been had. We'd like
our money back." So, you know, the customer always comes first, I would
send them off to the furthest corner of the fairgrounds to get their
fifty cents refunded. I don't know if they ever did it. But it was so
interesting that these people would always announce their credentials,
their qualifications, their vast experience, and then, of course, decry
the lamentable output. Is the public being had? Are the artists putting
us on? Where is the public taste? And who are these people who dare to
do this sort of thing? And they're just being hoaxed. One still finds
that, I think, all the time. Maybe I'll talk a little more
philosophically later, as we get down to the current day. But that was
an interesting experience. I think once the show was installed, it
pretty much ran itself. There were some technical issues. There were
occasionally very minor crises. I remember that one of the guards or
hospitality staff managed to upend some poor woman in her wheelchair so
that she fell out of it face first. There were little crises like' that,
but by and large, considering that a million and a half people went
through there, there was no murder, mayhem, and virtually no vandalism.
Maybe there was some unconscious damage, but I think today it might be
hard to do a show like that without having more vandalism or more active
expression.
-
GOODWIN:
- What kind of art community was there in Seattle?
-
GARVER:
- Well, there was, and is, a sophisticated art community. [There's] a good
group of artists, [Mark] Tobey, [Morris] Graves, and so on are usually
those who are hauled out. In retrospect, and from what I've seen up
there since, it tends to be a rather hermetic community that says,
"Northwest art is as good as anything, and we're as good as the best."
They're jingoistic. The people who live up there love the weather, love
the climate, love to sail and ski and do this and that. That was one of
the rainiest summers in years, and they finally did admit that, yes, it
would be nice to see the sun a little more. But there were several very
good, very strong collectors of modern art. The [Seattle Art] Museum
paid no attention to contemporary art at that time; they've come around
some. The museum, under the directorship of Richard Fuller,
cold-shouldered it. Fuller and his mother had built the museum, had paid
for it. He was not only director, but he was president of the board of
trustees, too. So he pretty much called the shots. His interest was Far
Eastern art, and so the museum there had a fine Oriental collection but
a rather thin painting collection. There are some contemporary Pacific
Northwest people. But I think the potential is certainly there. As I
say, there were some very good collectors, but who had very strong
points of view. You were either in their camp or you weren't. But the
museum was not particularly supportive, although I think this show was
very supportive because it was a good show, to the local artists and art
community. And it was there for quite a while. I think many people came
back again and again. Sam Hunter had organized the American part of it;
there was no pop art in it. That essentially was a development that Sam
got into later, and I'll go into that later. It was essentially, I would
say, abstract expressionism and post-painterly abstraction. In thinking
about it, there were, I think, all the right names from the fifties, and
there were people like Ad Reinhardt and Morris Louis. I don't remember
if [Kenneth] Noland was in it. I'd have to look at a catalog. [There
were] a lot of people, like Richard Lytle and so on, who have
subsequently disappeared, or who are at least less well established. So
it was, I think, a pretty fair shot. There was less sculpture, but there
were some very nice pieces in it, as I recall. But the installation was
something of a problem. It was a tough space, and the lighting was not
that good. But there were some very good paintings and some very good
things that, as I say, would be hard to get today. Well, that job very
much influenced my own career, because Sam Hunter and I worked well
together. And I was subsequently offered a job as assistant director of
the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts,
outside of Boston, [This is] a very—as Brandeis says—Jewish-sponsored,
non-sectarian university, I would say that more than half—I think
something like 75 percent of the student population was Jewish in the
early sixties when I went there.
1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE JUNE 25, 1980
-
GARVER:
- I had just left off at the tape change with my arrival at Brandeis
[University] as assistant to Sam Hunter in late 1962. Brandeis, of
course, in Waltham, is a Jewish-sponsored, non-sectarian university, to
use their terms. It was about three-quarters Jewish, I think. And at
that time, the arts there were used in a very interesting way. [Tape
recorder turned off] The president of the university was a remarkable
man named Abram L. Sachar, and Abe Sachar did not like modern art. But
he also knew that it was a very effective tool to get Jewish money
interested in the university, because, of course, so many of the great
collections in Boston, New York, and elsewhere—the great modern
collections are in Jewish hands. So he put up with it. Of course, having
Sam Hunter there, who was so well known as an author and as a museum
person and organizer of exhibitions was a big plus. You remember that I
had first met Hunter in Minneapolis, and that's the reason I worked with
him in Seattle, and the reason I was then invited to Brandeis. It was
something of a coup for Brandeis to have Hunter, although Sachar did not
care for him. And Sachar certainly did not care for contemporary
American art or modern art. By way of example of that, very shortly
after I arrived, in late '62, Sam was given the residual estate of a man
named [Joseph] Gevirtz, who had died in, I've forgotten, Florida or New
York, and the man's son-in-law was the executor of the estate. And there
had been a certain residual amount that was to go to good works of some
sort. This later came up for question, as to whether it was supposed to
go to cancer research or art. But Sam and Leon Mnuchin, [the
son-in-law], got together, and Mnuchin said, "All right. Let's buy some
art, using Gevirtz's money. I'll add a little, and we'll call it the
Gevirtz-Mnuchin collection." They had about $50,000—or perhaps a little
less. Mnuchin gave a couple of things. He. gave a very nice Sam Francis
gouache that would be worth that alone today. So, for $50,000 [or]
$48,000, they set out to buy works of contemporary American art. I think
it's instructive that, at the time—late '62, early '63, they were able
to buy a Jasper Johns construction called Gray
Drawer, not a great piece; a fine [Robert] Rauschenberg called Second Time Painting; a superior Blue-White [by Ellsworth] Kelly; a large [Adolph]
Gottlieb that I think was the most expensive painting, as I remember,
maybe the Rauschenberg and the Gottlieb, or the Kelly and the Gottlieb,
were about $4800; a six-foot-high [Roy] Liechtenstein, absolutely
classic (you know, the girl renouncing the guy, saying, "Forget it!
Forget me! I'm through with you and your kind"); a Ray Parker? a small
Alex Katz; a fine Larry Rivers; a small and rather indifferent Al Held.
I'm just thinking of these from memory. I think there were something
like twenty works. So the average purchase price was a couple thousand
dollars. Oh, [there was] one of the relatively few [Andy] Warhol
paint-by-the-numbers pictures, which was subsequently traded in by Bill
Seitz, who was Sam Hunter's successor, for an absolutely superb
double-image Saturday Disaster, a black-and-white
painting that is—it's a very tough picture, but very, very good. And
[there was] a [Claes] Oldenburg, one of the Oldenburg plaster
constructions, called Tray Meal; a wonderful
Marisol of Ruth Kligman. She used a wooden barrel, with five heads on
top, of a woman named Ruth Kligman, and the piece was called Ruth. Ruth Kligman was sort of an art
wheeler-dealer and groupie and woman-about-art in New York at the time.
I can remember that she was shaped, maybe, a little bit like a barrel.
But the tits were made of wooden apples that Marisol had cut in half and
doweled into the barrel. I think that the abstract expressionists were,
of course, too expensive. They subsequently acquired some very nice
ones. I think the Gottlieb, which is an artist I don't care for that
much, was most probably as close as they got to abstract expressionism.
But [they did get] a [Morris] Louis, a [Kenneth] Noland. [Frank] Stella
was not quite on the scene then. The. quality was, by and large, very
good, and of course the prices were ground floor. I can remember that
the collection was to be exhibited in New York at Sam Kootz's gallery.
Kootz, of course, was one of these very outspoken types. I'm trying to
think if there was a [Hans] Hofmann, because Hofmann showed with Kootz.
I don't think there was. I think the museum got one later as a gift. But
there were a couple of people of the more conservative, or older,
generation that Kootz was showing and that [Hunter and Mnuchin] had
bought. But Kootz said, "Well, listen. If you're putting this exhibition
together, let's exhibit it in New York." So it was exhibited in New York
and then subsequently at Brandeis. And I can remember Kootz being
absolutely outraged when he discovered the full makeup of the
collection, because, of course, it contained people like Warhol and
Lichtenstein and Oldenberg, whom he thought were just absolutely beyond
the pale: "Absolutely outrageous." But he backed himself into this, and
I remember it was a very nice opening. Then the collection, of course,
came up to Brandeis, where it is now. When you think of the value and
the quality of it, it was exceptional. I remember one other piece, and
it was a piece I was going to talk about with the president of the
university. And this, I think, gives you a little of the sort of the
dynamic of the situation at that time. Leon Mnuchin's wife left him
after the collection was assembled, and she went to the president and
said, "My late father's residual estate was to be used for cancer
research or scientific research and not for the purchase of works of
art." Now, I think she said something to the effect of, "I'd give the
money to the science programs of Brandeis," which were very strong, "but
I don't want it here in art." Well, Sachar came over and looked at the
collection. He'd seen it before, of course. And one of the pieces in it
was a fine Jim Dine, a beautiful Dine called Double
Red Bathroom. It had two medicine cabinets attached to it that
had paint on them, and the whole thing had sort of a painted, stenciled
red ground, with these applications and attachments, including a roll of
toilet paper in a holder, and the toilet paper had been dyed or painted
red. That piece just frosted Sachar to no end. [laughter] He was
outraged that this toilet paper would be hanging in the Rose Art Museum.
So he wanted to use that as a sacrificial lamb, and he wanted to sell
that piece just to show Mrs. Mnuchin that his heart was in the right
place. Fortunately, it was not sold. It's a very beautiful piece. But
Sam organized a show called "Modern American Painting," something of
that sort, using this collection as the basis, that traveled to a number
of American museums. It dealt with abstract expressionism and
post-painterly abstraction and pop art. It was really a very exciting
time I think, in the sixties. I would get down to New York fairly often;
there was a lot going on in the galleries. As somebody has described it,
there was a joy about New York art at the time. I mean, the media had
really gotten their teeth into pop art, business was booming. It was not
such a dog-eat-dog business as it had been, you know, a real struggle
for getting on top. People were really enjoying themselves, and things
were going well. And business was going well. It was an upturn; prices
were going up. As I say, there was real recognition of art and artists
as sort of media kings and queens. There was a fair amount going on, I
think, in Boston at the time, but the museum itself—Sam ran the museum
in a rather imperial way. The art history department at Brandeis was
very sound, in a very correct, Germanic-Institute-of-Fine-Arts, NYU [New
York University] way. The studio department was really bad, and the
students had a particular arrogance that I've never found as strong
elsewhere. I think it's more endemic in the East than it is in the West.
I'd meet a painting student, and I'd say, "Have you seen the current
show?" "Oh, absolutely not. I'm not going to sully my own vision by
looking at something else." Or they would come over and curl their lip
at Hans Hofmann. Just thinking about some of those shows that we had,
you know, Philip Guston and Hans Hofmann and Magritte, [these were]
major exhibitions. The Hofmann and Magritte show came straight from the
Museum of Modern Art. And [there were] other exhibitions that Sam
organized, some that I organized, and that later Bill Seitz organized. I
can remember a [Franz] Kline show. It all seemed so simple to get these
then, after Kline died. There was a memorial retrospective show that was
organized by the then Washington Gallery of Modern Art, which
subsequently folded up. The exhibitions were wonderful, but they were
presented in the attitude—at least Sam's attitude was, "If the students
and faculty and staff and so on like them, swell. If not, to hell with
them." We did a big show, "Boston Collects Modern Art," and a lot of
things came out of the woodwork. I was assigned to researching some of
the less well-known collections, more problematic ones. I can remember
walking into a home in Cambridge, one of those beautiful, shingle-style,
Edwardian, just post-turn-of-the-century houses. The whole place was
furnished in what I think of as kind of "Boston dusty," very good stuff
but all faded and a little tattered. I can remember the woman saying
about the wallpaper in the living room, which had definitely seen many
years, that, yes, her grandmother, her mother or her grandmother, had
bought it in Paris in the twenties and it was wonderful wallpaper. Very
expensive, don't you know? So why redo it? But here was an 1860s Monet
over the library fireplace, and here was an 1880s Monet over the dining
room fireplace. And here was a Berthe Morisot landscape over the
radiator in the library. The radiator, of course, had cooked the frame
over the years, it was one of those plaster frames over a wooden core.
And it had subsequently fallen off and hit the radiator, and, of course,
all the plaster fell off. So the owner had simply put gold paint on it,
like he was painting the radiator. He agreed that it should be reframed,
and when it arrived I would say he had spent maybe five dollars on the
frame. It was a beautiful landscape. I mean, it was very typical of
Boston that the things one had were known to be good, but there was no
ostentation or pretension. But that underdoing it was a little much.
But, at the time, Sam most probably had two vices and certainly some
virtues. Sam was ambitious and lazy, and so he let me run the day-to-day
operations of the museum in a very wide—I had very wide latitude for
operations. Sam had no consciousness of either developing or maintaining
a budget. He was sort of assigned a budget by the university, and he
paid no attention to it. He essentially ran way over the exhibition
budget. Of course, the university allowed that because the programs he
did were bringing people from New York. Brandeis had a big arts banquet
annually in New York, usually at the Waldorf [Astoria Hotel], where they
would give a Brandeis Creative Arts award. The whole thing was very much
a piece of showmanship to keep the university in the eye, primarily, of
New York and elsewhere in the large Jewish communities. And the support,
then, was very generous. It was, of course, to drop off very
substantially, but that happened after I left. So Sam, I think, was
ambitious. He would start on programs; he would get rolling. When he was
in the mood to write, he would write absolutely superbly and acutely—the
same in terms of his lecturing. If he wasn't [in the mood], he'd turn
out a real weak job. But I think most probably one of Sam's
characteristics that was of greatest concern to me was that he didn't
know his own taste. He had to be assured. He wasn't sure of his own eye.
I think that Sam has always had pretensions to money and power and
influence and so on. To him, he gained these things through his
influence and effect on others. But, in turn, he also took their word. I
organized some of the more unusual exhibitions there. I did the first
survey exhibition of Bruce Conner ["Assemblages, Drawings and Films"],
who, of course, is an artist. I don't know what he's calling himself
now. He lives in San Francisco, but at that time, he lived—for a while,
anyway—outside of Boston, at first with Timothy Leary. He was very much
involved in that sort of—he was not a heavy user, I think, of
psychedelic drugs, but he was very much involved in that group around
Leary and Richard Alpert. He lived in Boston, I guess, for a couple or
three years. I made a large exhibition that Sam said I could do only
when he [Sam] knew he was leaving. At that time, I wanted to do a show
of Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri as new builders, as builders for
people, using in very different ways, new technologies. And Sam didn't
approve of that until he went to Europe one summer, and the editor of
Domus in Milan said, "Oh, do you know the work of Paolo Soleri. Oh, very
important! There he is in America. Oh, my word!" So Sam came back and
said okay. So that had been rubber-stamped. But I did several
exhibitions, two exhibitions of photography, one show called "Twelve
Photographers of the American Social Landscape." I think that has become
something of a classic. It was done in 1965 and included such people as
Robert Frank, Duane Michals, Bruce Davidson, and Lee Friedlander. It was
essentially photography of the American social landscape, which is
Friedlander's expression. Photography from Robert Frank, it started with
Frank and included—there were a couple of Boston people and some other
people who have not stayed afloat, I guess. At least I'm not aware of
them. But [it included] Davidson and Michals and Danny Lyon, for whom I
subsequently made another exhibition. But another photo show I made, and
I should mention this, was of the work of a turn-of-the-century
photographer named Charles Currier. Currier was a Boston commercial
photographer, in practice. At least listed publicly as a photographer
for about twenty years, from I think about 1889 to 1909 or 1886 to 1906.
I wrote my master's thesis on Currier and his work, as I was still
groping for a subject by the time I ended up at Brandeis. Of course, I
got the thesis to the University of Minnesota, got it on the plane—I had
about ten minutes to spare. I drove it to the airport post office ten
minutes before the mails for that plane closed, and that was the last
plane that would guarantee next-day delivery in Minneapolis, when it had
to be there. But my interest in photo exhibitions, I suppose, which I've
done from time to time, started then. And my interest in photography
continued, although it has not now, as a practitioner. I no longer
really practice it, I would say, as I did even then. I think I stopped
my serious practice of it when I left New England in 1968.
-
GOODWIN:
- What was the public response to the photography shows?
-
GARVER:
- I think very favorable. Of course, at that time, Boston had a very
hermetic photo community. One reason that I organized both the Currier
and the social landscape shows was to twit this hermetic Boston quality,
I think, that centered around the work and thinking of Minor White, who
was then at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. White himself
was very open to new ideas. Of course he'd been publishing Aperture and had been very much involved, I
think, in developing a climate for the appreciation of the photographic
aesthetic, an appreciation of photo-seeing—camera vision, I guess, or
photographic vision. Of course at that time, in the early and mid
sixties, photography was only really just becoming acceptable. And when
I think of what I should have bought—I've never collected photography,
which was a mistake, at least an investment mistake. But White, I can
remember, came to a party at my house after the opening of the "Twelve
Photographers" and was very supportive and interested in talking with a
number of the photographers who were there. I think he subsequently used
some of their work in issues of the magazine. But there was a whole
clique of photographers centered around the Carl Siembab Gallery who
were very persnickety about what a good photograph is. By and large,
they are what I call the ice crystal school—frozen ponds, weeds frozen
in the ponds, the practitioners of the more pictorial of Minor White's
work and maybe also influenced by the more pictorial aspects of Ansel
Adams. I think of Nick Dean, who now photographs and lives in Maine, as
being one of the most outspoken of these practitioners. When I did the
Currier show, [it was made up of] photographs of anonymous Boston
buildings, high-class and upper-middle-class interiors in the back bay,
gardens, factories, landscapes. They were negatives that had been saved
by a photographer friend, a man named Ernst Halberstadt. Ernie was a
commercial photographer in Boston and a collector of many things. He and
his wife had a three-story house just filled with stuff, and he had
saved these negatives in the thirties, after Currier had died, and had
subsequently sold them to the Library of Congress, where they are now.
Currier had a very acute eye for the commonplace, the sort of banal
interiors. He had a way of really cutting through, I think in a very
effective way, to, I guess you'd say, the form that was inherent in all
that Victorian froufrou. And he had a way of operating the camera in a
very exciting way, simply setting it up. I learned, in my own work and
in looking at the work of others, a lot from Currier about how to
compose by dealing with the edges, not the centers, because Currier's
edges were always so carefully thoughtout. The composition worked
because it had been framed correctly. So many photographers ignore that.
They aim the camera at something in the center, but they're not
conscious of what's going on around the edges.
-
GOODWIN:
- Did you have the intention of changing the popular understanding of
photography?
-
GARVER:
- There were several shows that I did essentially to twit—I never said
this really, but they were done for that reason—proper Boston and proper
Boston's perception of "correct" art. I think the two photo shows were
among them, because here's an anonymous commercial photographer just
doing stuff that was not produced as high art. And the other
photographers were not dealing with artsy subjects, in the "Twelve
Photographers" exhibition. The Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri
exhibition, I think, was done in reaction to my watching the
construction of a monumentally impractical, extravagant, and ugly
theater building going up next to the museum. It was badly sited, badly
designed, grotesque in appearance. It was Max Abramovitz's worst moment.
So I thought, well, there must be other ways of doing this sort of
building. And, of course, Soleri and Fuller were both intrigued at being
put in the same exhibition, because Fuller was very much a
machine-technology sort of person, and Soleri much more of the
medieval-feeling type. But both were concerned with siting, in different
ways, with efficiency, with effectiveness, with not building something
that is grotesquely out of character with either the time or the
location. I never said anything about that, and I don't know if it was
ever particularly clear to anyone, but in my own heart I was certainly
making these exhibitions with that in mind. Certainly, I found at
Brandeis a kind of chilly, New England sense of restraint, even applied
to the rather passionate Jewish personalities within the university. I
had a great deal of respect for Sachar as long as he would stay away
from the museum, and he pretty much did. Sam Hunter left after I had
been there about three and a half years to become director of the Jewish
Museum in New York, and for about six months, I, in a sense, ran the
museum. It isn't very large; then it was about 8,000 square feet, I
think. Then it had no storage space or loading facilities or any of the
amenities that are always left out of museums. They've subsequently
expanded it and improved those. Bill Seitz came up from the Museum of
Modern Art, and I think that Bill, who died a few years ago, was
easier—and harder, in some ways—to work with than Sam. It's been rather
hard to deal with Sam, I think. He was always sort of morose and wished
that whatever he had he could have more of, or better, or this or that.
He was never really, I think, a terribly happy man, and he was always
very much influenced by—and, I think, seduced by—money and power. He was
always taking on projects for money and power and has, I think,
continued to do this as a professor at Princeton. At one point after he
left Brandeis, he was working for a Swiss-based firm [Modarco] that was
buying and selling works of art to maintain and develop an investment
portfolio. I can remember meeting Sam and a couple of his colleagues in
this firm when I was in San Francisco. This firm had also produced the
Max Ernst Bed that Nelson Rockefeller had in the Vice President's house
in Washington. In addition, it had produced a set of gold-plated,
sterling flatware, designed by Arman. So, during the course of lunch,
these portfolios were handed to me, and I can remember the Arman
flatware was offered to me at a very attractive price. I kept thinking,
"My God, these people could be brokering oil tankers or whatever. It
doesn't make any difference." I don't know if Sam does that anymore, or
if this organization is still going. Anyway, Bill Seitz was much more of
a scholar. He had a doctorate from Princeton. He was a much better
scholar. He was, I think, a much more careful and broad-ranging scholar
than was Sam. But I think he came to Brandeis expecting to find the
arcadian existence that he had known at Princeton. He'd gotten his
degree at Princeton; he taught there, I think, five or six years. He
received "the call" from the Museum of Modern Art. He had done, I think,
a Monet exhibition ["Claude Monet: Seasons and Moments"] for them, and
they subsequently offered him a curatorship. He was sort of rising up
through the Museum of Modern Art hierarchy, and he decided he didn't
want to become, you know, director of pointing and sculpture exhibitions
or whatever, collections or exhibitions, I don't remember now. So he
took the job at Brandeis thinking it was going to be very easy. But then
he backed into a number of major projects, a big Louise Nevelson
exhibition, and he took on theorganization of the ninth Sao Paulo
Bienal. He did not allow me the same freedom that Sam Hunter had. I
think Bill was better organized, but the situation became tense, I
think, for us. Certainly for me. He must have come in in about '66.
organization of the ninth Sao Paulo Bienal. He did not allow me the same
freedom that Sam Hunter had. I think Bill was better organized, but the
situation became tense, I think, for us. Certainly for me. He must have
come in in about '66. He would let me organize exhibitions. I organized
the Conner exhibition after Sam left. I think Bill had arrived by then,
and he approved it because he knew it was fine. Sam didn't like Conner's
work but said, "Sure, do it," and that's because he was getting out of
town. I'm trying to think of some of the other shows that I might have
done there. But the climate under Bill began to change. I think he
looked much more to the university faculty for support. Creighton
Gilbert organized a show called "Major Masters of the Renaissance," I
think it was. I worked in a technical capacity, I guess, in terms of how
things would be installed and working on a catalog and so on. I learned
a great deal about good catalog design, I think, and worked with a
wonderful designer, a man named Carl Zahn, who continues to design
catalogs for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. But it's interesting
that some of the works in the Creighton Gilbert show were borrowed from
Duveen Brothers, and, of course, Norton Simon subsequently bought Duveen
Brothers, all of it. So at least two of those paintings that were in
that show are at the Norton Simon Museum now.
-
GOODWIN:
- What was the relationship between the Rose Art Museum and the other
Boston-area museums?
-
GARVER:
- When Sam Hunter was there, I think that it was rather tense, because Sam
always saw himself as being a little better, more knowledgeable, more au
courant. In Boston there were really only two museums that, I would say,
one was really conscious of: the Museum of Fine Arts, which had just
barely begun dipping its feet into the twentieth century, and the
Institute of Contemporary Art, which then, as now, was undergoing a
period of foundering, staggering, collapse, and rebirth. This has
happened so many times. I think, in some cases, Sam would say, "Oh,
well, you know, their doing so-and-so, some local artist." Bill was less
that way. But I know that it was hard. Sam had so offended the critic
for the local newspaper that, it seems to me, he wouldn't come out and
review Brandeis shows. He'd go out to the Worcester [Art Museum], which
is another fifty miles out, but he wouldn't come to Brandeis. There was
always this feeling that Brandeis was doing great things in the local
community, but [this critic] was just ignoring it. But that was also, in
a way, Sam. And as I remember, under Bill the situation was much easier.
But Bill was much more tense about—he would come up right in the middle
of a very touchy installation and say, "Well, are we going to finish it?
Are we going to be able to get it done?" Then I'd say, "If there's a
real problem, Bill, maybe we should do this, and this, and this, and we
can block that off until after the opening." "No, we can't do that!
We've got to get it all up!" So there was no maneuvering.
-
GOODWIN:
- Why is Boston a bad town for contemporary art?
-
GARVER:
- It's funny. I don't know, but I have a theory. And I think it still is a
pretty bad town for contemporary art. There are people who collect it;
there are some very good collections, I think. I think the curator at
the Museum of Fine Arts is very much in the [Clement] Greenberg circle
of, I suppose, abstract expressionism and post-painterly abstraction, or
field painting. I know that, at one point, it seemed that they were
doing nothing but shows ranging between, say, [Jules] Olitski and
[Larry] Poons. I don't know if that's changed any, but when [Kenworth]
Moffett first went there, the range of exhibitions was not terribly
wide. My own theory is that Boston is such a center of intellectual
power, there's so much emphasis put on the endeavors of the mind, that
there is not that much energy or credence given over to what I'll call
insight or the Kierkegaardian leap of faith. And certainly at Brandeis,
I think everyone wanted to create works, I'm thinking here of the
faculty, too, that interlocked and intermeshed perfectly with history.
That would drop in like a brick into a wall, so that there'd be an exact
area. It's curious because, I think, now there are many good
photographers, for instance, and this climate has changed since I was
there. Maybe there are many more good painters. I know that there have
been a number of projects that have been started to encourage painting.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, at one point, sponsored a huge
outdoor mural-painting public art program that I think was quite
successful in the quality of the stuff. And it was done all over town. I
don't think this has been continued. That was under somebody named
Andrew Hyde, and Drew Hyde has faded from the scene, but he did leave a
very interesting mark on the city of Boston, quite literally. But I know
that in my recent experience as a panelist for the individual artist
grants for the NEA, [National Endowment for the Arts], we looked at
3,700 artists, and there were very few strong artists from the Boston
area. There were a lot of fallow areas of the country. Now, you would
expect Montana, Wyoming, and Utah to produce relatively little in the
way of heavy-duty artists—not because there's no talent there but
because it's so thinly spread. The population is so low. But the work
that came in from New England, I think, was definitely disappointing.
New England and the area around Washington, D.C. were two areas that I
remember—and the other panelists and I discussed this—that we were very
disappointed in. There was a fair amount of it, but it was just not very
interesting. I think, also, the training that some of the larger
universities—MIT and Harvard both have programs—they don't have degrees,
but there are art programs—and I think by and large they have brought in
people sort of heavy with honors and distinguished vitaes and so on who
are not exciting. Certainly they're protecting their ass, but they're
not taking a flyer, they're not taking a jump and trying something new.
I don't know. I feel that now Boston—this fellow, Jim Huntington, that
I'm going off to see shortly, came from the Middle West, I believe, and
lived in Boston for quite some time. I met him in Boston when I was
there. Then, as his career began to develop, he moved to New York. Many
people ended up moving to New York, so that there was always a drain out
of New England, because New York was so nearby. The lifestyle was
understandable and comprehendable to someone in New England, and New
England was easy to get to if you needed it. But New York was the
center. So I think that's part of it. I can think of a number of artists
whose careers started to flower, and they split for New York.
-
GOODWIN:
- What about the gallery scene in Boston?
-
GARVER:
- It, I would say, waxed and waned. It was pretty good when I was there.
[There was the] Pace [Gallery]. Arnold Glimcher had started the Pace
Gallery in Boston, and he moved to New York. He'd done very well in
Boston because he represented a number of New York artists who had
already been represented by major dealers. He said, "I'd like to show
your work." [Artists said], "Oh, sure, kid." He was quite young. And, in
many cases, he took those artists away from the dealers in New York. But
he went to New York and did very well and, of course, closed the gallery
in Boston. Boston is not that large a town. I would say that unlike San
Francisco, which isn't that large a town either, but San Francisco seems
to have a larger pool of resident artists. At least I seem more
conscious of local artists in San Francisco. But, of course, the same
cry is heard there, too. There's no support for the local artist. The
collectors, if they want to buy some hotshot item, go to New York. And
I'm sure that continues to be true. It's even true in L.A. that if
something is brought out and exhibited here, chances are that the
collectors may go back and say, "Well, I'd like a bigger selection," or
"I want to look around a little more." And New York is where you go. I
think of Boston as sort of a regional art center, but I don't—there are
four areas in the United States that I think of as national art
centers—that is, their productions seem to get into the national
mainstream relatively more easily. Those are New York, of course, which
is the heart of the national mainstream, still; Chicago; San Francisco;
and Los Angeles. So maybe you might just say California, the Chicago
area, which has produced, I think, a very interesting group of
figurative painters, and New York. New York has been, to some degree, in
the doldrums of late, but then I think art generally has been without
that kind of joy or focus or direction or even seriously opposing camps
that you found in the sixties. For example, [Clement] Greenberg and
Michael Fried setting upon others who would be espousing figurative art
and pop art and so on. There was a seminar at Brandeis on this issue,
and Greenberg was on it; I think Fried was on it; Sidney Tillim was on
it. I don't remember who the others were. There was a sort of
polarizing, and now, of course, in postmodernist art, there seem to be
no high styles or even conflicting high styles. The decorative movement
in New York is interesting, I think, because it swept a lot of the
formerly despised ideas and forms into high art. It's a little like punk
rock perhaps. You know, old wallpaper, kid's cartoons, anything is
grist, for the mill, to be changed. German expressionistic painting
comes in and is sort of churned around, and it comes out in a different
way, which I find very interesting. Because it seems to be that one of
the problems of modernist art has been an increasingly reductivist
stance, reductivist not only in formal terms but in terms of the areas
the artist himself, or herself, is willing to stake out. It's as though
the wall of art is built higher and wider, and each artist keeps trying
to find a chink to drop his work into. Well, if you take Clyfford Still,
who died today—yesterday I guess—so you'll find people like [Philip]
Guston and Still, or [Willem] de Kooning, or [Andy] Warhol, or [Roy]
Lichtenstein creating ideas and working against others. Then you find
people who have sort of tiny contributions, and they are like tiny
little bits of stone that are going in between these great monolithic
blocks, you see.
1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO JUNE 25, 1980
-
GARVER:
- I talked to George Segal recently about this point of what seemed to be
happening, and why [isn't] more happening, and so on, in New York. He
made an interesting comment. He, of course, came to awareness as an
artist as an abstract expressionist, or at least in that period. Later,
he was certainly one of those who tended to change the course of art.
And he reminded me that the abstract expressionists had really set out
to alter the course of art. They had set out in a great, almost
mythological—they saw their roles as—
-
GOODWIN:
- Heroes.
-
GARVER:
- Heroes, yes. Mythological heroes, exactly. "Those bastards don't
understand, but we will show them." [laughter] And [this was] at a time
when, quite literally, you starved for your art, and it was not a case
of escalating prices or anything. It was nice if you sold something at
all, or got it shown. And, essentially, against that monolith, then, as
that becomes acceptable, it also becomes intolerable, that kind of
monolithic, neo-mythological approach. It was against that that so many
both post-painterly artists and certainly the pop artists reacted.
Suddenly, they were thumbing their noses at these bigger-than-life guys.
But the point that Segal made, in particular, was the fact that this
ideational, mythological, bigger-than-life system was a very heavy-duty
thing to challenge, and the only way that you could challenge it the
least bit successfully was to find something that was equally strong and
that could be—if you were going to do battle in that way, you have to do
battle of strength against strength. Gradually the battles, the desires,
the ambitions to create a better world diminished, and speaking for
myself, I think they've diminished as the success rate of the artist has
climbed. I certainly do not feel that artists should starve for their
art. They may suffer for their art, but that is an internal
consideration, and I don't think that they should give their art away
free because they have to suffer. Not at all. But I think that in New
York, certainly, there is, again, a great emphasis on the intellectual,
on the academic, on historical patterns and flow of history, the
linearity of history, and, as a result, so many people are trying to
drop into these chinks now where they will receive some recognition.
There are so many galleries. There's so much being shown: art of the
seventies, painting of the eighties. Things are so quickly identified;
you know, single-image painting, new-image painting, deco painting.
Maybe somebody is a new-image deco. There's the possibility of that kind
of intercombination. When I was on the NEA [National Endowment for the
Arts] panel for fellowships for painters and sculptors, one of the
panelists was Alex Katz. Katz kept defining all the stuff "high style,"
"no style." I can remember looking at somebody's work that I liked, and
he'd say, "That's a seven-year-old surface." So it was essentially a
surface or a painting style that had, according to Katz, been popular
seven years ago. So you become so conscious, particularly in New York, I
think, of the slightest move, technically. There's so much hype, and
there's so much to lose. There's so much on the line. There are so many
galleries, so much money, and people really do deal in New York. The
idea of having a museum show in New York is so important. [There are]
pressures on the galleries to sell, pressures on the museums to have
popular shows. Marcia Tucker gets fired because she is not, as I
understand it and according to Tom Armstrong, giving enough due and
respect to our more senior figures, you see. So there's an awful lot to
lose. It's like mounting a Broadway play. The amount of money on the
line is so high and—
-
GOODWIN:
- It's a big business.
-
GARVER:
- You're exactly right—I owe several of my aphorisms to Barbara Haskell,
who used to be curator of the Pasadena [Art] Museum and is now curator
at the Whitney Museum [of American Art], Barbara made a very interesting
remark. We were discussing this point, and she said, "Yes, New York is
too concerned with error." You don't want to make an error. You don't
want to make a mistake. And under those circumstances, if artists are
concerned with error, they will most probably keep trying to refine what
is already known rather than really kick up their heels and pull a
[Robert] Rauschenberg or a [Jasper] Johns. Of course, those are the
classic figures that I thought of as beginning the turn away from a
high-style abstract expressionism. They were willing to be crazy and
willing to sort of mess things up.
-
GOODWIN:
- They may have. [laughter]
-
GARVER:
- Well, I know, that's right. And you find relatively little of that in
New York now. [I suppose it's] the times, the situation, and so on. I
was in New York in April, and I saw relatively little that really heated
my blood, and some things that I saw that I liked were not retardataire
but at least conservative and traditional and very nice restatements of
the past, very handsomely done.
-
GOODWIN:
- Well, let's talk a moment about your own taste, as it further
materialized at Brandeis. Where would you put your taste on a spectrum?
-
GARVER:
- I describe myself as a non-doctrinaire modernist. It's interesting, now
that I'm being interviewed at a time when I am not employed—so I've been
looking at a number of different institutions, and I find myself
inevitably drawn to those that are not general history-of-art
institutions. Even though I like working with old art and decorative
art, I'm not very knowledgeable about, or particularly interested in,
professionally, either the tribal arts or oriental art. I find that the
spirit of the artist is very important to me. I like working with the
artist. I like learning as much about something as I can. I may take on
the organization of an exhibition because it is a learning experience
for me, and it's a way of penetrating further into the metaphor of this
person's mind. So I would say, in looking at the exhibitions I've
organized, they've ranged from a conceptual, or life-systems, art—I
commissioned Tom Marioni from San Francisco to do a show called "The San
Francisco Performance" at the Newport [Harbor Art] Museum when I was
there first. It created a scandal, not—I would say there was one piece
that concerned people. It was a videotape, and the entire dialogue was a
work of Howard Fried's. The entire dialogue was "Fuck you, Ward. Fuck
you, Purdue." It was apparently based. on an experience that a friend of
his had had in basic training in the army, where there were two recruits
who hated one another, and whenever they would pass, Ward and Purdue,
they'd say "Fuck you." Well, so Fried is sort of rolling around on this
sort of army bunk and carrying on, as I remember. But the rest of the
show, the content of it, was not inherently scandalous, but it was
simply not standard art. So it created something of a concern. But also
I've organized shows of older artists like Edward Hopper, Reginald
Marsh, and a more traditional artist of a kind of classical, almost
Quattrocento, viewpoint, yet updated with surrealism, George Tooker. I
worked with Marioni twice, once also in organizing a smaller show of his
own. I would say the most recent show that I worked on, I didn't
organize it, but I wrote the catalog, was George Herms. And there have
been other photo exhibitions that, I suppose—in my own interest in
photography, for example, I am much more interested in photographs—I
like photographs that deal with human situations in a very effectively
composed way. I am much less interested, say, in the classic high
pictorialism of Ansel Adams than I would be of the photographs of
William Eggleston or Danny Lyon or some of these people who are perhaps
working with people in an emotional and yet in sort of a formal way,
too. So it's maybe hard to characterize it any more intensely than that.
But what I have done, I suppose, as a curator has also been modified by
the fact that I have been working increasingly as a business person in
the field. As curator [at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum] in San
Francisco, certainly my involvement as curator of exhibitions was much
more in a service area than it was in a creative or organizational,
exhibition-organizational area. But I think non-doctrinaire modernism
describes my sensibilities. I also occasionally like to see if one can
upset the cart a little bit. I'm not interested, say, in bringing down
the roof to make a point. The closest, I suppose, I came to that was
"The San Francisco Performance" show of 1971—'71 or early '72. I don't
remember now, I guess it was 1972. [In this case] a special meeting of
the Board of Trustees [of the Newport Harbor Art Museum] was called to
close the exhibition, and to close the exhibition would close the
museum, in effect. Fortunately, they voted not to do that. But the
strength of the Board then is not reflected today, I would say. It's not
a weaker Board financially but weaker in terms of belief, now. We'll get
to that.
-
GOODWIN:
- Right. I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves.
-
GARVER:
- But I really don't know. I think when people come into our home, they
expect somehow to find, let's say, a modernist interior, by which that
might mean sort of Bauhaus, or "Italian Moderne," or chrome-and-glass,
or whatever. And, in fact, that non-doctrinaire modernism may be
reflected in the house, which is [made up of] old furniture and new art,
to a large degree. I would say that one characteristic that I would
have, in terms of my interest in art, is loving machines, mechanical
systems, objects. I pretty much have to have objects, or at least
serious architectural implications in the art I deal with. It's very
hard for me to deal with somebody like Joseph Kosuth or even John
Baldessari, who are—so much of their work is implications and not actual
deeds or visible constructions. It's one thing that I happen to like
very much about Chris Burden, because he deals with the manipulation of
life systems in a way that everything sort of comes together in an
intense, perhaps instantaneous, focus, or perhaps in a certain kind of
machine or object that is likely to upset one's perceptions—and not only
of the genesis of that machine or object but also of the relationship of
the artist to it, and of the relationship of the viewer to the artist
and to the object. I like all of that. I like it when I'm set on edge. I
can be relatively easily bored, I would say, by certain works that are
so reduced and attenuated as not to be there, or by things which are, I
suppose, strictly formulae you apply—whose the—oh, I can't think of his
name. But he has reproduced pages of mathematical texts and so on, and
has recently done a series of arcs of circles that were shown at The
Arco Center for the Visual Arts. Bernard Venet [is his name]. I find
that is literally like the [Ronald] Reagan statement about the redwoods,
"You've seen one, you've seen them all." And I have a great deal of
trouble dealing with a lot of that.
-
GOODWIN:
- Well, how decisively were your tastes shaped by pop art?
-
GARVER:
- I think that there was a period where pop art was very influential in
several ways. One, pop art rose just at the time that I moved to New
England, a very old part of the country, filled with antique shops. I
was furnishing, and perhaps overfurnishing, an apartment. I began to
acquire objects and boxes, frequently objects of sort of a scientific
nature, with a rather obscure use, at least to me, but the form of which
I found exciting. I think I was influenced by pop there in my own life.
I would say, though, that I find now that the things that interest me in
art are the works that have the greatest metaphorical relationship to
life. That is, objects that are not, formalistically, just
self-contained statements of a problem and a possible resolution to it,
but objects which will have a resonance in everyday life. And I think
that, as an example of the former, let's say, Kenneth Noland would be a
reasonable example of relationships of colors, one to the other, applied
in horizontal bandings of varying widths. Well, when you see a large
show of Noland's, the inevitable relationship to yard goods is, I think,
a serious problem. I think in the latter, somebody like Bernard Venet,
where it's just lifted straight out of life and somehow given the status
of art by recontextualization and so on, interests me not so much. I'm
trying to think of artists who have strongly influenced me. I think,
certainly, Christo, with whom I've worked, [would be one]. Christo, in
the way he deals with the implications of landscape by making a gesture
across it for a moment, and then you see the landscape in another way.
And I think a number of these Chicago figurative artists have interested
me very much for their relationship to the life outside the work of art.
Or Cliff Westerman. I think that I find much of later [Andy] Warhol to
be boring. I'm not interested in America's current "court painter." I
think most of it, again, is rather formulaic. I've seen two ladies, in a
state that will not be identified, vying with one another over which of
the two had the better Warhol portrait of themselves. [laughter] You
know, the anguish. And it simply is an unimportant issue.
1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE JULY 2, 1980
-
GARVER:
- Well, I think I would add to the remarks I was making at the end of our
last session by saying that, on occasion, I've wondered if I had done
the right thing, in terms of my own career, by developing an interest in
so many different directions rather than attempting to follow a high
style, or a party line, such as a follower after [Clement] Greenberg,
like Michael Fried, who is, of course, a very brilliant man and a very
good writer. I think that many people in New York, and perhaps elsewhere
as well, have developed this stylistic hermetic quality that seems now
not to answer the needs of the present day. We hear discussions of
postmodernism in everything—the new decorative style; decorative
painting and sculpture in New York, which many people feel is most
probably a flash in the pan, although I find much of it very
interesting; postmodern architecture, of course. A little bit of
everything goes, from the Philip Johnson Chippendale top on the ITT
[International Telephone and Telegraph] building, to Frank Gehry's use
of strange and sometimes discredited materials out here, such as
furniture made out of cardboard. I personally like thinking in that
rather open-ended way. I think that in making exhibitions of artists, in
working on shows, to me it's most probably more important, to me,
internally, that I enjoy the experience and benefit from it myself,
rather than creating something that I think would be correct or right or
that should be done. I like the idea of change. I like the idea of,
perhaps, upsetting certain canons of thought, and that's gotten me into
some trouble out here. That might be a reasonable introduction, I think,
to my move from Brandeis [University] to Newport Beach. I think being in
a similar situation now, where I'm moving from Newport Beach to
someplace else, I've been thinking about that transit that took place in
1968. In the fall, actually, I think, December 1, 1967, I just decided
one day that it was time to leave Brandeis. I'd been working with Bill
Seitz then, I think, for perhaps two and a half years, or thereabouts,
maybe just two years. And, as I think I said last time, Bill was a much
more precise scholar than was Sam Hunter, but he was a much more
hysterical person. Working with Bill—well, it was difficult for Bill to
relinquish, I think, authority and responsibility, but, on the other
hand, he didn't want to do a lot of the things that had to be done. So
there were a number of changes made in the operations of the Rose Museum
when Bill came in, and I guess chief among them was the fact that I had
less direct day-to-day responsibility. While I had an opportunity and
did continue to organize programs and exhibitions, which was very nice,
Bill could go away from the museum, go away from it in the sense that he
would be thinking about something else. He would be there physically,
perhaps. Then, suddenly come back and say, "Dear me! Oh!" Something that
we had discussed before, and which was seemingly all right, would
suddenly dawn on him, and he would change his mind. I'd been there then
five and a half years, was in my early thirties, and felt that I'd
learned what I could learn. So in early December of 1967 I began writing
letters and looking around for other positions, and there were three
that rather shook themselves out of this search. One was a well-known
smaller museum in upper New England, and in sort of a played-out
industrial town. I went up there and—
-
GOODWIN:
- You don't want to mention the name?
-
GARVER:
- Manchester. The Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. I'd
gone to New York to interview first. I guess I went to New York, met one
of the people on the board who lived in New York, and then went up to
Manchester to interview. I can remember that I had a couple of blinding
flashes during this job-search procedure. But I went up there and was
talking to one of the matrons on the board, I think one of the grand
dames of Manchester. I suddenly had a flash that here I was a young guy,
unmarried, and I did not want to immolate myself in Manchester. So I
simply withdrew from those negotiations. I was offered two jobs. I came
out to Newport. I had written a letter to someone in the Los Angeles
County Museum, and he'd passed it along to the ladies of the Newport
[Harbor Art Museum], I'll get into the ladies a little more completely
later. I had also interviewed for the directorship of the Art Gallery at
the University of New Mexico. I was offered both of those jobs, and I
was going to take the one at the University of New Mexico. I had said I
would let the people at Newport know on April 1, 1968. On the evening of
April 1, in the East, I was about to call them, and I just suddenly—this
was quite literally a revelation from heaven that said, "Don't take the
New Mexico job." There were a number of political considerations. It
paid better. It was more attractive from a number of standpoints. It had
correct university cachet and so on. But I made a couple of calls. One
to Gerry Nordland, who was then director of the San Francisco Museum of
Art, just to get his thoughts. The upshot of it was that at nine o'clock
at night in the East I was going to take the job in New Mexico, and at
midnight I called and took the job at Newport Beach. Then I came out to
Newport in mid-June. [tape recorder turned off]
-
GOODWIN:
- What did you know about Newport before coming here?
-
GARVER:
- I was about to tell you that. I didn't know a thing. I mean, I was
completely naive, and I think most probably one of the best assets I
brought to Newport at that time was my naivete. I had been out here for
two days in early March of '68, and I left New England in one of those
late winter snowfalls, very heavy, soggy snow. So the plane was late in
taking off. But I came out here and landed, and—I guess I was here for
two days. The weather was absolutely as good as it can be in early
March. No early morning fog or low clouds. I could not believe people
were swimming. I had been to Florida before, but, of course, one thing
that struck me here was the fact that this is not tropical. It's much
more desert, much dryer, and, in a way, more luxuriant. Just driving
along, I was realizing that people just repaired cars out in the open
and—so I was very much taken. But I would not have taken the job, I
think—I'd originally just come out to visit Newport. They had a very
beautiful show at that time, a show of Northwest Coast Indian art that
had been a very complicated installation, with plants and trees and the
totem pole sort of set up among this, a major effort. And they had made
every effort to get me out here during this show, because otherwise
there was nothing to see. But I was very impressed with the fact that
they could mount a show like this, and that the institution really was a
quality operation. But, of course, really, in retrospect, I was most
probably blinded to a lot of the problems. The museum occupied half the
second floor of the Balboa Pavilion. That half was about 4, 500 square
feet total. There were three small offices. A little space developed
later as a sales and rental gallery. Then [there was] the large main
gallery, which was just a big barnlike space. It was like a big attic
space; you could look straight up into the rafters. There was some very
bad lighting. But, as I say, this exhibition was really quite
impressive. There were lots of windows that opened onto the bay. It was
quite a distraction, between the art and the passing parade of boats and
so on. I think that I sensed a strong potential. I had looked at their
exhibition and programs, which had really been quite sound. I was rather
intrigued with the idea of moving to Southern California and literally,
at that point, to right over the Pacific. As I used to say, I was
director of the country's only over-water art museum. [laughter] [So I
was optimistic], even though at that time the institution did not
collect, and the budget, I realized, was incredibly low. It's
interesting to think that in 1968, when I came, the budget had gone from
$26,000 to about $55,000. When I left in 1972, the budget was still
under $100,000. When I returned in '77, the budget, the first full year
I was there, was about $300,000. When I left in early 1980, the
operating budget was $575,000, but it will be increased because the
staff has demanded salary raises. So it would be maybe $600,000. I'd
heard a good deal about Orange County, I suppose particularly coming
from a place like Brandeis, as being an absolutely retardataire and
reactionary place. I think most probably what I did not see, at first,
were other considerations. I mean, yes, indeed, it would shortly, after
I came there, send John Schmitz, an avowed John Bircher, to the United
States House of Representatives. But I would say, particularly being
located on the Balboa peninsula, one was [more] conscious of the
surfers, the people who came to get away from it all or to live
comfortably, in touch with nature, rather than the more ponderous
aspects of Orange County civilization, which I was, I think, to
encounter more, perhaps, the second time I came back. But I would say
about my early experiences—"Newport One," if I can say that about when I
was there the first time. I was at Newport from July of 1968 through
early November of 1972, a little over four years. During that time, just
to mark a few achievements, the staff began developing, the exhibitions
were still organized either by myself or by Betty Turnbull and her
associates. Betty, who is now curator of exhibitions and collections at
Newport, was then a volunteer. I would also organize exhibitions, maybe
I said that, and we would take from time to time canned shows. There
were no collections. There were very minimal educational programs at
that time, although Phyllis Lutjeans, who was officially my secretary
but was also eager to do other things, began writing publicity and, of
course, eventually became curator of education, which she is now. That
took place after I left. She's done a very fine job. I think most
probably my own naivete worked as a double-edged sword. It worked
against me in that I did not become, nor have I ever become,
particularly comfortable with, or attuned to, the social needs of the
ladies who had been running the museum. This is a group of great
strength, although actually they too are terribly nervous, in that, to
them—this is a group of matrons, say, in age from mid-forties to
mid-sixties, and it was regarded as a sign of distinction and
achievement and maturity of the institution when men would be willing to
come on the board. I think that this is characteristic of so many
elements of American cultural life. They have been started by women,
and, by the time they are validated, then their husbands are willing to
stick their necks out and risk their good names. But not early on. So I
think the social dynamic did not interest me. In fact, not only didn't
it interest me, I was never included in it or encouraged to participate
in it. I'm not athletic; so in the four and a half years I was here the
first time, I was never invited out on a boat by a museum member. I
think the director, and even when we returned, the director and his
wife, were kept at some distance. There were a couple of exceptions to
that, certainly. When I did return, that had changed to some degree. So,
what I ended up doing, generally naively but, I think, occasionally
certainly with full consciousness, was to create an exhibition program I
might have done at Brandeis, parts of which would make people very
angry.
-
GOODWIN:
- Do you want to say a few words about how this institution got going?
-
GARVER:
- Sure. I think that's a good point. In the late fifties and very early
sixties, of course, Newport Beach was really beginning to grow. A lot of
people were coming down and were commuting to Los Angeles. The freeways
were being extended. When I first came here, the San Diego Freeway only
went to Harbor Boulevard in Costa Mesa, but the freeways had been
extended enough to make commuting relatively easy. There was a lot of
activity with, I think, independent business activity starting. There
were massive urban developments similar to what had taken place in the
late forties and fifties in the San Fernando Valley. A lot of people
were moving here from other parts of the country. But I think the resort
image of Newport Beach and Orange County, generally, particularly
coastal Orange County, was still being encouraged. This was a place to
get away from it all but yet to be near your business. But certainly at
that time there were a number of developments taking place that were to
lead on, I think, to very substantial achievements. The Newport Harbor
Art Museum was unofficially founded, or came into fruition, in 1961,
when a group of thirteen Newport Beach women got together and decided
that they wanted to run some sort of art program. They wanted to
organize exhibitions, but they did not want it to be a local association
that showed their friends, like [at the] Laguna Beach [Museum of Art].
They were quite explicit on that point. I think they were never
particularly explicit about what they really wanted to show, other than
it not be like the Laguna Beach Museum of Art. So they realized early on
that they could not show Old Masters, works of very great value, because
they didn't have the space and they didn't have the money. The first
year, I think 1961, they began showing in the Newport Beach City Hall,
which for a number of reasons, I think pretty obviously, turned out not
to be satisfactory. They then took over—and it was this part of the deal
that I found [out about] only after I came here—half the second floor of
the Balboa Pavilion, which had been constructed in 1905. It was a
bathing pavilion with a second-floor dance hall [constructed] by the
early promoters of the Balboa peninsula. The way, today, promoters and
developers of condos and other areas will create clubhouses with pools
and spas and tennis courts and so on, this had been created as a bathing
pavilion and central focus for the development of the Balboa peninsula
primarily as a summer place. The pavilion had undergone a lot of changes
and was restored in the early sixties. Jacked-up new foundations were
put under it and so on; so it was a solid structure. The Fine Arts
Patrons of Newport Harbor—I should mention that the organization was
founded under that name—agreed with the Ducommun family that owned it—a
family that had made money in steel—to take over half the second floor,
for which they would make a couple of hundred dollars a month in
leasehold improvements. But the Ducommun company and the firm that ran
the restaurant downstairs had an arrangement whereby, if they could rent
the whole top floor to a major party, they could take over these
premises of the Fine Arts Patrons of Newport Harbor. So there was a
series of rolling walls, or baffles, created that divided one-half of
the space from the other, and the other half was used for parties,
balls, proms, and so forth. But there was always this threat, and I
think it actually happened once that they took over about half of the
museum space. So, when I got here there were a number of—the original
thirteen, of course, had expanded very substantially. There were a lot
of women who were involved in fundraising, in staffing. The president of
the Board, when I came out, was Mrs. Walter Gibson—Patsy Gibson. She was
president of the Board and was in charge of maintenance as well. So she
would be seen sweeping up the floor. [laughter] There was another woman
on the Board who was in charge of installation. I did change the method
of installation, because thirty women would arrive in the morning ready
to hang a show, and there would be two hammers. Then when you finally
got things organized, come noon they would all have disappeared. But I
think the problems between the volunteers and the staff have continued
to this day, in the sense that many of the old-guard, and new-guard
volunteers too, say, "Look, we can do this. You don't have to hire all
this fat, lazy, high-priced staff. You can get volunteers to do it."
And, in fact, you cannot. Volunteers are very good in certain areas, but
the museum here has never really recognized and supported the volunteers
in those areas and supported the staff in operational areas. The
volunteers here are dynamite when it comes to raising money, and they've
run the restaurant there extremely effectively. But they are much less
effective when they get involved in maintenance of memberships lists or
designing the museum calendar, which are things they should not do.
-
GOODWIN:
- Right, it's perfectly understandable.
-
GARVER:
- Well, it isn't here, you see, and it's a problem in a lot of museums. So
I came out in March 1968. I then came out again perhaps after I'd taken
the job, in late April or early May to work on programs and so on. At
that time the museum's name was changed from the Fine Arts Patrons of
Newport Harbor to Newport Harbor Art Museum. I had suggested Newport
Harbor Art Center. But there was already a Newport Art Center that was a
shopping center; so that name was out. I was not keen for the use of the
word museum, because the Newport Harbor Art Museum did not collect,
which was, to me, the definition of a museum. But it was important to
them, to the Board, and that's what they wanted. So that was fine,
because their idea was that eventually that they would collect. I did
not encourage them to collect while I was here, although that's when
they began to collect, because I felt that the energy to collect, and
the money that it might take, would take away from really very limited
funds for organizing exhibitions and for conducting programs. That is,
if people were going to say, "Well, let's raise money to buy a work of
art." If you spent $25,000 for a work of art, that might be all that was
available, really, for exhibitions. If they raised, acquisition money, I
was very concerned that the exhibition funds would drop. Of course, this
was always the area that was being hatcheted, because salaries and other
fixed operating expenses were hard to cut. But the museum operated on, I
think most probably, between $15,000 and $20,000 a year for exhibitions
for several years while I was here. I think, naively, I simply said,
"Well, I'll continue to do the sorts of programs that I had done at
Brandeis." And the first exhibition was a great hit. I had been working
on a show at Brandeis of photographs of urban America from the Farm
Security Administration files. The historical division of the Farm
Security Administration had originally started as a propagandistic
section that would be documenting the achievements of the Farm Security
Administration, which had helped resettle farmers, had helped to improve
the plight of the farmer. So, in the earlier days of this organization,
the photographs had been much more propagandistic, such as, "Here's the
problem: farmers are out of work or driven off their land by landowners.
Here's some of the ameliorative circumstances: new housing, clean farm
camps, and so forth." Well, as the situation had begun to improve in the
late thirties under Roy Stryker, the Farm Security Administration's
historical division began to build a huge archive of photographs.
Stryker would send out, essentially, shooting scripts in outline form
that would say, "We must do something in the cities because many people
have left the cities and gone back to the farm. We must do things in
small towns. We have to look at how people live." So, what I did in
["Just before the War: Urban America from 1935 to 1941, as Seen by
Photographers of the Farm Security Administration"]—it was essentially
small-town America more than city America, but, again, I suppose I did
this because I was a little tired of the sort of bitter-years image, the
really heavy social documentarian or, let's say, the social polemic
quality of some of the shows that had been made from these photographs.
So I began looking at urban life, with a rather even hand, I think,
although some of them, of course, were very telling. But there were
photographs that Marion Post Wolcott had taken in Miami and Miami Beach,
you know, sort of the rich at play. And there were scenes in Chicago
bars, and some that Ben Shahn photographed in small towns in West
Virginia. So it was a huge show, and I had started working on it at
Brandeis. But when I left Brandeis, they weren't interested in it
anymore, and so I brought it out to California. Some of the people who
were on the exhibition committee thought, "Oh, God." This is going to be
a real dud." But, of course, it was not. It was a huge show. There were
about 250 prints in it here, and it was extremely popular. Everyone
could relate to it in one way or another. I took it from about 1935 to
December of 1941. All the photographs were dated, and the organization
continued, in a propagandistic way, to photograph under the Office of
War Information. But once we entered the Second [World] War, I did not
continue, and so the show was called "Just before the War: Urban America
from 1935 to 1941, as Seen by Photographers of the Farm Security
Administration." So it had a long title. But the show traveled to about
fourteen museums in this country, including the Library of Congress and
a lot of places. I couldn't circulate it very well until I had printed
the catalog, and once the catalog was done, people liked it very much.
The catalog was reprinted at least once and maybe twice. I just don't
remember now. But it was a very, very popular exhibition. They only did
about four or five shows a year, and early on in my career, in January
of 1969, because we had been told that we would be losing our space for
one of these big parties—in fact, I don't think we did, but this thing
had been booked, and so we couldn't book an exhibition. So I said,
"Let's have a performance group." So we brought the "Once Group," from
the University of Michigan, out here, and they created an absolute
scandal, because they were not—they were sort of a planned happening.
It's hard to describe. It was an actual stage event, but I think very
much in the tradition of, perhaps, some of the things that Robert Morris
had been doing. It was not nearly as structured as Merce Cunningham or
anything of that sort, but there was, in fact, a script and sound tracks
and so on. Well, [they thought] it was not theater, and it was very
loud, and it was not art, and there was just a terrific brouhaha. In
fact, fortunately, the museum only now is beginning to do performance,
and they sneak it in under the guise of just an evening's program—you
know, like a lecture. Phyllis has learned to downplay it, because
there's still such anguish over the "Once Group," that "awful group" and
that scandal. This, I think, certainly pointed up the problem that I
found here. While this was supposedly a museum of the term that I
developed for it—"the art of our time"—it avoided both the words, modern
and contemporary. Which, it turned out, were real red flags here. And I
would say that one of the great problems of Newport is the fact that
there's never been a real resolution as to what the museum does and what
it should do. So there was a constant plea to move the exhibitions and
the programs to the right, even to the point of saying, as certain
people have, "Why don't we collect older art?" I'm getting ahead of
myself a little bit. I mean, one of the problems in Newport is that
there's no awareness of quality, no sophistication that would be able to
tell the difference between the genuine article and a bogus
reproduction, in a sense. This has changed to some slight degree but not
a great deal.
-
GOODWIN:
- Why is there this ignorance?
-
GARVER:
- Well, my theories are as follows—there are some caveats and so on, but
I'll just tell you what I think. I tend to resent the New York attitude
that nothing great has ever come out of California, because all anyone
does is play tennis, get stoned, make love, sit around by the pool in
some sort of dazed state. The other side, and the positive aspect of
that, is that Californians, because of the very moderation of the
climate, I think, are much more in touch with themselves, in a feeling
way. They are not huddled by the fire, as I will soon be huddled by the
fire, thinking, perhaps, or using intellect in a very offensive and
defensive manner. Offensive in the sense that in New York, in
particular, but I think in the East in general, you will find people who
will use language and thinking in a combative way. An example I can
think of is a woman who, for a while, was head of the gallery at MIT
[Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and proved to be a terrible
disaster. I can remember talking to someone about her. I can't even
remember her name now, and I said, "She never seems to be right." And
this other fellow said, "Yes, but she always had the idea first." So the
idea of getting in there and, perhaps, regarding everyone else as a
potential enemy was very important. So you would get your foot in the
door, you would try and confuse the other people by throwing up a
smokescreen of obfuscation. You would impress your point very heavily. I
think all of this is true, and I think it has to do with the density of
ideas in New York. That's very important. I wouldn't want to change it,
really. Out here people may think more slowly. And there may be fewer
people who are thinking at all, but, on the other hand, at the end, say,
of an evening of discussion, you might not necessarily come to any
greater or more profound or larger number of conclusions in New York
than you would out here. But certainly in the East you would have a lot
more ideas, most probably, put on the table. I can remember being at a
dinner party here in Los Angeles when there were two New York artists
and two L.A. artists and a few other people, and Paul Brach, a New York
artist who was then living in Los Angeles, said, "Boy, if this had been
New York, a hundred ideas would have been out on the table by now."
That's unquestionably true, but [they would} not necessarily [have been]
good ideas or completed. I mean, there would have certainly been a great
deal of talk. But people out here think more slowly. They do not use
language and intellect in quite the same pyrotechnical way to dazzle, to
blind, to create a screen. But my theory doesn't deal so much with
intellect but deals, in part, with the weather and with control. I think
certainly here in Southern California everything by and large is new.
The homes are new. Everything is master planned. I can remember
reading—maybe in such a profound magazine as the National Lampoon—where somebody observed that progress in
California was measured by devices that turn themselves on and off
automatically. I think that's a good point, because one of the elements
of this very benign weather is the fact that one can control one's
environment very easily. You drive a car, it's a little hot, you turn on
the air conditioning. You go swimming in your pool, it's a little
chilly, you turn on the heat. I think that this extends into control of
environment, in a larger way, and finally into the control of one's
self. There should be nothing out of control. There should be no
surprises. Everything should be essentially rewarding and very pleasant.
That is sharpened here in Newport by the amount of wealth that's here,
so that if you have control, you can also have problem solving by
others. If something leaks, you call "the man." If something's wrong
with your finances, you call your broker. So pretty soon everything is
under control and there are no problems. Many people, too, have moved
here. Business people [have done so], I think, for two reasons: they
want to make a lot of money in a hurry, and they want to avoid problems.
So the conclusion I have come to, particularly having returned to
Newport Beach from San Francisco, is that this is a resort area, yes,
but it is also an area in which people are single-mindedly devoted to
work. I think people who have come here to work, and I am thinking of,
say, the professions and the senior executives, are frequently those who
are very single-minded. They are not, let's say, corporate types so much
as they are "plungers" and "bet-a-million" individual types who are
willing to take a flyer and, you know, if they hit it, they'll hit it
big, and it'll be their success. If they fall on their face, well, on to
the next project. So it is not a case of working so much with others,
except perhaps to get ahead, to get your own company where you can be
issuing the "yes sir," "no sir" instructions. So, into this, I think,
comes the museum, comes the whole idea of contemporary art, which does
not answer "yes sir" or "no sir," and in fact at times is likely to
thumb its nose at somebody looking at it. It is inexplicable. It is
likely to be made of degraded or despised materials. In organizing the
George Herms exhibition, I remember, at the opening of that show, a
hotshot lawyer coming up and saying, "I think I could successfully
prosecute this guy for fraud." Now, of course, this sort of reaction to
modern art is very common, but I know that the emphasis has been very,
very strongly here on don't offend, remember you have a voluntary
constituency. We are always in a moneyraising mode. We must look toward
all of these people in Spyglass Hill, which is one of the more expensive
developments near the museum, or Big Canyon, which is, perhaps, the most
expensive development near the present Newport Harbor Art Museum. We
cannot do things that will be offensive. I think there is always
something of a secret desire that the museum should be like the Palm
Springs Desert Museum. There the director, Fred Sleight, has said, "I
have created a museum to satisfy its constituency." Now, by
"constituency," he does not mean the Indians and workers of Palm Springs
who live there all year around, because that museum closes for three
months in the summer. He means the visitors, the very wealthy from all
around the country who maintain winter homes there. So he creates a
museum that, in its public offerings, at least in its art offerings, is
absolutely unimportant. It is calculated to be an elegant background for
fine dining and black-tie party giving. And I think that the use of the
museum here as a background for party giving was always a very tough
issue, one I think fought by myself and by the other two senior staff
people, Phyllis Lutjeans and Betty Turnbull. It was very, very difficult
to book exhibitions and to schedule exhibitions with these events. There
were finally three major ones. And, in fact, in this last event, a
black-tie casino evening, which was very successful—it was very
successful, in part, because I had put the people involved in it in
touch with Phillip Riley, President of the Mission Viejo Development
Company, who, through Phillip Morris, the owner of Mission Viejo, helped
finance the whole evening. But the scheduling of this was done, really,
without staff approval, and we had it for a partial museum function and
they took the whole museum. I mean, to a degree, you see, staff approval
was not important, because it had the approval of the Board and the
volunteers. It's this kind of treatment of one element of the museum at
the expense of another that is, I think, the most self-destructive
quality in the museum. But early on, when I first came here—and there
were more women on the Board—I think I was certainly much less conscious
of fundraising. There were a couple of agreed-upon events, but I was not
out seeking corporate support and so on. I think it was less common
then. The NEA [National Endowment for the Arts], for example was. just
getting under way, and I think we received a small grant in 1971—'72
maybe—to help support the catalog for a large Reginald Marsh
retrospective that I organized.
1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO JULY 2, 1980
-
GOODWIN:
- It seems to me that, except for the interest of the women volunteers,
there doesn't seem to be a very strong desire for an art museum in this
community.
-
GARVER:
- Well, you touch upon an interesting point, I think, and that is the
disparity between what I would describe as the constituency served and
the group that supports it. Certainly there are very few art collectors
in Orange County, and I think of Orange County as the area. There are
certainly people who own a few things, and who have been dining out on
their reputation as a collector ever since. People like Ben Deane, who
became momentarily involved—I think he met Al Elsen, who's of course, a
very distinguished professor at Stanford whose specialty is sculpture
and whose real specialty is Rodin. Elsen said to Ben, who suddenly
decided he wanted to collect—I think with the same passion that he
collects houses and remodels them and so on—"Ben, read and look at
things for a year or so. Don't just rush out and buy." Well, Ben can't
do that. He's one of these plungers. No one's interested in having
themselves defined as a fine intellect; you have to be moving and
shaking, right? So Deane rushed out and started buying stuff. Some
things he bought well, some things he bought very badly. Then, of
course, he made some very fortuitous purchases financially, and he has
subsequently sold those things. He wanted to sell some stuff to the
museum while he was on the Board. No one was really concerned that that
would be, under state law, illegal. Even if he was selling them under
the market, he would still be benefiting in some way, and I think that
the attorney general would find that not in the best interests of a
trustee of a not-for-profit institution. Others, like David Steinmetz,
had been active in the old Pasadena [Art] Museum. David had acquired a
very major Jasper Johns, Jubilee, in a sort of a
three-way deal, as I remember. David had bought some other things that
were very nice. A number of them he's subsequently sold, and he has told
me that he'd want to see Jubilee, which is a very
major American painting, go to the National Gallery [of Art] in
Washington. And David is a trustee of the [Newport], museum. So, in
terms of supporting his own museum, he'd like to see it go to the
National Gallery. But he won't give it to the National Gallery; it will
be bought by the National Gallery. And. now that they are collecting
modern American art, that would be a worthy depository for that
painting. David did give one very good painting—a fine Diebenkorn—to the
museum. But, basically, people like Jack Shea—for whom I must say I have
no respect whatever—are collectors. Shea collects very correct,
validated American art of the sixties—the [Clement] Greenberg mafia,
with certain additions. He is widely read, I would say, in a number of
fields, but not art. He once thought that a woman who collected Israeli
art was collecting only religious art, without realizing, of course,
that there's a great deal of contemporary art of high quality that's
produced in Israel or by Israelis. His interest is only—I would say
there are a number of people here who are very hermetic collectors, who
are interested only in a certain area and wouldn't give photography, for
instance, the time of day. Shea couldn't understand why we would want to
collect photography in a major center of photography that's very active,
and also very popular, in this field. There are few others. There was a
gallery, of course, that existed from the late sixties to about the
mid-seventies down here—Jack Glenn [Gallery]—which I think was the only
gallery of serious ambition of, say, the quality of [the] Nick Wilder
[Gallery] or Asher/Faure [Gallery], now, or [the] Jim Corcoran
[Gallery]. [tape recorder turned off] It's interesting, I think, that
there are so few collectors. There are others. Dr. Ron Tepper has been
collecting steadily in the, I guess, constructivist avant-garde of the
teens, twenties, and thirties. But there are not a lot of collectors.
There are some who want nothing to do with the museum, I think, because
they see it as an oligarchy, and one that is very much only oriented
toward society, the ladies, and life west of the [Pacific] Coast
Highway—in other words, focusing consciously only on a high-society
operation. I would say that the staff feels much more oriented toward an
egalitarian sort of institution, but that disparity remains there, and I
think will take quite some time to resolve. And maybe it won't resolve.
It's very hard to say. But, as I was saying, Jack Glenn, I think, was
successful for a time. Then, I think, the market went down, and he fell
on hard times and went out of the business. But a number of things that
have come into the museum were certainly purchases made by people that
Jack convinced to buy some art. But after Jack went out, they never
bought anything again.
-
GOODWIN:
- Why did he come to this area?
-
GARVER:
- I think because he thought it was wealthy—he moved out of Kansas
City—and he thought this would be a very interesting area. [He thought]
it wouldn't be a problem [for people] to drive from Los Angeles, and of
course this was 1969, and it wasn't. [He thought] there would be no
hesitation to go down to Corona del Mar and look at art, just as
somebody might decide to go from Los Angeles to New York or Chicago to
look at a painting. And, of course, I think a great deal of the work was
sold to his friends in Kansas City, the people he knew already in the
Middle West who were collectors, and certainly some to Los Angeles as
well. There was a very revealing remark—there was a panel discussion on
collecting, why you collect. Lucille Kuehn, a rather pretentious woman
who has not really collected, certainly nothing recently—she was the
head of the museum's acquisition council, interestingly enough—said, "I
think people don't collect here because they're afraid of revealing
themselves." And I think that's very apt. I think that part of the
resort sensibility, the materialistic sensibility of "If you have it,
show it," also means "Never get out of line," and "Never take a flyer."
Even some of those people who have taken flyers, like Shea, like Deane,
like Steinmetz, have always done it when they could really make a deal,
when they could get something under the market. So, if someone came into
your home and said, "Geez, I don't like that," you could say, "Yes, but
do you know it's worth a quarter million, and I only spent a hundred
thousand on it." So it's a deal. People down here love to deal. I think
the mentality is carried forth here that Joan Didion talks about in a
wonderful article that's in The White Album,
about how movies are made—that it doesn't have anything to do with the
quality of the movie but how people love to talk about the quality of
their deals. You know, somebody makes a "beautiful" deal, as though the
deal itself is a work of art. And that, I think, is true down here, too.
There is a great deal of this wheeler-dealer, dealing sensibility. [The]
Newport [Harbor Art Museum] has just lost, I think, a candidate as
director, somebody they" wanted very much, because he told them what he
wanted; then they began to really deal, and they dealt themselves right
out of this person. I'm trying to encapsulate this, because it's a
little vague. I think people have a great deal here. They do not share
it. They keep it behind guarded gates where there's twenty-four hour
security. As an example of that, it's always very hard to get people
here to entertain museum visitors, panelists, artists, whatever. They
also don't want to reveal themselves in anything that is other than the
height of social correctness. So collecting, even, I think, collecting
the right names, is done very little. For one thing, people here also
expect art to be free. They're happy to pay $85,000 for a Rolls Royce,
or $2 million for a house, or hiring the right decorator at a very high
price. But when it comes to, say, spending $20,000 for a painting, they
just can't bring themselves to do it. It seems like an absolute trifle.
And I think that some of this comes about both through an old-time
hangover of that Protestant or Puritan ethic that your money is not
really working for you somehow in a work of art, to which is overlaid a
very direct hedonistic ethic. So there's a combination here of two
separate things that I see. You can spend your money in two ways: a real
sharp investment, you know, get that land for ten grand an acre, hold on
to it, sell it three years later for a hundred grand an acre—very sharp
dealing, you see. Or you may spend it in the pursuit of pleasure and
fulfillment. "Sure this sailboat cost me a quarter million, but I've
never had a better time in my life." "Sure the Porsche is expensive and
in the shop a lot, but I need that for my head in going from my house to
my business." So, for instance, there is a couple, just two people, who
built a house in Laguna Beach. It's about 13,500 square feet, and
because of the structure of it, the rather incredible engineering, it
cost $5 million several years ago. I mean, they have a five- or six-car
garage, with a gym. On top of that are the tennis courts, and it's built
on the side of the cliff, practically, and it's all reinforced concrete
and so forth. But they gave Nick Wilder $25,000 to sort of decorate the
house—maybe more, maybe they gave him $50,000. So he bought a Sam
Francis watercolor for the dining room, a [Jules] Olitski over the
fireplace in the living room, and a [Kenneth] Noland over the piano in
the living room, and a few other things—Don Sorenson. But basically it
has nothing to do with their lives. It is correct art in this correct
home. In opposition: to this—and I think this is one reason why I'm
looking forward to being near a town like Chicago—the collectors in
Chicago are mad. They buy lots of things: high art, low art, non art. If
they find somebody they like, they try and get in first, at the bottom
prices. They don't want to wait until he or she is validated and proven.
So, given these circumstances, this feeling, perhaps, that art is
frivolous because it neither adds to one's physical pleasures nor is it
an investment of quite the right liquidity, and because if you have it,
people are likely to look at you a little strangely, I think it's a very
tough climate for new ideas.
-
GOODWIN:
- Or old ideas. [laughter] Just ideas. [laughter]
-
GARVER:
- Well, I think that's right. There's a fellow here who is on the Board of
Trustees, who's head of the art department at [California] State
[University] Fullerton—his name is Don Lagerberg. Don has been teaching
at the museum for most probably twelve years. He teaches Friday
mornings. I suppose there are women who have taken every class. It deals
with all aspects of art history but with a lot of contemporary art
history. Those women have nodded their heads for ten years, like the
Chinese dolls you see in the back of cars, and yet when we make an
exhibition of some of the more arcane aspects of what Don has been
talking about for years, it is as though they have heard nothing. And I
must say, not to Don's credit, when one of the women on the Board was
redecorating her home, she wanted Joseph Raffael to do a painting.
Joseph went over and looked at the house, and she thought of him as
being a little like a high-grade decorator. She said, "I want a fish
painting or a water-lily painting, and here are samples of fabrics and
the colors" and so on. Joseph finally said, no, he couldn't do it. He
turned down a couple of commissions. So she commissioned Don Lagerberg
to do a painting in the style of 1880s Monet. [tape recorder turned off]
But I think the issue is that this woman on the Board just didn't care
to wait or want to look at anything else, and so she commissioned
Lagerberg to paint a Monet in the mid 1880s style, which, I think to his
discredit, he did. But that's the way people think of art down here, as
some sort of convenience or decoration or investment. In another house I
was in, decorated in a rather thunderously French provincial style,
there was one small Gemini [G.E.L] lithograph of a Frank Stella. Clearly
the house was not entirely done in a déraciné style, and there was some
reference to modernity, but that Stella was okay because it was a print
worth a few hundred dollars. If it had been a Frank Stella painting,
then you would have been putting your taste and your name on the line a
little more, where friends might have said, "Gee, Harry, what's that
stuff?" So, anyway, I think this is one of the problems here. People do
not collect. Yet there is a great deal of interest in seeing the museum
collect, but the museum doesn't have any money to collect. There's NEA
[National Endowment for the Arts] money. [tape recorder turned off] The
museum has, for the past few years, received some NEA money for
acquisitions. It was certainly my hope—in fact, I did create a document
that indicated that the museum would collect in three separate areas:
regional artists, all the way from emergent reputations to distinguished
international reputations, which might be by purchase; works of art from
American artists not of the region, which would be acquired primarily by
gift, maybe, on rare occasion, by purchase; European art of the latter
twentieth century, that would be by gift only; and other objects that
might be taken for later sale or exchange. Well, there's such great
interest here in acquiring objects that have been validated by time, so
that the museum's collection is much more conservative, I think, than
the museum's programs. The museum began collecting, I should add, in
1971, when Avco Financial Services moved to Newport Beach and, as sort
of a public gesture, gave a collection that had been created for its
offices in, I think, Cleveland, where its former executive offices had
been located. They began collecting through the encouragement of a
senior vice president, and they collected some works of contemporary
California artists. But he left, or the program essentially
disintegrated. Now Pacific Mutual [Life Insurance Company] will begin a
collection of sculpture. But there are as yet no firms locally, I think,
that are leading the way. The Fluor Corporation has acquired lots and
lots of art, but basically it's all kind of anesthetic for the walls.
It's what people like. There's no challenge or toughness, really, to it.
Perhaps Henry Segerstrom will change some of that. Segerstrom's family
is the part owner of South Coast Plaza, the major regional retailing and
commercial center. Henry was on the Board of the museum. He does not now
want to return to the Board of the museum, because, I think, he regards
it as provincial. He also has great plans for South Coast Plaza as a
center of public art—important sculptures. He has commissioned [Isamu]
Noguchi to do a two-acre sculpture garden, which I think is a step in
the right direction, although the first few purchases of sculpture he
has made are perhaps not as strong as they might be. I think they will
get better. But Henry obviously sees himself as a patron of the arts and
thinks that he can, in a way, outdo the museum. And perhaps he can. I
think that I've wandered back and forth between the museum at present
and the museum in the old days. Maybe I should go back and be a little
more linear. After I came to Newport in 1968, I began work on improving
the space, installing proper lighting. The building was sold shortly
thereafter, and the new owners wanted to put in a hung ceiling, which I
did not favor, because it lowered the ceiling height. But, when we did,
we put in correct track lighting, which made a great deal of difference
in the appearance. Actually the ceiling made a good deal of difference
in the appearance of the space. I think we organized some very
interesting exhibitions there. There were two Indian shows: I mentioned
the one before I arrived; there was another one of Southwest Indian art,
organized by Betty Turnbull. I organized a favorite show of mine, I
think, a small exhibition, "Robert Rauschenberg in Black and White."
There were about ten or twelve paintings and maybe fifteen lithographs
from the early sixties, when Rauschenberg was working, almost entirely,
in black and white.
-
GOODWIN:
- Where did you acquire the work?
-
GARVER:
- I borrowed it from all over: [Leo] Castelli, private collectors,
museums. I was always a little frightened of doing, you know, a
thunderously valuable show—that was before Rauschenbergs became
thunderously valuable—because of the problems of the space. One could
have broken into it rather easily, even though there were burglar
alarms. Someone could easily have grabbed something and gotten out. It
was built over a restaurant and an outboard-motor repair place, both of
which were rather high fire risks, in a wooden building, although it was
well sprinklered. We organized shows of Los Angeles artists there. I
think that the mix was, perhaps, half regional artists and half other
artists, which, I think, has continued reasonably into the present day.
It was not thought of as a museum that was simply local in focus, or one
that was going to bring art from the outside into the local masses. For
me, personally, the function of the museum was to serve the art life of
the community, and it would do this in several different ways. One of
them was bringing in work that would not be seen; the other was
acknowledging the work that was there in Los Angeles and maybe less
frequently in Orange County. But we did later organize two large Orange
County shows.
-
GOODWIN:
- Why don't you characterize your views of art in Southern California at
the time you came here. What was the scene? How did it strike you?
-
GARVER:
- I think I was struck by the fact that there seemed to be relatively
little difference between the artists and their audience, which I found
quite interesting. I recall another quote from Barbara Haskell, who
then, I guess, was not on the scene, but who was later at the Pasadena
[Art Museum] and is now at the Whitney Museum [of American Art] in New
York. She characterized the difference between New York and California
as, "New Yorkers are much more concerned with class, and Californians
with affluence." And I think I found this to be the case. At a party you
were not aware of a disparity of identity or class, if you will, between
artists and their patrons or whomever. The whole group might have had on
dungarees. You might be aware that either the patron or the artist would
be driving a Porsche or whatever. But I liked this egalitarian feeling
that I found out here socially. I think that I felt that Californians
tended to be a little more open ended in what they regarded as art. They
were not so seriously given over—of course, remember, this was the late
sixties, early seventies, I suppose a high moment for post-painterly
abstraction and pop and so on in New York—to the terrific concern with
that form produced in the studio. People were more casual, and this, I
think, was taken in New York to mean spaced out or not really attentive
to their work. But considering the energies that I saw, I thought there
were some very interesting qualities that set, maybe particularly Los
Angeles—I didn't then know Northern California work very well—Los
Angeles work off from New York. I think you've heard it described as the
"finish fetish," the very high-finish qualities which so frequently—the
reason for this is—Von Dutch Holland, the car painter, the car stripers,
the car mentality. You know, you move the freeway into the gallery, in
terms of high finishes and metal flake and so on. That might have been
true to a degree. The other aspect was the high-tech aspect that here
was the center of the aerospace industry, and so, of course, all the
artists were going to be truly influenced by that. I think, in fact,
that the lie to that was given by the "Art and Technology" show at the
[Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art] back in 1970—that, in fact, the
high-tech stuff turned out by the artists was not particularly high-tech
at all. It was, generally speaking, rather simple-minded. I would,
again, give much more credence to the quality of space and atmosphere
that one finds in California vis-à-vis New York when dealing with a
finish fetish or a so-called high-tech—here is Garver's atmospheric
theory of art. That description, I think, would be apt in looking at the
difference between New York sculpture and California sculpture at the
time. In New York you are dealing with sculptors like Tony Smith and
"Frosty" [Forrest] Myers and Chuck Ginnever, lots of people dealing with
heavy steel, coming out of David Smith, perhaps. But in New York, it
seems to me that because you are dealing with such a pervasive
architecture—not so much an atmosphere but a kind of built space—the
sculpture reflects this space. Out here, in California, the sculpture
reflects the space and atmosphere, too. To put up a David Smith or a
large piece—even a Mark di Suvero, who has kind of combined the two, in
a way, even though he lives out here—or to put up one of these Ginnevers
or whatever, would hardly make a difference. I mean, you're not fighting
with, or dealing with, or modifying, an architectural space out here.
The buildings are lower; you're much more conscious of the sky than you
are of the skyline. One, I think, is also very much more conscious of
the weather, of the feel of the weather, of the climate, the dust in the
air, the smog, the sea air. One way that you respond to that, I feel, is
in making a sculpture that reflects light. So where you have a much
greater access to light, the sculpture has responded to light—in Peter
Alexander, DeWain Valentine, and these things that deal with light. Yes,
there's a high finish in all the automobiles, but yet somebody like John
McCracken, I think, is making a statement not so much about automobiles
as he is about space and the reflectance of light, not in a slab of
steel that absorbs it but in something else like a plank leaning against
the wall. I think it's been compared to a surfboard or that kind of
motif. But it very much deals, to my way of thinking, with light and in
responding to the qualities of light within the gallery. One of the
reasons for using plastic so much, it seems to me, or Larry Bell's
cubes, was this issue of light. It's interesting that Larry Bell is so
often pointed to as being the king of the high-tech artists, and yet his
famous vacuum-coating machine was made, I think, in Schenectady or
Syracuse, New York; so it's not a product of California. But the idea is
a product of California, because one is trying to work with, and in a
sense work against, what one finds out here. So a constructivist
sculptor, having a large field or a huge parking lot or a great big
space in front of a building, I think, doesn't make much of a dent.
Whereas somebody who, in effect, drops into the atmosphere, drops into
the space, in a much more subtle way has a chance at making a much
bigger dent. So, many of the people out here, I think, were also more
willing to try other techniques. Some of which worked, some of which
didn't. Like spray painting, in an automobile sense, because they were
not locked into, to reinterpret Barbara Haskell, a class struggle or
class structure of artist; [the idea] that artists used and did and said
and thought only certain things. They could only paint on canvas and so
on, as they did in New York, But there was a greater willingness out
here to try things. A lot of them, I think, have not worked. By and
large I'm rather mistrustful of art that you have to plug in to get to
operate. I think many of the artists who are eager acolytes of electric
art, or this or that, have gone away from electric art, which I think is
sensible. I suppose I found out here a sort of fey and interesting
sensibility like Ed Ruscha, somebody who seemingly approached Los
Angeles swimming pools and parking lots and apartment houses with the
same degree of intensity that he would approach his paintings. And
sometimes; they work, and sometimes they don't. But in California there
seems to be more of a willingness to take a risk, at least in the old
days. I think that was summarized for me once by Don Potts, who has made
really one great sculpture in his life, I guess: the four cars that
Newport exhibited in 1972 and then which also traveled very widely
throughout the United States and subsequently in Europe. But Potts said,
speaking of San Francisco artists, that they knew they weren't going to
sell; so if you weren't going to be successful, you might as well be
nuts. [laughter] And I think that's governed a lot of people's thinking.
I think it governed a lot of thinking in New York, at one time. If you
were in a business that was most probably not going to pay you very
much, then you might as well be profound. You should become involved in
mythology. You should become a bard, one of those insightful
philosophers, if you're not going to be a businessman. Then I think as
art became more successful, the pressures to continue that success
eroded some of the grand dreams and designs. I don't think an artist
should necessarily suffer for his or her work, but I think there's
always that caveat that one has to think about—that if you are
successful in something you do, do you change it, or do you try to
continue the formula? I always respect an artist who will change an
acceptable formula, who's willing to really give it a try, particularly
if he's willing to change what has been financially successful and has
brought him or her reasonable rewards, but sometimes the work isn't so
good.
-
GOODWIN:
- Do you think the late sixties were a particularly rich era for art,
compared to the present day?
-
GARVER:
- I think it was certainly richer, and I think the—at the moment I don't
find what I think Joseph Raffael has characterised as the joy that was
present, perhaps, sort of in the sixties, perhaps before the Vietnam War
tended to bear down so heavily. But I've seen relatively few people who
are willing to really get crazy, as it were, the way Rauschenberg and
[Jasper] Johns and a few other people got crazy and flung abstract
expressionism back in its face. Certainly now, for example, all of
Rauschenberg's current work appears to have been constructed in a
factory, and so it apparently has been. And [Andy] Warhol now becomes
the court painter to the rich and famous in the country, and is just
that. He's like late [Thomas] Gainsborough, or something like that,
upgraded. I like to see people who are a little crazy and who are a
little nuts and who don't give a damn. They obviously want to survive,
and they want to survive on their own wits, and they'd like to survive
very well, but they are not simply making improvements and modifications
to the existing product. I also think, given the recessional, I mean
recessionary—It's interesting that I should say "recessional." You think
of people withdrawing: the choir and the minister and so on retire or
retreat up the aisle of the church. I think there's a great deal of
retreating now, and this is in the nature of this country. It's like the
tide, perhaps. Social achievements won and forced and struggled for in
the sixties, tend to come to sort of a slack time in the seventies, and
now, I think, will begin a recession, as the tide begins to ebb. But it
will never go back as far as it was, fortunately. I think most probably
we'll elect [Ronald] Reagan as president—God help us all—because who
else is it going to be? I won't vote for either of them, I'm sure, I
don't know what to say. I mean, it's—
-
GOODWIN:
- It's bleak.
-
GARVER:
- It is bleak. And it seems to be that that bleakness, compounded by a
high inflation, is making itself felt in all of the arts institutions. i
think there are some that looked to the blockbuster show to give them
credence. Certainly in San Francisco (and we may get to that later)
there was the creation, after I left, of sort of a whole blockbuster
office, for ["The Splendor of Dresden] Five Centuries of Art
Collecting," the Dresden show, and the Tut exhibition ["Treasures of
Tutankhamun]. So, at a time when the city cut off some funds to the
museum—they cut off all city preparators and so on, who were pretty bad,
in terms of their output and the quality and quantity of their work—but
it was all farmed out. All the installations, all the design, and so on
were handled in a very expensive way, and suddenly now in a very
declining economy, they can't afford to do anything anymore. They're not
geared up to do an inexpensive show. At one time they were geared up to
do nothing but inexpensive shows. Then they reached a point where they
could do nothing else but expensive shows. So it was really a tough
situation they were in. I guess I see museums as obviously being very
conscious of box office and so on—at least the larger ones. And the New
York ones are very concerned about what they are going to sell in their
bookshops. The Met's bookshop [Metropolitan Museum of Art], of course,
accounts for a very good percentage of its net income, which is very
important.
-
GOODWIN:
- Were you having fun being director?
-
GARVER:
- Here?
-
GOODWIN:
- Yes.
-
GARVER:
- Well, that's always interesting. Yes, I think I was having fun. People,
I think, when I first came here, thought I'd most probably be out
sunning myself at noon and so on, and I never did. Probably one of the
conclusions I can come to is to say that I'll miss the quality of the
weather, but, on the other hand, it won't be as though I'll be cutting
off a major part of my life. I was enjoying it, but I think it was
modified most probably by the fact that there was always the problem of
money, that there never seemed to be quite enough, and there was
always—professionally I'm speaking of—the struggle for money and, I
think, also, the struggle for acceptance. I was reminded that I had said
to someone a few months ago that the chief problem I felt down here was
trying to create a real solid audience for what the museum was doing,
and wondering if we were ever being heard, if we were ever getting
through. The attendance had increased substantially and so on, but it
seemed, like Sisyphus, if I organized six popular exhibitions and did
one unpopular exhibition, that my credit ran out, and I was back to
zero. I think this was one of the chief problems with the relationship
of the museum's visiting constituency to its ruling constituency. Did I
have fun being down here and in California, personally? Yes. I think I
came from a very neurotic situation in New England, and it was suddenly
fun and games. I, as a bachelor, discovered young girls, which was all
very pleasant and gave vent to my fantasies. But I think, frankly, the
reason that I left here in late 1972 was that I had gotten bored.
Natasha, my wife, has pointed up to me that people do not, as we've
already discussed, give themselves. They stay behind guarded gates and
locked doors, and they don't really extend themselves. So I was missing
a certain kind of intellectual ferment, which I got in San Francisco.
And, I think, a passion for strong and good friendships, which developed
in San Francisco, had never developed for me, or Natasha, now in
Southern California, outside of Los Angeles. People don't think that
way. They have everything, and it seems that people here want to make
sure that they keep it to themselves, just like collecting art. They do
not want to risk putting themselves on the line and maybe being hurt or
being vulnerable. Perhaps that's it. People really resist being
vulnerable here. They are protected by their money. They are protected
by their power, their fleets of cars, their cushioned investments, their
staffs. So the people with whom I've dealt at the museum, other than the
staff—the Board, I think, has been very closed. Frequently, someone
would say, "All right, talk about this matter or item, Tom. But keep it
light, and don't get involved. And make it five minutes."
-
GOODWIN:
- Be superficial.
-
GARVER:
- Yes, be superficial, that's right, because everyone's going to get
glazed eyes. They're going to tune out. That's it. And it's really
unfortunate that somehow these people who have. access to everything
can't deal with it. The moment they get it. It's the same way with
housing here. There are several people on the board, chief among them
Ben Deane, who will spend his life redoing houses and selling them,
because the process rather interests him, and it's activity. But the
moment it's over, the moment it comes time for living in it and living
with yourself in it, forget it. And so, many people spend such efforts
to avoid living with themselves and enjoying themselves. But I think I
would want to say one other thing, maybe, about the development of the
Newport Museum from 1968 to 1972, and I see the tape is about to run
out. I just want to talk about the development of the new building, or
the building at 2211 West Balboa [Boulevard].
1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE JULY 2, 1980
-
GARVER:
- I wanted to mention a little bit about some of the developments,
technical developments, that took place at the Newport [Harbor Art
Museum] while I was there the first time. Chief among them was the move
from the Balboa Pavilion at 400 Main Street, on the Balboa peninsula, to
the old Daily Pilot printing offices at 2211 West
Balboa Boulevard, also in Balboa, although down near Newport pier. In
early. 1971 someone came to me to say that they had found some storage
space for material that was gathered year around for what was then the
annual museum rummage sale, called Le Bon Marché.
This had been an office of a newspaper, which, I think, had originally
been the Daily Pilot. Then the Pilot had been sold and had moved, and it was then, I think,
another newspaper, which had subsequently moved elsewhere. So the
building was then vacant. I went down and looked at it and thought that
the museum should move there. It was 10,000 square feet, including two
very large rooms, each of them about fifty feet square, some smaller
storage areas, and a suite of office or meeting rooms. I succeeded in
getting the museum board to agree to that. Patsy Gibson, whom I
mentioned earlier, agreed to put up the first year's rent, which went
from $600 a month at the Pavilion to $1,000 a month at 2211. There was,
of course, terrific concern, and this was one of the problems, I think,
at Newport, about how can we possibly make it go, just in the true
conservative sense. There was very little willingness to take a dare, or
to take the challenge, or [the feeling that] we will make it go. We
moved down there with what we had thought would be about $15,000 in
renovations. It turned into about $40,000; now I suppose it would be
$150,000. But changes were necessary to make the building acceptable for
public occupancy. We had to put in a new heating system, had to
strengthen some of the building so the roof wouldn't fall in should
there be an earthquake, improve lighting systems, do a good deal of
electrical work. But all of this was accomplished, and the museum opened
in October of 1971. I think the attendance increased reasonably, but not
as much, frankly, as I had hoped. I think it was finally averaging, in
that building, around 20,000 people a year, but it enabled us to keep
the building open all the time rather than have to close down to change
exhibitions, although major parts of it would, in fact, close. It also
gave us more storage space and space for our library and so on. It was a
material improvement. It was not attached to any other building. So
there was less of a concern about fire, although it was not sprinklered,
which was better for the art but worse for our fire insurance. I think
there I did the second of the scandal programs (the first was "The Once
Group") of my career at Newport. That was an exhibition organized for
the museum by Tom Marioni, who had been curator of the Richmond,
California, Art Center and later went on to found the Museum of
Conceptual Art, MOCA, in downtown San Francisco. Marioni brought down a
number of artists, including Paul Kos, Bonnie Sherk, by videotape Howard
Fried, Mel Henderson, and there may be some other people I've forgotten.
But they drove down in one of those eight-door airport limousines, sort
of documenting the trip. When they arrived, Mel Henderson did a piece
that spelled out the word Attica in Christmas
lights using a portable generator on an otherwise blank hillside on the
Irvine Ranch and was arrested for trespassing because, it being a
weekend, I couldn't get permission to do it and he wanted to do it right
then. The opening of the show featured several performance pieces.
Bonnie Sherk had brought down a frozen dead rat and a pregnant rat in a
cage. The rat gave birth to her babies actually shortly before the piece
began, but she had a wire cage built of small-bore chicken wire,
hardware cloth, that ran between the floor and ceiling. She went inside
the cage, which was floored with sod, and opened, or cut loose, the
other cage so mama and the babies could get out. There were a couple of
these concentric circles. Then she put the dead rat in another part of
this cage, which the mother rat ate, as I remember, or at least buried
the carcass. Of course, this was a terrific comment on life systems and
life cycles, but there was a terrific outrage. Paul Kos had done a piece
that used a pool table put into a corner of the room, so that there was
very little clearance between the end and side of the pool table and the
wall. On the wall, about shoulder height, he hung a series of varmint
traps that were set, so that when you were shooting—anyone could play
pool there—you were very conscious of these open traps right behind you.
If you leaned back against the wall, you were likely to get a snap. Most
probably the most outrageous piece, for the locals, was a videotape
that—I thought I discussed this before.
-
GOODWIN:
- You mentioned it before.
-
GARVER:
- Yes, a videotape of Howard Fried's, in which the entire dialogue was
"Fuck You Ward. Fuck You Purdue." The show opened, and the president of
the board had gone off to take a six-month holiday and had turned over
the board presidency to Bob Guggenheim, who is sometimes described
locally as being a big supporter of the arts. He hadn't seen the show.
But at that time they were using volunteer staff members for the front
desk of the museum. [tape recorder turned off] So this tape created a
great uproar. Bob Guggenheim's wife was on the desk one day, and a woman
camp up and said, "Aren't you Mrs. Guggenheim? Aren't you the wife of
one of the great art movers and shakers in Orange County?" And she said
yes. [The woman] said, "I think it's shocking that you and your husband
would permit such a desecration." So Guggenheim called a special meeting
of the Board of Trustees to close this show. Well, Bob said, "I don't
mind pornography. Sure, I like it. But this show isn't art—it's a
disgrace." I'm pleased to say that there were two people, a man named
Herb Gold, who ran a commodities brokerage business, among other things,
and Jack Glenn, an art dealer who had come on the Board—now, I did not
approve of Jack's coming on the Board, because he's a dealer. In fact,
after I left the museum, he was subsequently asked to leave, or he was
ordered off, at the instigation of other Board members, by the attorney
general, but that's another story. But both Jack and Herb Gold said,
"We're not on here to be members of a private club. We're here to
support this. Yes, there may be things we don't like, but, on the other
hand, that shouldn't deny the fact that these are valid ideas and that
they should be seen and measured, certainly, with other things." And, in
fact, their ideas held sway. I think the Board most probably then was
much more liberal than it became later; so they held sway, and the show
was not, in fact, closed. It stayed open. I'm sure there are other shows
you want to talk about. I just wanted to make sure that the museum had
the new building. It didn't have very good storage facilities. So its
very small collection, which was essentially that of the Avco [Financial
Services]. Maybe there were thirty-five pieces. [They] remained on
Avco's walls, even though they were our pictures. So why don't you ask
me about some of those other shows.
-
GOODWIN:
- Okay. Tell me about "The New Art of Vancouver" [exhibit] in October and
November of 1969.
-
GARVER:
- "The New Art of Vancouver" had come about, I think, as a result of a
conversation that I had had with Bill Seitz before I left Brandeis
[University]. He had been invited to organize a show of Canadian art. I
don't remember what group it was. It may have been for a Canadian museum
or, perhaps, for the Canada Council. I just don't remember. But he was
very struck by the quality of art that he had found in Vancouver.
Remembering that, I scheduled an exhibition and went up and organized
it. The show also went on to Santa Barbara, the University of California
there, and I think it was really quite an interesting show. There were a
couple of real painters in it, a very interesting ceramicist. I think it
was Gathie Falk, a woman. There were several interesting ceramicists.
One fellow, Glenn Lewis, who did some work in little closed booths that
had these little sort of worm shapes in white porcelain on a
back-lighted, or under-lighted, table. That is, the light was under this
translucent plastic.
-
GOODWIN:
- What are some names?
-
GARVER:
- Gathie Falk. It was Glenn Lewis that did the little booths. The N.E.
Thing Company, of course, was Ian Baxter and his wife, and they did a
number of pieces. Because so many of these things were installation
pieces—Gathie Falk had done an installation using real furniture and
ceramics. We could not produce the catalog until the—we produced the
catalog, which had an essay by myself, and then we produced a supplement
that went in the catalog, which showed the work installed. But I think
that this was the sort of thing that we were working on. This came just
before the Rauschenberg show ["Robert Rauschenberg in Black and White"]
that I mentioned. Earlier on, we had done a show of Paul Brach and Mimi
Schapiro. I had met them in the East, as I remember. They were both
eastern painters; they're married. And I made a small survey exhibition
of their work. Now, "The New Art of Vancouver" and Paul Brach and
Rauschenberg were all in the Pavilion space.
-
GOODWIN:
- How about "Balboa and the Fun Zone"?
-
GARVER:
- Well, before I talk about that, I'd like to talk about "The
Appearing/Disappearing Image/Object," which was a show of Los Angeles
artists that I organized in May and June of 1969. I hadn't been out here
very long. The previous exhibition had been a big show of artifacts of
the movies, which had been organized by Betty Turnbull. So there were
such problems in dealing with anything that was slightly new, and
everyone was saying, "But I don't understand it. And what about this and
that?" I did a poster for the show that, in effect, was sort of a
checkerboard, as I remember it, that described the people who were in
the show. There was a paragraph about each of their works, so that the
idea was that you'd open this thing, and you'd be prepared in advance
rather than coming in and saying, "Oh, but I can't figure it out. Oh
dear, oh dear." There were people in it who, I think, were very
important at the time in Los Angeles—[people from] Los Angeles and
Californians displaced—who were working in evanescent concerns. Barry Le
Va was in it, and of course he had come from the West Coast, although he
was not living here then. He had us cover a section. of the floor, very
carefully delineated and roped off, with flour dust, baking flour. It
was quite interesting because, of course, people would touch it, and it
changed in character, like some of his distributional pieces. We even,
apparently, had several birds that got into the building through the
louvered windows and walked across it, which was quite startling. Doug
Edge was in it. I think Greg Card was in it. Ron Cooper was in it with
some of those clear acrylic pictures. John Baldessari was in it. A
couple of other people who have subsequently vanished were in it. But
the title, of course, "The Appearing/Disappearing Image/Object," I
think, dealt with things like—oh, Al Ruppersberg was in it. Yes, he did
quite an interesting construction of stones and so on, as I recall.
Michael Asher was also in it with an "air sculpture," a blast of air
that hit you as you walked in the front door. But the [idea was that]
images and objects were disappearing, as the ideas and transient,
evanescent states were appearing. I think it was a much more successful
show than I would have thought. I think maybe the poster might have had
something to do with it. I think most probably the "Balboa and the Fun
Zone" was a very important exhibition, and it might be that I'll try
doing something like this again at [the] Madison [Art Center]. This was
September-October 1970, and I think there was some thought that the
museum might be building new space up in Newport Center, where, indeed,
they finally moved, but much later. So I commissioned three
photographers: Bill Doherty who later took his own life; Ed Seavers, who
still lives here locally; and Bob Von Sternberg, who I think also lives
in Los Angeles. I found three documentary photographers who had a rather
different flavor in their work. Each of them was different from the
other. I invited them to photograph the Fun Zone—let me go back. I asked
them to document the area in which the Balboa Pavilion was located,
because it's a very curious area and one that was not regarded as very
good living. I think this is another one of those shows where I ran
counter to what was regarded as "correct." There were a lot of small
houses; many of them had been built about the time of the Balboa
Pavilion [in] the early part of the century, and had been added on to
and expanded and remodeled and so forth. Right next to the Pavilion was
the Fun Zone, which was a small amusement park. It, I think, had just
been sold at that time and was going to be developed for condominiums.
In fact, I think part of it is still preserved. But the whole area
contained this rather tacky amusement park and boat-rental area, and
there was a lot of people—students, surfers, pensioners, the young and
old—living and working in small shops and so on around there. They were
really invisible to the more grand houses in Newport and Balboa. The
property was valuable? the houses and people who lived in them were not.
So these three photographers worked for seven months documenting the
people they met, the interiors of their houses, the businesses, the
rides. Interestingly, the work all came out looking rather similar,
maybe because the circumstances were rather similar. But it was a really
interesting show. Everyone in the neighborhood who lived there was
invited to the opening. It seems to me that they hired a big band for
the occasion to kind of give a little nostalgia to the Pavilion. But it,
too, was a very well-received exhibition, and it was later that I wrote
an article on it in Art in America. I think it was a very interesting
idea to do that, to document the area in which one was located. The
photographs were never deposited anywhere; so there's no real
record—there was no catalog of that show. In some of these other
exhibitions, like "Tom Wesselmann: [Early Still Lives, 1962-64"], we
only ran them four and five weeks. It was awful. The Tom Wesselmann show
was one that was suggested by Connie Glenn, and she, in fact, later made
a Wesselmann show at the Cal State University, Long Beach, Galleries,
which she runs. But I think that was another exhibition of the sort that
we were doing: one-person shows of well-known people, as I had done
earlier with Rauschenberg. There were maybe twenty-five or thirty works
in it, not a large show. Maybe there were even fewer than that. There
was a painting for which the drawing on the wall of my dining room was a
study. But that show also circulated. I think maybe [it went] to just
one other museum in Kansas City, which was not enough. We lost money on
it, as I recall. We opened the new building October 23, 1971, with a
show called "Contemporary American Art from Orange County Collections,"
which was—we've done one or two of those since, I think. You have to
borrow a lot of filler to make it look right. But the last show we did
in the Balboa Pavilion was "New Painting in Los Angeles," It had been
the first part of what had been anticipated as a two-part show, but we
ran out of money, and we were moving anyway. So it was supposed to
[cover] "new art in Los Angeles." It was interesting in that, I think,
most of the people we picked have not gone on to establish very
substantial reputations. Tom Wudl certainly has. There were a couple of
other people who I think have literally disappeared. [There was] one
piece that I think was most interesting. We commissioned the Los Angeles
Fine Arts Squad, which I think has finally boiled down to Terry
Schoonhoven, the muralist, who had been decorating disco clubs or supper
clubs on La Cienega [Boulevard] and walls in Venice, to make a work for
the show. Vic Henderson and Terry came down. I said, "Now, you can do
something inside, or you can put something on canvas outside." They
said, "Well, that wasn't quite right." So what they did, I think, was a
wonderful piece. They did some research on Japanese World War II two-man
submarines, and they made about a two-thirds scale model. They built it
out of plywood and put floats on it, so that it would stand upright and
you wouldn't see the floats. They painted this, and we anchored it in
one of the mooring spots off the Balboa Pavilion. People thought it was
a real submarine. Their work was very illusionistic, and they created
quite a stir in. the restaurant down below. The waitresses and waiters
down there apparently started telling people that there were two young
women who were making an around-the-worId tour underwater. [laughter]
You know, they were spending some time here, and their submarine was
anchored off the Pavilion. It was quite wonderful, because the other
side was left completely unfinished. It was simply varnished. So you
would see this, and you would come around and see all the structure, and
it looked like the back of a stage set. But it was a wonderful piece,
just right and very witty and people would do a wonderful double take.
Two other shows that I think I might mention, at the new building at
2211, other than the ones that I have already mentioned, was an
exhibition of Edward Hopper ["Edward Hopper: 15 Paintings"], the first
exhibition of his mature work that had ever been seen on the West Coast,
as nearly as I could tell. We had, as I remember—it was a very small
show, about thirteen to fifteen paintings in it, but we had some really
great ones. We had Tables for Ladies from the
Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art]; Manhattan Bridge
Loop and Gloucester from the Addison
Gallery of American Art; we had the Light at Two
Lights from the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Seven A.M. from the Whitney [Museum of American
Art]; Gas Station and Movie from the Museum of Modern Art. Bill Agee, who was then
director of the Pasadena [Art] Museum, helped me get some of these
loans, and the show then went from Newport to Pasadena, a distance of
about fifty miles. But it was a wonderful show. It was very
satisfactory. That was enough, in terms of the works there.
-
GOODWIN:
- It sounds like a show that fit Newport, [laughter]
-
GARVER:
- It did. And it was immediately after that that we did the Marioni show
that created an uproar. And, I think, following that, we did "Don Potts:
My First Car," which was a show that traveled very widely. Of course,
Potts was a San Francisco sculptor who had built this radio-controlled
car as a sculpture, a prototype chassis of wood that looked like the
inside of one of these old airplanes, and two other bodies: one of
stainless steel covered with cloth and the other of polished stainless
steel. That was a very popular show that traveled to the Walker Art
Center in Minneapolis, and the Whitney, the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Chicago, and so on.
-
GOODWIN:
- And you mentioned Europe.
-
GARVER:
- Yes, it subsequently went to Europe, not under the museum's aegis
(although parts of the catalog were used), but it was taken over there
and ended up in Berlin. I know that it traveled; I've forgotten how many
places. It traveled several times; I think to about fourteen places in
the United States. The other show that I think I would mention was the
"Reginald Marsh Retrospective." I resigned to go to San Francisco a
couple of months earlier, and it was the last show I worked on. My last
day at Newport, in fact, was the day that show opened, and it continued
on to the Des Moines Art Center, the University of Texas at Austin, and
the Fort Worth Art Museum. I had always enjoyed Reginald Marsh but had
never really seen or looked at enough of his work. That was, for
Newport, a very large show and quite an expensive one. I think there
were about eighty things in it, maybe even more. [There were] large
drawings, major paintings. Why Not Use the "L"?
was in it from the Whitney; Twenty Cent Movie;
there were a number of the Bowery paintings; and so forth. Everything
but High Yaller, which I knew I wouldn't get as a
loan and I didn't particularly want, because Marsh himself didn't like
it that well. And yet he was so famous for it. Like [Edward] Elgar, he
didn't want to be a one-song composer.
-
GOODWIN:
- Marsh seems even more appropriate than Hopper for Newport, or for the
old gallery.
-
GARVER:
- Well, it was a popular show, I think; but most probably the Hopper was
more popular. The most popular shows at that time were some of the
Indian shows. Peter Max ["The World of Peter Max"], would you believe,
which had been done not by the museum—it was a show that came from the
[M.H.] de Young [Memorial] Museum—and the Hopper were very popular.
Marsh, I think, was also popular, but not as popular as Edward Hopper.
So then, of course, that ended my four and one half year career at
Newport. There might be some other things.
-
GOODWIN:
- Yes, before moving on to San Francisco, maybe you could say a few words,
Tom, about the other museums in Southern California. How you were able
to coexist or whether there was any cooperation.
-
GARVER:
- Well, this was in the early days. This was before several of them, I
think, had come out of the doldrums. Tom Tibbs was director at the La
Jolla [Museum of Contemporary Art], and I think essentially all the
programs there had been done by Larry Urrutia. They had been primarily a
museum of, I guess, Los Angeles or also regional art. My connection and
involvement with the [Los Angeles] County Museum was, and I think
remains, minimal. We were most closely allied, I would say, with the old
Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, [Pasadena Art Museum]. We were trying to
do the same things they were, in a way, and in a couple of instances,
with Hopper and with a previous Indian show—we'd sent the Southwest
Indian show to Pasadena, and they were already in tough shape
financially, and they ended up owing us money. They paid for a lot of
the Hopper exhibition, which their board helped finance. The board was
not interested in paying off the Indian show; so they paid it off by the
services and shipping and so on that we received from them for the
Hopper show which took place a year later or so. It was in a different
building, and Hopper was an example of the sort of show I would not have
wanted to have done in the Balboa Pavilion.
-
GOODWIN:
- Actually, your experience at Newport reminds me a great deal of the
early years of the Pasadena Museum, before the acquisition of the Galka
Scheyer collection: problems of establishing an identity, of conflict
between a professional staff and the volunteers, between doing very
perceptive things that tended to be rejected by the local community.
-
GARVER:
- Well, I think this has been one of the problems there. I think most
probably suddenly under, first, Walter Hopps and then Jim Demetrion, it
began doing very, very well. I remember at Brandeis [University], we
sent several shows out there and maybe took several shows. The Larry
Rivers show that Sam Hunter organized went there, and I think something
else did. When I first went to the Pasadena Museum, it was still in the
old building, and there was a beautiful Wayne Thiebaud show there. I
should go back, by the way, and say that I was not going to come to
Newport. The one thing that changed my mind was that I was encouraged by
two people, Beverly Morphy and Betty Gold, who now runs the Arco visual
arts programs, to spend an extra day in Southern California and visit
Los Angeles, which I was not going to do. And I did. We tooled off in a
black Cadillac El Dorado, with a telephone, and I was suitably
impressed. We went off to the Watts Towers and Pasadena and had lunch on
Sunset Strip, which was then rather lively. We visited Ed Ruscha in his
studio and then [went to] the County Museum. So it was really an
exciting day, and I fell in love with Los Angeles. I think it's a
remarkable, interesting, and individual city, and that, I think, is one
reason that I decided to come out. But I would say, in terms of other
museums, I had to keep encouraging and continue, I think, even after I
returned, to encourage the fact that we would be best only if we were a
specialized museum, that specialized in, in fact, the art of our time.
While, the Pasadena [Museum] had changed, the County Museum was going to
expand and the downtown museum would be coming in. Maybe we had not made
sufficient use of some of the Los Angeles collectors and resources, but
on occasion we invited several of them to join the Board at Newport, and
I think that while there was support from Los Angeles, there was very
little interest in what was regarded by a number of Los Angeles
collectors as an okay but sort of provincial museum. We were not the big
time, to a very big-time crowd. There were also very many people in Los
Angeles, collectors, who really did not cosy up to the Orange County
types. There were certainly a lot of liberal Jewish collectors in Los
Angeles who did not see themselves thrown in with sort of conservative,
more Waspy elements in Orange County. And many of them, also, were just
very heavily committed to programs in Los Angeles.
-
GOODWIN:
- Well, it seems that Los Angeles, generally, never lived up to its
potential, that there was almost a disaster at each institution.
-
GARVER:
- I think that this has been one of the problems—I was just speaking very,
briefly to Rusty [Earl A.] Powell, the new director of the County
Museum, a few days ago, and he said, "Well, Southern California has a
way of just going through its directors." They got rid of Rick Brown at
the County Museum, and then they had Kenny Donahue, who was perfectly
likeable but no director. He's a real curator but couldn't make
administrative decisions, and he didn't make any waves for the big guns.
This is a serious problem out here. If this Bunker Hill downtown museum
does take off—and I think it most probably will—it will take three or
four directors before that place is really running smoothly and there
aren't big conflicts. I think that with people like Eli Broad and Marcia
Weisman and whomever, there are a number of artists on the board, too,
it's going to be very difficult. They're going to want some flashy
architecture that's going to give them something with no walls or plenty
of exposed plumbing or whatever. But I think that right now the
potential for art in Southern California is very sound. I think that
there's the possibility that the [J. Paul] Getty Museum may help
underwrite other institutions after it receives most or all of its money
from the Getty bequest. Obviously, they'll take care of Number One
first, as well they should. I think the downtown museum of modern art,
as I like to call it, is getting off the ground. I think that Lefty
[Sebastian] Adler has done a very good job and has really developed, in
the long term, a very viable program in La Jolla.
-
GOODWIN:
- How has that been possible?
-
GARVER:
- Well, I think that somehow Lefty managed to save his ass. I just had
lunch with him recently, and he apparently just called a spade a spade
and preserved his position there, and then has gone on to develop strong
board support. They've remodeled the building, extensively expanding the
gallery space and much improving it. He took a very clear-cut view that
he wanted to collect essentially American post-painterly abstract
paintings, or hard-edge painting, and they have been working on that.
Many of the exhibitions have concentrated on that. He's developed, I
think, a loyal and supportive board that's been financing a lot of the
shows. They've improved their endowment. I think a great deal of it is
that finally they accept him and accept what he's been doing, and they
have been supporting—it just has happened, and I think this will happen.
It's a matter of the chemistry, I think, between the personality and the
museum—the director and the board of the museum. Right now Lefty can be
very rough-hewn and cross-grained and difficult, but he's managed to
develop a strong point of view and real respect. And I think that with
the exception of one person, whom I see as—maybe that's simplistic of
me—that my downfall was essentially orchestrated by one person. But had
that not happened, I think I would have continued on here at least for a
couple of more years, but we'll get into that later. So I would say of
the situation in the Los Angeles area that another museum of modern art
would be quite in keeping with a number of the programs here. This is,
after all, I think, the second-largest metropolitan area. I think it's
exceeded Chicago now, even if Los Angeles isn't as big as Chicago. You
support such things as the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art,
which does things that other museums might not want to. The County
Museum and the downtown museum are going to be like the [Solomon R.]
Guggenheim [Museum] and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or the
Whitney—not in feeling or in character, necessarily, but in terms of the
fact that the area will be able to support, I think, two museums.
-
GOODWIN:
- How about UCLA?
-
GARVER:
- Well, I think that UCLA, which started doing such important things under
Fred Wight, is now doing pretty much canned shows, and I don't
understand at all why they have not had a director in two years. I think
this was a problem that was tossed to the new dean. I think he doesn't
want to deal with it; so I guess it's run by a committee, basically. I
think it's too bad. I think that UCLA, essentially, is a resource that
at any time it chooses can be important or not. I think the director at
USC [Donald Brewer] has just resigned—in disgust, one would gather—and
the man who was in charge of their program, Steve Ostrow, one hears, is
looking around. Basically, he came from the Rhode Island School of
Design and, I think, was used to a more serious academic institution,
more serious academic endeavor, and what he's finding is that USC is a
high-grade vocational school. Those departments that can plant students
in highly paid professions, such as medicine and law, do very well;
those other departments that can't, are up against the wall. And I know
that he's found that it's very hard to support quality against the need
for money. [tape recorder turned off]
-
GOODWIN:
- Last week you referred to Los Angeles as being, perhaps, one of four
national art centers, along with the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago,
and New York. Well, after reviewing the situation here, at least through
the museums, it doesn't sound as if Los Angeles is as strong a center
as, perhaps, it has seemed.
-
GARVER:
- No. I think it is. When I say art center, it's not only the museums.
It's the artists who are here. It's the support. It's the talent coming
in and going out. Certainly a number of important galleries have faded
from here, Irving Blum, Nick Wilder, and there are others. Yet, there
will be others that will take their place. I think that Los Angeles
continues to have a certain flavor. I think that if the Pasadena Museum
of Modern Art sinks in the West, in due course, the Bunker Hill
museum—the new downtown museum—will come, hopefully, to take its place
and maybe even to have some of Pasadena's things in its collection on
extended loan, if Norton Simon doesn't sell them all. So the thing
that's important, I think, is not that the situation is completely fixed
but that there is that dynamic here that, to my way of thinking,
continues. At the moment, there may not be a lot happening all over the
country, but yet there are developments here. There will be a major
extension to the County Museum in contemporary art. There may be some
major supporters—possibly, I don't know—from the [J. Paul] Getty
Foundation for arts generally. I think an area that I haven't mentioned
are the several very strong university galleries: U. C. Irvine;
particularly, I think, [the] California State University at Long Beach
is very strong and very good under Connie Glenn; I think that the
California State University at Fullerton, under Dextra Frankel, is very
strong, particularly in the area of crafts. So I think that there's a
lot happening here, and it's keeping the situation going, keeping it
alive. It may not be in a thunderously high-profile way, although this
evening, the Russian avant-garde show ["The Avant-Garde in Russia,
1910-1930: New Perspectives"] that the County Museum has organized is
opening. [tape recorder turned off] So I think there's a great deal
happening here. And I think there are places like Los Angeles
Contemporary Exhibitions, LACE; LAICA [Los Angeles Institute of
Contemporary Art] has two venues; the County Museum comes up with an
occasional blockbuster, although I think they've not been nearly as
active, maybe, on the local scene as they might have been. There's been
a great deal of anger, I know, about that. Of course, the County Museum,
is really the museum of record in the region—that is, a show there
usually receives more notice and so forth. But you go even as far north
as Santa Barbara, and the university and the Santa Barbara Art Museum
are both doing important things which reflect on and pay attention to
the area. So there's a number of institutions. I didn't even mention the
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, the Otis [Art
Institute], and the Art Center [College of Design]. If you read your
"Calendar," there's a lot happening. It seems to me that it's like New
York. There are a lot of other things—maybe there are even fewer
exhibition spaces to show in New York, other than galleries. But yet the
density is there, I think there's enough density and enough interchange
here to maintain this as a very viable area, even though at any one time
there may be fewer galleries, or fewer museums, doing current
exhibitions. I think that just in my visits to downtown, there have been
a lot, of programs. A lot of artists have moved in downtown, many, many
more than I had any idea of. I made one visit down there, and I'm going
to make another, just to spend a day down there and see what's going on,
because it's very impressive. It bodes well for the future.
1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO JULY 2, 1980
-
GOODWIN:
- Now we're going to begin to discuss Tom's years in San Francisco.
-
GARVER:
- I think that I first began going to San Francisco, just as a visitor,
about—I'd been up there as early as late '68 or early '69, I guess on my
first visit to Vancouver. Obviously, like everyone else, I liked the
city very much. I had friends who moved from Newport Beach to San
Francisco, I think in. the early summer of 1970. I used to go up and
spend long weekends with them. I'd drive up, back in the era when gas
was thirty-eight cents a gallon, and I loved the drive. I would leave in
the morning and get in in mid-afternoon or late afternoon, depending on.
the route I'd driven, and I'd spend a couple of days and come back on
the fourth day. I enjoyed the city. I thought the museums up there,
particularly the [M.H. de] Young [Memorial] Museum and the [California
Palace of the] Legion [of Honor], were very stodgy, [tape recorder
turned off] Both the de Young and the Legion seemed to be museums that
somehow had gotten stuck in the twenties or the thirties, in terms of
their appearance, their care for objects, the quality of the programs
they were doing. And I think it was most probably early in 1972, when I
received a letter from Elsa Cameron, who was then curator of education.
I think that as part of the "pogrom" necessitated by Proposition 13, she
has just left the museum Avery Brundage, in offering his collection to
the city of San Francisco, had apparently been the person who was
responsible for forcing the merger of two mediocre museums, the M.H. de
Young Memorial Museum and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor,
into one very respectable museum. M.H. de Young, who had founded the de
Young Museum, had been a great rival of Adolph and Alma Spreckels, who
had founded the Legion of Honor, and of course their interests had been
quite different. So the de Young Museum was always thought of as the one
where the masses went, and the Legion of Honor where the classes went.
And among some of the old guard, that feeling still continues today. But
Brundage offered the collection of Asian art to the city. Apparently, it
was to have been the Asian department of the de Young Museum, but when
he looked at the situation, he realized that here were two museums
competing for support, collections, and so on, in a relatively small
town—a city of 700,000, in a metropolitan area of several millions—and
that the support wasn't there. So, I understand, he created the climate,
or forced the climate, for merger, while, on the other hand, changing
his mind and wanting his own museum. So, of course, there's the Museum
of Asian Art and Culture, which contains the Avery Brundage Collection,
attached to the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, even though they are two
separate entities, sharing almost nothing except utilities and guard
staff.
-
GOODWIN:
- And a front door. [laughter]
-
GARVER:
- Yes, and a front door, which was always a very hot issue with the
director of the Asian Art Museum. I think it was originally called the
Center of Asian Art and Culture of the Avery Brundage Collection; then
the name was changed to the Asian Art Museum. But in early 1972, I
think, I got a letter from Elsa Cameron, who said they were beginning to
think about creating a department of exhibitions that would help
straighten things out and improve the really appallingly bad image the
museum had. The one problem that was never dealt with, of course, was
the fact that most of the people there were civil servants, and the only
way to get around them was simply to hire someone else to do their job.
But I was interviewed first, I think. I spoke briefly to Ian White, the
director of the two museums, which had just begun to be operated under a
single administration but not merged officially until early November of
1972, when the city voted a charter amendment to merge them. Ian came
down with F. Lanier Graham, who was, as was later to be demonstrated,
the not terribly effective deputy director of collections and
exhibitions, I think his title was. They came to Newport to see somebody
about a grant when the Edward Hopper show was on. So they had a chance
to see the Hopper show and were very impressed, and I was subsequently
offered a job there in August of '72 and took. it in late November. I
left Newport early in November and took the job there in late November
of '72, and my salary went from $15,000 a year in Newport, having gone
there almost four and a half years ago at $12,000, to $16,500, which I
thought was a very nice increase. I sold a Jasper Johns print, I recall,
borrowed on my life insurance, took all the money I had, and paid ten
percent down on a two-flat building in the Sunset, 1217 Twenty-First
Avenue, right near Golden Gate Park, for which I paid $48,500—back in
the old days. I then came up to San Francisco. There were several
reasons for making the change, I think. I had never worked in a large
museum, and I wanted that experience. I had not worked for some time in
a great city, and I wanted to do that again. And I think, frankly, I was
just becoming bored down here. I knew all the cast of characters, I knew
what was happening, I had moved the museum, I felt I had made a real
contribution and a mark here, maybe it was time somebody else took over,
and I went and tried another place. So I came up, and I well remember
that, within three days of my starting in San Francisco, I thought,
"God, if I hadn't bought this house, I'd go and ask for my job back."
Really I think most probably I was much too impetuous. The problems of
the Fine Arts Museums were most probably based originally on the fact
that it was a city-run museum, absolutely in the control of a civil
bureaucracy that, even by [the standard of] most civil bureaucracies,
was exceptionally hermetic and centrally controlled. I mean, from what
I've heard of other cities, it's bad. But San Francisco, of course,
since the thirties, has been very much a labor town, and so the
management never stood a chance (it never tried to make a change
either). That's not true anymore, because financial requirements
(Proposition 13) and the financial demands have simply forced changes.
But when I was there, the constant battle was just to get something done
and to try and get somebody to do something. I remember one man taking a
day and a half to paint, maybe fifty cutout letters—just 170 a to paint
these and let them dry. You [would never know] where these guys would
disappear to and so on, and you couldn't fire them. There was one guy
they'd been trying to get rid of for ten years. [laughter] Even if he
was given an unpaid furlough, there he'd be back again. He was not
removed until Proposition 13 did the job. It was personally a wonderful
experience in San Francisco, because of our friends. I met Natasha
Nicholson, the woman who became my wife, who was seeing an artist
friend, Bruce Conner, and I met her when he came down here to a film
festival. I think he was introducing his own film. No, he had come down
for an artist friend's opening and had called me up, because I had
organized a show of his at Brandeis. So I came up, and here was Natasha,
whom I thought was another one of Bruce's hip chicks that he used to—he
always would have one on the side, as it were, Bruce being married and
living with his wife and child. But, indeed, the second time I met
her—again, Bruce had come down—I quite changed my mind. Then she came
down once again, and we got along very well. When I went to San
Francisco, I saw a good deal of her, and then we lived together, I
guess, for about fifteen months before we were married. It annoys
Natasha; it most probably would annoy her to no end to have it in the
archives, when I say that Natasha arrived in my house in San Francisco,
along with the furniture, but that's exactly right. [laughter] We've
been together, of course, since very late December of 1972, and it's
been a wonderful relationship. I think the relationship with the friends
we made in San Francisco has been very important and lasting.
Professionally, San Francisco was, I think, less rewarding. I think it
was most probably summed up by a remark that Ian White made to someone
else about me after I'd been there maybe six months, and that was, "When
is Garver going to stop thinking like a director?" I think this was one
of the problems, that I was always thinking like a director, or in
rather broad terms. And Ian is a very bad leader—perfectly nice guy,
very pleasant, but it's very hard for Ian to make tough decisions. It's
very hard for him to articulate them and discuss them, and you always
knew, when you were called into his office, that there'd be ten minutes
of generalities and another ten minutes of sort of specifics dealing
with something, and then after he had announced that the meeting was
just about over, he would spring some item on you. That was very
difficult to deal with, because the problem was bad enough already,
given the civil-service nature of the institution, and it was very hard
for Ian to deal with tough decisions: Shall we buy it or not? Shall we
hire him or fire him or not?—this sort of thing. Particularly in his
interpersonal relations with staff, he was, I think, critically
deficient. While I was in San Francisco, I became known—I suppose the
article that you mentioned in Artweek, "Thomas H.
After One Year"—and there were a couple of others that were examples—got
me in hot water. I was pointing out problems and deficiencies in the
system, and I wasn't very subtle about it either, which I now rather
regret. There were always problems, I would say, in the Fine Arts
Museums. There were problems with top management there was an inherent
problem in that the city ran the museum, but there was a private
not-for-profit volunteer group that put up all of the money for the
exhibition programs and that really financed everything, except a few
thousand dollars in city money. So this group could be very difficult
and flaky. You know, you would have to go to them on bended knee for
money. Finally, after I came, that was in the process of changing, and
it did. Essentially, they would look at their budget and we would look
at ours, and we would create a melding. There were times when we had to
delay exhibitions or cancel them—and that's certainly been the case
recently—but we worked on a number of shows that they financed, and I
think I gained a great deal both of administrative experience and also
experience in working in a larger-scale way. I mean, the major
exhibition spaces at the de Young covered about 14,000 square feet,
which was bigger than all of the space of the Newport Museum combined. I
know that I was occasionally the spokesperson for the museum's role as
supporter of local artists. This had been quite a heated issue, because
for twenty-nine years the Society of Western Artists, which was
essentially a group of "Eisenhower painters," had been exhibited at the
de Young. They'd been having their annual salon there. Under Ian, to his
credit, they had canceled this, and there was terrific uproar. They went
to the Board of Supervisors and made a big stink, and fortunately the
Board did nothing. It was a very hard time to begin to turn the museums
around, but we did begin creating smaller exhibitions of what we thought
of as Bay Area artists, which was the nine surrounding Bay Area
counties.
-
GOODWIN:
- Let's hold off on exhibitions until next time. What are some of the
other reasons that the de Young fell apart, other than the management
problems with the city and weak leadership? Obviously, the collections
weren't growing, either.
-
GARVER:
- Well, I think right now—this fellow, Lanier Graham, whom I mentioned to
you, had been brought in. Let me recast. I think historically, maybe
from, let's say, the early sixties, after Walter Heil left as director
of the de Young, there were a series of shorter-term directors.
Essentially all dynamism was lost. There were very few purchase funds,
and the quality of the staff was simply very, very low-energy. I think,
as somebody observed, the toughest decision of the day at the museum was
where to have lunch, [laughter] and the curators would sit around the
table and have an exhibition committee meeting and just decide whether
they would take shows from the American Federation of Arts or the
Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Some local artists
did have shows there; they were usually not so good, but they were very
persistent. At the Legion, I think, under a man named Ross Smith, there
was the Legion Midwinter Show, which was an exhibition of contemporary
artists from which a winner might be selected for a one-person show. And
the Legion, in fact, did acquire, and was buying, contemporary art at
this time, in the forties and fifties. But I think both places were very
content to not do much—one of the problems, perhaps, of San Francisco.
The Legion had a little more money for acquisitions, and it was making
some acquisitions. But in the waning days of Tom Howe—and he was
director for, I think, thirty-three years at the Legion—and after Walter
Heil had left, really the dynamic almost stopped. It's hard, really, to
say why, except that essentially maybe people had been there too long,
too much had been taken for granted. Certainly the physical facilities
of both places were very seriously deteriorated. It's only been quite
recently that those facilities have been substantially improved, over
the last three or four years. So I think that the first thing, in terms
of the revitalization of these two museums, that was a real irritant was
Avery Brundage, who came in and started making lots of demands, and who
got the city to put a bond issue on the ballot (which was passed) to
build the Asian Art Museum. He also forced, in one way or another, the
idea of the merger, which subsequently, of course, did come about. Ian
White was a native San Franciscan, whose art historical and management
credentials were maybe a little thin, but he was very "correct"
socially, and he had been picked as Tom Howe's successor. When the
museums were put together, he was the only person on the scene. There
was no one really at the de Young, and so he succeeded to the position
of director of both of them. I would say that he was never terribly
supportive, but he's been able to get things to happen there in one way
or another. I don't think he was very supportive of staff or created a
climate of good morale, because it was so hard for him to deal with
people. But certainly in the time I went there, and since, they acquired
the [John D.] Rockefeller [III] Collection and have made major
acquisitions. There were some funds available. Finally—and this was one
of the revelations—when these two mediocre collections were put
together, they turned out to be one fairly good collection, particularly
strong in French art. So the Legion became the museum of French art, and
with one exception I can think of, I guess, modern art was really kept
out of there. I did an exhibition of George Tooker there, which was sort
of suitably correct and not controversial. It was a tiny little show,
about thirty paintings, mounted in one gallery. Then, of course, the
Achenbach Foundation, the Department of Prints and Drawings, has taken
quite a contemporary stance, which I think is very good. But I think
there was just no one there, really, who could deal with a rather vocal
group saying, yes, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. is all well
and good, but they can't do everything. And, after all, the museum'
supported by the ad. valorem taxes, and so what are you doing for
artists who pay those taxes and who are citizens There were exhibitions
that were selected from the local art festival and so on, and after I
went there, we began making small exhibitions. We had two small
galleries and occasionally larger exhibitions of contemporary artists.
So this was important—and, I think, important for the museums—but has
not really continued. When I left, you know, they were into "Tutomania."
Now, I don't know what they're going to do, because they've announced
that they're not going to do any shows that are not going to pay for
themselves. So I suspect they'll do one, or maybe two, shows a year. But
while I was there, certainly we improved the exhibition systems. I also
spoke occasionally on the problem of the museums to artist groups, and
that most probably got me in hot water.
1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE JULY 9, 1980
-
GARVER:
- I think I'll discuss a little bit more my functions at the Fine Arts
Museums in San Francisco. I did discuss previously some of the problems
I saw of management that were based on individual personalities as well
as on the bureaucratic civil-service system. The two, I think, worked
together to defeat a lot of high-energy endeavors, although I would not
want to discredit the achievements of the museum under Ian White, who is
director. The two museums jointly have certainly come further in the
last ten years than, I would say, at any other time in their history, in
terms of development of collections and programs. I gave myself, I
guess, a dual role there, both as curator of exhibitions and curator,
perhaps without portfolio, of modern art. With one glaring and garish
and horrific exception, I organized, or caused to be organized, most of
the contemporary shows at the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco—with
the exception of graphics, that is, prints and drawings exhibitions,
organized in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, under [Robert
Flynn] Johnson. The one horrific exception was a show mounted in, I
think 1975 or early '76, called "The Rainbow Show," which was organized
by F. Lanier Graham, then chief curator, and it became his swan song
from the museum, really. He had been spending years working on this
show, to the detriment of everything else, and when it finally opened,
the ideas turned out to be five years late, visually uninteresting, and
qualitatively extremely uneven at best. I would say, in a word, it was a
bust. The idea had come to Graham and a friend of his while they were
stoned on acid one July Fourth, in the late sixties or early seventies.
It was to be a show that dealt with the idea of color as a bridge from
pure perception into works of art. I guess there are seven colors in the
rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. It turned out
to be really a grotesque sort of mishmash of environments and rooms,
slide shows. One of the more successful parts of it was an environment,
a room created out of stretched nylon cloth, sort of a woven cloth that
stretched, by a New York artist named Aleksandra Kasuba. Aleksandra had
created these chambers, which were lighted from the floor by neon tubes.
But you went from that into something that was supposed to be like a
thunderous lightning bolt that took you back into the primordial swamp,
with a forty-foot holographic rainbow arching overhead. Well, the
thunderous lightning bolt turned out to be some rather half-baked spark
coil that would send out a crackling spark a foot or two long, and it
was put behind glass; so it looked like something you'd see in a science
museum. The primordial swamp was a room filled with folksy weavings and
hangings and so on that had been made in the museum's galleries. They
had dyed them there, too, with the result that they had gotten stuff on
the walls and stained the floor and so on. The famous holographic
rainbow made by, in my estimation, a high-grade charlatan named Lloyd
Cross, was produced, at vast expense, on a piece of photographic film on
which a rainbow, or the spectrum, could be seen rather as a large
detraction grating. His crew, who were so numb, had no idea as to how
this was going to be installed. I had designed an installation, and they
had changed it. They were warned that if they put this thing up, which
was mounted on, or at least one piece of it, mirrorized Plexiglas, it
would fall down, it would fall out. "Oh, no, man, we know what we're
doing." They came in one day and put it up, and, of course, it fell out
and broke. So then the. great holographic rainbow, which had been widely
touted, was moved out into the hallway. When people said, "Where's the
rainbow?" and you pointed up there, and it looked like somebody had
strung a vinyl shower curtain overhead, there were a number of cries for
their money back, because this was a pay exhibition. But it was this
sort of misfire and miscalculation that the museum had been infamous for
in the old days, and which we tried to avoid in our contemporary
programs under my curatorship. I think, in retrospect, I would see
myself as a bridge figure in the development of better exhibition
technologies and even in encouraging a better quality of exhibitions. I
was an appointment about midway through a series of new appointments for
museum staff, replacing the old guard, which was really exceptional
deadwood. Most of those people have now been phased out. But at a time
when the staff is quite strong, Proposition 13 has cut into the program
so much that now the Fine Arts Museums cannot mount any exhibitions
except those that will pay for themselves, other than very small shows.
My successor there, Sue Levitin, who was curator in charge of the
department of exhibitions, has been laid off, along with a large part of
the exhibition staff. While I was there, I was very active in
encouraging the director to do a graphic redesign of the museum. This
had been something that had been in the works and sort of on schedule,
but we pressed for it very strongly, brought in a young designer, Ron
Rick, who was working first for us on a freelance basis and then later
came on the staff. He did architectural graphics and printed graphics.
But this was the beginning of the development of a new design
department, which came to full fruition after I left. The original
museum exhibition designer had been working there for thirty years. He
simply had very few ideas and was a prissy, not very supportive, person.
Then he and his companion—they were well off in their own right—won
$800,000 in the Irish sweepstakes, [laughter] So he abruptly resigned in
the middle of an installation, and we brought in a young man, a fellow
named Michael Cox, who gradually became more and more involved in
design. Michael worked finally, for perhaps two years, as acting
exhibition designer, until they brought in another man, named George
Sexton, who came in after I had left. Sexton fired Cox and then
subsequently left himself. At this point, the design department had
created exhibition designs that could not really be executed very
cheaply. While I was there, we had developed an exhibition module
system, a series of boxes that were approximately twelve feet high,
approximately eight feet wide, and two feet deep, which were on skids.
These boxes looked like permanent walls, standing in the middle of a
room. They could easily be moved by one or two people and were very
architecturally solid. So you could create different shapes and spaces
and walls of varying length by butting these things one to the other.
This system was discarded for a system that used—well, I'm getting ahead
of myself. Sexton preferred to build new walls for each exhibition, and
after I left, the old temporary exhibition galleries at the de Young
were gutted and completely remodeled and air conditioned to accommodate
the "Treasures of Tutankhamun" exhibition. The same thing was done at
the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. The galleries were
renovated, not so heavily, and new lighting was installed there, as well
as air conditioning, for "The [Splendor of] Dresden: Five Centuries of
[Art] Collecting" exhibition. All of this took place after I had left.
But I would say that the thrust and impetus for this kind of change and
improvement was set in motion by myself, supported by several other
members of the curatorial staff, who pressed the director to, in turn,
press the board. The board of the Fine Arts Museums had traditionally
been very sluggish because it was a city-supported museum. The board, I
think, saw its function as being more honorific than working. That began
to change under the current board president, Walter Newman, and I think
now the board is somewhat more sensitive to the issues of our
time—certainly the issues of being a city-run and largely city-funded
museum. For years, of course, the board elected its own members and
perpetuated itself, the idea being that each museum had its own board to
rather insulate it from city politics. I think that was quite wise, but
of course the board was quite specific in saying they knew who should be
on it. So, in fact, when members of the minority communities of San
Francisco would come before the board, as they did periodically,
demanding a wider board representation, the answer was: "We"—meaning,
essentially, the ruling white elite—"have the time, we have the
know-how, we have the finesse, because we know what's necessary here."
So those requests for broadening the board, or for taking a more active
involvement in local art, fell on deaf ears. I think that, on occasion,
I did get in hot water—sometimes deservedly so—by my pronouncements at
some of these artists' meetings, when I would say, "Well, if you want to
make a change, you've got to make the change with the board of
trustees." I think, in retrospect, there were times when I sounded
rather prissy myself. So I was not really, perhaps, as helpful as I
should have been at some of these meetings—or maybe I should have just
shut up. But the museum while I was there, I think, began to do more in
a steady way for the local artists.
-
GOODWIN:
- Let me just interject a point here. Did the Fine Arts Museums get
involved with tribal art as a result of community pressure?
-
GARVER:
- No. The collections had been there for years, but I think the strong
involvement with the tribal arts, particularly Africa, came about
through the appointment of Tom Seligman as curator of Africa, Oceania,
and the Americas—AOA, as it was known there. Seligman, from an old San
Francisco family, as an artist in New York, had gotten involved in the
Peace Corps, had gone to Liberia, and had developed a deep love of
African art. I think he very quickly learned, read, and assimilated a
good deal of material about it and developed a very good eye. He came
back to San Francisco, where he was from, was looking around for
employment, and went to the Fine Arts Museums. This was back, perhaps,
in '70, '71. He went to the museum, and they were in the process of
redesigning, or reinstalling, their ethnic collections—they had modest
collections of African and Oceanic art, as I recall, and I think some
very good collections of Native American and pre-Columbian material. Tom
was hired on to write labels and essentially ended up completely redoing
this installation in process, was hired as the curator, and flew
steadily along until he became a deputy director. He has risen very
rapidly and is very well respected, I think, in the field for
exhibitions he's organized. Many of these exhibitions have traveled to
other museums. There is basically no community response, I would say,
from the black community or the Latin community or whatever, to these
exhibitions. One of the lessons, I think, that has come out of the
sixties and early seventies is that, let's say, exhibitions of current
black artists—. [tape recorder turned off] One of the lessons of the
sixties and early seventies was that exhibitions of art culturally
antecedent to the interests of minority groups had little effect on
those groups—that is, an exhibition of pre-Columbian art would not
necessarily seem to bring in a significantly higher attendance of the
Latino population. I think that that did not hold true, say, for certain
Oriental or Asian art. I think there was, in fact, a higher percentage
of Asians who came to the Chinese archaeological show ["The Chinese
Exhibition"]. Although, of course, that was also from "behind the Red
Curtain," from mainland China, and so there was that sort of allure of
forbidden fruit. If you had an exhibition of a local minority artist or
artists, that might very well bring in more people. But these other
shows did not generate a terrific response within the minority
communities affected. I think that the involvement with the tribal arts
there has come about because one of the strongest curators on the staff
is involved in that area. There was certainly not a great deal of
effort, I think, to involve any of the minority—in fact, at times I
think they were encouraged to turn off, particularly when it came to
their input in managing, in wanting a voice on the board of trustees.
-
GOODWIN:
- Were there any blacks or chicanos on the board?
-
GARVER:
- No. There was one black [James L. Gibbs, Jr.], who was the dean of
Stanford Law School, and he resigned. I think he saw that he was a
token. I never met him. The board had been, at one point, elected for
life, and that had finally been changed. But there were some on there
who would stay on most probably forever. I think there would be a few
shows I might mention that I worked on, organized, were important to me,
and that I really enjoyed. There were two sorts of contemporary programs
at the Fine Arts Museums. Old galleries A and B, I think they were
called, in the de Young, were designated for more or less continuous use
for contemporary exhibitions of local artists. These galleries were
quite small. They measured, I think, about eighteen by twenty-eight
feet. But we created a number of exhibitions in there, some of which I
organized and some of which were organized by other members of the
staff. I can recall Paul Kos, who was a video artist and a conceptual
artist working in site location pieces, and he did two pieces: one was
called "Pilot Butte, Pilot Light." It was a single piece that used a
large sheet of metal that had a transducer, sort of a loudspeaker coil
mounted on it. So there was a repeated—he was walking up the hill—saying
that, "There aren't any sounds in the desert." If you say this over and
over again, it may come out, "There aren't any sounds in the desert,"
or, "There are tinny sounds in the desert." This, of course, was played
through a sheet of tin and it sounded tinny, while he held a video
camera and walked up Pilot Butte, which is a place, I think, in
Wyoming—so-called because it stood up off the prairie very much like a
beacon. He photographed it with the sun coming over it, and he went up
there and built a fire—built a pilot light, as it were. And all of this
was recorded on videotape and in photographs. I did another exhibition
working with Tom Marioni, who is best known up there, I think, for
running the Museum of Conceptual Art—MOCA—out of a couple of file
cabinets over Breen's Bar, on Third Street, now, alas, demolished for
urban renewal. But Marioni would become involved very much in body
motions that were sort of rhythmic responses, physical responses, to
music. He would take large sheets of a very rough sort of German
watercolor paper and beat on them in rhythm with a pair of snare-drum
brushes, which he had had silver-plated. The silver plating would come
off, and he was making, in effect, a silverpoint drawing. He did, I
think, eight of these drawings that were then moved one by one into an
adjoining gallery. Of course, as the silver plating wore off, the
drawings became fainter and fainter. I think he made the drawings over a
weekend. But the sound of his drumming—he may not even have been using
music—this sort of a swish-swish drumming rhythm, was played in the room
where he was making them. The room itself had been very interestingly
set up by Tom. It had been painted, I remember, sort of a pale Naples
yellow, and there were some very interesting reflections that were
thrown: the table on which he worked was spotlighted, and there were
reflections thrown off that. I think there was a mirror on which the
brushes rested, and the shadow of those brushes was thrown on the wall,
and the drawings were next door. Interestingly, for some exhibitions I
had trouble. There were things I would not get through. I wanted to do
an exhibition of Deborah Butterfield's horses, and Ian said, "I'm not
going to have some big, fiberglass horses in a dark gallery—you can
forget it." So, I remember, I couldn't make that one fly.
-
GOODWIN:
- Going back a moment, why did you feel it was important to have Marioni's
work in these—?
-
GARVER:
- Well, I think Marioni represented a contingent of San Francisco artists
who had never been seen in the museum. People like Darryl Sapien, Howard
Fried, and—how can I forget his name? [Terry Fox], he had a major
exhibition at the University Art Museum at Berkeley, very much a part of
this whole Museum of Conceptual Art movement that was very much in
evidence in the sixties. Kos was part of that. Mel Henderson was part of
that. Fried; a number of other people. So I wanted to use these two
galleries, in a way, to distill certain essences. There's no way we
could show everybody. But I thought we should take a rather
forward-looking stance and do something that would be not simply the
usual hang-up pictures. So in both Kos's case and Marioni's case, we
were doing things that not even the San Francisco Museum was doing. We
had Clayton Bailey, a ceramic artist, at times rather ribald or
broad-brushed in his humor. He set up a "Wonders of the World Museum" in
these two spaces, with ceramic bones and strange machines. He had
"burper bowls," I remember, which were fountains that had ceramic frogs
in them and little electric pumps which would supply air under the
frogs. When there was sufficient air, it would lift the body of the frog
up, which would then appear above the water, the air would escape, in
sort of a burping or bubbling noise, and the frog would sink beneath the
surface. You know, there was an aspect of wit there that—also, I rather
liked the environmental, large-scale projects for these two galleries,
because they were very small. So, to bring in a series of little cases
of local ceramics didn't seem quite right. We did that in one case with
the artist Coille Hooven, whose rather fanciful ceramics are well known
in the Bay Area. We made an exhibition of hers. I didn't organize that.
I did not organize Clayton Bailey's show; it was organized by Sue
Levitin. Tom Marioni's and Paul Kos's show I did organize. There were
other people who were winners of the San Francisco Art Festival. There
were a number of museums that would get together and select people who
had exhibited in that show for one-person exhibitions. Finally, at the
end of my tenure there, we stopped doing that, because the art festival
was organized in such a retardataire manner that we felt we couldn't
support the organization of it any longer. I can't remember the specific
details, but there was somebody there named Elio Benvenuto, that isn't
quite right, I think, and he and his boss were sort of the San Francisco
city art "mavens." They were simply in an entrenched position and would
not consider changing. So we stopped really participating actively in
that. Some of the other larger exhibitions that I organized two of
one-person exhibitions—come to mind, because we had a space in the
largest gallery. I think it was gallery I, if memory serves, which was
approximately seventy-five or -eight feet by about forty-five feet wide,
and with a high ceiling. We did exhibitions, back to back, of Sam
Richardson and Robert Cremean. Richardson created a large environmental
piece. I think it was about twenty-eight or thirty feet square, with
some preparatory drawings. Then that was followed by Robert Cremean's
Vatican Corridor, which was a series of
twenty wooden columns about eight or nine feet high. There was also a
piece called Homage to Paul Apostle, which was in
marble. All of these were male nude figures, or portions of torsos, and
it was a very dramatic and moving exhibition. The people were absolutely
startled by the power of these pieces, and the reaction was that they
either loved it or hated it. I think there'd be four other shows that
I'd want to mention: one, an exhibition of drawings by Bruce Conner I
had worked in organizing a small survey show of Bruce's assemblages,
which included some drawings and some films and so on at Brandeis
[University] in the middle sixties. The date of the Conner show at San
Francisco was late 1974, and it surveyed his drawings from about the
last fifteen years. Bruce, of course, was a very difficult man to deal
with, particularly as Bruce and my wife, Natasha Nicholson, had been
involved, Bruce was thoughtful enough to introduce me to Natasha, who
then left him for me. We continued working on the exhibition, although,
let's say, our relationship was distant. One incident that comes to
mind, and I think touches on some of the problems of the Fine Arts
Museums, occurred during the Conner exhibition. A man wandered into the
museum one Sunday when the place was fairly crowded, and he had
apparently been seen by the guards as looking a little dazed. He walked
into Bruce's show, which was arranged in two galleries in tandem with
one another. You had to go through the first to get to the second, which
was slightly smaller. He went into the second, the back gallery and took
a work off the wall. It was a fragment of masonite that had been painted
with acrylic paint, and Bruce had subsequently broken it up and drawn on
a fragment of it in India ink. He carried it from the second gallery
through the first, perhaps seventy-five yards to the front door, took it
out of the museum, down the steps, and threw it in the Fountain of
Reflection in front of the museum. So a woman came into the museum
shortly thereafter and said to the guards, right there at the desk by
the door, something to the effect of, "Say, do you know that a man just
carried a painting out of here and threw it in the pool?" The guards
rushed out, and apparently they were in the process of fishing it out of
the pool when who should come along but Bruce. [laughter] He was
visiting his show with some friends. So I got a hurry-up call from the
guards and came in. It happened that this fellow was decent enough to
pick about the only insoluble drawing in the whole show; most of the
others had been executed on paper, many of them in felt-tip pen, which
would simply have dissolved. It was easily and quickly reframed and so
on. But the chief guard, the chief of security, had the nerve to ask me
to commend one of his men who went out with the police into the park and
found this guy, sort of sitting under the bush. The fellow claimed he
had eaten some berries off a tree and they'd done something to him.
[laughter] But I think it was a day when the museum was fully staffed
with security, and that they would simply let this guy walk out with a
painting is flabbergasting. I think that man is finally out of his job.
He was a political appointment, Sal Priolo, and his uncle, Paul Priolo,
is in the State Assembly. I believe that he was later suspended when a
Rembrandt was stolen from the museum, stolen not on the first but the
second attempt. He may, in the last cutbacks in the museum, have been
let go altogether.
-
GOODWIN:
- Was that Rembrandt ever recovered?
-
GARVER:
- No, it, has never been recovered. They stole the worst of the two,
though. They still have one.
-
GOODWIN:
- What did Conner do?
-
GARVER:
- You know, it was just more grist for his mill that museums were no good
and so on. But the drawing was, fortunately, all right. I organized a
Bill Allan watercolor show that was installed at the Achenbach
[Foundation]. [It was] very badly installed, because the then-curator,
this was before Bob Johnson came there, always installed everything in a
balanced way, so that you'd have a vertical picture in the middle and
two horizontals next to that and then two more verticals and so on. So
the whole wall balanced. Of course, it didn't make any sense. If you
were hanging a show of several artists, he would still hang by frame
size. So the artists' work would be broken up and so on. It was always a
problem. [There were] two other exhibitions that I organized that I
think were very enjoyable. One was "New Photography San Francisco and
the Bay Area," which opened in April of '74. I remember that because I
had to delay my wedding by a week to get the show opened. It was
certainly one of the first big contemporary shows of San Francisco
photography, and one of the first big contemporary shows that had been
done, let's say, of a more avant-garde nature at the de Young in many
years. There had been programs run under Nympha Valvo that were, I
think, quite exciting, but they essentially faded in the fifties, when
she retired. The Society of Western Artists, which was a group of
"Eisenhower-type" painters, had been exhibiting there. They exhibited
routinely at the de Young, as a matter of course, for twenty-nine years,
before those shows were canceled. They were so irate because they really
only existed to exhibit at the de Young. They went to the Board of
Supervisors of the City and County and tried to get this changed. They
did battle for a year or two before they gave up. There was no way of
reinstating those shows. So the new photo show, I think, was very well
received. There were some sort of tough images, shall we say, and the
director was a little nervous but supported it. And there was no
problem. The show later went to [the] San Diego [Fine Arts Gallery], and
those images were censored out. [tape recorder turned off]
-
GOODWIN:
- In the introduction to the catalog of the photography show, you said
that you selected the work of 23 photographers after reviewing the work
of 120.
-
GARVER:
- Yes.
-
GOODWIN:
- So you looked far and wide for quality work.
-
GARVER:
- Well, I did, and I think it was a very mixed show, in thinking back
about it. Some people vanished absolutely from the scene. There were
some other people that I later found who should have been in the show
but whose work I simply didn't know about. There are others who have
gone on, I think, to do very good work. The idea of the show, for me,
was to create an exhibition analogous to the shows that Dorothy Miller
used to do at the Museum of Modern Art—"12 Americans," "16 Americans,"
and so on—where you might have Jackson Pollock cheek by jowl with
somebody who has since disappeared without a trace. It was a way of
looking at current production and making a speculative combination.
-
GOODWIN:
- So how did you go about contacting the photographers?
-
GARVER:
- I think I started I was working with—I can't think of his name, either.
He was a young photographer who came from Cincinnati.
-
GOODWIN:
- Messer.
-
GARVER:
- Messer, right. Do you remember him from the catalog?
-
GOODWIN:
- Yes.
-
GARVER:
- Well, Bill Messer had come down. He had been studying at the San
Francisco Art Institute and had come down and shown me some work when I
was in Newport. I liked it, and when I moved to San Francisco, I
contacted him. Through him, I spread the word. Through the Art
Institute, through a number of other institutions and photographers, I
essentially told everyone I was working with that I wanted to see work.
I would just take days, and the artist would come to my flat; so I
wouldn't be interrupted. They'd have at least an hour; so I could really
look at the portfolios. Then, I think, I went over to the East Bay and
had a couple of sessions there. Even so, there were people—I don't know
why I didn't see Jack Fulton's work. He should have been in the show. I
never saw Phillip Galgiani's work. He should have been in the show.
There were a number of other people who should have been in it. There
were a couple of people who may have been in it to create the right
ethno-sexual mix, but not very many. There were two or three people, I
think—one, in particular, I recall—who changed his style dramatically.
He had been doing these small things, and I thought, "Okay. This is all
right. That's fine." Suddenly, in came these monumental things he'd done
and put on masonite, and they were—he hadn't mounted them
correctly—warping. They were turning into spaghetti in front of our very
eyes. So we had to sort of bolt them to the wall to hold them flat.
-
GOODWIN:
- What do you say to the photographers when they show you their work?
-
GARVER:
- Well, I try to be noncommittal. In looking at their work, I would ask
questions about their working method. I never wanted to say, "Man, this
is terrific!" or, "This is awful!" Because I wouldn't know what I would
see next. I might see something that I really liked, and yet there was
somebody working in the same way that I liked even better. So I'd ask
questions about them, about their work, how they worked, how they
envisioned their ideas, and so forth. There was one man—I think his name
is David Howard—who was not in the show, and he was the most pushy
photographer in San Francisco. He's published his own work and so on,
and I think he is horrifically bad. He's the only artist I've ever told
right to his face—after the third time I'd been pressured into visiting
his studio, and he said, "Why can't I have a show?" I said, "David, I
don't think you're a good photographer. I don't like your work." And
there was no answer. That was it.
-
GOODWIN:
- He stopped bothering you.
-
GARVER:
- Yes. There were other exhibitions of photographers that I organized.
One—again, I can't think of his name—was Filipino, oh yes, Jose Bernal
Ramos. This was one of those small gallery A, B shows, and I think he
had been selected in the Art Festival. I'd liked his work very much. I
wanted to consider it for this big show I'd done. I could not get hold
of him. So I'd written him, and he said he never got the letters. So he
was not considered. When his work was in the Art Festival, I made a
small exhibition. He was a real pain in the ass, to be blunt, because he
wanted to be dealt with, and he wanted his work dealt with, in a certain
social and ethnic way. And he felt the museum was not doing this. He ran
the Gestetner machine, the duplicating machine, for the Neighborhood
Arts Program. They printed a newsletter, and as a result [of all this],
he wrote a ringing denunciation of the de Young Museum for its racist
views. What happened was that he simply described his dealings with the
museum. He thought he had been selected only for racist balance and so
on, which wasn't true at all. The draft of the wall label had not been
written the way he liked—I've forgotten if he regarded it as racist or
somehow patronizing—and it was changed. These were part of the internal
operations of organizing a show. So, essentially, [his point was] that
our posture was not, from the very beginning, correct. When the show was
finally mounted, I think it was installed exactly as he wanted it. I
remember there were some very specific requirements about how the glass
was to be nailed to the wall, and all of these things were met. He said
the nails were too big, and he wanted them smaller, I think, and so we
changed them. But he recounted all the things he wanted changed as
though they were absolutes, and the museum was disgustingly bad because
of these things. He said we were "nailing the glass with huge nails."
Well, you know, that's—he said, "I don't like this, and I'd like it
changed." And so we found another way to do it. When the show opened,
the label was correct, and the glass was installed as he wanted. But
that was one of the few incidents I can recall where we did not get
along well with the artist, and where he was so gun shy that he shot
first.
1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO JULY 9, 1980
-
GARVER:
- I think the two shows that I enjoyed working on most when I was in San
Francisco were the George Tooker exhibition, because of the remarkable
vision of this man and his remarkable personality and another show, very
different in character, "As We Were, As We Are: A Century of San
Francisco Life in Architecture." The Tooker show was organized in
1973-74 and opened in 1975. it traveled to three or four other places. I
think the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Indianapolis Museum
[of Art], and the Whitney Museum [of American Art] in New York. It was
not a large show. Of course, Tooker is a very slow painter. I think
there were maybe thirty things in it; it took up one gallery at the
[California Palace of the] Legion [of Honor]. And this maybe is
instructive as to how I had to go about doing things. The show was
scheduled at the Legion, but the Legion had no in-gallery lighting
systems. It was entirely lighted by skylights, and there were sort of
old-fashioned floodlights over the lay light, over the flat glass panels
that separated the top of the gallery from the attic space. When you
turned these on, you got an effect that I would describe as "Legion
moonlight." So, working within the exhibition budget, I designed and
floated the construction of a new lighting system in this one gallery.
It was a trial> and I think it cost a couple thousand dollars.
Eventually, all of the temporary exhibition galleries were lighted with
this system, which allowed you to cut out natural light. You could not
cut out the natural light and use the searchlights above, because you
had to lay something on the lay light, and I wanted to cut out natural
light. The whole thing was subsequently removed and lights put on the
ceiling, as I think they should be, up on the underside, around the lay
light. But that was done later and, of course, at greatly increased
expense. But the Tooker show was very popular. The catalog, I remember,
was very late, due both to my finishing it late and to a printer, who,
without saying anything, went off—the whole crew went off on two weeks
of vacation.
-
GOODWIN:
- Well, how did you get interested in Tooker?
-
GARVER:
- Well, I had organized a—I'd always been interested in Reginald Marsh,
and Tooker had studied with Marsh. I've always liked some of those
rather strange, offbeat American figurative painters: [Edward] Hopper
and Marsh, on the one hand, and people like Tooker and [Paul] Cadmus and
Jared French, on the other, the so-called Magic Realists. Lincoln
Kirstein uses another, and better, term for them. I had worked with
Tooker's dealer, John Clancy, at the [Frank] Rehn Gallery in New York in
doing the Marsh exhibition in Newport, and so I had posed doing a Tooker
exhibition, and John talked to George who said okay. So I came and did
it at the Fine Arts Museums and enjoyed doing it very much. I stay in
touch with George, who lives in Hartland, Vermont, in the summer and in
Spain in the winter. Natasha and I traveled east in September, I think,
of 1973, while I worked on this catalog. We stayed with friends of mine,
and we had a really magical time. We took the train across Canada after
we left Vermont. So it was a very nice time, personally, for us, shortly
before we got married. Tooker was just putting his house on the market,
and we said. we would love to take it, exactly as it was. It was one of
the two or three places we've ever walked into and said, "It's just
right." Tooker's companion of many years, a man named William
Christopher, was very ill; Natasha would sit at Christopher' bedside,
and he would tell her stories of his life, while I would be in the
living room talking to George about his painting. Christopher died, I
think, just a few months after that. But it was a magical time in upper
New England in the last of the summer. I remember that the days were
quite warm, but the evenings were getting nippy, and there was a little
bit of color just starting. We were staying in Woodstock and going over
to Hartland. It was a wonderful experience. The other show, "As We Were,
As We Are," was a very different sort of thing. It was the Fine Arts
Museums' tribute to the city on the occasion of the Bicentennial. Both
San Francisco and the United States were founded in the same year, 1776.
So it was a tribute to the city and the Bicentennial year of 1976. It
was a show that comprised four sub-exhibitions. I'd been approached, I
guess a year or so before, by a photographer named Ira Nowinski, who had
been in the "New Photography" show. Ira and his then-partner, Glenn
Harrison, both turned out to be extremely flaky, and the less said about
them the better. But Nowinski had proposed a show drawn from the
negative files of Gabriel Moulin Studios. Moulin had been founded right
after the San Francisco fire by Gabriel Moulin, and it is now being run
by the fourth-generation Moulin. They had saved all their negatives.
They'd gotten rid of some, I guess, but Gabriel continued photographing
up into the thirties, and he would only use eight-by-ten glass-plate
negatives. So there were tons of these negatives in Moulin's files. They
weren't filed; they were just sort of packed in boxes. So Ira did
organize that largest part of "As We Were, As We Are." It surveyed
approximately, fifty years of the city's life after the fire, because I
was always so tired of [hearing about] Victorian San Francisco, which
seems to have just disappeared after the fire. There are all these
books, you know, about the grandeur of San Francisco Victoriana, with no
acknowledgement about what was happening afterwards. So we picked about
135 photographs, blew them up to twenty-by-thirty to forty-by-sixty, got
an NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] grant, and got some other
grants, I remember, and put together a whole show and wonderful
newspaper catalog for it. It was a very flimsy package of financing. I
mean, a few bucks here, a thousand there. The [first of] four shows was
"As We Were," which went from 1910 to 1954. The first photograph, I
think, was William Howard Taft turning a spadeful of soil to begin the
construction of the Panama Pacific International Exposition. The last
was the new airport in 1954. So we covered the span of both wars and a
very, very active time—a time when San Francisco expanded faster than
ever in its history. You [had] Market Street with the two competing
streetcar lines going down the center; so there were four pairs of
tracks instead of two. You [had] the opening of the Fox Theater, which
has since been demolished. So there were all of these photographs that
essentially documented everyday life and everyday business activities as
seen by a first-rate commercial photographer. Another part of the show,
"As We Are," was a multimedia slide-tape [presentation], which I think
was one of the best things I saw of that sort. It sang the praises of
San Francisco, while at the same time reminding people that there were a
lot of problems there. And it acknowledged those problems. So this was,
I think, a six-projector show, for which there were all kinds of
production problems, because one guy claimed the other hadn't done the
work right and so on. But anyway, when it ran right, it was wonderful.
Another part of the exhibition was a show called "A Gift to the Street."
At the same time Nowinski had approached me, I had been approached by a
little slip of a woman named Carol Olwell, who had been photographing
Victorian houses, and had been photographing them, I think, very well.
Her ambition was to photograph every Victorian house in the city that
still had any original detailing on it. She knew exactly what she
wanted, she was putting it together, and, boy, she did. You know, she
even came in, measured the galleries, and sent me a diagram showing
exactly how she wanted it installed, [tape recorder turned off] Olwell
specified exactly to the inch how she wanted them laid out, and she had
been so precise in doing this project, and she could be so difficult, I
think, but she was right. It looked fine. I remember we installed these
photographs, which were beautifully printed by—there was a commercial
printer—Moulin did their own—and the two other shows were done by this
printer, whose name escapes me. But they were just perfection. They were
rather cold-tone prints, and I installed them on—at that point we were
still using some of the old exhibition technology, and you couldn't
paint the walls because they were cloth covered. So I covered the walls
completely in a deep burgundy felt and lighted the room very softly, and
the photographs just glowed. It was wonderful. [tape recorder turned
off] The fourth part of the exhibition was organized by Sally
Woodbridge. I guess she had also come to me—all these people had sort of
come in to me with these ideas, and we put it together. So there were
the four shows: "As We Were," "As We Are," "A Gift to the Street," and
"Houses of Our Own: The Development of the Bay Area's Own Residential
Architecture." One of the most enjoyable things about this show that
gave me a chance to really work in a learning way, for me, was the
writing of all—I wrote all of the descriptive text labels for the Moulin
work, and I rewrote, essentially, all of the labels for the Sally
Woodbridge "Houses of Our Own." I enjoyed this very much, because I
wanted to be very descriptive in as few words as possible, and not be
pretentious or heavy or [not] understandable. I wanted the labels to be
simple and direct. People wanted to know what it was, and so there would
be a sentence that would describe what it was, and then maybe an
additional description as to how the photograph got as it did. We
printed a newspaper for the catalog, which was financed by a couple of
small grants from Standard Oil [of California] and TransAmerica
Corporation, and we started off—I got Herb Caen, cranky as always, to
write the introduction. Then I wrote a good deal of the text for the
interior, about the show and what we were trying to do. Each of the four
exhibitions had its own page, and then there was the introductory page.
I think the whole thing was twelve pages. Then we did what we called a
neighborhood supplement: a description of all the neighborhoods and a
big double-page map. We had an introduction to this section written by
Chester Hartman. I guess he would describe himself as a socialist? [he]
had written on the problems of the city and how the city was being
forced to change by big business and so forth. But this gave another
point of view to Caen's introduction. Then we had this city map. I did a
great deal of driving throughout the city to define and describe, in my
own words, these neighborhoods. We would have, for instance, just in
looking at this [catalog], a section on the Tenderloin: "Within a few
blocks of the major hotels and stores of downtown, the Tenderloin
contains a dense mix of small residence hotels, little grocery stores,
bars, restaurants, and 'adult' movie houses and bookstores. It is the
home of the aged, many of them living on fixed incomes, as well as the
City's low-income transients and winos. With the demolition of many
residential units south of Market, the Tenderloin has become an
important source of low-income housing." Then there would be two places
in that neighborhood [listed] where people could call for assistance to
find out more about it. In this case, [it was] Hospitality House and the
North-of-Market-[Street] Senior Center. So we really saw this newspaper
as being useful in describing the city. I think we printed and
distributed something over 50,000 of them. So it was a very good and, I
think, very interesting exhibition, and I had a wonderful time working
on it. I think most probably that would be one of my favorite shows. Oh,
you've asked me for some comparisons and contrasts of San Francisco and
Los Angeles.
-
GOODWIN:
- Well, before we get to that, why don't you describe the relationship
between the Fine Arts Museums and some of the other Bay Area art
museums.
-
GARVER:
- Okay. Well, I would say that San Francisco is quite a good art town,
first of all. It may not be as supportive of its own artists, but, for
one thing, there are a great number of artists there in a relatively
small urban or metropolitan area. If you consider the nine Bay Area
counties, I think the population is still only a couple of million or
so. And there are a lot of artists who live in that area—in San
Francisco, Marin [County], and the East Bay—all of whom, of course,
would like to be supported. I think the museums got along fairly well.
Certainly it was easy for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to say,
"Well, the job of showing modern artists, or contemporary artists, is
that of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art or the University Art
Museum at Berkeley, or the Oakland [Art] Museum, and here are all these
museums. We benefit the community by bringing older art to the city."
Indeed, that is certainly true but, I think, does not really let them
off the hook. I think the relationships of the museums were pretty good.
I think most probably the merger of the two small museums was a distinct
plus. It was important because they were two small museums competing for
the same collections. No one really competed for the same collections
after the merger. That is, the Asian material would go to the Asian Art
Museum. There were some works, in fact, on loan from the Fine Arts
Museums—some modern paintings—to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
The Fine Arts Museums had adopted a policy, ostensibly, of not
collecting anything after about the turn of the century; but, in fact,
that was not necessarily the case, and when they acquired the
Rockefeller Collection of American art—the paintings in the American
galleries did go up to the conservative fifties and sixties—
-
GOODWIN:
- [Andrew] Wyeth?
-
GARVER:
- Wyeth, that's right, because that's what John D. Rockefeller collected.
The Fine Arts Museums had also acquired from the midwinter shows at the
Legion of Honor and from other de Young shows works of art that were, by
and large, in storage, because the San Francisco Museum didn't want them
either; so they were rather orphaned. But I think, officially, the
relationship was pretty good. In fact, I was given permission by Ian
White to organize the Joseph Raffael exhibition, which had originally
been scheduled for the de Young but had to be canceled for lack of
money. A couple of years later it was revived at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, and I started work on it as a guest curator while
still at the de Young and finished it just as I was coming down to
Newport. So I would say that many of the other museum people felt that
Ian was not as precise and focused and clear in what he wanted the
museums to be and in his involvement with contemporary art. But at least
the relationship of the parts to the whole seemed to be reasonably well
established. I think right now, for instance, under Jim Elliott, the
University Art Museum at Berkeley is the place that's doing the really
exciting avant-garde exhibitions. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
is doing the sort of classic mainstream, old masters of the modern era:
[Jasper] Johns, [Robert] Rauschenberg, [Philip] Gustin. I think this is
quite a self-conscious position of Henry Hopkins to establish the museum
as a national museum and not a regional one. Some people think that
Henry should be more inventive and exciting, but I think he has a very
clear-cut idea. Most probably within the next couple of years you'll
begin to see more avant-garde programs, now that he has essentially
established the place as a national museum.
-
GOODWIN:
- Where does Oakland fit?
-
GARVER:
- Well, I. think [the] Oakland [Art Museum] is by definition and mandate a
museum of California. So, under George Neubert, head of the art division
there, I think, would acquire as widely as they could. I always accused
George of considering an artist a Californian if he changed trains here.
[laughter] I think that's perfectly legitimate and very sensible,
because obviously there's Arthur B. Davies, who came out and apparently
painted a number of sketches and studies in Yosemite [National Park].
And so some of those are in the collection at Oakland. Hans Hofmann came
and taught [at the University of California] at Berkeley, and so he's in
the collection. He always had a great deal of respect for Berkeley, and
he gave them, of course, a major collection of his own work. But he was
never, in a sense, I suppose, a resident. There are people, like [Mark]
Rothko and [Clyfford] Still, who worked in California for a limited
time, and they would certainly be fair game for George.
-
GOODWIN:
- Do you think there's perhaps too great an emphasis on modern
contemporary art?
-
GARVER:
- No, I don't think so, because I think it's a very rich, productive area.
I think most probably there could be more in the Los Angeles area. You
asked me to give my thoughts about the differences or similarities, and
I think most probably Los Angeles could use a couple more important
exhibition and collecting institutions. I think the development of the
downtown museum, as I call it, the new museum on Bunker Hill, will be
very good for the area. It will be created, of course, at the expense of
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which I think, from its trustees
on down, has taken a rather imperial attitude. I think for many years
Maurice Tuchman has been criticized for not paying enough attention to
local artists or not courting, I suppose, local collectors and so on.
From what I've learned recently, it might be that the board encouraged
him not to—that he was just there as a functionary and they would do all
of that. And they haven't done it very well.
-
GOODWIN:
- Not at all.
-
GARVER:
- That's right. So there are a lot of people who—there's Marcia and Fred
Weisman, and Fred Weisman sits on the board, or has sat on the board, of
the County Museum, and he is one of the supporters of the downtown
museum. So it's very strange, and I think very typical of the sort of
big-man syndrome that you find here on the board. But I think that there
will be additional and continuing support to the County Museum in the
field of modern and contemporary art. It would be my prediction, made in
July of 1980, that the downtown museum, once it's built—first of all, I
think it will be built. I think it will take a rather conservative
stance. They are talking about hiring Pontus Hulten from the Centre
Pompidou-Centre Beaubourg. He is coming here shortly to interview, I
guess. Hulten has done many very exciting avant-garde programs—very,
very exciting. I suspect that they want a big name.
-
GOODWIN:
- I think it's incomprehensible that he would leave the Beaubourg for Los
Angeles. [laughter]
-
GARVER:
- I think he's had a tough time. He has never worked in a museum that's
been privately funded. All of his museums, the Moderna Museet in
Stockholm and the Beaubourg, have been state funded. And I think they're
going to want a big money raiser. There are those people who speculate
that Henry Hopkins wants the job very much, and he would be a logical
candidate. I think he has demonstrated—but I think that what you would
get in Los Angeles would be very similar to what you got in San
Francisco, some small exhibitions of local artists and so on, but very
few. With the emphasis on the modern masters. And the collectors in Los
Angeles, I think, would respond to that. The biggest collectors are
collectors of that sort of high, big-name—well, it's not going to be
another LAICA [Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art].
-
GOODWIN:
- Right. But why would it be attractive to Hopkins to move?
-
GARVER:
- Oh, because it's a big new thing, I think, and Henry might like the idea
of building it. I think it would be a mistake for anyone to take it
until they've had about two or three directors, because there are some
baronial types, like Eli Broad, who I think are very difficult. You
know, Bob Rowan and some of these, Marcia herself, are all maneuvering
for power and for essentially top billing, and that would be very
difficult.
-
GOODWIN:
- And meanwhile, holding back on pledges.
-
GARVER:
- Well, I think that's right. Everyone's saying, "I'll give if you give."
[laughter] "No, you give first; then I'll give." This is also very
typical of Los Angeles. There's a story—I don't know if it's apocryphal
or not—that's told about Norton Simon, who put a million dollar check on
the table at a board meeting, when he was on the board of the County
Museum before it was built. He said, "Okay, if you can match this for
the new building, it's yours." They matched it in something like
thirty-five days, and at the next board meeting they said, "Okay, it's,
matched." He said, "Sorry. Thirty days." [laughter] I've been very much
aware, having gone through what I've gone through, and having now talked
to at least one person who was offered my job at Newport and turned it
down, George Neubert, that Los Angeles is so addicted to the deal. Joan
Didion has written a very telling essay on the movie business, and she
describes people discussing "beautiful deals" as though they were
actually aesthetic creations. You know, "It's a beautiful film, but it's
even a more beautiful deal." And I think that this is one of the
problems here: So many people are self-made men. They are used to never
taking the first answer as the final one. "All right, what can I get
this painting for?" "X-thousand." "Well, what if I buy three? Can I get
them at 30 percent off?" As though works of art can be manufactured
cheaper in quantity, which has always fascinated me. These people
expect, they somehow think, that if the guy sets up the assembly line,
he'll be more eager to sell several than one, because, somehow, once it
starts, it's easy. Fortunately, it was diverted, but Ben Deane, on the
board of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, wanted to buy—there were several
watercolors in Joseph Raffael's show that were in Raffael's own
collection. He didn't want to sell them, but he had done one for the
Museum's poster for the show, which was for sale. So Deane was ready to
make him an offer on all three of these, as though Joseph was going to
want to sell something out of his collection and cheap, too—because it
was such a deal. Ben Deane is a house builder, and so you say, "Okay, if
I'm going to build thirty units, can I build thirty-five and get the
price breaks that might be involved?" Very typical.
-
GOODWIN:
- What do you think of the rivalry between the Bay Area and Southern
California?
-
GARVER:
- I don't see it so much as a rivalry but rather as a difference of
quality of art. I wrote about this in a catalog that was never published
for the show that I organized with Henry Geldzahler. I haven't discussed
that yet. But what I said there is that I think Los Angeles is much more
attuned to, maybe, the world view, world culture. I think there are more
Los Angeles artists who maintain New York studios, for instance, and
more people perhaps traveling back and forth—big New York names coming
out here to Gemini [G.E.L.]. There is a more conscious awareness of New
York high style here. There are certain marked differences, too, as I
see them. But San Francisco is somehow more oriented toward hearth and
home. Maybe the weather may have some slight factor. But I find artists
there dealing with much more personal considerations. If you think of
people like Richard Shaw and [William] Wiley and Bill Allan and Joseph
Raffael, too, who left New York, they are more into, I think, personal
mythology and personal storytelling than are the L.A. artists, who are
much more involved in visual phenomenology. I think a lot of this has to
do with, I think we've discussed this before, the weather. And the
relative lack of a massive architectural "enframement," as it were,
which you get in New York and against which a constructivist sort of
sculpture, in particular, can operate effectively. But it wouldn't
operate effectively out here, [tape recorder turned off] I have never
really sensed a rivalry in the sense that one would say to the other,
"Those guys down there (or up there) are stealing my thunder." In fact,
dealers, of course, up there—I suppose chief among them, John
Berggruen—show a number of Southern California artists, and Northern
California artists are seen down here. But I think the rivalry is the
difference that's seen by one group of artists about living in the other
area. That is, I've talked to Southern California artists who say, "Yea,
sure, it's all very nice up there, but it's colder, and there's no
support for the artists" and so on. Artists up there say, "All that smog
and the pressure. It's very nice here, we like it, and the pace is
right." And so forth. So it's a matter of preference, I think, and that
preference has begun to develop certain identifiable styles—although
certainly, from my experiences being on the NEA panels, I think it's
more possible to recognize a New York or Chicago style than it might be
a very specific L.A. or San Francisco style. Joseph Raffael, I know, has
said that when he first came to California, the difference he felt was
that the artists out here were essentially living a certain lifestyle
which encompassed their art and may have encompassed a number of
different art media. In New York, it was all very, very linear. You
know, your work in the studio was most probably very separate from the
rest of your life, except that you might be promoting yourself by
hitting the right parties, going to the right openings, being seen with
the right people. So that, too, was important, but your work as an
artist was very carefully delineated. Your work as an artist and your
endeavors to promote yourself were done in a certain way.
-
GOODWIN:
- I tend to think there's an ethnocentric attitude among artists, both in
this area and in the Bay Area—and maybe among collectors and museum
people, too. That is, the relative importance of these places seems to
me to be exaggerated.
-
GARVER:
- The relative importance of Los Angeles or San Francisco?
-
GOODWIN:
- Both.
-
GARVER:
- Is exaggerated?
-
GOODWIN:
- Yes. Granted there are large numbers of artists in those areas—
-
GARVER:
- Exaggerated in comparison to what?
-
GOODWIN:
- Anywhere.
-
GARVER:
- You mean that their description as being an art center is—
-
GOODWIN:
- —is overblown.
-
GARVER:
- No, I don't agree with that. I think I would disagree with that. I may
be using a false measure, but one of the most interesting things for me
to see—earlier this year I was one of the national panelists for the
individual-artist grants in painting and sculpture for the National
Endowment. The number of grants, absolutely, that came out of New York
was most probably the highest, but the number that came out of San
Francisco and Los Angeles was prodigious. I know that in Los Angeles
there was an active campaign by LAICA, the Los Angeles Institute of
Contemporary Art, to promote artist applications. There was no such
campaign, that I know of, in San Francisco. But there was a lot of work,
and quite a lot of good work, as opposed to not-so-good work coming out
of Washington and the Boston area. I know we discussed that a little
earlier. And [there was] quite a fair amount of work out of the Chicago
area, but not much work out of the—there are vast sections of the
country where there just isn't much coming out of it. There's a fair
amount coming out of Texas, but I remember the Pacific Northwest, for
instance, is not turning out very much—and not terribly good.
-
GOODWIN:
- You're thinking mostly of emerging artists.
-
GARVER:
- Well, the grants are given for—it's ten grand, and it's given to promote
creativity. There were a fair number of established middle-period,
middle-aged artists, not artists simply in their late twenties and
thirties.
-
GOODWIN:
- Well, obviously one way to evaluate the relative importance of an art
center is to look at the number of artists. But I think another
way—maybe more important—is to look at the number of so-called important
artists.
-
GARVER:
- Well, look at the number of artists in New York, and how many of them
have been, or will be, important?
-
GOODWIN:
- Very few.
-
GARVER:
- That's right. I think the classic example is—okay, Paris was a great art
center in the teens, and how many of those people have really survived?
Maybe a dozen.
-
GOODWIN:
- Right.
-
GARVER:
- But it also seems to me that it's the fever—that out of this matrix
comes a lot of bad art and comes some very good art. I suppose I'm very
conscious of this, now going to a much smaller area that in no way could
be called an art center.
-
GOODWIN:
- But, taking Southern California, how many important artists are working
here, or have worked here, in the last twenty years?
-
GARVER:
- I think Southern California has really made a mark on art. Without going
through, say, a list as to whether I'd consider Larry Bell or Bob Irwin
major figures, I think they've been very important. I think Bob Irwin
will make, in particular, a distinctive mark on American art of this
period.
-
GOODWIN:
- Well, I think there's another way to look at the quality of the art
being produced here—at least one that is very familiar to me, as a
teacher. I look at the huge number of schools, colleges, universities,
art schools, in this area, and the enormous number of faculty members
who are, in a sense, subsidized by the government—not by NEA, through
grants, but through tenured teaching positions. I'm not sure that at
each school there's really either a group of a few important artists or
even one artist who's doing something that's particularly noteworthy. I
think, in a way, it's kind of sad.
-
GARVER:
- Well, I guess I'd answer that by saying that the democratization of art
has not produced more good artists, just produced more art. I think it's
one of the problems that one faces everywhere—in New York, too. There
are mills turning out artists left and right. And what are those people
going to do? They carry their MFAs away so proudly, and they're
unusable. And they're unusable because, while they have the degree, they
may not be good artists. Or they may be very good teachers and not good
artists. Or they may be very good artists and unable to make their way
in the world, as it were. So I think the whole pursuit of art"—there are
times when I think it's so frivolous that I almost want to go into real
estate or selling Colonel Sanders franchises or something of that sort.
But I don't. And occasionally I think it's very worthwhile. I suppose I
had an opportunity recently, when I left Newport, to change my career,
and I looked, in fact—the idea of working in an arts-related or an
arts-administrative job, other than directing a museum, interests me.
The opportunity did not arise.
-
GOODWIN:
- What kind of position?
-
GARVER:
- Oh, a position, say, working with the NEA, or perhaps for a foundation
or something of that sort. It was not to be, and so I've taken on
another museum that requires massive remedial work, and I'm quite good
at that. I'm good at it because I have, for reasons I don't understand,
a good seat-of-the-pants feel for what is interesting visually and what
looks good, and I can avoid the Lanier Graham syndrome of creating, as
in the "Rainbow" show, a non-visual experience. Speaking of the
"Rainbow" show and returning to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,
at that time we didn't have a very good staff exhibition designer, and
so we called in a "play doctor," Tom Hartman, a guy who had completed
his degree in exhibition design at [California] State [University],
Fullerton. It was Hartman's job to sort of make the show have some
degree of coherency. Lanier dealt with it only in terms of his writing
about it and what I would characterize as a certain kind of stoned-out
aura that surrounded it—in my opinion. I would say that so I'm not sued
for libel or slander.
-
GOODWIN:
- Well, why don't we pick up the chronology and have you explain how you
wound up back in Newport.
-
GARVER:
- Okay because I think maybe we have another forty-five minutes, at the
most. While I'd been in San Francisco the four and a half years I had
interviewed for at least four jobs: one in upstate New York, one in
Ohio, one with the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, and
one in Oregon. I had withdrawn from one of those. I think I had declined
a couple, and I had not been offered one, as I remember. At that point,
I could not bring myself to leave San Francisco and to leave California.
While I was not particularly happy at the Fine Arts Museums, I was very
happy personally. We had made many lasting and very good friends in San
Francisco. It was a very good experience personally. In the early spring
of 1977, the Fine Arts Museums had decided to take on both the "Dresden:
Five Centuries of Collecting" and the Tut ["Treasures of Tutankhamun"]
exhibitions. In early May, I think, of that year, Natasha was away in
Italy. She had gone as one of a group of artists to show their work and
do some things at the Bologna Art Fair, and she had been underwritten
through a program created by Lynn Hershman up there, the Floating
Museum. I received a call from Leon Lyon, who was then president of the
board at Newport, asking me if I was interested in returning to Newport.
Their director of a year had left. Of course, the red flag should have
been out. My first response was very negative. No, I was not—I couldn't
believe it, but later I said I'd come and interview. I recall that I
went to Chicago and spent a day at an all-day Tut operations meeting for
the participating museums. The museum had not quite signed up for Tut,
but I was there as an observer. It was a war meeting with people from
the museums that had had the show and people from museums that were
going to get it. Out of that, I remember, I wrote a twenty page memo.
People compared [the Tut show] to the Second World War, being in the
trenches. At that time they had not instituted selling tickets by
Ticketron—something of which I disapproved, because I thought there
would be terrific scalping.
1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE JULY 9, 1980
-
GARVER:
- I wrote a twenty-page memo to summarize that Chicago meeting and to
express how difficult this show was going to be. Well, I flew back from
Chicago, and I think I told the people at the Fine Arts Museums I was
going to be in Chicago two days. In fact, I came down to Newport and
interviewed, and I was offered the job immediately. I can remember
saying at that interview that I thought most probably both the Newport
Museum and I had suffered a certain loss of innocence—that is, I
realized that it was necessary to work more closely with the volunteer
groups that helped finance and underwrite a private museum. And I think
since they had had two other directors since I had been there, that they
most probably realized, too, that you just don't go out and get a
director-type from central casting. I think there seemed to be general
agreement with that, at the time. Lee Lyon was president of the Board,
and I suppose what the two-and-a-half year time from then to now showed
was that a "nice guy" (but a weak one) wouldn't want the presidency for
too long. I suppose I interviewed for that job, as I say, in late May or
early June. Natasha returned shortly thereafter in late June or early
July, and we went down and I accepted the job. But I think what the
experience has taught me is that the dynamic of the boards of trustees
and their relationship to staff is absolutely critical to an
institution. It's very scary to me now. I know that if Lee Lyon had
remained president of the Board for two years, say, and if someone else
other than Jack Shea had come in as president of the Board, I would have
still been there. I can say, I think, in dealing with Jack Shea's and my
relationship, that Shea is a very negative man, a man who has no belief
in himself, but who has been able to create an aura and a climate of
fear around him. He is so manipulative and so rigid that people are very
frightened and very intimidated, and I was certainly one of those,
without question. I avoided communication with him because it was always
so difficult and because he was always faulting, not necessarily my
programs, I realized early on, but my relationship to him and my style
in relationship with the other members of the Board, or the way in which
something had been handled. So, even if a meeting had gone fairly
smoothly and well, he would turn it around. I can recall one such
luncheon where, out of the blue, he brought up a criticism that he had
made some months before and which I thought had been resolved. I mean,
he just brought it up and said, "I just can't believe that you would
do—" whatever it was. In other words, [he would do this] simply to put
me back on the defensive and create this climate into which—I should
have just dealt with him head on. The results might have been the same,
but he has created a climate now—he created a climate, I think, of
non-support for the staff. It's very interesting that a salary survey
has indicated that the staff is very much underpaid. So he turns to the
staff and says, "All right, where are we going to get the money?" So, in
other words, he throws this right back at the staff—"You want more
money? Where are we going to get it?"—instead of working to improve
staff morale. The staff is leaving. Two key people have already left. A
third one, I found last night at dinner, is sending her resume around,
and she won't last very long. She won't last very long on the market,
because I think she'll be grabbed up. The basic issue is that Shea
doesn't care, because he and David Steinmetz will end up pretty much
running the museum as they want. There should have been an election this
past June of not only new members to the Board, which was done, but then
the Board should have elected officers, and that was not done. The
museum is not operating legally, according to its bylaws. Jack Shea
apparently announced that the nominating committee had asked X, Y, and Z
to be president, and they had all declined, and so he was just going to
stay on. But that was not put to a vote. Never did anyone recommend that
Jack would stay on another year, or stay on until the new director was
hired. So apparently no officers really have been elected. A couple of
officers have left their posts, and they've just sort of appointed
people. I see it as very analogous to Hitler, who used the burning of
the Reichstag to declare marshal law. Essentially, what Shea has done is
to use the absence of a director to take over, as the emergency under
which he must operate the institution. People who raise these questions
apparently have—a couple of women have been shushed up by him. So I'm
very sensitive to this. I'm about to pick up and move to a situation
that's very different. There the board is not manipulative and scheming.
They tend to be rather low energy. They have to be pumped up with new
ideas. That, I think, is just one of the things that—you have to create
the dynamic. One thing I definitely want to do is take the board of
[the] Madison [Art Center] on a retreat to discuss goals and directions
of the museum, because they have no idea where they're going. I have no
idea where they're going. I think I know. Here [at Newport] there was
such a retreat, in which about half the Board and two staff—Betty
Turnbull and myself—participated. This was, in fact, required by
Development Management Associates [DMA], if they were going to take the
job of beginning a program of endowment enhancement, a capital-funding
campaign. I think what came out of that is exactly what's happened.
There was a good deal of discussion that the relationship between the
staff, the very strong volunteers, and the Board was unresolved and
unclear. And the DMA had felt that the image of the museum itself was
unclear in the community. The community leaders said, yes, they'd heard
of it, or they knew about it, or it showed that "awful modern art," but
they really didn't know what it did. So it was essential that the Board
clarify its own position as to what the museum should and should not do.
But also it had to clarify the dynamics of operation, and this is a
problem in Madison as well. The board doesn't want to pay good salaries.
You know, people work free for art because it's art. This will be most
probably my first [objective]—getting a substantial increase for the
rest of the employees.
-
GOODWIN:
- Why has Shea been involved with the Newport Museum?
-
GARVER:
- I think he wants—he regards himself in a degraded way. This may come, I
gather, from what must have been a rather austere Catholic upbringing.
He sees himself, as the owner of a chain of car washes, in a rather
despicable business, even though it makes him a lot of money. When
people ask him what he does, he won't tell them sometimes. He simply
won't say, "I run a chain of car washes." I mean, Jack isn't out washing
the cars. He's a successful developer and so on as well. But he thinks
people are always trying to use him, get the. best of him, and, in his
business, people have. I mean, there have been cashiers who've emptied
the safe, and there've been people who've come in and deliberately
fallen down, I suppose, to sue him, and so he regards employees as—
-
GOODWIN:
- —chiselers.
-
GARVER:
- That's right. Absolutely. Chiselers. They're out to get the most for the
least amount of input. He said to me that he wants no surprises, he
wants to know everything that's happening. He creates a very rigid
situation. But I think he also feels that they are not yet socially
"right." He and Marion, a woman who, at one time, I think, was really
quite bright, but who has been co-opted, who has been bought out, so she
is very much the bird in the gilded cage—but Jack wants social cachet,
and to be accepted as a mover and a shaker, and so he's collected modern
art as, I think, part of that. He has some very good pieces, and I think
he's most probably, personally, one of the more stylish people in the
community. His own taste, or at least the taste as exemplified in his
house, is much superior to most of Newport's rather thunderous
pretentiousness. You know, Newport is very "French," given over to this
French "elegance." But it's a little silly to find some very stiff,
uptight building on a beachfront lot. I think that Jack wants absolute
control, because he's very frightened of any situation in which he is
not absolutely in control. I can give you an example of that. The
museum, among other museums, lent works of art to be installed at Vice
President [Walter] Mondale's house, Henry Hopkins had coordinated this.
There was a party for Mrs. Mondale, where the stuff was previewed at the
San Francisco Museum, and then there was a dinner party at the Mondales'
house in Washington. The invitation came in after I had left the museum,
and Betty Turnbull said she'd like to go or that Jack, at least, should
go. Jack said, "No, it's too expensive." Jack would not go. So,
suddenly. Jack, who loves to hobnob, was in over his head. The Vice
President was too much. Jack would have just been one among many
directors and board people. So Jack didn't go. Jack, who kept money in
paper bags when it wouldn't fit in the safe, thought it was too
expensive or something of that sort. He wouldn't even spend his own
money to go; so Lee and Molly Lyon went. Jack would not have been in
control, and Jack must have that control. From the second meeting I had
with him as president, he said, "Why do you resent me? Why aren't you
telling me? Why aren't you supplying me with all of this?" So he wanted
to know everything, and he wanted to make sure that everything was run
through him. At one point, he said he didn't even want me calling other
Board members unless Jack had approved it. Yet on other occasions, I'd
say, "Jack, we should do this." "Well, why are you telling me? Do it."
It would be something in relation to the Board and something he didn't
want to do. So he was a very, very inconsistent man, and he rules by
confusion, in that way, so that only Jack can basically make the
decisions. And he's working very hard to create that, so that now he can
simply say to the Board, in contravention of their bylaws, "Well, I'm
going to stay in for a while." It seems to me that somebody should have
said, "I think that your staying in for awhile ought to take a vote of
the Board. And maybe you do stay in, but I think maybe you should say
that you'll stay in until a new director is hired." Right now he's just
in there, and he's just floating along. He has effective control of the
museum. It's very dangerous, because—it's interesting that I recently
again met the man, and I'm working with the man, who ran the retreat in
August of 1977, and he's doing something for the Western Association of
Art Museums, of which I'm president of the board. He told me that a few
months ago he was talking to one of these Development [Management
Associates] people, and he said, "If Shea ever becomes president of the
Board, Garver will be out." He said Jack is the most non-negotiable
person he's ever met. And I think that's exactly right, because Jack
wants control, and he operates in this very rigid and sort of passive
way. I mean, he won't really get up there and say and do things. He's
very uptight, but he won't turn around and operate. He sets up a climate
of non-support, spreads the word to others by the way he talks about the
staff, et cetera, and then waits for those others to jump on the
bandwagon. He has a lot of criticism but never, never offers positive
support to make changes. So I think I ran up against this, and I didn't
operate, I froze up and got very angry and uptight and resentful and
blew up a couple of times. There's no question but what that was simply
grist for the mill, as far as he was concerned. So I think the dynamic
of running a museum in Southern California—I guess every museum director
gets kicked out at least once in his career.
-
GOODWIN:
- Especially around here.
-
GARVER:
- That's right. San Diego and Newport—this is the third director they've
fired.
-
GOODWIN:
- Pasadena, several; UCLA.
-
GARVER:
- Right. It's very much like—was Gerry Nordland kicked out? Who knows. He
left. I think he didn't like it. Now he wants to get back here, because
he's a Californian and I'm sure he doesn't like the middle-western
climate. It's a strange business. "Lefty" Adler has compared it—there'd
be somebody you ought to interview, Sebastian J. Adler. But "Lefty"
Adler said it's very much like marriage, and I think that's exactly
right. If you take a job in a profit-making corporation, there's a
clarity there. You know that you're headed toward a successful bottom
line. There's usually a clarity of focus of the function of the company
and what it does, what it makes, and what services it offers. That isn't
true in a museum. So, many people approach a museum—and I think Jack is
a perfect example—because they have certain needs. They have needs
within the community, they have needs to be recognized and lionized as a
powerful man. Yes, Shea runs most of the car washes in Orange County,
but he's a mover and a shaker at the Palm [Springs] Desert Museum and
the Newport Harbor Art Museum. So people can say, "Well, he's socially
correct." Jack loves to have his photograph taken standing with the
right artists. But his own taste is very, very limited. His only
interest—and he's very candid about this—essentially is high-style
painting of the sixties and seventies. When Raffael had a show here, he
wasn't interested in the least. He saw no reason why the museum should
begin to collect photographs. In other words, he has no sense of the
more public responsibilities of a museum or of trusteeship. It is simply
another device, another forum for his power. What's interesting—and,
again, analogous to Germany in the thirties—is that in the face of a
seemingly powerful leader, everyone else—all the other big men—have
essentially abrogated their power and responsibility. Jack set it up in
such a way—I don't know how, exactly, but I think he most probably
created a climate of non-support by maybe saying things like, "Oh, that
guy Garver. Jesus I He's not giving the volunteers a chance to do
anything." I could imagine that. This after a call when Jack says,
"Well, these women have got to have the whole museum for this casino
benefit event." I was away from the museum when this happened, and I
said, "Well, look, Jack, there's a show scheduled in there. Let's sit
down and talk about it, but right now I don't think we can do it." Jack
says, "They gotta have it J." "Well, Jack, my responsibility is this
show, and we can't have the show and this event in there. You're cutting
heavily under the skin." So you would get into this situation instead of
saying, "How can we work this out?" And the matter was negotiated, but
it seemed everything was done under duress. We changed the date of the
show a little bit, and it was fine. We changed their date one week, and
we changed the date of the show one week, and everything worked out
fine. But basically, Shea would take the credit and might say, "This guy
Garver, he's not giving credit. He's not letting the women support the
museum, and they're so good at it. It's a voluntary museum, and that's
it." And that just wasn't true. So he can say this to enough people
until—there are some hysterical types on the Board, like Charlie Hester,
who's been very generous. He's the treasurer. Charlie would begin to
say, "Well, maybe Tom shouldn't be here!" without really looking at the
situation. Most trustees don't read anything. They don't look at the
material sent them. They're not aware of what's happening. They
essentially are running the institution in, I think, complete ignorance.
There was a meeting just a few days ago, I gather, with one of the
museum staff and Jack and some other people, to deal with issues that
are raised by section 504—the Handicapped law, that requires that public
institutions, or institutions that get federal money, must meet certain
minimum standards. The person on the museum staff who has been working
on this is very knowledgeable, has attended seminars, prepared a very
large package that was distributed to the trustees, and Jack said, "Have
you done any research on this?" He hadn't even bothered to look at this
material. Jack reads a lot, but when I would write him letters and so
on, he'd say, "Well, what is this?" He wouldn't want to read it, or he'd
just say that because he thought the material was too unimportant and
that my point of view was too unimportant. So he worked very clearly, I
think, to create a climate of non-support and non-belief in the staff.
As George Neubert said, when he came down to interview, they made an
offer, he made a counteroffer, he told him what his minimum offer would
be, and then they began to sort of weasel, make a deal. When George's
wife, Eva, who is Mexican-American, came down, and she asked Jack what
he did, he wouldn't tell her. Eva said, "I know why. He employs a lot of
Mexicans—most probably illegal aliens—in his business." He wouldn't even
tell her what he did. Then George said, "All right. I'd like to receive
a letter from you outlining these terms, as part of the job offer." They
sent him a letter, and apparently the letter said, "You want this; you
want that." But it never said, "We accept this; and we make you an
offer." They never made the offer; they never closed the deal. George
read this and said, "This is a reiteration of what I want, all right,
but it doesn't say, 'We accept it, '"
-
GOODWIN:
- Did you see the item in Sunday's paper about Neubert?
-
GARVER:
- Sure. George called me, and he had been offered that job [associate
director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art], and I encouraged him to
take it. We talked about it. I said that it's a much better—one thing I
found, coming from a small museum even, I think, a well-managed and
well-run one, in looking for another job, is that people haven't heard
of it. I mean, they've heard of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
and when George gets ready to take a directorship somewhere, he will be
in a much better position than as director of Newport—I mean, if he's
going to take a big, big job. I most probably realize now that at
forty-six, my career has taken a—I would say, for the first time, I've
really been thinking about where I will be going and what will happen to
my career. I'm going to a small museum, in which a great deal of
remedial work will be necessary, and it will take years to develop a
reputation for that—one where it's really well known. I'm not working in
a major art production or, say, an art distribution center. So I would
say that I will never work in a large museum. I will never be director
of a large museum. Chances are, I may stay in Madison, if all things go
well, I would say at least ten years—maybe longer, because at that time
I'll be fifty-six, and generally museum people just don't move around
much at that age. So I think most probably this will be a very long-term
arrangement. I hope I like it, because I think I'm going to be there,
and I think it's not easy, frankly, to get out of a situation like that.
It's not easy coming from a small museum to find a major institution
that will even give you the time of day, for which you can even
interview. There were several positions in which I was asked if I was
interested, and I said yes and sent material and so on, but never really
heard again.
-
GOODWIN:
- What would be the kind of job, at this point, that you would like
ideally?
-
GARVER:
- I think maybe a job like Madison, with some of the dirty work done
already. But, on the other hand, by dirty work I mean going out there
and securing additional funding, building the staff, and having the
architectural spaces work right (the building there will never work
right). That can be fun. But, on the other hand, I think that Madison
will—I'm very gun shy; I'm very much aware, as we've discussed, of the
whole resort mentality in Newport, keep it light, airy, frothy, no
problems. Madison is not necessarily a town like that. I think that I'll
have some of the same problems with board members, who will want to keep
it run on the cheap, and who will think of it as an institution that has
always run on a $300,000 budget, and so why can't it always run on a
$300,000 budget? It's a smaller board. I'd like to see it increased. I
think most probably I will work much more closely with the board. This
is one lesson I've learned. Down here, I thought at least half the Board
would be supportive of me, but when the vote came, essentially nobody
challenged—Shea had set it up in such a way—he put so many people on
this personnel review committee; they'd been brought in one by one—some
people on the committee had not even attended a meeting of it. They were
simply called and told that the committee said, "Well, look, the
committee feels that Garver's this way and that way." And they'd say,
"Oh, okay." Lee Lyon, who got me back here, is no fighter. If there's a
problem, Lee skirts it. He won't deal. So many of the people down here
won't deal, and so many of the businessmen are absolutely afraid of the
women. Basically, this is a sexist place in the most profound way. These
businessmen are "big men," to use David Steinmetz's term. They want
things in a certain way. They have bought their wives; they have made
sure their wives are not, say, assertive business people. They've given
them everything they want, and the wives have given them no lip. That's
the exchange, you see. So Marion doesn't challenge Jack except in the
most subtle and rather interesting ways. But Marion doesn't challenge
Jack, and Jack pays her off with, you know, V-12 Jaguars and Fendi coats
and trips and jewels and you name it. But when the men get on a board
with these women, they are really deathly afraid of a woman turning to
them and saying, "No, you're not right." So they would never deal with
the problem of an over-assertive volunteer force operating not in the
best long-term interests of the museum. The volunteers, when they're
centered and focused and directed, are dynamite. They are absolutely
incredible. They set their sights quite high. But the men would never
deal with the problems of the volunteers being involved in excessive
amounts of day-to-day programming, day-to-day policy, and day-to-day
operations. And the Board couldn't stay away from that either. It's a
classic story of a lot of smaller museums. Now, in Madison, the staff
kept the board at a distance, with the result that the board is not—this
is the other side of it—really geared up to think in terms of five years
hence when the museum has a $600,000 or $700,000 budget—so that it's not
a shock, so [they can think about where they] want to be in five years?
This is why I want to take this group away and do some long-range
planning. What should the Art Center be? I haven't, in the waning
minutes of this tape, said much about what Newport has been in terms of
exhibitions and so forth. I didn't work on that many here, because I was
involved mostly in administration. I think, during my stay, that the
Newport Museum has been "managed." Many museums suffer not from
mismanagement but from non-management. They are simply allowed to run a
course, and that course can be influenced by strong people in certain
positions, strong board members, or weak boards. In looking at a museum
like the Flint Institute of Arts, where I interviewed, I realized that
the place had no look, no style. It was a building that was constructed,
I guess, in the early sixties, to which other additions have been made,
in a style that was antithetical to good exhibitions. You came in the
lobby, and the first thing you saw was an art-rental gallery of no real
quality. Then the shop sort of spilled out into the lobby. There was no
coherency and continuity. The exhibitions had the same kind of erratic
flavor, and the collections, of course, were small and rather
erratically installed as well. The thought there was that it was a
museum that dealt with a number of different periods. They wanted
somebody who was knowledgeable in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art.
That's what they wanted to continue concentrating in, but not entirely,
and I just thought the place was such a mess and would have to be—the
director was perfectly nice. He had a doctorate in, I've forgotten,
medieval arts or something of that sort, but he had not really been
concentrating on what the museum offered on a coherent point of view.
Madison has the same problem, but at least it's newer and, in a way, the
changes can be made.
-
GOODWIN:
- What was the situation with the new building at Newport? You weren't
involved in—
-
GARVER:
- Well, I was involved—it's interesting, because early on I was asked to
be an architectural consultant, and I did, and I disagreed with a number
of things. The architect had been on the Board of Trustees and had the
decency, I must say, to resign when he began doing it, although in fact
he did it all free. But obviously he wanted to do it for good business
reasons. I suppose he must have donated $150,000, maybe, all told,
something of that sort. I think the building was built on the basis of
the past, not on a promise of the future, in the sense that they said,
"All right, we've done a lot of exhibitions, and so we need the
exhibition galleries." But they never thought about the expansion of the
education programs, creating educational spaces, and what a new museum
should have. They said, "All right, we'll build 20,000 square feet." And
they did. If they had worked to build 24,000 square feet, they might
have had a building that would have been 80 percent better, because
there were programs that could have been accommodated, or programs that
could have used different spaces. But they didn't do that. They just
said, "Well, we'll build a warehouse space and improve it later." Well,
maybe yes, maybe no. They can expand maybe 10,000 square feet, and
that's it. Maybe they'll have to build up on top, but that would be very
expensive. So I was involved. I noticed that I made a number of
suggestions by letter and so on, none of which were ever taken
seriously. I was brought in, and I think I was most probably a little
too critical of the plans, made too many suggestions, and I was
short-circuited. It's terribly frustrating, this business. The director
[at Madison] quit in disgust over the building in Madison, and I can
understand. He quit in disgust because they pay a high rent in a space
that has no loading dock. How do you bring in the art? I don't even know
if you can bring in really large pieces. I'll talk myself out of a job
if I'm not careful. I think the potential is there, and maybe eventually
the Art Center might move out of there. It depends on the opportunities
that I'm given to operate. It's such a different situation, such a
different board, such a different climate—and I don't mean just the
weather—and I have never experienced it. So I think the lesson that I
have learned is that I can't run away from or deflect myself from
problems, and I have to stay more focused on critical and key
issues—maybe doing fewer things but doing them in a more focused way.
One way I have of avoiding problems is to rush off and do something
else.
1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO AUGUST 13, 1980
-
GARVER:
- I wanted to talk a little bit more, I think, about the issue of
management. In the summer of 1979, just a year ago, I attended a
month-long museum management institute, sponsored by the Western
Association of Art Museums and the [extension program at the] University
of California, Berkeley. This is a very intense program dealing with
management-leadership styles, lots of nitty-gritty budgeting, planning,
and so on, I think one of the things that I brought back to Newport from
that session was an awareness of the need for much better long-range
planning. I mentioned earlier the Flint [Institute of Arts] and [the]
Madison [Art Center], to which I leave in a matter of a few days,
neither of which have been operated in a corporate sense of trying to
plan ahead, taking the strengths of this year and past years and
building on it. I think that this is most probably one of the reasons
why so many museum directors feel like Sisyphus without really knowing
why. They are not creating, shall we say, landing places on that long
push upward. So that so often, particularly, I think, in smaller
museums, if one falls down, one may fall all the way down, rather than
attempting to build steadily. One thing that came out of. the museum
management institute was a project that had been encouraged by a
development group that we had had working for the museum on a
consultancy basis, and that was the development of a document of
artistic belief as a philosophical document that was necessary prior to
beginning the long-range plan. This now covers about six pages. Some
people feel that it should be shrunk to one, but there are, I think,
eight or nine points that cover the nature of what will and, conversely,
won't the Newport Harbor Art Museum be? What is its area of
specialization? What will and won't it collect, in what way? What is the
relationship of the board of trustees to the staff and volunteers? How
do these three groups intermesh with one another? In fact, of course,
the document, like the Soviet constitution, is ignored. It will be
useful only if it is respected, and I think at the moment it is not
respected. But I realize that I do take this kind of experience to
Madison, and will be using it in Madison. We are scheduling what I'll
call a goals retreat in February, when everyone wants to stay inside
anyway, at, I hope, a conference center near Madison, where we can sit
down, with a professional facilitator (as some of the Newport board did
in August of '77) to discuss the long-range goals, plans, and so on. But
a great deal of this—there are discussions of who we are now, and it
will be very interesting to see, as I know we will see, that there will
be very widely variant differences of. opinion as to what the Madison
Art Center is, as there have been with what the Newport Harbor Art
Museum is. I think that in the case of Newport, I was insensitive to
what I was shown at this retreat in August of '77. I did not play upon
it and encourage its development. I think just the strain of getting the
museum open, opening the new building—the first president, Lee Lyon, who
was not particularly interested in getting involved in a long-term and a
real leadership way, was followed by a president—Jack Shea—who wanted to
rule or ruin (and has most probably done both). That made it very
difficult. But, in fact, the artistic-beliefs document did come forth,
and I think it was a very interesting one. At least it is a document to
which one may point as an accepted, viable, voted upon, board of
trustees agreed upon statement as to artistic beliefs. From there,
perhaps, you create other long-range plans, because one of the things
that, I think, the museum management institute pointed out was that,
really, only the board of trustees can create the final viable plan for
the museum. The staff carries it out, and certainly the staff influences
enormously. If you have a strong director with a strong point of view,
this will certainly carry so many museums. If you have a weak director
with a weak point of view, as I think Flint did, it floats this way, it
floats that way, and that's happened, too, I think, in Madison. I'm sure
that there will be exhibitions I will do that will bring me rave
notices; there will be others that will bring an equal amount of rage,
because I will try and expand programs in both directions. But the board
of trustees has got to be in agreement as to what the institution is
going to be, or in substantial agreement. I think there's been
disagreement at Newport and no real awareness or commitment in Madison.
Natasha Nicholson, my wife, and I were discussing this issue earlier
today. Why is it that there has been no major commitment to the museum
in Madison? Part of it has to do with the nature of the people there,
perhaps, but part of it also has to do with the fact that awareness
comes before the checks, and sex appeal comes before the checks, and
certainly you have got to create a program, and you have got to ask for
the sale. So these are areas that I will be working on, and that I had
begun to work on here. I think before going on to, specifically, the
exhibition philosophy and collection philosophy, and my strengths and
weaknesses in both areas, I would make one further mention of Newport as
it is today, perhaps my parting shot, as we load the truck, Newport did
not, as I encouraged them to do at my last official moments in the
special board meeting which terminated my employment there—I said that
if the board did not deal, to some degree, introspectively with the
problems of the museum that have led on to the termination of three
directors of very different persuasions and sensibilities, that they
would simply operate another revolving-door directorship. I said, "I
think you've got to sit down and really decide what you want, where the
museum should go, and what you would anticipate and expect from a
director." The response was, "Yes, thank you very much. Good luck, Tom,
Bon voyage, kiddo." What they did was exactly, I guess, what I would
have expected. They did not create a national search. They solicited a
few friends. They brought only three people out here: George Neubert,
from the Oakland [Art] Museum, who was about to take the job and then
felt that they were trying to overrefine the deal. (We've discussed this
whole issue of dealing. ) They tried to refine the deal too much, and he
said no. [They brought out] Gerry Nordland, an ex-Californian, now in
Milwaukee. (As a soon-to-be Madisonian, I would not want to live in
Milwaukee. ) Nordland runs the Milwaukee Art Center, rather unhappily,
one gathers, and he came out here to look at the directorship of a very
much smaller institution, and under what circumstances, we don't know,
Gerry has told me that he came out at their suggestion to offer advice
on the search for a director; others say Gerry was eager to come out and
consider the directorship. They have finally hired a woman named
Cathleen Gallander, who was put in similar circumstances at the Art
Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi. After. having run it for many
years, she was forced out by her board, through a board president who,
apparently, does not like modern art, even though that's what they show.
They do other things as well, I guess.
-
GOODWIN:
- Does Gallander have contacts on the Newport Board?
-
GARVER:
- No, not—she's here now, as you know. Her appointment was announced about
ten days ago, and she arrived immediately thereafter. Obviously, enough
calls were made to determine who might be available. Her name was given,
and she was highly recommended. I have no clues as to her capability or
competence. I think, maybe, her performance, or her documented
production, may be less than mine, but the Art Museum of South Texas is
about the same size as Newport's. It's distinguished by a Phillip
Johnson building and by the fact that, in hiring Phillip Johnson, she
gained entree to Leo Castelli, and they organized a number of
exhibitions of well-known New York artists: Jasper Johns, Frank Stella,
et al. So she has come out here amongst a fair amount of ballyhoo, but
in fact she only has a one-year appointment, which is not sufficient
board confidence, I would hold, to encourage long-range programming and
long-range planning on her part. So I realize that museums, generically,
I think, suffer from lack of management—just non-management. The thing
floats along—the sort of thing that I described last time we talked as
at times avoiding conflict by simply stepping around it, and then of
course it blew up in my face later. But so many museums are run this
way. They're also run without long-range planning and without a real
commitment, and I would say that she may be victim to that. The director
who was my immediate predecessor, Harvey West, came down on a year's
contract. He took a year's leave of absence from Washington State
University in Pullman and decided not to stay on. I have never known
whether he was told not to stay on or whether he decided not to. I do
know, however, that one of the Board members said, "Oh, that poor Harvey
West, the Board just didn't listen to him after the second month he was
here." [tape recorder turned off] West's experience was entirely in
university museums, and he was used to submitting a budget to the dean,
having it reviewed, either accepted or rejected, modifying it, and that
was that. He had no experience at political manipulation. Apparently I
didn't have enough. But be that as it may, I think that was West's
problem. I think, parenthetically, that Jim Byrnes's problem as director
at Newport was that he had very low output, and he came into a museum
that was very much smaller, in itself an interesting observation, than
the New Orleans Museum [of Art], from which he had been asked to leave.
He was unable, without a large staff, to produce good programs. He
simply had lost the touch, which I guess he had had at one point, to
create good, coherent, and ongoing programs. I think that you'll notice
that I refer to some people who've been fired from museums in sort of a
negative way, while of course, I think of myself as being absolutely
wronged, but I don't give them that credit; so we'll see how I'm treated
in this field. So far, I think, most people have felt that, in fact, I
was wronged, and that truly the reason the Board said good-bye was my
not getting along. Somebody said, "Well, Tom, they just didn't like
you." And that's right, they didn't. And I think they're cynically
treating Cathleen Gallander by saying, "Okay, you're in bad shape. There
you are, we can control you easily." I do realize now that it is
certainly much easier to get employment if you come from the ranks of
senior curatorial staff or senior management of a larger museum, but not
as a director from a smaller museum.
-
GOODWIN:
- I hope I don't have to interview Cathleen next year. [laughter]
[Cathleen Gallander was fired in early 1983; she continued to work until
June 30, 1983—T.H.G.]
-
GARVER:
- Well, we'll see. But I do want to make this point, and I made it to
George Neubert when he was considering coming here. George, at
thirty-seven, has, I think, a very good career. He's an extremely good
administrator, with a good eye. I said that if he had ambitions to a
major museum directorship, he would be well advised to leave Oakland,
which has the stigma of being simply a state museum, having that mandate
of dealing with California art, get into a world-class museum in a
second position, which he has—he's associate director of the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art—work there five years. At that point
he'll be forty-two, and he will be absolutely ready. I was going through
some old files and packing them yesterday. I was amazed at the number of
offers for consideration that I received from important institutions
when I was at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It is, perhaps,
more visible and sexier to work in a larger institution? but, on the
other hand, the quality of work I did and the scale of work and the
nature of it at Newport was very much greater and better. As I think I
mentioned earlier, as a field-grant reader for the Institute of Museum
Services, many of the grants that I read from the smaller museums were
much more carefully wrought, much better thoughout, and I think this is
very much the wave of the future. At least this is where museum boards
should be looking to find directors for larger museums: among directors
of smaller museums who actually have that experience as chief executive
or chief operating officer, and who know what to expect in the job. I
think that's enough of that. Let's go on and discuss the exhibition
philosophy of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, I think that it has varied
throughout the years, starting primarily as a local—local meaning
Southern California or California—institution involving itself with
regional and local artists. It can do this in an easier way than, maybe,
many other museums around the country, because local artists are those
in Los Angeles, and you have such a reservoir of good artists to select
from that you are not stuck with the problem that I will have and that
so many institutions have: How do you deal with the local artists, with
those who have not made it to the major art centers, never will make it,
and who will leave you with a rather bland and not exciting exhibition
program? I know, for instance, in Madison that the moment I get there I
will be set upon by the Madison Art Guild, which is a group of women
artists who have banded together, and who, I think, are primarily
high-class Sunday painters. They are not, say, of the caliber or
commitment or dedication of the feminists here who are involved in Woman
House and some of the other art organizations here. There are many other
groups like this that are not segregated by sex. I notice that it is a
mark of the smallest regional and local museums to do the X-Y-Z annual
local artist guild show, and I will not do that, because I think that it
does not include the best art that's available locally. It also gives
somebody who pays fifteen bucks a year and joins a local art league or
art group a leg up on exhibiting in the museum, and I think that's
essentially an unfair advantage. I would certainly consider their work
in making exhibitions of local or regional art, and I think in a place
like Newport, as in a place like Madison, local or regional exhibitions
are very important. We can say we are a regional institution. Many of
our exhibitions do reflect what's happening in Southern California,
including Orange County, which is half the size of the population of
Wisconsin. But you can't be only a local institution. I mentioned George
Neubert earlier. The Oakland Museum is one of the best-run museums, I
think, from an artistic point of view, that I know. George has always
had a very expansive policy about who they will collect and exhibit.
They have a mandate of dealing—it's the museum of California, and they
deal with California artists. Well, I've always joked with George
that—
-
GOODWIN:
- Who is a California artist? [laughter]
-
GARVER:
- Right, who is a California artist? But I've always joked that George
would collect or exhibit somebody if they had changed trains in
California. So you find, certainly, people like Hans Hofmann. If they
could afford one, you'd find Mark Rothko, and I think they do have one
on loan. Arthur B. Davies, whom you hardly think of as a Californian—he
came out here and apparently sketched and made studies in Yosemite—he's
in the collection. So George has taken that stance of being very
expansive, but even so, there is still that stigma—I suppose I'm
thinking now professionally—that, well, it's a local museum. I never
wanted that for Newport. I also never wanted a museum that would simply
be "Art since 1950." That was really an impossibility, I think, because
the local sentiment required constant references—they required this
perhaps even more than they got it—constant validations to the past, to
history, to correctness. Maybe even correctness more than past history.
That is, the Frank Stella exhibition ["Stella since 1970"] that we
brought in in 178 from the Fort Worth Art Museum would have been, I
think, not very well regarded if Stella had not been an absolutely
world-class painter. In fact, Jack Shea could not believe that the
Newport Harbor Art Museum got this show, but his disbelief was militated
by the fact that he failed, really, to put up the money to help
underwrite the show that he had promised, or he floated it through on
another pledge he had made. Nor would he work to put up money for
world-class acquisitions or other major exhibitions.
-
GOODWIN:
- How did Newport get the Stella show?
-
GARVER:
- At that point, it had been booked by the University Museum at Berkeley.
They were having a serious funding crunch at that time, something I
think Jim Elliott has worked out. He has done, to my way of thinking, an
absolutely superlative job there. They had to cancel the show at the
last minute. We had just moved one exhibition that we had scheduled,
"Rooms: Moments Remembered," from that summertime slot to a slot six
months later, and so we had an opening. I think we canceled this show
one week and said, "Well, I suppose we could put up the permanent
collection." We had something in there. We had some money, anyway, and
this show came along, although it was much more expensive than we had
anticipated. So we went out and solicited the money among our friends,
although we were still short when we did it.
-
GOODWIN:
- It was a great coup for Newport.
-
GARVER:
- Well, it was. And I think there are a number of exhibitions that can and
will be done here. I think the Christo documentary exhibition ["Christo:
Running Fence Project, Marin and Sonoma Counties, 1972-1976"], which was
one that I solicited, knowing Christo, was one, and that show's
traveling all around the country. Another that I solicited, and that I'm
very sorry to leave behind, I might add, is Cy Twombly. Now, that will
not be a particularly popular show, because, of course, Twombly's work
is very arcane and very specialized. Stella's things, at least, were big
and bold and noisy, and you could say you were getting your money's
worth just in weight and drama. But Twombly, of course, would be very
different. I think the exhibition philosophy that had been followed by
Betty Turnbull, the curator of exhibitions and collections, has followed
her own rather limited knowledge: occasional excursions into the past,
which I think have been good, but concentrating primarily on regional
artists, and by regional artists I would say those that live within 100
miles of Newport. So the exhibition programs, when she was entirely
responsible for them, took on a flavor of Southern California. I think
when I returned in '77, I said that I wanted the institution to retain
this regional point of view, but that it should also acknowledge art
involvement of the present and recent past, nationally and
internationally as well. Now, we have booked for this fall the Paul
Delvaux exhibition that's traveling. It's a mixed bag, I would say. I
saw it up in San Francisco. We've done the Christo "Running Fence"
exhibition, which was very well received. There's Twombly. There will be
a few others, I think. One or two I may take with me to Madison, or I
may do [them] in Madison. They will not be done here, things that I had
been planning, such as Nathan Oliveira, although, of course, he is a
regional artist. But I also wanted to mention that in October of '79 we
did a major exhibition of really local artists, that is, Orange County
artists. Orange County has a 1.8 million population. This exhibition was
called "Our Own Artists: Art in Orange County." We had done a show
previously called "Our Own Art," which was art in our permanent
collection, with some very handsome additional loans. In fact, most
probably the most valuable of the stuff in our own art show was borrowed
from our board members. But the "Our Own Artists" show was done with the
care that we would use in selecting any exhibition. We produced a major
catalog, I think, carefully documenting each artist with one good
photograph, a bibliography or biography of exhibitions, and so on. There
were short essays by Betty Turnbull, myself, and Victoria Kogan, who
also worked on the exhibition as a guest curator. So we were not about
to shuffle the local art into a juried show, which is something for
which I have no respect and is something I will have to change in the
"Wisconsin Biennale," which is put on in Madison, because we will have
to have an invited section as well as a juried section, if we're going
to continue it in its present format. Juried shows are a way of
abrogating, I think, curatorial responsibility by saying, "Yes, all
right, we'll do this. So we'll bring in some hotshot parachutist from
out of town—"
-
GOODWIN:
- The Whitney [Museum of American Art]. [laughter]
-
GARVER:
- The Whitney, right. For this last show, which was, I guess, juried in
May, Madison brought in Henry Geldzahler from New York. They were so
nervous that Henry was going to patronize the natives and give them a
bad show. In fact, Henry is very smooth and very good at this sort of
thing, I think he selected a good exhibition, but no matter how benign
and effective the juror is, how do you know what's out there? And what
is left behind? Most of the faculty, certainly the senior faculty, at
the University of Wisconsin did not submit; they did not care to have
their work paraded before the juror, paraded, one might add, by people
who knew their work, and have the juror say, Out. So this is an area in
which one must deal. Very possibly, the senior faculty at the University
of Wisconsin are not the best painters, sculptors, whatever, in the
state. This is something I'll have to find out. But juried shows never,
I think, bring in the very best, and it's a double-filtration process:
filtration that's set absolutely by who submits or doesn't submit, and
then it's filtered again by the personal biases of the juror. I can well
recall having juried a Crocker-Kingsley exhibition in Sacramento a few
years ago. The show was roundly panned in the local newspaper, and the
reviewer, somewhere in the interview, said, "If public taste is left in
the hands of people like Garver, we're in trouble." At that time, I was
curator of exhibitions in San Francisco; so, indeed, I had some say, I
suppose minor say, in public taste, at least at the Fine Arts Museums. I
was startled by this and commented on it to somebody from Sacramento,
and he said, "Oh, don't worry about it. You just juried out the
reviewer's lover." [laughter] So that's another way of looking at it. I
think that it's much better to put yourself on the line, put your
institution on the line, make the selections. We did this here. I looked
at about fifty-five photographers. Victoria Kogan and Betty Turnbull
looked at a couple of hundred artists in other media. We selected, I
think, totally seventy-five people, approximately. There was only one
sour-grapes complaint that we got from a very commercial sculptor in
Laguna Beach, who—his slides had apparently been returned before. I
don't remember; there was some confusion about whether we had considered
him sufficiently or not. It was not a complaint that he was necessarily
left out of the show. So we have worked regionally, but I think that
when I was here previously we were perhaps a little more exciting. Did I
discuss Tom Marioni and the San Francisco performance? I think I did in
relation to the Board, too. We did fewer exhibitions like that. I think
a show of Pino Spanulo and Ludwig Redl, called "Fine Tuning," which
dealt with sort of spatial sculpture and holograms, the second
exhibition in the new building, was about as risky as we got, and there
was a good deal of complaint that there's nothing there to see, and what
are these mud pies and broken glass in the middle of the floor. Another
show, "Rooms: Moments Remembered," which dealt with the evocative
quality of rooms, spaces, objects, and so on, had Roland Reiss, who
built a full-scale room, twenty-six feet on the side; and Bob Cumming,
who sent us some drawings from afar. Michael Davis, Richard Turner, and
Bruce Williams were also there. [The latter two] teach at Chapman
[College]. It was, in fact, very well received, even though the objects
themselves are not works of art in the usual sense.
-
GOODWIN:
- Tom, you haven't mentioned the relationship between Newport Harbor
Museum and University of California, Irvine.
-
GARVER:
- Well, I don't think really that there is any. There's no involvement
between them. I think, early on, Irvine was founded, I guess in the
mid-sixties, just as the Fine Arts Patrons of Newport Harbor was
forming. The disparity between a branch of the University of California
and a group of volunteer ladies hanging exhibitions in the Balboa
Pavilion was too great to be seriously considered by the university. The
thought of approaching the university was nerve-racking for the ladies.
When I came out here in 1968, the university had an exhibition program,
a very interesting one, run by John Coplans. Coplans had created, I
think, a group of women, some of whom had been disenfranchised or were
otherwise not interested in the Fine Arts Patrons, to create a Gallery
Associates to help underwrite shows. But he did a number of very
important shows in what was essentially a converted classroom or two.
Clayton Garrison, the dean of the College of Fine Arts, apparently early
on developed a dislike for Newport, or perhaps thought it beneath his
notice. I remember, when I came out here in '68, they were about to
build Fine Arts Village, which is the visual and performing complex on
the Irvine campus, and the ladies were terribly worried because they
heard they were going to spend $3 or $4 million for a gallery. Well,
there is one very small space, not very well designed, with typical
problems no loading dock, no this, no that—on the campus, which I think
has been run by some very interesting people. Coplans left before it was
finished. Alan Solomon was running it and did programs for a year or two
before the new building. He helped work on the new building, but he died
before it was actually opened. Hal Glicksman, who is now at Otis-Parsons
[Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design], was here. Melinda
Wortz has been here and has run very interesting programs. But there
have been some informal dealings. Phyllis Lutjeans, curator of programs
at Newport, has taught an extension course. Melinda will bring her
classes down. Tony DeLap, who has been long associated with Newport,
brings his classes down. I think there's pretty good use made, let's
say, but on a casual or a go-see-this-exhibition-there basis.
-
GOODWIN:
- But today, are the two institutions competing with one another? ;
-
GARVER:
- I don't think so. They don't collect. I don't think there are really any
competitive institutions in the county. I think that Dextra Frankel, at
Cal [California! State University of Fullerton, runs exhibitions that
are very different and tend to be, I think, more craft oriented than
Newport's have ever been. Melinda tends to do sort of one-artist
installation projects; people like DeWain Valentine, Richard Jackson,
and, if there are artists from out of the area, frequently it's one
large piece or some very specialized thing. I think, in fact, they're
quite complementary. I wish there was, perhaps, a little closer
intertie, I think that will be impossible, at least for a while. I would
say, if I have felt competitive with any organization, competitive in
the sense that I look at something and say, "Dammit, that's really
good," and "Why didn't I do that?" it's been Connie Glenn at Cal State
University of Long Beach, another person I think you should interview. I
think three women, Connie Glenn, Julie Gilliam, and Melinda Wortz, would
be three interesting interviewees. So I would say that there has been no
official involvement. I think we have had a museums problems or museums
practices class at Irvine come, and we certainly—the Newport museum has
used graduate students and recent graduates of the art department in
their installation operations and, through work-study, in clerical and
book shop and sometimes as teaching assistants in the workshop classes
that we have offered. I think I mentioned that Newport might offer more
of these workshops, mostly for young kids, if they had the space that
the building did not provide for two classrooms. The one that is there
is under siege by the Christmas tree ladies, who regard their activities
as essential to the operations and financing of the Newport Harbor Art
Museum, and who are very unwilling to see it used for any other purpose.
But I would say there is no official involvement, and, in fact, when it
was impossible recently to lend Irvine some cases, Clayton Garrison
called up, spoke sharply to the museum administrator, said that he was
subsidizing his ex-wife, who worked as a teacher for us, because he was
paying her gas bills to get here, was going to see to it that no
work-study money ever came back to Newport, and carried on at some
length. I wrote him a rather bland and regretting letter, but certainly
did not discuss his marital or the university's financial relationship
with the museum. There has been no real involvement but certainly, I
think, a commitment to the activities of the museum on, let's say, a
one-to-one, faculty and student basis, and I think we have a lot of
students come in. We ran a rather erratic demographic survey, at the
time of the Stella and Raffael exhibitions, and found that we got more
younger men, who I think were students, and more older women, who were,
I think, users of the restaurant and perhaps volunteers as well. So
there was sort of a double-hump curve there, in terms of the attendees
at the museum.
-
GOODWIN:
- Superficially, it seems that there might be some overlap between Newport
and Irvine, since both institutions are focusing on contemporary art and
often the most extreme styles.
-
GARVER:
- Irvine will be a little more extreme than Newport, I would say. I think
it's an issue. In terms of the competitive sense that you mentioned, I
see the relationship between institutions much more as being like a
shopping center where you have a big department store at one end and a
big discount store at the other end and lots of shops in between. That
is, you need to generate interest in art. You need to have product, and,
in this case, maybe the museum is the product. But you need to have
things going on down here, simply to energize the art community. Maybe
by art community, I mean Los Angeles artists and collectors. But I think
I also mean just that art awareness on the part of lots of people that,
if the Bowers Museum, which is not distinguished for its art programs,
becomes increasingly involved in art, it's because they see that there
are other activities in the county that warrant its becoming
increasingly active in art. They got a show that I think would have been
very nice for Newport to have had, "A Decade of Collecting," the show
from the Phillips Collection in Washington. So different institutions
around here are going to get different shows, but basically there's
Newport, Irvine, Bowers, and Laguna Beach [Art Museum]. [The latter] has
pretty much never done much of quality, I think, and they are in a state
now of suspended animation, awaiting a new director. That may make a
very substantial difference in their renovation and in programming.
-
GOODWIN:
- It seems to me that this area needs a solid history-of-art museum.
-
GARVER:
- Well, it does, but I don't think it will ever get that. The [J. Paul]
Getty [Museum] is in Malibu, and Norton Simon—
-
GOODWIN:
- —was here. [laughter]
-
GARVER:
- Well, Fullerton had its chance, blew it, and in a case like that, it's
opportunity knocks but once. I suspect that even if Fullerton had said
yes, Simon would not have made a major commitment in Orange County. But
I think clearly what has to come in Orange County first is going to be
some sort of very major corporate commitment, which has not really been
forthcoming. If you look, for instance, at the new museum of modern art
that's developing in Los Angeles, they now have $3 million in the bank,
another million from apparently another bank that's in the offing. They
are apparently going to bring in Pontus Hulten from Pompidou Center and
are going to pay him a fabulous salary. I don't know how much, but I'm
led to believe it's in the $80,000 to 100,000 category. I think this is
not the right way to go about it, but it's very much the superstar idea
of that museum and perhaps of Los Angeles generally. They're also
bringing in, as assistant director, I understand, Richard Koshalek, who
is one of the brightest museum operators I know. He's been running the
Hudson River Museum and clearly I'm sure, wants to get back in the big
time. They have $16 million pledged by Cadillac Fairview [California
Incorporated], the developer.
1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE AUGUST 13, 1980
-
GARVER:
- The Newport Harbor Museum, or Newport Beach, is, I think, both helped
and hindered by its proximity to Los Angeles. I think it's helped
because it's a major visual asset and resource. It has not been
particularly helped financially. The big donors in Los Angeles do not
spill into Orange County if they are not as active in Los Angeles as
they might want to be. In fact, so many people in Los Angeles want to
make it in the big time and do not want to appear as pikers [laughter]
by coming down to Newport. There is the term in nuclear physics, of
course, critical mass. When you get enough fissionable material
together, you reach a critical mass, and you will have a spontaneous
fission. Thus, in the atomic bomb you apparently slap two subcritical
masses together, they go critical, and the thing blows up. Well, this
has not yet happened in Newport, and I think that despite the fact that
Newport has done many of the things that other institutions in Los
Angeles should have done. I guess the only one would be the [Los
Angeles] County Museum [of Art]; of course, Pasadena [the Norton Simon
Museum] has changed in character, and the Long Beach Museum [of Art]
died aborning.
-
GOODWIN:
- Probably the [Los Angeles] Municipal Art Gallery has done more for Los
Angeles artists than any institution.
-
GARVER:
- Have you interviewed her? She's somebody else, you know. She has a
long—we're speaking of Josine Starrells, and Josine would be most
interesting, if you could keep her focused, because she has dealt with
at least three institutions of very different sorts. I think to get her
on the subject of both the Municipal Gallery and certainly the Litton
Center, which she ran in its declining days, would be very important.
Why was it that Bart Litton—you know, this captain of industry—set out
to build a center for the visual arts, at a time when, let's say, the
mood was even more Philistine than it is now? I just wanted to say that
Newport is helped by this proximity. It is also hindered, in that much
of the collectors' energies simply go to Los Angeles. So there might be
a time when, if you were the only thing in the area, you might be able
to get a show. But, no, the circulating agencies, even the corporate
funders, which have now become quite a critical factor, will say, "We
want that show to go to Los Angeles and not to Newport." You asked me
about corporations, and I think down here, because this is such a
business-oriented area, and there's such corporate richness, that this
is where the new support is going to have to come. Pacific Mutual, which
is a mutual insurance company, is constrained by insurance laws from
making charitable contributions of any size, because they are a
policy-owner-held company, and the maximum amount of money possible must
be returned to the policyholders. Yet they have made a commitment of a
quarter-million dollars, 1 percent of the cost of their new
construction, for public sculpture. So I think there will be three
California sculptors and one New York sculptor, I hope, working very
creatively with the architect and landscape architect in this project.
-
GOODWIN:
- Are you a consultant?
-
GARVER:
- Yes, I've been a consultant, and they've bought what I've recommended.
They've accepted my ideas to date. The artists will be working, perhaps,
more closely with the architect and landscape architect than is
generally the case when a building is finished and you get somebody to
come in and stick up a piece. I'm hoping that relationship will be as
satisfactory as it has been previously. But I think right now Henry
Segerstrom, for instance, one of the owners of the Segerstrom
Corporation that's developing South Coast Plaza, has become very
interested in public art. He apparently has commissioned Isamu Noguchi
at, we know, a very substantial, six-figure price, to develop a
sculpture garden of some size between two buildings now under
construction. He has bought other work; he did give the land on which
South Coast Repertory Company is built, as the Irvine Company gave the
land on which the Newport Harbor Art Museum is built. Henry has also
pledged the land on which the Music Center will be built, and I see the
Music Center as being very key to the future development of the arts in
Orange County, because it's nominally a $50 million project. Well,
nothing of this scale has been undertaken here, even though there's no
reason to think it could not be, and I think that it—it's going to take
fund raising of a scale, effort, complexity, and, most importantly, full
county commitment that has not before been seen. I think that in the
case of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Henry thinks it's rather
provincial, in part because of its name but also, in part, because it's
nestled right down along the coast and is under the wing of the Irvine
Company and under the wing, certainly, as I've adequately demonstrated,
of a small group of coastal folks who hardly recognize the existence of
money in north Orange County, much less the existence of any people of
"quality" who might live there and who might benefit the museum. I think
that we've had several substantial corporate pledges to Newport, I think
that if they can get several major corporate pledges to the Music
Center—pledges of a half a million dollars, a million dollars, and
better—this will change the complexion of the arts in Orange County, It
will also change the complexion of arts funding, I think, in that one
reason there's been a relatively low level of support here is that the
corporations of the county itself have not been blackmailing their
peers. The first such major grant for programs, in a sense, was the one
which I helped engineer from Philip Morris Incorporated, through Mission
Viejo, which is a building and development subsidiary. They gave $25,000
to the Newport Harbor Art Museum; another $40,000 or $50,000 of
corporate cash fell in behind that. And Newport raised about $85,000
clear for the matching of an NEA [National Endowment for the Arts]
challenge grant for operations, and some for acquisitions. So I think
that if corporations, which are so exceptionally wealthy here, through
their senior executives, finally catch on, this will most probably be
the answer, because it's not going to come from any major sugar daddy,
although there are plenty of those sugar daddies here, as we know.
There's an enormous amount of money, a lot of it very new money and a
lot of it very rapidly made money. But I've also been intrigued to
listen to some of these parvenus talk about their money when they have
been asked to make ongoing contributions to the Newport Harbor Art
Museum. It's very interesting to hear Nancy Otting, for instance, who
was given $7 million in General Telephone and Electronics stock by her
father say, "I can't make a long-term pledge, because what would happen
if I lost all my money?" Or a similar statement as that from Jack Shea,
who is, I would imagine, a much better businessman than all of that, and
he will not, one imagines, lose all his money. But still that easy come
and the specter of easy go is there. I think the answer lies in the
corporation, lies in some major corporate contributions. We'll see. I
wanted to talk a little bit about collections. I think that my own major
interest has been in the area of exhibitions, and so I think that's
another reason that [the] Madison [Art Center] has interested me. I
think that Madison, while it has a larger collection, it's a much more
diffuse collection than Newport's, and perhaps there should be some
selective deaccessioning and purchases of other things. But Madison's
primarily, I think, an exhibition and programmatic entity, at least for
the present. Here, there has been a great deal of verbal interest in
developing collections. In fact, I would say that that has been rather
shallowly based, and while there are a couple of respectable
collectors—I'll give you some examples—their interest in collecting, I
would say, is for reasons of investment and validation and not a way in
which they demonstrate their commitment by actually acquiring works of
art. By way of example, David Steinmetz, who has given the museum a very
major Diebenkorn Ocean Park painting, also owns a
superlative Jasper Johns painting of the early sixties—one of the very
dark-gray paintings, Jubilee. He has said that he
wants it to go to the National Gallery [of Art] in Washington. Well,
he'll let his small-fry paintings come to Newport, but he isn't about to
give that painting to them. He wants them to buy it. I think the same
could be said of Jack Shea, who has made very major acquisitions for
himself but has been very, very penurious with the museum. He has said
time and time again he wants to see the museum collect, and it's the
most important aspect of the museum, as far as he is concerned. He made
us rewrite this beliefs document so that the acquisition of important
New York or national figures could be made by purchase as well as by
gift. But on the other hand, his single donation to the museum that I
know of to date has been the Jack Zajac, which he obtained at half price
through a two-sculpture purchase. It was sort of, "Buy this one at
virtually full price," which was a much larger piece, "and get this
smaller one at half price, and we will give you"—as the dealer did—"a
certificate attesting to its fair market value at twice that price." An
incident that came up may also delineate this for you. We had a small
exhibition, just two pieces, of George Segal: Blue
Woman behind Blue Door and Hot Dog
Stand. Hot Dog Stand was a very major piece.
There was a little box with a sort of ugly, multicolored, fluorescent
lit ceiling. It was a black box, open on one side, and in the front
there was a white plaster figure behind and some serving utensils,
steamers, and so on. The figure standing in front ordering the hot dog
was Martin Friedman, director of the Walker Art Center. Friedman had
described this piece, and his participation in its fabrication at length
in his recent catalog for a Segal exhibition. It came to us, it was for
sale, the price was $40,000; we negotiated a little bit. Jack loved the
piece. He went back to his home in Palm Springs, measured his bedroom,
and finally, regrettably, decided that he just couldn't accommodate it.
David Steinmetz was very enthusiastic about the piece, and I asked
David, as somebody who was very interested, and as a major donor to the
museum's collections, would he work on several people to see if we could
acquire the piece. Well, we approached one person to see if he would do
it entirely, and the meaning of the piece was far beyond him; so he had
to say no. Then we began to try and put together piecemeal support. Jack
Shea, who I believe could have purchased the entire piece at $40,000
without thinking twice, allowed as how he might commit $2,000 to the
project. [laughter] And I think we finally got something like, oh,
$6,500. I spoke to several people who said they were not interested. If
I could have gotten $20,000, I would have gone to the acquisition
council for the other twenty, but I couldn't get $10,000 or, maybe,
$7,500 Henry Hopkins came down from the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, saw the piece, and said, "What's its status?" I said, "We had it on
reserve." He said, "Please, if you don't buy it, let me know." So, when
it was obvious there was nothing we could do, I called him up, and the
piece is now on exhibition up there. A similar effort: there was a very
major Joseph Raffael painting here, Black Spring,
the largest painting he's ever made. It comes in three sections, which
bothered some people slightly, although it would be virtually impossible
to move without having it come apart. I think it's a very important
painting. It was offered to us at a price that had been paid for it
several years before by the private collectors who had commissioned it
for their home. It was $36,000. I said, "Raffael is so popular; I think
this is a very good painting. I think we should try and finance it by
public—"
-
GOODWIN:
- —subscription.
-
GARVER:
- —public subscription, exactly. That's right, you know, the pennies and
dimes of schoolchildren, [laughter] So we worked out an arrangement
whereby we would try to do this. We would borrow the painting, and at
the end, say, of ninety days, three or four months of this campaign, we
would either decide we had been successful, we would try and sell some
sections of it privately, obviously, internally, or we would put a box
out in front of it. Museums have done this. I can recall when I said
that, after a certain point, we would have to decide if it was go or no
go, and if it was go, the board would have to commit themselves to this
project. Somebody on the board was just incredulous, and they said, "You
mean that we will be committed to this project if we decide to go with
it?" I said yes, and [the response was], "Forget it." There was one
person on the board who agreed to put up $100 [laughter], even though
that [Raffael] had been an enormously popular show, and a couple of
people locally have since acquired Raffaels. Most recently—and I thought
this most probably would really fly, because it was big enough and it
didn't come from me. A group went over to France, a wine and art tour,
and they visited [Alexander] Calder's studio at Sache, and there were
half a dozen major pieces outside. There was a piece everyone just
loved—and, I must say, a very beautiful piece—Three
Wings, of 1963. The price—it went up while they were
talking—stabilized at a quarter-million dollars, but that would include
delivery to Newport. A group informally formed, the idea being to sell
shares at $5,000 apiece? hold the piece, without indicating that it
would be a gift to Newport; and then, hopefully, after it had increased
two or three times in value, give the piece to Newport and take the tax
write-off. The alternatives, of course, would be to sell it or give it
elsewhere. I mean, it was not a sure thing at all, nor could that be put
in writing. Well, there was a lawyer who had worked on this and was
doing it. There was a meeting or two, I think, to work on this, but it
just fell on its face. I don't know why; I don't know if it was the
personalities. This was just at the time, just shortly before I left; so
I have not been close to the project. It may still be alive, but I know
that they would have had to have extended the reserve many times on it,
because this was back in January and early February. So the way, now, in
which money has been raised for collections has been NEA, matched by the
acquisition council, who give some sort of annual party. But the
acquisition council wants to vote on everything that's acquired, and so
they become not so interested, say, in less-validated works at a lower
price with a greater appreciation—and certainly also a higher risk. But
they want the real validated items. So last year, the last year they did
this, they—I think they had about $50,000—bought an $18,000,
late-fifties Sam Francis gouache, a beautiful piece? they bought a 1960
Elmer Bischoff, a superb painting? and they financed the Loren Masden
sculpture, and there was a problem about that, because the cost of
fabrication had not really been calculated, and that was going to come
to more than they had budgeted. We had to take a mail poll, and there
were many people who were just outraged that "every single factor had
not been considered," And that was perhaps my fault, in not putting a
little extra money in there and so on. We had a set price for most of
the fabrication, but installing it on the museum's walls was something
of a greater problem.
-
GOODWIN:
- I think it's terrifically ironic that the museum's collectors council
has accomplished more than the trustees, in terms of building the
collection.
-
GARVER:
- Well, they have. But, in fact, aside from them, in terms of outright
gift, we've gotten much more from outside this past year, the end of
'79. We got gifts from New York, from one of these guys who assembles
stuff and then packages them and sends them out. [We got] a lot of very
good prints, and a collector or two in Los Angeles and one or two
dealers in New York sent stuff our way. Nothing—and I think literally
nothing—came from the Board of Trustees. Another example of this I
suppose, Ben Deane, who is very active and did make a major
building-fund contribution, and who is very effective at getting other
contributions. He wouldn't let people slip off the line. But somewhere
along the line, as the building was being built, Ben, I think, pledged,
in cash, $100,000. He made a $50,000 contribution and then came to the
board—I don't know if he was feeling a bit pinched or what—and offered
to give the museum his superlative Gaston Lachaise Standing Woman: Elevation—you know, the very bosomy woman with
her hands sort of raised in a circling gesture over her head. There were
several people who were opposed to that. Apparently one or two of the
outspoken women on the board said, "Well, if Deane's going to get away
with this, I'll cancel my pledge." So Ben was quite stung by this in two
ways. One, that he was criticized by women, and he has a great deal of
trouble in his relationships to women, as again, parenthetically, do
many of these captains of industry on the board, who, in having bought
their wives' silence and loyalty through money, gifts, trips—the bird in
the gilded cage—and who have bought their employees' loyalty, silence,
and efficiency by money, cannot deal with anyone questioning them,
particularly other women. This is a problem that I feel is central to
Ben's personality. Well, Ben was deeply stung. There were later on
efforts made by some on the board of trustees to buy the piece. Ben, I
think, made an offer later to the museum of several works of sculpture
as a gift, if they would buy this piece for $50,000. Of course, I
believe that this is most probably illegal, as you would be making money
through your relationship to a not-for-profit board. Obviously, the
price he was offering it at was a great deal less than the market, and
perhaps that could be argued. But this did not take place, and Ben
rather huffily withdrew and subsequently sold the piece for, I
understand, more than $200,000 to the Richmond Museum of Fine Arts in
Virginia, where I saw it kind of standing in a corner. But he
subsequently gave some additional sculpture to the museum, including a
rather nice Jean Dubuffet; a Rodin, one of the small nude Balzacs, a late cast; and a perfectly horrific
Marino Marini, the Flower Cart, which he had
apparently bought from Marlborough Roma after a very good lunch hosted
by their very effective and, one gathers, very attractive woman who runs
the gallery there. He bought it sight unseen and has required—he said
that it may be sold; he knows that it's not a good piece—that it be
shown for a year in the sculpture garden, and it's been over that. I do
hope that my successor will be able to crate it and send it off for
auction.
-
GOODWIN:
- It was at UCLA at one time.
-
GARVER:
- Yes, that's right. It was right there at the steps by the [Fredrick S. 3
Wight Art Gallery. It was bought, I believe, for the lobby of a proposed
hotel that never took place, and it is, in my estimation, a very weak
piece of sculpture.
-
GOODWIN:
- We haven't mentioned on tape Sterling Holloway.
-
GARVER:
- We haven't? Well, I'll do that. I just want to see if there are any
other things—there's one other matter on the issue of collecting, before
we get to Sterling. You had mentioned the museum's beginning to collect
photography, and I think this brings up another example of the
narrowness of the collecting interest here. Photography's a great
interest of mine. I've organized a number of exhibitions. I did not want
to collect photography one piece at a time, or have five pieces in the
collection. In fact, we had one or two, I think, that came in just after
the museum opened as gifts from Susan Spiritus, the photo dealer. It
happened that in late '78, we received, right out of the blue—it was
mid-December, and I was out of town—a call from Walker Smith of Newport
Beach, who is one of the trustees of the T.B. Walker Foundation of
California, That, of course, is a branch or offshoot of the T.B. Walker
Foundation of Minneapolis that underwrites and supports the Walker Art
Center. So many of the Walkers in the clan had moved to California that
they had opened a division of the foundation, if I may say that, based
in San Francisco and involved primarily with California philanthropies.
Smith inquired if we were interested in receiving a grant of about $2,
500, and what projects did we have that we could suggest to the board
when it met very shortly thereafter in San Francisco. Two or three
projects were outlined by, I guess, the development person, and one of
those was helping match the NEA acquisitions grant. And they took that.
Well, that was exactly what I was looking for, because that gave me
$2,500 of their money and $2,500 of NEA money that did not have to go
through the acquisition council. So I worked with Susan Spiritus, who
was very public spirited and worked very hard. Of course, it was
enlightened self-interest on her part, because developing a collection
in Newport would help her gallery business. But she worked with many
other dealers and so on in putting together a package. We decided on
some of the people whom we wanted to see, and I wrote a number of other
museum people, just to get their input as to how one might start, and
received some interesting responses. She and her husband contributed a
number of other things. Several other people contributed, encouraged by
her. Walker and Molly Smith were so revved up by it that they
contributed, I think, securities worth another $3,000 or so. So really
we spent, I think, about $8,000. We got a lot of extra work as gifts. We
acquired some gifts from portfolios from New York, in addition, and so
suddenly we had quite a respectable small collection, enough to hang a
fifty-plus print exhibition as the introductory group. People were very
pleased, but Jack Shea, on the other hand, could not understand—"Why are
you collecting photography?" To him it was completely unimportant,
because it was out of his own personal involvement with art, which, as I
say, is very narrowly based, following his brother's precedent. His
brother, George Shea, had been a dealer in Minneapolis, being
essentially of the Leo Castelli group of the sixties, with some Andre
Emmerich additions. So you have [Morris] Louis, [Frank] Stella,
[Ellsworth] Kelly, [Tom] Wesselmann, [Roy] Lichtenstein, [Cy] Twombly,
[Josef] Albers. Jack has, I think, a good eye, and there are some very
good things in the collection, but he is concerned only with the idea of
validation. And I think the Board and the acquisition council is also
concerned only with validation, with proving that they have bought the
right stuff. Now, maybe in the long run it may be that this
institution's collections will come to play a much larger part, but it
seems to me that with [the] Norton Simon [Museum] at one end—if he
doesn't sell all the modern stuff but lends some of it to his sister for
the new museum, we shall see—but with Norton Simon at one end and with
the downtown museum of modern art at the other, and with new activity
and, I think, strong and very directed leadership at the County Museum,
that it's going to be very hard to build a major collection, a
collection that people are really going to want to come down to Newport
to see. Photography is one area that I think could be developed
relatively inexpensively. There is no museum that is involved locally.
Pasadena [the Norton Simon Museum] has quite a good collection, but it's
not seen, and I think that's a collection they will not sell off for a
while. One might very well approach Simon with the idea of borrowing it
or maybe even purchasing it. That would be less appealing.
-
GOODWIN:
- Wasn't Gerry Nordland interested in photography while he was still at
UCLA?
-
GARVER:
- I didn't think so. They've had an occasional exhibition, but I don't
think it's a major area of his interest. The only collections there, I
think, are in the Grunwald [Center for the Graphic Arts]. I don't think
they have collections other than graphic arts, but photography would fit
in that. But I've never heard that Maurice Bloch is particularly
interested. I think they've done an occasional photo show, but I think
more from the standpoint of, "It's out there and it should be seen,"
rather than any burning commitment. No major institution, I guess, other
than Newport, shows photography, really. To give you one final example,
I think, of the problems of being adjacent to a major city, as we are,
would be the Ansel Adams retrospective, of course, that's received such
to-do recently; organized by the Museum of Modern Art. When I heard
about that show, I called John Szarkowski, who is an old friend, the
director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, to
see if I could get it, and, alas, it was going to the County Museum. Has
it been there yet?
-
GOODWIN:
- No. I think in another year or something.
-
GARVER:
- Well, I was, bluntly, pissed off. I said, "John, how could this happen?"
And he said, "Well, these major shows are circulated in a little
different way." So that the County Museum, which doesn't give a
damn—supposedly, they've bought one or two photo portfolios, and that's
it,, in terms of their collections—suddenly is offered the plum
exhibitions. That's the way it is here and the way, clearly, it will be
in Madison, although I may have better luck there, because, being a
little further away from either Chicago or Milwaukee, yet still being a
major university city and a state capital, I may be able to pick up an
occasional show on those grounds. We'll see. You asked me about
Sterling, and I thought that we had discussed the fact that Sterling was
influential in my getting the job during Newport One, my first tenure
out here.
-
GOODWIN:
- That was said off tape.
-
GARVER:
- Oh, it was? Well, at the time I had decided to look for another job,
when I'd been at Brandeis [University] more than five years. I simply
started by writing letters, first to the museum people I knew and then
to museum people I didn't know, throughout the country. I'd written a
letter to Maurice Tuchman, and perhaps we corresponded, I don't remember
now. My letter arrived on Tuchman's desk about the same time that
Sterling arrived in Tuchman's office, and Maurice handed Sterling the
letter and said, "Well, you're looking for somebody down there to take
over the Pavilion gallery, and this guy looks like he's got a good
resume, and maybe he'd be good." So Sterling passed on that information
to the woman who was then president of the Board, and we began
negotiating. Sterling's relationship to the Fine Arts Patrons of Newport
Harbor was much closer than. it ever was to the Newport Harbor Art
Museum. Sterling was one of several men who were on the Board as
advisers. Perhaps Holloway was the best collector in Orange County in
the sixties. [Other men on the Board were] Tom Leavitt, who was then, I
guess, director of the Santa Barbara Museum [of Art], and Gerry
Nordland, who, I guess, was in San Francisco. He would come down
periodically for Board meetings. But Sterling had been brought into the
organization, I think, by Sue Green, who now is at either the University
of Delaware or the University of Maryland Art Gallery. She started with
the Fine Arts Patrons, then went to the County Museum, and then out
there, where she's been running the program. There 'was another woman,
who lived locally, Dorothy Curtis, who was also, I think, involved early
on with the Fine Arts Patrons, then went to work for the County Museum,
and I think she now lives in Hawaii, So there have, in fact, been
several people who have started in the Fine Arts Patrons, or in the
Newport Harbor Art Museum, as volunteers and have flown up to other
positions. Betty Gold, who runs the Arco Center for Visual Art is
another. And Betty Turnbull, who is in fact now the curator of
exhibitions and collections at Newport, which is the highest-paid
curatorial position, started there as a volunteer, and then was acting
director, I think either once or twice, when the museum was without a
director.
-
GOODWIN:
- Did you have any contact with Holloway after you came to Newport?
-
GARVER:
- Well, I certainly met him, and he assisted us on an exhibition called
"From Silents to Cinemascope: The Seven Stages of Hollywood," which was
perhaps the most historical and non-art show that the museum has done,
in my experience, anyway. It was sort of a history of, or a show of the
artifacts of the cinema, and I think it was a rather erratic exhibition,
in terms of selection and so on. Those are very tough shows to do. But
still, for all its problems, I think it was a very interesting
exhibition. We had the little pocket diary that W. C. Fields would write
words in that caught his ear, and then he would look up their meanings
and memorize them. Of course, he was unlettered, but he had a remarkable
vocabulary because he really worked at it. The boots that Charlie
Chaplin gnawed on in The Gold Rush. There were
film clips during that show. I went over to, I think, Palm Desert, right
near Palm Springs, and we collected Busby Berkeley and his fifth wife,
living then in very straitened circumstances. We had an evening with
Busby Berkeley and Ruby Keeler, and we did it at an auditorium at Orange
Coast College. It was half-full, which is really—what a shame. We had an
evening with Harold Lloyd later, and we did that at a theater down near
the Pavilion. We took it over for one night. That was full, but we
really made an effort to do that. But with Busby Berkeley—"Just call me
Buzz"—and Ruby Keeler, here was a rare wine, a really rare vintage. They
were both there. Ruby Keeler lives down here, and Berkeley worked with
her. We'd gotten, I guess, all his old films from Warner Brothers—I
think they were Warner Brothers, he worked for Metro [Goldwyn-Mayer]
later—all the films of the thirties. We'd rented them all at some high
price. Then we had a retired film editor down here, and he went through
with Berkeley, and I spent a day just listening to the two of these
guys. I mean, that in itself was an experience, listening to how these
things were made. And Berkeley went through and cut out all of the
production numbers. So it was great. Berkeley insisted that I wear a
tuxedo, and he wore a tuxedo, and he talked—a wonderful sort of
garrulous old man. It was just a splendid experience.
-
GOODWIN:
- What did Holloway have in his art collection?
-
GARVER:
- Well, Sterling was not—I should finish on this score, I guess. Sterling,
I think, helped on that [Hollywood exhibition], and there was another
exhibition, and I can't now remember what it was. We were still in the
Pavilion, and it was one of these shows that had gotten the ladies'
noses out of joint. You have a whole list of them here.
-
GOODWIN:
- Was it "For Children Only"?
-
GARVER:
- No, that was the first show he did—"For Children Only"—and of course
everyone loved it. It was for kids, and the adults couldn't go in unless
they were accompanied by a kid. This was done in the early sixties, and
he had achieved just fabulous loans; I mean, the sort of stuff, a Renoir
and so on, you absolutely could not have gotten a few years later. This
catalog, by the way, The Audacious Years:
[1961-1971], has really annoyed me, and I realize that there was
the implication of professional jealousy here, where it would say,
"Organized for the Newport Harbor Art Museum by Betty Turnbull," then
another show would say, "Organized by the Newport Harbor Art Museum
under the direction of Thomas H. Garver." I mean, it doesn't say that
organized the show. But let's say that that's an element of professional
jealousy. Well, I don't see now what the exhibition might have been that
created some slight brouhaha.
1.14. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO AUGUST 13, 1980
-
GARVER:
- In thinking about it, I don't think it was a specific show. But
certainly, in the early years of my tenure, it was much harder to sell
any new ideas, perhaps, although perhaps we were also a little more
daring then, too. It's hard to say. I certainly don't think that
"Newport Two," my second tenure here, was retardataire but perhaps some
of the things that we did as a matter of course in Newport Two, or in
the later seventies, were easier to take than in the later sixties.
There was a wider audience. There was less influence of some of the
really outspoken types. But I think that what happened then, as I recall
it was that there was such concern for, "Oh, why does art have to look
this awful way?" and "Why is it?" and "Oh, these dirty street people."
Who, of course, were the artists, who have come to the openings. And
"Why is it thus?" Somebody said, "Well, let's get Sterling [Holloway]. I
mean, he's so respected and so loved by everyone here. Why don't we get
Sterling to talk to the ladies on the Board." Because then it really was
the ladies on the Board. Sterling came up and spoke. Sterling is a very
passionate, feeling man. I think, as a collector, [he is] a very
personal collector who would buy things—you know, like most actors, it's
either feast or famine. He spoke, and the response was, "Yeah, well, why
does it have to be this way?" I mean, it was essentially as though he
had said nothing. [laughter] Let me give you another parenthetical
example of that There has been a man, Don Lagerberg a painter, chairman
of the [art] department at [California State University], Fullerton, who
has taught courses on art, mostly, I think, on modern and contemporary
art at the museum. He teaches a different course every year, and he has
been teaching now, I think, at Newport for twelve years. Dutifully those
ladies have turned out for twelve years, and they have not learned, as
nearly as I can see, one single thing If there's a problematic
exhibition, it is as though it was introduced to them for the first
time. You know, [it's as though] they've been hermetic. This was one of
the problems, I think, with Sterling, who said, To hell with them. They
are hermetic and intransigent and uncaring and unfeeling. And Sterling
was anything but that. His own collections—you asked me about
that—were—I would say that he collected most rapidly during the sixties.
In the seventies, and particularly now, he's in very frail health and
he's begun selling things, because he requires constant nursing
attention and so forth. Sterling also never married, and he has adopted
a much younger man as his son, for reasons of taxes and the estate and
continuity and so forth. But in the sixties, I think, he became very
interested in contemporary art, both locally and nationally. Betty Asher
feels that Sterling and she were very influential on one another, I
think that Betty introduced Sterling to a lot of artists that she was
beginning to see. He had [Roy] Lichtenstein, he had—it's a mostly
California collection, but with some very key pieces like—I want to say
Adam and Eve, but that isn't right. I was
just looking at it, a very famous [Edward] Kienholz piece of the figure
of a man's torso—
-
GOODWIN:
-
John Doe.
-
GARVER:
-
John Doe, that's right. Well, he has John Doe, and of course it has a great phallus
that comes out through the chest, which is rarely put on. It's on a
little baby buggy, a little stroller, and that sort of stovepipe phallus
piece is stored underneath. So it can be shown either mounted or
dismounted, as it were. [laughter] So he had that Kienholz, and he had a
couple of early and important Larry Bell boxes, when they were still
semi-silvered and not run through the famous machine. He had several
[Robert] Irwins. Early on, he was more involved, I think, in some of the
figurative people like [Rico] Lebrun, Elmer Bischoff and [Robert]
Cremean. Cremean made a sort of a sunscreen for the inside of his house,
which is down in south Laguna and which faces the ocean. This screen was
pivoted—I think there are four or five panels, so that you could look at
one side—you could open it and look out through the leaves of the
screen. You could close it one way and see one relief design. You could
swing it around the other way and see another relief design. He had a
small [Frank] Stella. He got involved with some of the ceramic people.
His front door, which no one uses—in part, I think, because of its
weight—is a John Mason. There's a couple of Kenny Prices, one of which
was broken by a photographer who swung his tripod around. Things were
always happening like that. One day when I was there a window washer had
come in and broken a pedestal to a Bell and scratched an Irwin. He had a
couple of Irwins, a [Nathan] Oliveira or two, some New York people, a
few Gemini [G.E.L.] items. He has the Claes Oldenburg Chrysler Air Flow. He had an early Joan Brown that I think is
on loan to Newport. The 1960 [Billy Al] Bengston and the 1960 [Elmer]
Bischoff that I mentioned, both were acquired by the acquisition
council, came from his collections and were offered to the museum at a
reasonable discount below the market. Both were superb pictures. But
Sterling, has not been particularly involved with Newport over the last
few years, in part because of his health and, I think also, because he
felt that the place was involved socially but not socially committed, To
which I think I would have to agree. He would appear periodically. The
last time I saw him he came in for lunch. I think he was there for lunch
or maybe to visit an exhibition. He's very close friends with Phyllis
Lutjeans, the curator of education, and, of course, with Betty Turnbull.
Betty and her husband, Glenn, and Sterling have traveled in Europe.
Betty said it was like traveling with two children; she had to do
everything. I can certainly imagine that with Sterling. [laughter] But I
think that he was a very important early influence for quality, for
avoiding the pitfalls of falling into creating an art association or
showing local artists, and for—and this, of course, is one of the key
problems—keeping the Newport Harbor Art Museum from becoming a Palm
Springs Desert Museum, a place in which the exhibitions are absolutely
secondary to the social panache and social activities. I understand that
the Palm Springs Museum now has a new director, someone I don't know,
I'll be looking forward to see if he can create and maintain the same
high funding level while improving the quality of the programs.
-
GOODWIN:
- What happened to the previous director?
-
GARVER:
- Fred Sleight, while he looked much younger, was in his mid-sixties, very
"hyper," and suffered two serious heart attacks, so serious that he
really couldn't continue. He had one, was recovering nicely, apparently
had just started to come back in to work—and that first one had been so
serious that if his doctor or somebody hadn't been there, he would have
been gone. He had another attack and felt that he just couldn't go on.
-
GOODWIN:
- Well, let's move on to your. Russian experience, [tape recorder turned
off]
-
GARVER:
- One of the perks, of course, in working in a large museum {aside from
your own future employment, as I mentioned earlier), is that other
things may fall into your lap. One of the things that fell into mine was
that the Fine Arts Museums [of San Francisco] became briefly involved
with the Metropolitan Museum in New York in creating exhibitions in
exchange with the Soviet Union. For the Fine Arts Museums, this lasted
only one exhibition, but in the cycle of exchanges, the Met had promised
the Soviet Union a show of American representational painting from the
late nineteenth century to the present. We were offered a chance at
working on the organization of that show with the Met. Of course, at
that time Henry Geldzahler was working at the Met, and because I was the
only person really, courant with contemporary art in the Fine Arts
Museums, I was working on it from the Fine Arts Museums' standpoint.
More than half of the things in the exhibition, which went from [Albert]
Bierstadt and Worthington Whittredge and [Thomas] Eakins and [Winslow]
Homer up to people like [Joseph] Raffael and [Robert] Bechtle and Chuck
Close and Richard Estes and Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein and so on,
were from the Met's own collections. So, very much right up to time, the
Met handled most of the organization of the show. Henry and I worked on
writing a catalog together that was divided into several sections, and
that was an interesting experience, because I think Henry is a very
astute politician. I've known him since 1961; I've respected him. He is
not an administrator and tends to be academically lazy, but he gets good
administrators to work for him. But he is a great thinker, a real idea
man with real style. Much of the catalog, as he originally wrote it, was
bootlegged out of previous things that he had written for the Met,
handbooks for the Met, and was written in such a way as to keep making
references to abstraction and abstract expressionism, so that, in a way,
the hierarchy of quality of a painter might be set in relation to that
painter's relationship to abstract expressionism, which wasn't
represented in the show and wasn't well known in the Soviet Union. Well,
I got him to rewrite some of these portions of the catalog, and I
rewrote some of what he had written, and he rewrote some of what I
wrote. But, in fact, his lover and companion, the man with whom he
lives, Christopher Scott, handled the editing of what we had both
written—and very effectively, too. For the final introduction, Henry had
written a page and a half, and I took that and incorporated it into
about seven and a half or eight pages, and Christopher edited that to
about four, which was very succinct and right to the point. I had
thought we were going to write something major—you know, I would do
something on "Why the West?" but it didn't turn out that way. But
anyway, the show was organized in '76 and started touring in '77, and
then I came down here in September of '77. The show then went to three
Russian museums: the Pushkin [Museum] in Moscow, the [State] Hermitage
[Museum] in Leningrad, and the [Byelorussian] Museum of Fine Arts in
Minsk. I had been promised a trip to move the show from one place to
another, but I was then an employee of the Fine Arts Museums. So I tried
to see if I could collect the trip anyway, and it turned out yes,
because no one in San Francisco wanted to go to Russia for several
weeks. So I went with Lowery Sims, who is an assistant curator of
twentieth-century art from the Met, and another woman who is in the
conservation department. I can't remember her name. We went in early May
of '78 to Leningrad to close the show there, pack it, and move it to
Minsk, All of this, it was expected, would take about ten days or maybe
two weeks. I thought I might spend about three weeks total in Russia,
because I had hoped to visit Moscow for a few days as well. Well, we got
to Leningrad just before Victory Day, which is May 9, the day the
Germans surrendered. Of course, I'd read Harrison Salisbury's book The 900 Days and had been very much aware and was
very moved by the experience, of being in Leningrad, just as I was also
very moved by the experience of walking through, I think, the Music Room
and into the Grand Hall and finding a show that I had helped organize on
exhibition in the Hermitage in Leningrad. It was a very interesting
experience. I talked to a number of the people who spoke English who
were visiting the show. Several of them said, "Why is there no abstract
art here?" [laughter] They were knowledgeable. I said, "Because the
Ministry of Culture does not want any abstract art here." And they
understood that perfectly. We were wonderfully well received and
entertained. The spring was exceptionally cold that year, and the ice
was still going out of the Neva [River] when I left a couple of weeks
later. But, you know, the circus, the ballet, the opera, visits that
were wonderful and personal. I knew a couple of curators there. Larissa
Dukelskaya, who is curator of English graphics, had come with a show
from Leningrad, and she took me on a walking tour of Dostoevsky's
Leningrad. We were just wonderfully well treated. I think we were better
treated than, in my recollection, we treated the Russians when they came
here, which is a little lesson to be remembered. But we were there as
guests, sort of on a per diem supplied by the Ministry of Culture. We
got our free hotel room, free tickets to the various events, and fifteen
rubles a day. There were two shipments of the show that were made, and
the way in which they crate and pack, I think, was quite interesting. Of
course, everything had been crated in the United States. But there are
no elevators in—I think there may be two very small passenger elevators
in the Hermitage. Of course, these are state rooms, and it's very
interesting to see that these rooms have, perhaps, twenty-five foot high
ceilings—maybe even higher—great chandeliers, columns, malachite, bronze
dore bases and capitals. So, running around all of this, at a height of
maybe nine feet, a series of wall panels is set up that kind of box in
all the architecture, which above nine feet was perfectly obvious. From
these wall panels they hang fluorescent lights that come out on a
horizontal—it would be a little like a soffit and a fascia—and there are
fluorescent lights built into this. So, in some cases, there are higher
panels, because we had some bigger pictures. But even so, you would come
in, and there would be this little ribbon of light. The Russians use
fluorescent light everywhere because it's cheap, it's economical, but
their units buzz a lot. You know, you hear this [buzzing sound]. And the
tubes' aren't the same color. Then kind of under this are all the
pictures. And then you look down at the floor, which is just made of
forty different kinds of wood, and it's just this way and that way, and
it's just exceptional. They would use Russian army cadets—these were
guys who had been in the army. You know, they go in, they have universal
military service at eighteen, and they would be available, essentially,
for public service as well. So these cadets would come in and, like
youth everywhere, they were sort of callow-youth standing around in
their jackboots and olive-drab wool uniforms. They would carry up the
smaller boxes empty. The Hermitage packing crew would pack them, and
then the cadets would carry them down full. In some cases, they would
carry down the larger paintings; they were packed in a back hallway. But
like Madison, I have to tell you, the Hermitage has no loading dock.
[laughter] There's sort of a ramp built in an old stairway in an inner
courtyard. But they, also like most centralized bureaucracies, had a lot
of kids—I'd say of about late teens to late twenties—who were working on
packing the art. As I understand it, many of them are actually art
students and art history students. They were the packing crew. They were
under the supervision of two other younger men who were art history
students and who were very good packers. They did most of the work.
These other guys would sort of open the lids and put in all the extra
screws after the thing was packed. But these two guys were really first
rate. I had brought two twelve-foot American tape measures that measured
in both metric and English, they had a little clip so that you could
wear it on your belt. Well, I gave these two [tape measures] to these
two guys. I was going to give one in Leningrad and the other in Minsk,
but these two guys in Leningrad were so good, I gave them to them, and
they wore them rather like a medal on their breast pockets. [laughter]
They were very proud of them. I bought some vodka for one of them from
the beryoshka shop, the sort of hard-currency shop, but he wanted
imported Scotch whiskey, which they can't buy. So the two ladies who
accompanied me were happy to drink the vodka, and I just bought another
bottle of Scotch. The show traveled on the Bug Express, named for the
Bug River. This was a train that left the Vitebsk station, a wonderful
art-nouveau station, at about three-thirty in the afternoon, and I think
ended in, I've forgotten, Estonia or Lithuania. It would swing south and
west through Vitebsk, Minsk, and then swing a little bit further west
and come up in wherever its destination was. It was a huge train, jam
packed. Of course, many more, people travel by train there than here. We
had a special car put on the train, which is worth a little description,
because it was a car used to move the political bigwigs' fancy cars,
Chaikas and Zils, between towns. One whole end of the car opened up, and
a ramp came down; so you could load objects that were the full height of
the car. It had its own attendant, who had his own little room and a
little samovar and so on. We loaded that up and sent the shipment off.
The car came back on the train the next day, and the third day I took
the second shipment out. Lowery and the conservator from the Met
traveled with the first shipment. I was invited by the American.
consulate to visit some dissident artists, and there were supposed to
have been some events where we met artists and so on. The Ministry of
Culture kept all of that at bay. Alice Neel and Alex Katz were supposed
to have come to Leningrad and to Minsk, and they never did. I've
forgotten now if they made it to Moscow or not, but the Ministry of
Culture stalled all of this. I think that, in fact, Katz, anyway, did
get to Moscow and met with some of the artists. But I went out to a
wonderful old house out in the country, I guess it was a dacha. I
visited with several artists in Leningrad as well, one of whom had lost
his official position, teaching in graphics, although he was still
hanging on to his studio. If you follow the party line, of course, you
get everything. Of course, too, to us, I think the dissident work would
be absolutely pale and tame. It essentially did not follow the realist
party line [which] I think is calculated, as I look at the art. It's no
longer calculated to glorify Marxism-Leninism and to glorify the Soviet
way of life so much as it is simply to make art irrelevant. Art, of
course, has a strong tradition of service to the state in Russia and,
later, the Soviet Union, but, to me, the modern academic art I saw was
essentially frivolous. Landscapes, still lifes, and, yes, there would
certainly be Soyuz and cosmonauts and that sort of thing. There was a
great deal of painting done, I think, after the war and even today, that
commemorated the "Great Patriotic War" [World War II], the memory of the
Great Patriotic War, the constant need for the motherland to be ever
prepared. The achievements and suffering of the past are always kept
before the Russian people, all the time. So many of the television films
I saw and the films I saw advertised dealt with the war, or they dealt
with military service. In one [television film] I saw, a young boy goes
off—he's eighteen—into the service. He meets a girl. I'm trying to
remember how it is; he sort of sneaks out Of camp and sees her. He's
distracted; he screws up his searchlight. His comrades discover this and
discover what's happening. They work with him to fix the
searchlight—he's dropped a wrench into the mechanism. [laughter] The
story is that. Of course, as a hot-blooded young man, you would be
distracted by this young girl, but obviously the needs of the motherland
come first. He is convinced of this, serves his unit well, and goes on
with the girl and fades into the darkness [laughter], or into the west
or east. Certainly the emphasis on. Victory bay, the emphasis on every
monument, every statue of Marx and Lenin and, less frequently, Engels,
even little monuments—they have preserved, in a couple of places, the
stenciled warnings that were put up during the war to warn people,
"Don't walk on this side of the street, because German shelling will hit
here. Walk on the other side." Some of these have been preserved.
There's a little shelf for flowers, and people leave flowers everywhere.
Tulips were just coming into season then, and I was never without them
in my hospital room. I'll get to that in a moment. But they would be a
very formidable foe, and they're a very passionate people. As somebody
said, the Jewish mother is the Russian mother, and so often that is
exactly, the case, because so many Jews in this country are Russians by
prior nationality. You see this sort of passion, this kind of real
willingness to suffer. The curator of medieval art, Marta
Kryshanowskaya, and her last name is very difficult to pronounce,
invited the three of us for a cold supper at her apartment. We thought
this would be very light refreshment; so we ate dinner and then came
there, and it was a splendid meal zakuska, which is the sort of hors
d'oeuvres and cold specialities. It was absolutely superb. We ate again.
[laughter] She had lived in that apartment since the mid-thirties. Her
grandmother had died in that apartment during the siege. It was so cold
at that time that they huddled in the kitchen, which was a space perhaps
seven by ten. The family lived in there; her mother and father and her
grandmother, too, were then living. But she died and was put in a
bedroom and stayed there a month until they could get her out. [She
remained] perfectly frozen—I mean, just preserved. We went to the home
of Albert Kostenevich, who is the chief curator of Western art at the
Hermitage. [He is] very, very interested in contemporary American art,
has never been able to travel outside of the country, because, while
he's married, he's still regarded as not quite politically correct. But
he receives material regularly. Again, [we were] warmly and very
thoughtfully treated. Well, the visit to the dissident artists was
curious, too, because one of them wanted to sell me quite a number of
icons, but preferably for American dollars, which he wanted to use to
emigrate. Then I took the train, the Bug Express. We got to Minsk,
unloaded it—we were staying at a hotel outside of town, because the
Ministry of Culture had not notified the museum when the show was
arriving; so they had not made hotel arrangements, and there was a huge
congress going on there. So we stayed at the Yunost hotel, the "youth"
hotel, a place where socialist youths were brought from the Eastern bloc
countries and Russia as well. I was there two days. They had painted my
room, and the fumes were overpowering. I woke up one morning, and I can
remember thinking I felt good but that I had a little tingling in my
leg. This got worse, and within an hour I had a very high fever. I'm
going to compress this part of the story, because, while it was a large
part of my Russian experience, it took place in a hospital, Hospital
Number Four, at—I love this—110 Rosa Luxemburg Street [laughter] in
Minsk. I had what was diagnosed as a thrombophlebitis, and I was—
-
GOODWIN:
- That was related to your childhood—
-
GARVER:
- Well, I had vein trouble in one leg, in my left leg. This had been
ligated, at the Mayo Clinic in the mid-fifties. It's happened to me
twice since. Once, serious enough to put me in the hospital for a short
period, and once I just spent several days in bed. It's not a thrombosis
or a clot but is apparently a backup of the lymphatic system, which
comes about during periods of great physical stress, and certainly I'd
been under a lot of physical stress in Leningrad. So, to make a long
story short, I spent twenty-six days in a Russian hospital, where I was
very well treated. The food was absolutely abysmal and, I think, more
than being very unpalatable, was very unbalanced by our standards—a
breakfast of cream of wheat, mashed potatoes, and fried fish or
something of that sort. The only fresh vegetable I got was cabbage, and
it was prepared in what I came to describe as "rancid oil." It had a
sort of rancid flavor to it. In fact, I found that to be quite inedible,
and in one case, somebody brought in some cucumbers in sour cream which
was superb, and I would. sort of mix this together, and then it was all
right. But I was very well treated by the staff, communicated with them
in halting German, with the exception of one young doctor who spoke
fluent English, with whom I carried on a continuing correspondence until
[the invasion of] Afghanistan. I've cabled him twice and written him
once or twice, and there has been no response. So I'm inclined to think
that either he cannot respond or my communications have not gotten
through. He was a very good Marxist-Leninist; we did not discuss
politics, really. We discussed differences of lifestyle, and he
encouraged me, after I left the hospital—originally I was just going to
get out of the country. He said, "But you cannot leave." I mean, he was
so enthusiastic for his country. "You must stay. We must have a few days
of sightseeing." And indeed, we had a couple of sightseeing days in
Minsk, where I got out to what I can only describe as the memorial at
Katyn, which was a village burned by the Germans, but only one of 185
villages burned, and the peasants murdered, by the Germans in
Byelorussia alone. Then I went back and saw the show installed. All in
all, I think my hospital experiences are not necessarily noteworthy,
aside from the low point of the food. There were certainly, I think, a
number of high points. I was lent a shortwave radio and listened to the
BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] World Service, which is certainly
one of England's greatest exports, I wrote them to that effect and have
since bought a shortwave radio. The people were very nice to me; I was
never without flowers. There were one or two of the hospital orderly
staff who were very good about helping me shave and wash. I did not get
out of bed for twenty-one days. That isn't true, Natasha called me once,
and I was put in a wheelchair and taken to the phone. But the
accommodations were satisfactory. I had a private room—it was a
two-person room, but I was the only person in it—with a refrigerator,
and it had its own private bath. Some of the treatment was a little odd
by American standards. My leg was kept tightly wrapped, which you might
expect, but packed in Vizhnevsky's liniment, which was supposed to do
wonderful things. I received microwave treatments, and as somebody at
the embassy in Moscow later said, so had they. [laughter] There were a
number of things like diathermy, things that are not really done here
anymore. But my doctor here felt that, while I had been over diagnosed
and overtreated, that he would have done exactly the same thing had a
patient from another country with no medical history available, or no
information on that medical history, come in. He thought the treatment
was very good. And I was in the hands of the professor, Professor
Schott. Doctors are not that highly regarded, but teaching doctors are
very highly regarded. So I was pretty much in the charge of the chief of
service, and I was lucky enough to get into a hospital with a strong
cardiovascular specialty. So when I left, I spent a couple of days in
Minsk with Alexander Kharotonchik, [the young doctor of whom I spoke]. I
had an official interpreter, although [Alexander spoke fluent English].
We had a very emotional departure when I flew to Moscow, and I spent
three more days there. My guide had been assigned to me from the
Ministry of Sport, where he was working on the Olympics. He had traveled
widely in the West, but not to the United States. He was Mr. Brand
Names, because he owned a Sony this, Adidas clothes, and his Fiat car.
His father was obviously very highly placed, and he was also Mr.
I-Can-Get-It-for-You-Wholesale, because I said—we went to the antique
shop, and I said, "God, there's a wonderful clock and the price is
right, but it's sold." And he said, "I can take care of that for you. I
think I could get it for you for $1,000 American." I said, "I don't have
that kind of currency." But I finally ended up buying, for American
currency, half a dozen jars of good caviar at half price. [laughter]
Then I came back. But it was a very interesting experience, particularly
in realizing the problems of—I met many wonderful people, but the thing
I realized—it was so pervasive; it would be so difficult—was the fact
that everything was centrally controlled, and everything you thought and
saw, with very few exceptions, was centrally controlled. There was a
major exhibition of an artist—he has the same name as a well-known
Russian late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century composer. The name may
come to me. I think it was Glazunov. But 99 percent of his work was
absolutely correct: he was a strong draftsman and there were drawings of
North Vietnamese ironworkers and so on. But he had two [other]
paintings. One of them was called Salut; it was a
Russian worker with all of these great socialist images behind him, and
here he was dressed in shirtsleeves, with a pipe and a glass of beer.
And that's sort of all he had. The other one was much more symbolic,
showing a feast, a table set up in the winter, as I remember, and there
were all these sort of Russian iconic images of previous czars and so
on. There was this one figure of a man from the back, stripped to the
waist, and down below this feast there were pigs—you know, sort of the
greatness of Russia succumbing to greed. People were surrounding this.
Apparently there was another one he'd done, a triptych of Lenin, Stalin,
who had bloody hands, and—that one they wouldn't allow to be shown. But
there was a line around the block to see these two paintings. So there
is a great interest, I think, in seeing and hearing about different
sorts of things, and these were just the people in the street. These
were not party regulars. When Elton John goes to Russia, the people who
see him are the party hierarchy. I would just say about Russia that it
was a very important experience for me, and while I really have no
desire to go back to Russia, I would certainly have a great desire to
visit the people that I met there again. They were very intense and
passionate and committed, and they would make a very formidable foe, I
hope we never have to face them, particularly given the quality of
energy and leadership we now face here. You've asked me about teaching.
I have taught, I think I talked a little bit about teaching at San
Quentin [State Prison].
-
GOODWIN:
- No.
-
GARVER:
- Well, I've taught down here, during "Newport One," at Orange Coast
College—just the second half of the basic survey course—and it was at
that point that I discovered that people who were getting a free
secondary education, having gotten a free high school education, cannot
and could not write. So many of them are functionally illiterate,
particularly at this first- and second-year level. We are near 1984,
but, in fact, Newspeak is upon us, because these people, if they can't
write it, can't formulate it, I think. I asked them to write a brief
essay question, which I finally gave up doing on exams. Or to get an A
in the course, they had to write a paper: you had to go to a museum and
look at two paintings that were specified—people simply could not deal
with the issue of interrelating—you know, it's great, it's rotten, I
like it, I don't like it—beyond essentially the grossest sort of
observations. They were perfectly willing to say, "I don't know. I don't
really care." Then I taught a couple of courses at Cal State Long Beach,
One, called the "Visual Resources of Southern California," visited—it
was class work, but it was primarily, I must say, a fun summer course.
We took a number of trips to artists' studios, collectors, places like
Gemini [G.E.L.], down to Laguna Beach to go to the arts festival, to
deal with the issue of genuine article and kitsch and so on. That was a
lot of fun. I taught another one, a course which I barely remember
because I think I did such a bad job on it, called "The Community
Museum" or "The Place of the Community Museum," something of that sort.
When I went to San Francisco, I taught at two places. [At] the San
Francisco Art Institute I [taught] a course that [I wanted to] deal with
the whole issue of the development of photographic style: how you see—it
was [about what is involved] other than aiming your camera in some
inspired way, I had hoped to be teaching graduate students and was given
a group of undergraduates who had all taken the basic introductory
course, but who didn't really know what they were doing and what they
wanted. So that was not terribly satisfactory, although interesting.
Then I taught a course, which was nominally about contemporary American
art, through the College of Marin at San Quentin Prison. In fact, it
became much more a whole discussion of the history of modern art and why
things look the way they do and how they developed. Many people in it
took it so they could get out of their cells at night; others were very
interested and very interesting. One fellow, in fact, turned out a truly
remarkable pornographic manuscript, which he delivered to me after he
got out, and I've seen him from time to time since. The manuscript is so
interesting, and while it's not grammatically correct, it's so well
written in terms of style and content—it could be edited and cleaned up.
I don't think this was imagination, and he claims it wasn't, [laughter]
He claims that all these experiences happened in his teenage life, and
he condensed them into one summer. But I filed a copy of it with the
Kinsey Institute of the University of Indiana, because there should be a
copy of that document.
1.15. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE AUGUST 13, 1980
-
GARVER:
- Just to finish with the San Quentin experience: of course, inmates at a
prison are not encouraged, just the way I think all of us are not
encouraged, to think abstractly. But particularly there, they are not so
encouraged. So it was a little hard to sell a Rothko or other non-image
painting to them, and we never got into conceptual art, although we did
deal with Duchamp. I had several artists as well come and visit and talk
to the inmates about what it was they did. I think many of the inmates
had a lot of talent, maybe, but they tended to regard themselves in a
rather debased way, as you might imagine.
-
GOODWIN:
- They were probably more interesting students than the junior college
students.
-
GARVER:
- Well, they were of all ages, and some of them were [interesting]. There
were about half of them, as I say, that kind of sat in the back. It was
an excuse to get out at night. And the others were really quite
interesting and had very interesting experiences. I think I related more
to the inmates than the staff, who, after all, were there by choice and
not by requirement. You had a question for me?
-
GOODWIN:
- Right, in one of your first comments at the beginning of the series of
interviews, you said that as a child you were regarded as a dreamer. How
do you respond to that observation or accusation?
-
GARVER:
- I think that most probably I am a dreamer. I know I am a dreamer, and I
think, in the last few years, I've also become a believer. Certainly,
what I have been able to achieve—whatever that may be, at the
mid-forties in my life, and in a transition between one job to another—I
suppose is not entirely clear. But I think most probably the quality
that I brought to any institution where I've worked, and most
particularly here at Newport, is the quality of dreaming, of being able
to think beyond the intensely literal point of view of the moment. And
Newport is as literal, almost, as San Quentin. There is not the vision
here, and there is not the vision in so many places, to see what can be
done: what can be done with a certain amount of money, what can be done
with a certain idea, what can be done even with a physical space. I
found this to be true in the renovation of the space at 2211 West Balboa
Boulevard, when Newport Museum moved from the Balboa Pavilion, You can
see that here's a room, and it's all cluttered up and it's a mess, and
you unclutter it and people say, "How did you know to do this? How did
you know?" And who can answer that? I think one of my weaknesses as a
dreamer is perhaps that I get angry and resentful that other people
don't share my dream and that I have to take so much energy to develop
and encourage that dreaming in other people, and to try to sell the
package, as it were, rather than spending more time working on plans.
This, maybe, has been one of the problems here in Newport—that the only
dream they want is something they already know about. In fact, it's
interesting in Newport that with so much money available, which means so
much energy and availability of goods and services, the people here
cannot dream, and they are frightened of stepping out of a set mold.
Thus, as somebody said about collectors here, "People don't collect
modern art here, because they might be afraid of having people think
that their real feelings were exposed, or that they would be odd." So
I'm going to a new area, and if I see you in October, I may be able to
tell you a little more. I think the situation there is perhaps a
different kind of dreaming or an unawareness of the possibilities of the
organization and how it may be expanded and how it will grow I am
president of the board of trustees of the Western Association of Art
Museums [WAAM]. I've spent this past weekend in a retreat with a number
of those board [members] and senior staff, and the executive director of
WAAM said something very interesting. When she came three years ago, the
place was really on the verge of bankruptcy, and she has done a
brilliant job in turning it around. Individuals were saying, "Well, if
you want to do this, what about the experiences and problems of the
past?" I made some reference to this, and she turned to me and to all of
us and said, "When are you going to let the organization grow up? And
when are you going to acknowledge what it can be?" And she was exactly
right. And we shall see if Madison will allow the Art Center support,
will help it grow up, as I feel Newport has not. If you carry the
growing up analogy further, the Newport Harbor Art Museum is like so
many familial relationships here, where the children are given
everything they want: cars, trips, you name it. They are given
everything but an identity and true support. Somehow objects and
materials replace love and support and belief. And so they give with one
hand and take away with the other. In Madison, I'm hoping that what I
will find is while they will not be so generous in giving; I know they
will be much more even handed in support. I feel very much that my
career is not only in physical transition; it's in emotional,
psychological, philosophical transition; a transition I hope will
increase awareness. I feel very much in mid-career and quite good about
it. It's been very interesting to me to have had this opportunity to
articulate my feelings, to take a few potshots at my enemies, to
acknowledge and support my friends, and to outline, to some degree, what
I think my career has been. Thank you, George.
-
GOODWIN:
- Thanks so much for contributing. It's been fun.