A TEI Project

Interview of John Coplans

Table of contents

1. Transcript

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE APRIL 27, 1987

RATNER:
Today is Monday, April 27, 1987, and we're at the home of Mr. John Coplans in New York City. Our discussion today will be on the Pasadena Art Museum, and it will supplement material found in your interview with the Archives of American Art, which was conducted from April 1974 through August 1976, and also published in your article on the museum in the February 1975 issue of Artforum. Normally I would begin the interview by asking you about your background, but that's covered fairly extensively in your interview with the Archives, so we'll just jump right in and talk about the Pasadena Art Museum. What was your perception of the museum prior to your involvement with it?
COPLANS:
Oh, I was very interested in what Walter Hopps was trying to do. He was the person that impressed me very much and whom I met at the museum several times, especially after he became curator. My impression was that he was trying to make it into an important institution to service the West Coast. Is that good enough?
RATNER:
Perfect.
COPLANS:
All right.
RATNER:
Your first official association with the museum I believe was the Roy Lichtenstein show.
COPLANS:
Correct.
RATNER:
Which you curated. But I read in the Archives interview that prior to that exhibition you had helped Walter Hopps write some catalog essays. How did all that come about?
COPLANS:
Well, I was very close to Walter. It was a situation somewhat like this: I had helped to start Artforum in San Francisco. I had met Walter up there at the [San Francisco] Art Institute. I had heard him give a talk to some of the students, and I was enormously impressed by his knowledge of the history of West Coast art, something that hadn't been documented and published. At the same time, I met—a little later, I met his wife [Shirley Hopps, later Shirley Blum], who was an art historian and also avidly interested in the history of the West Coast too. Thirdly, I met Irving Blum in Los Angeles, who was a dealer in a kind of new mold—very interested in New York art and at the same time pioneering the work of certain very good Los Angeles artists. What was the original question? I lost myself—
RATNER:
How you became involved with writing the essays with Walter Hopps.
COPLANS:
Oh. Well, I got to know Walter, and it's not true that I wrote essays for Walter. I don't know who said that, but Walter had difficulty writing. He used me as a medium, giving the history of the Coast, you know, which I checked, and everything like that. And I would write articles. So he was being helpful to me more than anything. There was an occasion when, for the South American, São Paulo Bienal ["Exhibition of the United States of America VIII Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil"], Walter was supposed to write a catalog, which he never wrote. He took material from various people, and it was published under his own name. But that's because he got locked up in a hotel room by some lady who was running USIA, United States Information Agency in Washington, who said she wasn't going to let him leave Washington until he had written the essay. Since he was incapable of writing that essay, he just frantically phoned, I imagine, Karen—what's her name? Karen who used to help him—and he got copies of some of the stuff we had written and just kind of altered around and rewrote it and gave it to the lady and was able to escape from Washington. But that was much more the truth of the matter. The ["Marcel] Duchamp Retrospective" catalog, for example, looks like a very clever idea of Walter's: to take an already published catalog, tear it up, paste it down again, and then put in the correct entries—re-correct the entries and put in his own entries. But that's the way Walter was. He wasn't going to waste time on doing something that he hadn't the ability to do. He concentrated always on what he had the ability to do. That's fair enough I think.
RATNER:
When you were officially hired at the museum, Jim [James T.] Demetrion was the director who was serving then. He's the one who hired you. Had you worked with him at all previously?
COPLANS:
No.
RATNER:
What do you think it was about you that made him hire you?
COPLANS:
Shirley Blum.
RATNER:
What about Shirley Blum?
COPLANS:
Well, she told him about me. He had no experience. I mean, Jim was a sort of bureaucrat, a good bureaucrat. He's no art historian. I mean, he's never finished his doctorate. He couldn't write his Ph.D. thesis. And he did his—I think he taught at Pomona [College] a bit and started a doctorate at UCLA, which is hardly renowned as a school of art history. So he had a kind of standardized version of things. He did a [Alexei von] Jawlensky show. The museum owned a hundred and fifty Jawlenskys. And I saw the show. I was very unhappy with it, not because of the paintings or anything like that. Because of Jim's catalog and writing on it. It was just standard, boring art history which didn't examine the work. Because when I looked at the work, I saw that Jawlensky worked in series. So I kept saying to Shirley, "This is not the way. I mean, Jim hasn't dealt with it. I really want to re-deal with it. It should be re-dealt with, because it's very important, it seems to me." So I said to her, "Let's do a show with the same material again—all the stuff Pasadena owns." And I did. I was director of the art gallery down at the University of California at Irvine.
RATNER:
So this was before you ever—I'm sorry for interrupting—
COPLANS:
Yes. Before I ever went to Pasadena.
RATNER:
Before you were working there. I see. Okay.
COPLANS:
Yes. So I borrowed all the material and I did an exhibition, which Shirley Blum helped me on called "Jawlensky and the Serial Image." I don't know if you've seen the catalog.
RATNER:
No, I didn't.
COPLANS:
I have a copy. If you'll switch off, I'll show you a catalog.
RATNER:
Okay. [tape recorder off]
COPLANS:
I was director of the art gallery at the University of California at Irvine. Aside from what Walter was doing at Pasadena, I was doing a series of exhibitions down there that related to a similar kind of activity, including historical shows about fairly closely related time period. For example, Peter Voulkos and the ceramic movement, and various things like that. New sculpture and so on. So I was probably the most active curator in Southern California at that time down there, and I was naturally—also, being British and having lived in France, I knew European art very well, contemporary European art as well as, of course, the historical side. I probably had seen more historical material than Jim Demetrion himself, been to more major European museums, obscure ones, and seen a greater degree of historical art than him, even in the period that he was involved in. So I was fairly experienced. But I was not experienced as a museum person except in relationship to my function for a couple of years at the University of California at Irvine. But Demetrion himself was not very experienced either. There was no hard-core cadre of experienced professionals either in San Francisco or Los Angeles, except in sort of anthropology departments, of course, at the University of California and so on. But not in the museums particularly. There were people who had worked a long time. There was a man up at the Achenbach Foundation who had worked a long time on prints. There were odd specialists of that nature, but not general people. Of course, there may have been some people in the [M.H.] de Young [Memorial Museum] that were quite good on historical material, but I just didn't know. But in late nineteenth century, twentieth century and current, I was probably better informed than most, and it seemed more than most. So I was a natural person. On top of that I wrote and published. I was energetic, active, busy, and I wrote and published. A lot of people found great difficulty in writing. Jim Demetrion is one who has difficulty in that respect.
RATNER:
So when he hired you, what was your job description?
COPLANS:
Just as curator, curator of contemporary art.
RATNER:
So what exactly did that mean?
COPLANS:
That I would put forth a series of exhibitions and carry them out within certain budgetary restrictions. I mean, no one quite knew; there was no narrowly defined function such as you now asked. There was one other person, you must remember, that was there. That was Frederick Wight, who was at UCLA Art Gallery; he'd been doing shows for years. But he was a bit of an old fumbler, you know. I mean, he never had a—he was a sweet man, but he never had a very sharp view. The problem was there was no sharp view of anything on the West Coast at that particular time. And Walter was the primary person who was trying to generate this. He had been—you must remember, he had been involved in art right back as a schoolboy. You probably know about that. Okay.
RATNER:
So what was the exhibition policy? Was there a stated exhibition policy when you started?
COPLANS:
At Pasadena? No, no. It was hand-to-mouth.
RATNER:
What kinds of exhibitions—what sort of parameters were there for what kinds of exhibitions you were supposed to be doing?
COPLANS:
There weren't any. I made them up as I went along. I mean, for me, you see, there were certain problems that had to be resolved that the exhibition program should resolve. They were also affiliated to Artforum in the same way. Let's go back a little bit. When I helped to start Artforum, it was a West Coast art magazine and was seen as a West Coast art magazine, and I pretty well soon realized that we were getting nowhere. It was being read by its own audience, and the problem of an art magazine is it's got to be read by another audience if it wants to convey information about the artists and for those artists to get a larger place in the sun than they already have. So what I did was I went to New York. Actually, Andy Warhol gave me a painting, and I sold it, and I used it to go to New York at the same time that Larry Bell and Bob [Robert] Irwin had their first show at Sidney Janis Gallery. I went and got hold of many of the leading younger critics in New York who were writing for Art International: for example, that was Barbara Rose, Michael Fried, Max Kozloff, Robert Rosenblum—I can't remember who else. I said to them, "Why don't you write for Artforum? We'll let you write whatever you want to write. You can agenda your own articles. And we'll actually pay you." The guy at Art International hardly ever paid them. I mean, he had no money, [James] Fitzsimmons. And they liked the idea and said yes. So what we had immediately then was some of the best, younger, and brightest critics in New York writing for Artforum, and people in New York began to read Artforum. So they began to read about West Coast art. So the principle I adopted in organizing the exhibitions was exactly the same kind of principle. I felt that part of my function was to work with the East Coast and the West Coast in such a manner that I brought information into the West Coast that was very necessary information. At the same time I would try and do exhibitions of West Coast people and place them east. In order to do that, I had to get a reputation for doing first-rate and important exhibitions. So the first exhibition I did was the Roy Lichtenstein exhibition. I couldn't place it in New York, but I worked out how to place it in Europe. I knew—and I was very interested in that, how we on the West Coast could get direct links to Europe, bypassing New York. We couldn't go through New York. It was a kind of stranglehold. So I knew the director of Stedelijk Museum [in Amsterdam], and I proposed to him he should take the Lichtenstein exhibition. We could ship it free of charge. I knew he got his exhibitions shipped free of charge via Holland America Line. So if I could place it across America in one or two places and we could get it to New York cheaply, he could pick it up by Holland America Line, it could come into Amsterdam, he could show it there. And if he would distribute it in Europe, I wouldn't charge him a fee. If he could send it to the Tate [Gallery in London], and to Paris and to Germany and so on, on our behalf, they would pay us a fee to cover the costs of this, so that the exhibition was widely distributed. Well, I did that with Lichtenstein, for example, and with ["Andy] Warhol." I used to try and send my exhibitions across country. I would send them to Minneapolis, to the Minneapolis—not to—what's it called?
RATNER:
To the Walker?
COPLANS:
The Walker Art Center. They took both of those shows, for example, and some other shows I did. So it was an ambitious program. Basically I was trying to create an ambitious program that would place this little institution on the map internationally, that they should become well known for the kind of exhibitions that they did in contemporary art in the hope that when I proposed an exhibition of West Coast artists they would take that equally as seriously as anything I proposed about the East Coast. At the same time, the funding was tiny. So I had to use my wits very much in order to take whatever funds I was allocated and stretch them as extensively as I could so that I could get out decent catalogs. There was very little money. The "Serial Imagery," for example—I sold the catalog. I mean, I got it printed very cheaply, and I sold it to New York Graphic [Society] and we got back the costs. We made a profit on it. The "Andy Warhol," we sold twenty thousand copies of that exhibition catalog, and the museum made a profit on it to pay for the costing of the exhibition. At the same time, the fees that I charge people also—so really, in actual fact, I think in the case of "Serial Imagery," which traveled to Seattle, it cost them nothing. At the same time, "Warhol" cost them nothing. The same with "Lichtenstein." It cost them nothing. I was very cost-conscious. The trustees were not aware of this. They never looked at those sort of figures or what one was up to. But having worked at the University of California at Irvine, for two years with the tiniest possible budget and done large numbers of exhibitions, every exhibition with a catalog, a full catalog, color plates and everything, and recovered the money, I knew that what I was doing was the most effective way—from the costing point of view and the distribution of the information—it was the most effective way that I could possibly operate. But I don't think that—by the way, that wasn't the first exhibition. Oh yes, that was the first exhibition, "Lichtenstein." The second one was "Cezanne Watercolors." Again I did a book for that that paid for the cost of the catalog.
RATNER:
That was your first show once you were at Pasadena?
COPLANS:
Yes, yes. Does this give you a kind of—
RATNER:
Yes, very much so.
COPLANS:
Hmm. So it was a mixture of these things. But it was particularly the distribution of information and cost-effectiveness.
RATNER:
Which of the exhibitions that you organized were your favorites?
COPLANS:
Oh, I don't—each served a cause that I thought was necessary, so I don't—I mean, I don't look at it that way particularly. There's some—no, I mean, I don't look at it that—I have to say in passing, concerning the remark you asked me about my program, of course my program was also to try and upgrade the museum attention towards certain West Coast artists. You must remember that Robert [A.] Rowan was the most informed trustee, constantly traveling, well in touch with the major dealers, with a particular view of what he wanted to buy, very well informed about what he wanted to buy, and that none of the trustees had that kind of information that I'm aware of, except for Fred [Frederick] Weisman, who was briefly a trustee. But no others. What is it you call those ladies that have commissioned this report?
RATNER:
The Art Alliance [of the Pasadena Art Museum].
COPLANS:
I mean, they just didn't know their asses from their elbows. I mean, they were just, you know, Pasadena housewives. However generous they were in giving time and effort and things like that, they had no view, no world view. I mean, they were local people. They had no idea of a world view, I mean, of any kind. Go ahead.
RATNER:
Okay. You mentioned a minute ago that you wanted the museum to be known beyond its—
COPLANS:
The local confines. Yes.
RATNER:
Right. One of the first things—this was before you came of course—that made the museum somewhat known was of course the [Galka Scheyer] Blue Four Collection. I read in that interview you did with the Archives of American Art that you said the reason that the collection hadn't been properly researched, cataloged, and published, was because of lack of funding for an expert on that particular period.
COPLANS:
Yes.
RATNER:
And—
COPLANS:
That's why I think Demetrion was brought in as curator.
RATNER:
Oh, really?
COPLANS:
Yes. Because he was supposed to do his doctorate on Jawlensky. He never did write it.
RATNER:
Why do you think that, considering this was their primary asset, this collection, they then didn't go ahead and give the money to get—
COPLANS:
Ignorance.
RATNER:
—someone to do—
COPLANS:
Ignorance. Sheer ignorance allied to a certain flavor of stupidity. You know, not able to work things out. They had no idea of the value of the collection, had no idea at that time that they had it that unquestionably it was the greatest [Paul] Klee collection in the world. There was no more remarkable collection of Klees. None existed in Europe that was qualitatively and quantitatively in combination as important as the Klee collection. They had no idea what they were holding. To them it was just a lot of foreign painters. Also, you must remember, marketwise, the value of the works hadn't taken off to the degree that they're worth now. I mean, they're worth twenty, thirty, forty times what they were worth in the fifties. Prices were still comparatively low. A major Jawlensky now, like one of the nine or ten early portraits they have, I think that in the fifties it was worth three or four or five thousand. Now they must be worth five, six hundred thousand. So there's a tremendous disparity between what the value of the collection is now. So they had no indication. I mean, they weren't experts. They had no knowledge of art history. You can't blame them. They were local, regional people. And it's hard for people to sort the information out. You know, if someone says, "All this is extremely valuable, " they don't even know whether the person telling them that is a person who has the particular world situation where they can take for granted the truth of the matter. Basically I think it was Walter who was pushing like mad. But I also—the former director also knew. I'm trying to remember his name.
RATNER:
Before Walter?
COPLANS:
Walter.
RATNER:
Tom [Thomas W.] Leavitt.
COPLANS:
Tom knew. Tom had a pretty shrewd idea. But you see, they were—you must remember, they were not hiring first-rate people. They hadn't the money. There weren't any first-rate people to my knowledge available on the West Coast. I mean, it simply didn't exist. And the art historians in the university departments who had some very good specialized knowledge, they were not members of the boards. They had no power. They were more involved in art history itself rather than museological work—going their own way, teaching and writing and so on—so that they weren't particularly listened to. Even if they were listened to, no one made too much of the information, at least as far as I could see. I mean, there's been a dramatic change in the distribution and evaluation of information between 1960 and the late seventies, particularly on the West Coast. Some things have changed drastically, other things haven't changed too much. But there was no—even the [Los Angeles] County Museum in the fifties, the art side was pretty dormant. And the major collectors in Beverly Hills were buying, like Edward G. Robinson and people like that, well, they were buying impressionist material. You also have to remember from the kind of world point of view that it was very difficult for them to sort the information. For example, I was British, but very little of that work existed in Britain. The Tate Gallery owned virtually none of the artists that are in the Blue Four collection, except—I don't think they even have a [Wassily] Kandinsky. I'm not sure. But they certainly didn't have Jawlensky. And you must remember that [Kurt] Schwitters died, who was a major German artist out of dada, died in England, and that there was no value given to his work in England. It lay there for years. I saw his work for years and years in the fifties at Lord's Gallery in England. You could buy it for nothing. You could buy a great Schwitters for a few hundred pounds or a few hundred dollars. So it's only in comparatively recent times that the information has become refined, honed, and important to people.
RATNER:
Okay, since we're talking about the Blue Four, Blue Four aside, how would you rate the quality of the permanent collection?
COPLANS:
When I arrived at the museum?
RATNER:
Yes.
COPLANS:
It was virtually nonexistent outside of the Blue Four. It was a few little bits and pieces. And it wasn't much different up and down the West Coast. San Francisco Museum [of Modern Art] also had a very indifferent collection, except for stuff loaned by Mrs. [Elise] Haas. They owned some four major abstract expressionist paintings, and very important ones. But they traded one of them away. I think I wrote about it in an article. The [Mark] Rothko, which is now at the [Museum of] Modern [Art], in exchange for some rotten Rothkos. People just didn't understand what they had. I understood. Walter understood what they had. Irving Blum understood what they had. I think Jim understood very well what they had. And a few art historians. But outside of that, hardly anybody.
RATNER:
How about by the time you left?
COPLANS:
Well, it depends whom we're speaking about. I mean, your question has to be more specific. By the time I left, who understood what? Which people?
RATNER:
No, no, no. By the time you left, had the quality of the permanent collection improved at all? What kind of acquisitions were made while you were there?
COPLANS:
Oh, I made an enormous number of acquisitions. I made an enormous number of acquisitions by gift. You have the gift catalog?
RATNER:
Right. Very—
COPLANS:
So you can see the kind of acquisitions I made. But I don't think that when we did the Lichtenstein show, I don't think we got a Lichtenstein out of it. I mean, the prices even in '67 were dirt cheap. You could buy a Lichtenstein in '67 for six, seven thousand dollars. We hadn't the money to buy anything. [Thomas G.] Terbell formed a little society of collectors to which we gave talks. I would give talks and they would pay a little fee in, and we were able to buy, I think, a Larry Bell and maybe a Bob Irwin and one or two local artists. I don't even remember if we had a major [Edward] Kienholz. I don't think we did. I mean, there was no concerted effort to build up a collection. It was—I think Jim tried, but he was only there a short time. Terbell tried, but he was only there a short time. And I made a massive effort, even though I am speaking about myself, a massive effort to get major material in. I also began a photo collection, which still languishes in the Norton Simon Museum. That was the first photo collection outside of the San Francisco Museum's collection, which was an old one, on the West Coast in a museum. And until—I've forgotten the name of the lady at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—got some money recently, it remains still the only collection in Los Angeles. But I think it's buried and no one can get hold of it. Probably it will go to UCLA. But there was so much to do. You have to understand. There was so tiny a staff and so much to do. If you look at the exhibition schedule that I did, I was virtually alone, and I wrote books at the same time for the exhibition. I mean, I wrote the "Serial Imagery" book for example. It's a book. It's a catalog, but it's a book. Its book length, I mean, but I wrote it in three weeks, day and night. I sat with an editor, Peter Nelson, next door to me. As I wrote the pages, he corrected the English and typed it up, you know. It was just done like that. And everything was done like that. It was done with virtually no money and a tremendous amount of energy.
RATNER:
How aware was the board of trustees that those were the kinds of conditions that you were operating under?
COPLANS:
No, they weren't aware in the slightest bit. Not in the slightest bit. And if they were aware, they were indifferent. They didn't understand it. But I never complained about that because I was pleased to have the opportunity to do it. It was great to do. I mean, I loved doing it. It was absolutely terrific. But I mean, someone like Weisman, who should have known better, was utterly indifferent. He was on the art committee, and I remember he had a [Piet] Mondrian, and my whole "Serial Imagery" effort on Mondrian was contingent upon Weisman's painting which he said he would loan. Then I found the matching painting to prove the series. In the meanwhile, he sold his painting without even telling me. So when I went to get the loan, he said, "That's gone. I've sold it." They were indifferent.
RATNER:
It seems like the local community was fairly indifferent also, though the museum had a lot of national and international acclaim. What might have been done to broaden the museum's base of local support?
COPLANS:
Well, it was in the wrong place. Pasadena was the wrong place for it really, you know. The Beverly Hills people weren't going to traipse out to Pasadena. They wanted a place near them. And you know, museums become social clubs. You have to remember that being on the international council of the Museum of Modern Art is quite significant for people because they meet in America all the most important people interested in art. I think Rowan was on the council. I'm not sure. But the Beverly Hills people wanted things in style. Pasadena was too tacky a kind of effort for the kind of style that they were interested in. Go ahead.
RATNER:
When a museum is privately funded, as the Pasadena was primarily, to whom do you feel it is responsible to in terms of its exhibition policy?
COPLANS:
Well, it's an interesting thing. I mean, you're asking a very—it's a very acute question. You have to—it depends on the view of the curator. Now in this sense, the curator's responsibility is to the art community rather than to a specific board of trustees because the board of trustees is meant to be operating within the community of museums itself. So they have a responsibility within the community of museums: the standards, the operating procedures, the relationship of trustees to staff, acquisitions, the care of collections, the restoration, the exhibitions program, the education, the whole functional operation of a museum has, by and large, ever since the nineteenth century, the late-nineteenth century, an agreed-upon international relationship and bias that's set forth. Of course, more recently in America the American Association of Museum Directors has codified this kind of information. I think they had not codified it in the early sixties. I don't think it came until a little later, the early seventies. So that trustees were not necessarily aware, except by inference, not by instruction—it wasn't codified—of their function in the relationship to professional staff. Also you must remember that something was very different at that time: all the museum directors in America at that time were art historians, professional men. It's not like today. It's very different today. As soon as it began to be different of course it had to be codified, because the role and function suddenly became very important. So the first function of an art historian, or a curator who acts as an art historian as well as a curator, is towards his peer group—that is that his information is correct, that his judgments are shrewd, that his scholarship is impeccable. So his responsibility is to his peer group. Just the same way that, at the same time of course, he has some sense of responsibility to his regional or local community to instruct and bring forth important information about art itself. That happens in the exhibition program and the catalogs that people read and in the education department's outreach programs towards adults and so on. So the primary responsibility is within that situation. Now of course, trustees are not responsible to anyone other than the attorney general of the state, or the board of regents of the state, that the material which is in the public domain—that that material is looked after in the best legal fashion in the sense of responsibility towards that sort of issue. But the board of regents doesn't license a museum's function. On the other hand, the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] for example, where there are certain things trustees may and may not do that are a conflict of interest, they don't license trustees. If trustees either collectively or individually behave illegally, either way, then either the attorney general or the board of regents of the state or the IRS can intervene. But there is no governing body. The trustees are not responsible for anyone except themselves because they are not elected. They are not elected members of the community. What happens with a museum is a number of people get together and form a museum, and they become self-perpetuating bodies. The [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art] and Pasadena, for example, and MOCA [Museum of Contemporary Art] now, are self-perpetuating bodies in which the trustees are not responsible to the community in any way except for the success of the institution, and then legally that the funding meets the approved statutes and regulations and so on of charitable donations and things like that. So a curator—obviously, a curator works through a director. The director is the intervening officer between the board and the curators of the museum, the staff of the museum. Pasadena, like many museums, had committees for each function: a finance committee, a staff committee—I don't know if they had a staff committee. I mean, they had an art committee, and they would meet with the director, and the curator would put up his proposed program and they would approve it or not approve of it. Invariably they knew so little that they would approve it. In any event, it had to go through Bob Rowan. If Bob wanted it, it was all right; if it wasn't, he would argue about it or something like that. But much was forced upon him by circumstances, by the financial limitations and his own realization that a great deal of energy probably was being put in to try and do the best that people could with very limited means. And as long as it fitted the kind of profile of what he thought was important, that was fine. The other people were just completely ignorant, basically speaking. Does that answer your question?
RATNER:
Yes. Thank you. Okay, we'll go on and talk a little bit more about while you were curator. In late September 1968, Jim Demetrion requested that the board extend you a leave of absence with pay in order to work on an Ellsworth Kelly book. But then the next minutes were missing, and I never found out whether that was granted to you or not.
COPLANS:
I think I had three weeks or a month. I had a month, a month's leave of absence. Yes.
RATNER:
Was that in conjunction with a show that—
COPLANS:
No, no, no, no, no. I just wrote a book.
RATNER:
I see. Okay.
COPLANS:
I had a Guggenheim Fellowship. The fellowship excluded—I never applied for pay. I merely asked for some travel money to do the book. The reason for that was of course that the Modern was very interested in me doing the show if I was qualified enough, and if I could do the show for the Modern, then it would come to Pasadena and we would get it for nothing. So I would be, you know—so it was mixed up in one's activities. It was important for me to do a show for the Modern, as the curator of Pasadena, of a major New York artist. And it would be important for Pasadena to have it on their premises.
RATNER:
So did all that work out finally?
COPLANS:
No. I did the book and it was published.
RATNER:
But the exhibition—
COPLANS:
But the exhibition didn't take place.
RATNER:
Well, it's an honor, isn't it, to get a Guggenheim Fellowship?
COPLANS:
It's supposed to be, yes. I've had a couple of them. I got one last year, another one.
RATNER:
What was the board's reaction to that?
COPLANS:
Oh, they didn't understand it.
RATNER:
They didn't.
COPLANS:
Certainly they had no idea. You must remember that boards of museums are not like academic institutions where everyone from the chancellor down, or the president of the museum all the way through, has an advanced degree, graduate degree, is a specialist in some particular area—where faculties deal with promotions and can assess the degree of effort and intelligence and scholarship of a person and the nature of a particular honor that is given, vis-à-vis to a specific person, vis-à-vis that particular university. I mean, [University of California] Berkeley concentrates tremendously on, and is proud of, its number of Nobel Prize winners, and pays special fees to get them there. They give them extraordinary salaries, you know, to have them there because they know how important this is for the status of the University. But museums are not particularly like—certainly no one at Pasadena understood any of those refinements that we speak of, or could speak of, within the university atmosphere.

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO APRIL 27, 1987

RATNER:
Before we flipped the tape, we were talking about the Guggenheim Fellowship. Did you have anything else you wanted to add about that?
COPLANS:
Oh, it was in response to a question. I'm only responding to questions. You asked me about what happened, you know, about the leave thing that I got it. Yes, I think I had a month off. But you must remember, I never took a holiday, so [laughter] I always worked through my holiday. I never took any time off, you know. I worked night and weekends for that museum.
RATNER:
Yes, I read that in the Archives interview. You said something like a hundred and twelve hours a week or something; you all were working around the clock.
COPLANS:
Yes. Yes. My marriage went. Everything went. We were working extraordinary hours. The trustees had no idea.
RATNER:
In terms of grants, I also read that in 1970 you received a grant from Mrs. Sadie Moss. She was a museum trustee. I don't know if that was before or after you left.
COPLANS:
After I left.
RATNER:
After. But what was that grant for?
COPLANS:
I was in a lot of medical trouble.
RATNER:
And so it was—
COPLANS:
She gave me some money to see a doctor. I had a lot of severe medical problems from World War II, from my service in the tropics. I was many years in the tropics. She heard about it and helped me over it. I lost all my—my teeth were all rotten and my mouth—I'd been for years in Burma and East Africa and Ethiopia. She gave me some money to have my teeth fixed up. It was very expensive. I couldn't get it on the Blue Cross, you know. So it was a generous thing on her part. I gave her a painting.
RATNER:
That's very generous. That's nice. Okay, so things are moving along there, and Jim Demetrion resigns. What was the general feeling about the timing of his departure?
COPLANS:
Well, I don't think anyone knew. Jim hugged his cards pretty closely to his chest—never said anything. We never had any indication from him whether things were going well or badly. I mean, he'd been sort of thrust into this position by the firing of Walter. I don't think he particularly wanted it. I'm not sure, you know. He never said very much. I don't know why. It's really a little hard to recollect, except there was a sense of a great deal of chaos at the time. A tremendous amount of chaos. But one was working so frantically—I was working so frantically. I never had time to consider these things, you know. I mean, it just put a greater load on me, a much more extreme load, because I had to virtually fill his position professionally at the same time as do my own work. There was virtually no staff. You have to remember that what staff we had was all inexperienced; they were all local people. They'd been to UCLA and done maybe an undergraduate degree in—concentrated on art history and possibly a master's. But a master's in art history is very nominal from the point of view of being an art historian. There were people like Gretchen [Glicksman] and her husband [Hal L. Glicksman] who were there. But they were all sort of trained by Walter, who was hardly a museum person. You know what I mean? Who'd never worked in a museum other than Pasadena, had no experience. So the support staff was terribly limited in its experience.
RATNER:
What do you think the reason was that they continued to hire really inexperienced people?
COPLANS:
Because they had no money.
RATNER:
They weren't willing to come up with the money, or they just didn't feel it was that important?
COPLANS:
Oh, they had no money. I don't know. I mean, they were indifferent. It was lack of knowledge. It was sheer lack of knowledge.
RATNER:
Who was interviewed for the director's position after Demetrion left?
COPLANS:
No one that I know of. Didn't Terbell say the same?
RATNER:
I've only done half my interview with him.
COPLANS:
No, I don't think anyone was. I think Terbell went in and said, "Look here." You know, his mother owned Pacific—or was an enormous shareholder in Pacific—I've forgotten the name of the bank. It's a well-known West Coast bank. You're from the West Coast. What's it called? Pacific National Security Bank?
RATNER:
Security Pacific.
COPLANS:
Security Pacific. There was a lot of money behind—they were always interested in money and people with money, you know. And he said, "I can do the job. Coplans can do all the professional work, and I can do the raising of the funds and various things like that." He was desperate to get the position. I mean, in my interviews in the—isn't there some discussion between Terbell and myself about the day that he—
RATNER:
A little bit. But—
COPLANS:
In my interview with the Archives?
RATNER:
A little bit. But I guess what I had really been wondering was how you felt about the fact that they decided to—for instance, there was a memo that I came across in the minutes that said it was the general consensus of a number of museum professionals that the Pasadena Art Museum already had one of the two or three best curators in the country. That's you. So that it might be wise to hire a director whose area of expertise was business and administration and kind of split those functions. So how did you feel about that idea?
COPLANS:
Well, you see, it depends when this minute was put in. These minutes are self-serving, you've got to remember. Minutes do not reflect, or do not accurately reflect two things: first, that long before anyone has gone into the board meeting, an agreement has been made between the most powerful people—that's the way it will go. Secondly, that what they had decided about the way it will go will not necessarily be discussed in its full amplitude and the reasons for it with the remainder of the board. The board is only there to rubber-stamp the decisions of the people. So then the minutes are made up, cooked up afterwards, and some remark is put in. But it has very often historically very little to do with the true nature of the occurrence at that particular time. So you must bear that in mind all the time. Robert Rowan was always consulting the best museum directors in America. As I said in the Pasadena article, he could pop up any moment for any problem with one of the best museum directors that he had consulted. Of course he only looked for the best museum directors that had exactly the answer that he wanted to the problem that he had consulted them on. If they gave a different answer, they were not one of the best museum directors. They were second-rate. So I mean, it's just exactly the situation I have given you. The powers that run the place make the decisions in advance, find some sort of support thing which they tell the trustees about. Bob was wonderful at that. He was just great. More specific answer?
RATNER:
I just wondered how you personally felt about the fact that they decided to split the functions of having a director who was not an art historian. His function was to be the business end. Then they would leave you in the curatorial position as, you know, running that—
COPLANS:
Well, that's often done. That's done at the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art] at the present moment.
RATNER:
But it really wasn't done then, was it?
COPLANS:
No, but they came up with a solution. But it's been done by lots of major museums now, I'd say. The Metropolitan does it. In a sense, in a kind of—certainly, the museum in Washington does it. What's the—The Corcoran [Gallery of Art] does it. Lots of museums do it now. The Chicago Art Institute [Art Institute of Chicago] does it. And it's an unhappy situation. As soon as [William C.] Agee got there, he realized the situation, so he said, "Well, I want to be director of exhibitions instead of curator," you see, which was the title the Modern took. And virtually the same thing exists at the Modern. The director of the Modern is not an art historian; he's an administrator. The departmental heads are more or less autonomous, and it causes a lot of problems. The power of William Rubin, the director of the department of painting and sculpture, is so great, though he's not director, and he's so forceful as a person that the other departments suffer very considerably about his view and his activities and his restrictions. So it's a commonplace thing now. I don't know how I viewed it. I mean, I just—Terbell convinced me that it would be a great working partnership—would I do it? And I said okay. I didn't make any protest.
RATNER:
Why do you feel he was so anxious to have that position?
COPLANS:
He was collecting. He hated banking. His wife was taking a master's in art history, Melinda Terbell [now Melinda Wortz]. He just felt that it was the kind of thing he would love to do instead of banking. He was eager, young.
RATNER:
So how would you rate him as a director?
COPLANS:
Well, I mean, the guy's a buffoon. You know, he's an id—it turned out that the guy is brainless. He really is.
RATNER:
Okay. So shortly after he becomes official—
COPLANS:
Don't tell him I said so.
RATNER:
[laughter] I certainly won't. Shortly after he becomes the director, you were asked to resign. As you explained in the Archives interview, the board, and specifically Bob Rowan, changed his mind and asked you to stay. But you decided that you were going to leave. So Tom Terbell asked you if you would stay at least until they hire a curator and help him with the next few exhibitions, which you agreed to do. But you said you needed to have an airtight contract if you were going to do that, which they gave you. But then shortly thereafter—
COPLANS:
Agee was fired from either the Modern or the Whitney [Museum of American Art] and became available. Right?
RATNER:
Right. So that is what I was wondering. Why, after they go to all the trouble to give you this contract, did they decide not to honor it?
COPLANS:
Because they got hold of Agee. Agee said, "I don't need that guy doing exhibitions for a year. I want to do my own." Quite rightly. It was an uncomfortable position for him. Extremely. Poor guy. [laughter]
RATNER:
How do you think that should have been handled?
COPLANS:
Well, I handled it, you see. I mean, I kind of said to them, I understood the position. I had planned on a year's work and certain income. And Agee was there. I had done a certain number of the shows. And, all right, I would pull out and they give me half the money, and I'll just leave it like that, which is the agreement we came to. I was reasonable about the compromise. I didn't go to court and insist or anything like that. I knew they were short of money. So I just let it go. It didn't bother me too much. I was also doing exhibitions for the University of California at Irvine, so it was okay. I'm not a person who litigates if I can—I'd rather have a compromise and let the matter slide. Leave it. I'm also not greedy for money, you know. I'm not a businessman, you know: "I have certain entitlement;" "Now, damn it, that's mine," you know. "If you don't give it to me, you're taking from me." I don't see it that way. After all, the museum is a charitable trust. It's a charity, you know. So let it go.
RATNER:
Okay. I wanted to move on and just ask you one question about California Design, which you've already discussed extensively in both of the other interviews and the article. But I did want to ask you about one statement you made in which you said, "California Design successfully alienated every designer and architect of note in California."
COPLANS:
Yes.
RATNER:
In what way were they alienated?
COPLANS:
There were extant in California at least two really important architect-designers. There was the great German architect who lived and died in Los Angeles, the exile from Germany, Richard Neutra. And he lived in Pasadena. You know the reservoir in Pasadena?
RATNER:
Yes.
COPLANS:
He lived there. His house was there. [Neutra lived in the Silver Lake district in the city of Los Angeles—Ed.] No one had bothered about him in the program to do a Neutra exhibition. He was completely neglected and overlooked. Southern California completely neglected him. He never did a public building that I know of. They gave him no important works to do. He merely did some houses for the rich, but he was an important figure in the evolution of twentieth-century architecture after World War I, between World Wars I and II. Charles Eames, like him or not, also was a really worldwide figure. Well, obviously a local museum deals with and honors its worldwide figures, you know, which are of great importance. And they never did. That's neglect. It's as simple as that. There were others. There were others.
RATNER:
Why do you think that happened?
COPLANS:
The ignorance of trustees. The ignorance of trustees. Particularly the ignorance of the lady who ran California Design, Mrs. [Eudorah] Moore, who was a past president of the museum. She didn't know anything. She was an amateur. She had no idea of the importance of Neutra or of Eames. No idea. She was a do-gooder. She was a do-gooder, you know. That's all. I mean, do you understand what I mean by a do-gooder?
RATNER:
Yes.
COPLANS:
That's exactly what I mean. Intentions were of the best. She is a really terrifically energetic, first-rate person, but she's not a qualified professional. She can't—well, at the time. I don't know what she does now, but she couldn't assess the—she didn't have any hold or grasp upon the value system within the arts. She was a kind of craft person, interested in sort of good-looking household products, or curious household products, and things like that. She was not an historian in architecture or design or anything like that. Does that answer your question?
RATNER:
Very well. How did you feel about the fact that there even was a design department at Pasadena—the idea of a design department in a contemporary museum?
COPLANS:
Yes, I'm wholly opposed to it. I think the design department at the Museum of Modern Art is a horrifying mistake. It's the one mistake that Alfred Barr, who was a kind of genius, made. It's never worked out, and it still doesn't work out, and it's the department at the Modern which everyone regards with contempt, even today. The major museums kind of bypass this as much as possible, although they're interested in design and they're very interested in architecture. But the question of design and architecture in this country is very different from the questions in Europe. To some extent, the Smithsonian, for example, its outreach program here in New York—I've forgotten the name of the museum up on—
RATNER:
The Cooper-Hewitt?
COPLANS:
The Cooper-Hewitt [Museum], you see, is a design museum that deals with the history of design, and it does it from a high, professional level, but it's mostly the history of it. But this is pretty much what it's like in Europe. Those artifacts which are neither painting nor sculpture but are important in the history of civilization are usually put in separate museums. The Victoria and Albert [Museum], for example, in London is such a museum. It does include a certain amount of works that we would call high art. I mean, it has Constable watercolors and—but generally speaking it deals with what one would call the—not so much the design, but the major artifacts of worldwide civilizations outside of what we would call art, high art. It's the same on the Continent. In France they have separate museums for this purpose. It's the same in Germany. They're not mixed up. When Barr started the Modern, he felt it was important at least to incorporate this into the Modern, because America had been a major contributor in the twentieth century in architecture, or late nineteenth to twentieth century. When you have world-renowned figures like Frank Lloyd Wright, [Louis] Sullivan, and quite famous architects that came to this country from Germany, he felt that something should be done. I think he was quite right. But it's not been a good department unfortunately. It's gotten very confused in its aims, and that's because there's a great deal of confusion I think in the late-twentieth century about the role and function of design. Most artists hate that side. The abstract expressionists, for example, were totally contemptuous of design and its lack of any metaphysical background or thinking, which is not true of course of Frank Lloyd Wright or someone like that, who had a remarkable mind. But the average designer is hardly what one would call a giant intellect, or even involved in the pursuit of important intellectual ideas. I mean—so I'm basically very antithetical. If you look at the way I live, there's nothing here that's—it's not a designed room, it's a functional workroom that I live in where everything is a functional object that I—least expensive that would serve my purpose, and it's only there for effect, you know. Effect and comfort, not for decorative purposes. So I'm just not terribly interested—so I did have a bias, you see. But the bias was not a personal bias as much as it was an intellectual bias.
RATNER:
Okay. Okay, good. That's what I wanted to know about that. Let's go on and talk about the new building, which is also a topic you have covered extensively previously. But I just have a few more questions. It seems that, given the many, many problems that there were with the building, it's obvious that neither the staff nor professional museum consultants were truly part of the planning process. What do you believe was the reason for either ignoring their suggestions or excluding them altogether in terms of planning this new venture?
COPLANS:
Well, see, you have to understand that patronage, as it operates at least in California, or as it was operative in California at that particular time, is one of powerful, private men directing corporations and becoming the tastemakers because of the amount of money they can spend in hiring architects and so on. So you're contingent upon the cultivation of your men of power. More recently in many cities in America—you've got to remember that in America in the past thirty years the cities have become destroyed, unlike, say, Toronto, for example, where the great Victorian buildings have been saved. If you go into many American cities in the Midwest, they simply razed building after building after building of character. I went into Norfolk, Virginia, and was stunned that they had razed the old city and just kept a few buildings. I mean, one of the oldest cities in America—every evidence of it gone except for a few buildings, for a downtown redevelopment to bring money in, you know. In California they raze one after the other, major buildings that were of great significance by first-rate architects. Even in the University of California, where [Norton] Simon was a very important regent, until very recently on some campuses the architecture has been a horror. Take Irvine, for example. What is the name of that man who did Irvine, that architect? [William Pereira] They courted men of power and got the jobs. Once they got the jobs, they felt they were free to carry them out as they wished, whatever the advice of the professionals who were going to use those buildings functionally. They were never concerned with the function at all, or minimally concerned with the function. So it's something that was endemic to the scene in some way or other. In any event, I mean, coming back to the question of museums, museums are extremely difficult buildings to build. I mean, literally hundreds of new museums have gone up in Europe and in England and in the United States in the past thirty years, and hardly any of them are outstanding buildings. Most of them are functionally miserable. So Pasadena was not any different except in one respect: that artistically, architecturally, it was a dreadful building. I mean, you can say that the Georges Pompidou Cultural Center in Paris from the point of view of function is a horror. I mean, they're having to rebuild the whole interior of the museum, trying to deal with all kinds of problems. But perhaps the building from an architectural point of view is very interesting. But it's a horror as a museum. The same may be said of many buildings. The [Louis] Kahn building in Texas is I think very inefficient as a museum, but it's a very interesting building. But you can't say that of Pasadena. And in Southern California at that time, as I said, for example, Neutra never had—one of the most eminent architects they had living—never had a commission. They never gave him a university building to do. Not the tiniest university building. They never gave him a post office! I think he did a fire station, a small fire station. That's all they ever gave him. The man I mentioned, Eames, never got a major building of any kind. Frank Lloyd Wright got the Northern California, that—
RATNER:
The Marin.
COPLANS:
Marin County Building, which is very interesting. But that was a rare exception. Frank Lloyd Wright had a history of buildings in Northern California. He had that wonderful little building downtown, off the square, Union Square.
RATNER:
Oh, I don't know that.
COPLANS:
Little—a tiny building, which was the first Guggenheim. It has a walking ramp. It's a jeweler's store, he built it as. It's a beautiful building. But see, it depends on the taste of the people In power. If the people in power are uncultivated boors to a large extent about architecture, then you get bad architecture. The architects themselves, having got the men of power behind them, feel they are free to work as they wish within those ideas. Besides, they were possibly also untrained from the point of view of museums. I don't know how many museums [Thorton] Ladd and [John] Kelsey went to see before they designed that building, how many museums they went to in Europe, how many new museums they went to. I mean, had they even just studied Philip Johnson's building at the Modern, they would have seen how—you see, what you're dealing with is a regional society which has not got a long-term cultivation, particularly in Southern California. This is not true of Northern California. But in Southern California, this is the problem. You have a city which really, although it began under the Spaniards, it really didn't become anything until about 1910, when it began to boom as a—and which grew extensively in the twenties and thirties, you know. You don't have a civilized background in the full sense of the word. It's hard to explain to people. I would say to people, "Look. If you live in Canterbury, England, it's a little, regional city. It's the size of Pasadena. But the Romans were there, and the Roman buildings are there, apart from a great medieval cathedral and so on. There are renaissance buildings; they were bombed out by the Germans. But if you live in Lyons, in France, there's the same burial ground there that was used since Roman times for three thousand years. The city has an inherited cultivation in food, in buildings, in manufacture of goods. I mean, Lyons is a great center for cloth and so on, with museums and all kinds of things. So you have an accrued culture." California had to make its own culture, so it was very difficult, because the men in power—I mean, what was Weisman's first moneymaking effort? He imported dildos from Japan! You know, what kind of a man is this who imports dildos from Japan? Is this a cultivated man? You know? And then becomes a car dealer, importing cars. The only thing he knew about art was when Walter used to go to his house and hold little meetings to try and teach these people something. They have no background. It's all acquired. They're frontier people in a sense. But the people who went out to the frontier in the 1860s onwards, they weren't necessarily poor people. By and large, the people who went out to stake a claim in the West were very often mostly people who could afford a wagon and weapons and clothing and seed and money to acquire the acreage, you know, to live for a year or two. They had a background of some kind. They had come from Philadelphia, from Boston, from cities with a culture. The people like Weismans who come up in California, what kind of culture do they have? They don't have any. It's not rubbed off from several thousand years of civilization, accrued every day; every time you walk in the town there's something there, some reminder that an Italian has, or an Englishman, or a German has, or a Frenchman has, or a Greek has. They don't have it. So they have to learn it firsthand, and they learn it on the job. They do the best they can. I'm not saying that they're bad people. They do the best they can. They learn it on the job as best they can. Sometimes they enrich themselves in the process because they are Yankee traders. You're interested in art? You make money out of art. But that's not what curators and people who are really interested in art do. You know, you're interested in the objects and the ideas and their love of it and the entrancement that it gives them and so on. Of course, they try to perform a public service to some extent. Simon was trying to perform a public service by putting that collection together and giving it to the people. And it's a tremendous public service. But he's a very destructive individual in the meanwhile about certain other aspects. He certainly was with the University of California in the issue of architects because he didn't know. But I think he learned a lot when he himself became director of Pasadena and tried to use that museum. I mean, I don't know, but I imagine he learned a lot. I think he must have pored over my article because most of the things I did he kept. He kept those windows shut, he did all kinds of things. He realized the problems.
RATNER:
Okay, speaking of keeping the windows shut, that had something to do with the lighting, and that also is what I wanted to ask you about. That was a problem that eventually everybody did agree on, that the lighting was a fiasco. Interestingly, I did find two references to this lighting situation, one prior to 1969, and then again in June 1969, where it was brought to the attention of the board that there was a severe problem with the lighting. And they did nothing!
COPLANS:
No.
RATNER:
And then it's not until just a very few weeks before the museum is supposed to open that the board is finally told, "Look, this is an impossible situation. It has to be corrected or everybody's going to be screaming at us." At that point, they ended up spending $35,000 or something like that.
COPLANS:
Yes, I couldn't use the lighting system. I had to put in another lighting system.
RATNER:
So why do you think—what happened that they finally said, "Okay, let's spend the money and get it fixed"?
COPLANS:
I'm trying to recollect way back, and it's a little hard for me because it's some time ago, and of course also I'm much older and I don't think about those things anymore. But I made the architects—I insisted that the architects build, in one part of the museum as it was being built, a sample of the lighting. A sample of it. Now, it's a very simple problem that had to be resolved. Pass me that book. That book is on a vertical plane, and the ceiling height is there, the floor is there. If you put one light there and another light next door to it, and the lights are of equal strength, and you shine one light there and the other light down there, from the distance that the architects had, this part will be well illuminated, and that poorly illuminated. Or if the lights are strong and that is well illuminated, this part will be bleached. Even Rowan could see that I was right. Even he could see when I showed them that. Also the distance of the lights was not [points to book]. They were not according to the distance which was published in the manual of the American Society of Lighting Engineers for the standards for museums. They had not followed it. They had it. Ladd and Kelsey had it, because I gave it to them. But they were just pigheaded. They were just pigheaded, and until there was that lighting test, which was about—I don't know, whatever the time was you gave me, the time frame—a couple of months, three months before the museum was opened, they just wouldn't believe me that it was impossible. I just looked at the drawings, and I knew. You only have to go into the Museum of Modern Art. You see, the Museum of Modern Art has the most rigorous standards in the world. They have a model. It was easy to see. Rowan only had to go in and ask the people at the Modern what distance are the lights and how do they do the lights. You have several tracks and you can make a lighting situation. They have a very simple one at the Modern. In the old days they just had pieces of tin around a light. They didn't have expensive fittings. They just did it themselves. Ladd and Kelsey, I say, they just didn't go and particularize in that kind of way. They trusted in their own intuition rather than the pragmatism of seeing what was best and how it was to be done. People in California had a tendency to start all over again, to want to invent the wheel. Ladd and Kelsey had want-to-invent-the-wheel-again mentality, when it came to technical functions of a museum. They just simply had it. They were bovine about it, argumentative and bovine and stupid, and refused to move. Only when I got furious at the situation and was prepared to go to any lengths, you know, in my anger to get someone down to see the stupidity of the situation did they want to placate me. So they allowed the lighting test, and of course their system completely failed the test. But it was obvious to anyone with any experience in museums that this was so. You have to remember, you see, that of all the people there—I was about forty-seven, and apart from my eight years service in the army from eighteen to twenty-six, the rest of my life from there onwards, both as a student in London and Paris and as a person living in Europe, in Paris and England, had been spent as an artist in museums, looking at them. I was the only person with twenty years experience of looking at museums. Ladd and Kelsey, it's the first time they probably ever looked at a museum when they thought about designing a museum. That's how the situation was. This kind of ineffectiveness, by the way, is very endemic to California and elsewhere in America. Again I have to point out to you if you take a town like Akron, Ohio, which is in the Midwest, founded in the 1870s, long before Los Angeles, it has about 400,000 people. Now that in Europe is a substantial city. Most of the cities of Holland and Switzerland do not even match that amount. The towns of Switzerland are small: 200 or 300,000 people. They have beautiful museums of great cultivation. They may have three museums or four museums: a Volkerkund museum, an artist's house; a Kunsthalle, a major museum for the showing of great works of art with a permanent collection, as well as some other kinds of museums. Pasadena, what's its population? The population of Pasadena?
RATNER:
I don't know exactly, but about—
COPLANS:
Several hundred thousand.
RATNER:
Right.
COPLANS:
It's the same size as one of—
RATNER:
Right.
COPLANS:
But they have no culture, no inherited culture, you see. It's at every level. So people don't know. They're ignorant. The worst thing is they're not willing to find out. And I was in that situation. Even now, you can hear the aggravation in my voice over the bovine stupidity of people I had to deal with. You know, it's like—it's the medical equivalent of someone's refusing to have an appendicitis operation, saying, "You know, I'll go down to a card reader or something like that." Or "I'll go down to someone who'll lay their hands on it, and that'll cure it." And, of course, they die from septicemia. They refuse to believe in modern science, you know. Children die because their parents won't allow it, and things like that. It was that kind of mentality, and it's very endemic to the people there. It's hard to deal with. And they're not aware of it. They are not aware of it. They're just not aware of it. What do you do? [laughter]
RATNER:
And then of course they got slapped with a big bill at the—
COPLANS:
At the wrong moment.
RATNER:
Right.
COPLANS:
Not only that, they got an ugly lighting system that was up there. You've seen the photos. Do I need to show them to you to remind you? Something we couldn't use, with all those struts across. Simon couldn't use it either. I mean, no one could use it. It was all specially made, and they wasted probably I would say somewhere like three-quarters of a million dollars on that lighting system.
RATNER:
Oh, I didn't realize.
COPLANS:
See, which we couldn't use. See, you hadn't even realized that. It was all specially built in, all specially made, specially ordered, and we couldn't use it, and we couldn't cover it over. But at least I would think three-quarters of a million dollars of construction work, special construction work and special making of stuff which are lying at Pasadena Art Museum, of fittings—but it was the building work that was expensive—at least three-quarters of a million was wasted. I mean, I may be wrong in my figure. It may be half a million. But a substantial, very substantial sum of money was wasted for which the architects took no responsibility.
RATNER:
Right. The part that really surprised me is the museum coming up with the bucks to pay for this.
COPLANS:
Yes.
RATNER:
And I wondered why the architects hadn't been responsible.
COPLANS:
They're all powerless, you know. Everyone is in the same boat. They keep making errors and so on. It's all a friendly situation. I don't know, it's hard to explain.
RATNER:
Okay. Well, why don't we move on. The opening exhibitions were "New York: 1944 to 1969"; "West Coast: 1945 to 1969"; "The Avery Brundage Collection: Recent Acquisitions," which is what you had put together; and "Selections from the Print Collection." Although the original ideas planned by the art committee—nobody else remembers this, so I don't know if you do either—that in June 1968 was that they wanted to do an exhibition of impressionist works. But obviously that didn't pan out. Various alternatives were suggested, but those apparently didn't work out, or they changed their mind, because—
COPLANS:
They hadn't the money.
RATNER:
Oh, is that what happened?
COPLANS:
Yes. To do an exhibition of impressionist paintings, to get major loans from the Louvre, from the Courtauld [Institute of Galleries], from the Tate, from the Metropolitan, from the National Gallery [of Art], Washington, and things like that, they had neither the—see, it wasn't a question of the money, they hadn't the status. They hadn't the status. They hadn't the staff. They hadn't the guards. They hadn't the professional standards. I mean, that's how cheeky they were in their imaginings, you see, how naive, naive, naive. They were so naive it was incredible. They were—you see, you have to understand that they were—I keep saying it to you, as if you're responsible, [laughter] but in the interview you're doing, you have to remember there's an incredible level of naiveté. An incredible level of naiveté. You want to go on about that because some important things come up about that which I haven't said and I want to say about the opening exhibition.
RATNER:
Oh, right. I do.

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE APRIL 27, 1987

RATNER:
Before we flipped the tape, we were talking about the exhibitions that were to open the new building. So we talked a little bit about how they wanted to do this impressionist exhibition, and you said they didn't have the money to. So, of the exhibitions that I just mentioned that they decided to do, what was the thinking in deciding to do, for example, this New York survey, and the West Coast survey?
COPLANS:
Well, I, as you can imagine, was extremely overloaded, and any kind of expert help I could get reopening the new museum was welcome to me. Alan Solomon, who had been director of the Jewish Museum in New York, and where he had carried out an immensely important series of contemporary exhibitions, had recently arrived on the West Coast and taken over my job at the University of California at Irvine. So here we have an enormously experienced man, now in the area, available at a local university. I think Jim [James T. Demetrion] came to me and said, "John, would it be a good idea to pull Alan in?" I said, "Sure, because any help I can get would be great." I did not know it at the time, but he was in extremely poor health. He I think died during the course of the exhibition, had a heart attack and died. A great deal of misunderstanding arose because [Robert A.] Rowan welcomed the idea tremendously of someone like Solomon's tremendously important name to be associated with the new museum. So whatever Alan—he saw Alan, of course, and Jim spoke to me about it, and I said, "Yes, yes," you know. So they came up for a proposal for an exhibition. What was the title?
RATNER:
"New York: 1944-69."
COPLANS:
Yes. Which was not the title of the exhibition, if I remember correctly, that I had agreed on or been approached on. It was "American Painting," not New York. It was "American Painting," the title that I understood it to be. It was American painting over the date. Somehow this other exhibition got substituted because it had been my expectation, being "American Painting," that certain West Coast artists would be included, namely, at least Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn—and it wasn't painting, it was American art—Richard Diebenkorn and possibly one or two others, younger painters: Robert Irwin, Edward Kienholz, people of substance whom I regarded as major contributors, but not necessarily as important figures as some of the American abstract expressionists, or Jasper Johns, or someone like that, but nevertheless certainly worthy of inclusion. The exhibition should be aimed towards including them, so it was a survey across. To my astonishment, I later discovered that it was only to be New York painting. I was thrown into a complete tizzy by this. The major budget had gone towards this exhibition. Solomon wrote the catalog essay, and I got a list of the works, and I was in complete consternation about it because there was nothing about any West Coast artists. I mean, it was just, I knew, a complete slap in the face for them. So I went to the art committee and put up a protest, you know. Solomon heard about it and was furious, you know, that I had made a—we had sharp words about it. I think even Demetrion was in disagreement with me. He may have mentioned it in his interview. But I think he was in disagreement with me about my anger, you know. And the art committee said, "We'll allocate you one room with $5,000." I made up a kind of catalog and a show, one work each. Of course, the West Coast artists were furious. Now I have to say this: the pressure was very great, and I probably made an error on my part. I didn't think it through clearly enough. What I should have done, I think, in retrospect—soon afterwards I realized it, not years later—was to have said, "The second exhibition will be an equally important exhibition of West Coast art with the same kind of catalog, which I will do." I could have worked on that, but I didn't. I tried to do a remedial exhibition, which was an absolute failure from the point of view of the local artists. They were furious with it. And I had, I said, a tremendous quarrel with Solomon about it. He was mad with fury about my attitude about what I—you know, I said to him, "You have no West Coast artists. And it was not supposed to be painting." He said, "You're just the curator here." You know, "Demetrion and I have—" You know, whatever, it went on and so on. I had a big row with him. We never spoke to each other again. I was also furious with Jim because he was kind of running away and leaving me handling the boat, you know, leaving me alone in the boat with this very bad situation. So I just put together, as well as I could, an exhibition of the best West Coast artists, included them in the other galleries. They were obviously receiving inferior treatment and resented it enormously, were furious about it. It was a bad situation. It was not good. It was not good for me, and I decided to leave the museum soon after that. I mean, I was fed up. There were better things to do than go through this kind of agony. To have worked so hard, so long, to put the West Coast on the map, and then in the most critical moment—you know, Artforum, if you go through the index of Artforum—you should make a Xerox of it—you'll see the largest number of entries in the first index of Artforum for the first years are by me. I mean, it's my name consistently, and it's on the history of the West Coast, of these artists. For me to be put in this situation was, to say the least, impossible. I resented it deeply. I was full of anger about it, and fury, that I had even allowed myself to be put in this—I hadn't thought it through. But the pressure was so great, and I was operating on the long hours and things like that, that I was in a daze. I just couldn't—I just hadn't worked it out well enough. I made a mistake, and it caused a lot of problems. I lost my integrity over it. You understand? You have so much integrity—see, you have to understand that outside of universities, in the art world in general, if you are a critical writer or a curator, your appointments are not like academic appointments. You can operate to the extent that people will permit you to operate, that they believe that what you are doing is good and important. So you become a center of power, but you don't have the power. It's not part of you, born in you and radiating outwards. The power is granted by the exercise of your intellectual abilities and your energy and the belief that people have that this power is benign and useful. When the power is no longer benign and useful they react against it in anger. And I had been put into a situation like this, which I—it was horrible, you know. I mean, it just cut the ground from under my feet. So it was a bad situation. It was a bad situation. Not good. Any more questions?
RATNER:
Well, I just wanted to comment that, even if you had done it as a second show, they probably still would have been angry, because they would have felt that they were being treated as second-class citizens, don't you think?
COPLANS:
Well, see, I can make some remarks, slightly an enlargement of this. Artists are, by and large, in a very difficult position because they have to support themselves, they have to capitalize—raise the capital—to do the work. It costs money. And the time. This is their career or profession, but their only status is through the market and the museums, to get into the history of art. So that if they're always in an excessively difficult position because they don't have any right to exist except by recognition of their talent and since they can't measure their talent because they don't have a world view of themselves, it is only the world that can measure their talent, and often it does it incorrectly, as they well know and are often taught in the history of art. So they often have the feeling that their backs are to the wall and they're not getting their fair due, because lots of bad artists sell well in their view, and they're quite correct. There are artists that ought not to be in the history of recent art that are, but once people are in the history of art, it takes roughly from thirty to fifty years to take them out, to drop them in some way. Secondly, you could never stitch anyone into the history of art, recent art, later. You can't suddenly come up at this point, when we're scrutinizing art in the way that we've been scrutinizing it ever since the turn of the century—you can't suddenly come up with a major impressionist or a major cubist that is unknown. Yes, in the late nineteenth century, when the names of artists were not known and everything was mixed up and art history only began its discourse much the same as biology or any of those things where you first begin to scrutinize and examine and name and put into position and docket and analyze everything, there were all kinds of mistakes that had to be corrected. But once those mistakes were corrected later, now, it's an absolutely impossible situation. So artists feel that during the course of their time they need the recognition with immediacy because if they don't get it now, they may not get it later. Events have passed them by. So the issue of the museum and its response to the West Coast artists was of grave concern to them personally, to each individual, and quite rightly so. Thirdly, they had the feeling of being kind of second-class citizens, which they did not feel at first with Artforum, you see. The moment Artforum moved to New York they had that feeling, because it was not devoting an enormous amount of space to them. I was the only person writing. It's hard to find writers; people were not interested. The university people are all lazy, you know. Young art historians at universities do very little beyond their teaching and trying to get their thesis published as a book. They don't go out and deal with contemporary painting. It's very hard to find people. I was enormously active and busy. And people find great difficulty in writing, the fluency of writing, outside of academic writing. So I was alone once Artforum had left. Once Artforum had left, they also felt they had been let down. They'd been let down, and they hated Artforum for that reason, you see. So they were in—by this time, Artforum had left I think. In 1967 they had left. They left in 1965. And they felt that the situation is not in their favor, that they were being treated all the way through, both by Artforum, now, and New York, and suddenly with this exhibition, as second-class citizens. It was a difficult situation. But of course, vis-à-vis this, they did not realize that with the departure of Artforum and with their hostile reaction to me, that my departure shortly thereafter would close down their recognition altogether. The result now, the West Coast is back in the kind of way—they don't realize it too much, but it's in the kind of pre-Artforum way. Nothing comes through here at all. Younger California artists have seen no reception here of any kind. They did not know in their hostility—they were very hostile to Artforum even when it was operating on their behalf in California. Extremely hostile. They did not realize what its loss meant in the sense of an ambience, a community in ambience. And with what great degree of difficulty they're now experiencing—you may not know about this. No one may have discussed this with you, but nevertheless it is so. Even the entry of MOCA [Museum of Contemporary Art] and the new building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will in my opinion do little to change the situation because—this is a side thing—they simply don't have the curatorial staff to do the kind of work that people like myself were doing at that particular time. You have the involvement and the interest. Maurice Tuchman has not done anything for years, and he's been curator of the County Museum. And the MOCA program, looking at it from my point of view here, is a disaster. The director's more interested in fundraising. He has no staff worth speaking of that are interesting from the point of curatorial in my judgment. That's enough of that. But you see there are consequential effects in time. Instead of something being built up, it decayed. Those are consequential effects. And the nature of these consequential effects are not understood by trustees who institutionalize their operations. They don't take a kind of responsibility for the overall culture. Do you understand what I'm trying to say?
RATNER:
Yes.
COPLANS:
So even when one acts in a public capacity, in an institution, nevertheless one is bound in a kind of way, I think, personally, to act on behalf of, in loco parentis, for the culture itself. The acts you do, the decisions you make are decisions that should be made for and on behalf of the enhancement of the culture as a whole. That goes back to my role as curator of choices, you see. I thought that Solomon had made absolutely the wrong decision and the trustees had made absolutely the wrong decision over the opening exhibition of the museum.
RATNER:
Why were the trustees so adamant about not having a West Coast—
COPLANS:
Because they didn't know anything. The only one who knew anything—there were two trustees at the time. There was Rowan and [Frederick] Weisman. Rowan was putting in the money; Weisman was not putting in the money. In fact, I can say I think that, to the best of my knowledge, Weisman had entered into a kind of operation with Pasadena to obtain a certain work of art from it, which he got. He had promised to give other works of art in exchange. When the debacle happened, he felt self-released from that contract. I think that when he divorced Norton [Simon's] sister [Marcia S. Weisman], Norton really went after him, and I think he got those things out of him. But you understand there was no feeling on Weisman's part, to the best of my knowledge, that he owed this to the public, to the people of the state of California for whom this was. It's always to one's own pecuniary advantage. Do you understand? I regard that as a totally immoral position. I believe that all the acts that we make, once you are in a position of trust, there are certain moral issues that have to be a guiding force which are not to do with one's self-interest, though, nevertheless of course, one seeks fame, one seeks recognition, whether one is an artist or a curator or the chairman of the board. The presupposition is that you're doing it for and on behalf, not only of your specific community, but you are enriching in some way or other your regional community, and also you are acting within the framework and continuum of the history of Western culture, trying to make a contribution. So that one's efforts are more than sort of local self-interest. One makes also that supposition at a university that—it's not just scholarship; it's a contribution to the cultivation of the culture of Western civilization, in some form or other, in whatever field or media you work. I mean, you are working now as a historian, obtaining raw data which is going to be looked at and evaluated, perhaps or perhaps not, by some future generation of historians who—but you're providing them with the raw data. And someone's got to evaluate this raw data. I don't know whether anyone intends to or not. Probably no one will. It will lie there in some archive. But it will be there and it will be available.
RATNER:
Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about these specific exhibitions. What was the philosophy for the inaugural year? You know, there were certain exhibitions planned, but—
COPLANS:
There was the Bauhaus exhibition ["Fifty Years of Bauhaus"].
RATNER:
Right.
COPLANS:
That was—I don't have the exhibition program. If you had it, I can tell you, you know.
RATNER:
No, I might have—let me put this on pause for a second. [tape recorder off] But let's talk about the policy as well as the specific—
COPLANS:
Well, this is not correct.
RATNER:
Okay. I got that from somebody at the Norton Simon [Museum of Art].
COPLANS:
Yes, well, it's not correct. The "Marcel Duchamp [Retrospective"] was not in 1970, it was in 1963.
RATNER:
I think that was a tiny little something. She didn't mean the big retrospective by that.
COPLANS:
I see. When did I leave?
RATNER:
You left in February of 1970, approximately. I think that's when you submitted your resignation. But then, however long your contract—
COPLANS:
But there are exhibitions missing from this. Oh, yes, there's "Fifty Years of Bauhaus." Yes, well, okay. I left in February of—I did the [Henri] Fantin Latour, I did the "Fifty Years of Bauhaus," I did the Andy Warhol. And I left when I did the Andy Warhol? I don't remember doing the Atget photographs ["Eugene Atget Photographs"], or also the Kelly lithographs ["Ellsworth Kelly Lithographs, 1964-66"]. Yes, I did the Frank Lloyd Wright collection of Japanese prints ["Japanese Prints from the Frank Lloyd Wright Collection"]. Well, I think I left—the Warhol was my last active exhibition, wasn't it?
RATNER:
Yes, I think so.
COPLANS:
Yes, because I don't remember some of these other things. These were put together by other people. I certainly would have not have done—yes, I did the Frank Lloyd Wright collection of Japanese prints, many of which were fake. I had to call in some Japanese experts. But it was—these were bought by Weisman and different people, were put on loan to the museum so that the museum could pay the insurance and be stored in their airtight vaults. I had no expertise in the material. I knew the material but I had no expertise, which is very different. But I was very suspicious of it. Quite a number of the works turned out to be fakes. I called in someone from Japan before I put the exhibition up, and I remember that's the last one. So what is it you're asking me now?
RATNER:
Was there and, if so, what was the philosophy for the inaugural year? You know, they've just put up this new building. Were they trying to project a particular image of themselves by putting on these certain exhibitions?
COPLANS:
Yes, the same image, the same image that they had been trying to project from Walter Hopps's time at the old Pasadena Art Museum. Very soon after this they changed their name to the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, so obviously they were trying to project an image of some equivalency of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and its programs. That is that it would deal with the history of art that led to the current art, the roots of what led to the current art, and an examination of the current art itself. That's why I did the Henri Fantin Latour. It's something they had never seen before, this aspect of French painting, in person. Instead of looking at reproductions, I managed to borrow—I found out there were some Fantin Latours at various museums, and I borrowed them and put it all together. Craig Kauffman is a local artist; Richard Serra is a New York artist; Joseph Kosuth, a New York artist; DeWain Valentine is a local artist and so on.
RATNER:
So there was a balance there going on.
COPLANS:
Well, some reasonable sort of balance. Some sort of balance going on between old art and new art, out of the West Coast or out of New York and so on. But the Bauhaus was the most important collection of design and art coming from the most advanced educational institution in Germany in the thirties, in which a number of the most important artists in the [Galka Scheyer] Blue Four Collection were associated. [Paul] Klee and [Wassily] Kandinsky both taught at the Bauhaus, and [Alexei von] Jawlensky was resident near the Bauhaus at the time that he made some of the works in the institution. We were a museum which had what could be called a major collection of German art, though many of the artists were not German in it. Jawlensky and Kandinsky were Russian, and Klee was a Swiss, and the other one was a German, I've forgotten the name of the fourth man, but—
RATNER:
[Lyonel] Feininger.
COPLANS:
Feininger. But he was an American German. So it's hard to call them Germans. But they nevertheless operated in the north, as against the school of Paris, between Russia and Germany, and they came after the revolution into Russia. So it was important to see the roots and ideas surrounding—and results and consequences of some of—the influence of the major artists who were in the Blue Four collection, as they operated with the Bauhaus. It was very interesting, you see, to see this. It was a question of conveying to the regional audience the circumstances, events and products of that mind that they owned a major collection of. It was to enhance and enrich their knowledge. Moreover, the Bauhaus collection could not travel in America because no museum was big enough to take it—or they were big enough to take it but they were not in the position to strip the museum the way I felt Pasadena was. It went to Toronto, and I booked it from Toronto to Los Angeles to Pasadena. I cleaned the whole museum and we put the whole thing up. So it was a great experience from the point of view of the history of what they were associated with. See, it's not so distant when you kind of think of the Blue Four collection. So the philosophy concerning the follow-up that I had in mind was exactly as I've stated: to go back to the roots of what we were dealing with; to deal with the West Coast as well as to deal with East Coast artists. You have to remember that one is operating within certain restrictions, both of finance and of availability. There are certain exhibitions you can't do, the artists will not permit you to do. I could approach someone like, say, Ellsworth Kelly, and say, "I'd like to do your exhibition." He would say, "No, I don't want one at Pasadena. I've got one coming up at the Modern that's much more important. I'm waiting for that one." Many artists were unavailable because either European museums or American museums were already doing exhibitions on their work. So you had to seek your way through to find what was available and what was economically possible or plausible with the resources that you had and do the best you could under the circumstances. That's basically the situation. You're looking at me in amazement.
RATNER:
No. I just wanted to see if you had anything else you wanted to say on that.
COPLANS:
No, no.
RATNER:
Okay. Good. Okay.
COPLANS:
I mean, there probably is, but you have to ask the question.
RATNER:
I think we'll go ahead and move on to talk about the board of trustees a little bit. In the interview that you did with the Archives of American Art, you talked about a lack of a clearly defined acquisition policy, and that consequently many works unrelated to the museum's stated purpose were acquired. Then works were de-accessioned at various times for all sorts of reasons. And then, as the museum's financial status began to deteriorate, they began de-accessioning to finance operating expenses, which is a practice considered unethical of course by most museum professionals. They started doing this actually while you were on staff, and there were two instances I wanted to ask you about. One happened I think in about September of '69, and it regarded a whole group of American works—
COPLANS:
Yes. Yes.
RATNER:
—that were de-accessioned, and then they were sold to Paul Kantor, who was an L.A.—
COPLANS:
Yes, dealer.
RATNER:
—and then he in turn sold them to the Maxwell Gallery in San Francisco. They resold them for a substantial profit. I guess people on the board were very upset about the whole thing. What exactly do you remember about that whole situation?
COPLANS:
I can tell you. First of all, let's take the situation. The museum had in its basement, so to speak—though it never had a basement—large numbers of so-called works of art. By so-called I mean unimportant works of art which had been given to them for tax deductions. Some were fakes; some were pieces of tourist art. It was a mishmash of material of no interest to the museum. When we decided to move, I decided to clear out all the stuff that was not part of our purposes, you know. Among them was, I think, regional paintings, nineteenth, early-twentieth century, of indifferent quality. Now, you had two options. I had to send them to [Sotheby] Parke-Bernet in New York, or get, you know, a price for them, for it was a fair price. We sold lots of stuff. Kantor offered a price which I thought was a reasonably fair price for very indifferent material. He resold it at Maxwell Galleries. Maxwell Galleries refurbished them, stoned and varnished them, reframed them, and put them up at high prices. That didn't mean to say they sold them. You understand that someone walked in and saw a painting that we had sold for $400, marked at $4,000, said "We've been swindled." But they haven't sold the painting. Besides, it's got a new frame on it, it's been varnished and it's not dirty anymore or scratched or anything like that. It was probably a mistake on my part. I should have had nothing to do with it. But I was anxious to try and buy some new pieces for the museum. And that's why I was harassed. I was—whether or not the price was right or wrong, I probably should have done it in a different way. We might have held an auction at the museum, but of course the auction might not have gone off well, and if the auction has not gone off well, the paintings are then burnt and you can't get any price for them. So it was one of those things that went along the way.
RATNER:
And then you didn't even get the money to use for new acquisitions after all?
COPLANS:
No, no. They spent it on the building. So that was another mistake, you see, that I trusted them that it would be put back into acquisitions, and it wasn't.
RATNER:
Okay. Then the other incident—this was brought up in I think January 1970—was about a whole group of oriental objects. Now they apparently were sent off without being de-accessioned, or something like that. According to the minutes—and you've already given me your comment on the minutes—but in it Tom [Thomas G.] Terbell said that it was his understanding that they weren't particularly important works, although a piece from that group later sold for a pretty significant sum. Do you remember anything about that?
COPLANS:
No.
RATNER:
Oriental objects or anything?
COPLANS:
No, no.
RATNER:
Okay.
COPLANS:
I had nothing to do with that.
RATNER:
Okay. Then just one final question about the board. Given that so many members of the board were fairly successful businessmen in their own right, why do you think the financial management of the museum got so out of hand?
COPLANS:
Well, I don't think so many members of the board were fairly successful in their own right. I mean, like whom? You have to be specific. Give me the names of the board members and—
RATNER:
Well, maybe we're equating wealth with being successful, and maybe that's not exactly the same thing, but you would think that Rowan and Terbell and [Gifford] Phillips and [Alfred] Esberg perhaps—
COPLANS:
Well, Esberg didn't come on until later, I think.
RATNER:
Well, '71, I guess he was president and you were gone.
COPLANS:
Yes. I had left by then. All the mistakes had been made.
RATNER:
Made by then.
COPLANS:
And you must remember Rowan was not wealthy in the sense of the way that—and Gifford Phillips was not wealthy in the way that Simon was wealthy, making money all the time. I don't think [Edwin W.] Janss was on the board—was he?
RATNER:
Not by that point.
COPLANS:
No. Janss was wealthy because his land values were constantly being enhanced at Thousand Oaks in these developments and things like that. Rowan was decayed wealth. In other words, his firm, which his father had founded, had been the most important real estate operators in Southern California, and by the time Rowan was—I think he had a brother, I'm not sure—were in charge, he was a bad businessman and everything was in decay. Who else did you mention?
RATNER:
And Tom Terbell, who was a banker of course.
COPLANS:
Yes. Tom Terbell had no—it was Tom Terbell's mother who had the money. He was a vice president at a bank, at a large bank, and what he did and what his judgments were like and what his experience was, under the most severe professional scrutiny, no one knew. In time I discovered that he was a kind of a bit of a waffler, and not very strong, you know. I mean, he was a little idiotic about hard and tough decisions. But he knew enough to glibly talk about various things, but that's not what it's about, you know. It's the actual, operative thing. Who else did you mention?
RATNER:
That was it. But really my question was at least—
COPLANS:
You see, most of them are just local people who—
RATNER:
So do you think that had something to do with why the financial management was such a mess?
COPLANS:
Let's be fair. Let's take two sides. Let me be devil's advocate for fairness, if I could use such a term in that way. First of all, at this period there was very little experience compared with more recently. And because of Pasadena, which was the first major museum to go under of the problems—certainly the previous director, whose name I keep forgetting, Tom—
RATNER:
Leavitt.
COPLANS:
Leavitt had a suspicion that there was not the support in the area for the ambitions that they had. And he was correct. Certainly Walter Hopps had nothing to do with the financial side, and they cut him off from that.
RATNER:
Right.
COPLANS:
The decisions were made by Rowan. And Rowan had very little to guide him in the way of experiences of this kind of situation. So from that point of view they were doing the best they could in what was a fairly buoyant and optimistic situation, which changed itself. There are a series of ups and downs in the American economy. When it's up and people have money to burn, as in the current stock market, they'll burn it. When it's down, they retrench and say, "I haven't anything," you know. Secondly, they had very little experience of professional fundraising. They didn't have a first-rate firm doing the professional fundraising. They weren't careful about it and informed, you know. So they were doing the best they could under the circumstances they thought were right. But in actual fact they were of course, as anyone can say afterwards, inexperienced and they were wrong. They blundered. It was hard for them. Now from the other point of view of course, from the opposite point of view, one could say that they were never willing to scrutinize the situation in a hard-nosed way and hire tough professionals to operate at the right level with good salaries to do the job properly. The financial adviser was the retired—as I said in my article—the retired city treasurer, who was an affable enough man, you know. But I mean, he had no experience with this kind of thing. Secondly, the feasibility study was not a good feasibility study. There were no tests made, and various things like that as to how they could raise the amount of money. Thirdly, if I remember correctly, the costs of the museum kept going up, didn't they? I can't remember now.
RATNER:
Yes.
COPLANS:
That's a fairly normal situation. But a businessman would say, "Well, that's impossible. When I build a building I get a price and that's it, I sign a contract at a fixed price, and that's what they have to do." But a museum is a very special operation, and there were changes made and difficulties encountered. So it was a tough situation. But as a consequence of the Pasadena situation, many other museums in the country scrutinized their operations, as a consequence of my report which was widely read by trustees through the country. When they did new buildings and things like that they were wary and careful and much more thoughtful and tried not to overextend themselves. But it was a period of pioneering, so to speak, almost, in that particular moment. So to some extent the trustees—Rowan feels blameless. You know what I mean? The trustees were naive, feel blameless. So there you are and there it is. A great many institutions profited from this situation. They profited. But also you have to remember there are many aspects that are immensely hard to deal with. If you take, say, a community like Minneapolis which has many Swedes because it has an enormous Swedish population it has a highly developed socialist orientation, the Twin Cities. Therefore the community accepts its communal responsibilities in a very different manner than the manner in which Pasadena accepts its communal responsibilities, because the make-up of the people is entirely different. One has to allow for things like this in America which are not so delineated and strong. The cities grew here recently, organically—clusters of people with different backgrounds, and they have prejudices and weaknesses and strengths that are all different. So each community in America—it's not homogenous; it has its own local prejudices and orientations and abilities and willingness and wealth. How that's tapped into—and it requires a great deal of skill on the part of people who advise and help—needs a great deal of testing, research and various things like that. I've been in situations in America—I built another museum where the testings were quite different because I was well aware, you know, of this situation and much more insistent ones. And they still ran into trouble. They ran into trouble, not because they—they didn't need to run into trouble, but because of local prejudice. Local prejudice can actually defeat the successful erection of a museum. I don't need to enlarge on this, but this is good enough for the purpose of what we're speaking about.

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO APRIL 27, 1987

RATNER:
Okay. I just wanted to go ahead and wrap up with a couple of questions. What do you feel were the primary factors leading to the demise of the museum as a contemporary showcase?
COPLANS:
Money. That's all. It's only money. Nothing else. If they could have sustained the building, they could have managed. I don't think I could be more complicated than that.
RATNER:
Okay. Despite its ultimate fate, most people would agree that the museum did have a significant impact on the cultural life of Southern California. How would you summarize those contributions?
COPLANS:
Well, there are strange aspects to it. Maurice Tuchman came out from New York—extremely well trained, highly intelligent curator. A good art historian, or a good organizer of art-historical things. When I was at Pasadena and he was at the County Museum there was an immense rivalry between us. It was a colleague's rivalry. When I left, Maurice had nothing to grind against and went into a kind of quiet period, and so almost into decay. As soon as MOCA arrives, Maurice comes to life again. You know, he did a quite important and good exhibition in response to the MOCA situation. So when you—which is very American—when you don't have a free market economy of, so to speak, [laughter] rivalry, you know, then the energy level is much lower. That's a very American thing. So that's one effect that it had. The second effect that it had of course was that it left Los Angeles to some extent without a center, the artistic community without a center. When I was the curator of Pasadena I used to visit the studios and see people, and I kept in touch very closely. When someone like Henry Geldzahler, the curator of the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art], came out, he would say, "Who is interesting to see? I've come out to see if there are any interesting artists." I knew who they were and would take him. So it's not so much the question necessarily of the museum, but of a staff that has information and can pass the information on. Because people are constantly seeking and searching. Then there was, I think, the sense of loss. Because the West Coast, or at least Southern California, more than any other area at that time, and probably subsequently, is such a vast, rambling area that it's not like Manhattan Island which is full of artists and galleries and art historians and museums and exhibitions and art magazines. Their museums tended at their best to be sort of centers to which people could gravitate. It's the information aspect. When Pasadena died, that kind of information aspect also died with it. There was no one there to operate for and on behalf of the artists in that particular way. Also I think that there was a kind of hiatus in the sophistication of the city, the sense of loss, you know, in the sense that they had failed. Let me put it this way. The feeling of the abstract expressionist painters, whether consciously or not—and I think consciously—was that they were living in a new civilization: one which had taken over an aboriginal civilization. But whatever its greatness as a power, its manufacturing power, its learning and all its architecture, its other abilities, it had not a high art of its own. Therefore something was missing from the culture, from the concreteness: sensitivity, intelligence, power, and glory of the culture from the point of view of civilization. They set out, I think, in their own minds, as indeed artists before them had tried, to bring that into American life. It was an important part of their dream perhaps. When they fulfilled it, it was one of their glories, their recognition that they were great artists and as great as the Europeans. They brought to the land of their birth, or their adopted land, treasure. Each of them operated out of their own ego, but the ego had a purpose in mind. I think that it's a very important kind of factor that a culture in itself should be regarded at the best level as creative, that the people who live there and work there and who have a civilization feel a sense of loss or incompleteness if their civilization is not highly regarded in the best sense. They realize, you know, that without some great artists or musicians or poets or writers that there is a sense of loss. I think that when Pasadena went there was a sense of loss among many people, that something that was good had gone, something that had its own—it was a kind of treasure in a way. However rough and wrong it had been it had gone. That hurts people, that sense of loss. You can't define it in a narrow way, but there was something missing. Of course they're trying again. They're trying with the County Museum, the new building. They're trying with MOCA. But you can fall out of phase. It's hard. You could fall out of phase, and the job is terrible. What I mean by that, I mean, the Germans had, for sure, a thousand years of a great culture, at least from the year 1000 onwards, a great culture. I mean, there wasn't a Germany, but those northern states that we now regard as Germany, Nuremberg, all kinds of places. I mean, just think of the various states of Germany: Frederick the Great and his court and the people he brought around him, and the musicians and so on, German music and—I mean, when we speak of music today, baroque German music is the great music of civilization. I mean, it's the most wonderful, extraordinary, touching music that one could ever come across. To touch the soul, if one may say so, such a thing. And in a matter of a few years, Hitler totally destroyed this, a thousand years of that culture. Then the Germans after the war had to rebuild it. And to rebuild what has been destroyed and made over a thousand years is an impossible task. It's the most difficult task. That's what I mean by being out of phase. When Pasadena fell, then you got out of phase. Now it has to be rebuilt fifteen years later. It's hard to rebuild it because things have passed and things have gone, and the accrued effects of the things that were there and the excitement and the events and whatever there was and what could have been built upon now has to be remade and rebuilt upon, which is hard. It's hard for the people. That's really my comment.
RATNER:
Okay. Well, we've spent all this time talking about your relationship to the Pasadena Museum. But would you tell me a little bit about what you've been doing since you left the Pasadena?
COPLANS:
Is this for the tape?
RATNER:
Uh-huh.
COPLANS:
Well, I came back to New York and I took over Artforum as editor and had severe problems with it, just the same problems as with Pasadena—I seem to fall into these problems—very severe problems financially. I had to rebuild the health and strength of the magazine financially and keep it operative as a—hopefully, as a significant, dynamic force in American culture, or world culture. Then as the market forces overtook what I call the moral forces that I've been trying to describe, I became very unhappy and dissatisfied with Artforum's role and my role, and I tried to restructure it and I got fired for it because of that restructuring. They felt that my way of wanting to restructure it might cost it money with—of course everything costs money. Money isn't important, I mean, as much as ideas are important. I could manage. I built it back from bankruptcy to a viable magazine, and then the change—I could keep it going. But anyway, then I went to Ohio and built a new museum there in a blue-collar town. But I didn't like it. It was impossible to operate in, it was so uncivilized. I left it, having while I was there decided to become an artist again. I'd become an artist again, with some astonishment and surprise and a great deal of, it seems to be, success recently. I mean, in the last year or two I'm getting very good reviews, covers of art magazines, many museum shows, and people are enormously interested in my work. I must say, I'm happier than I've ever been in my life, being back on my own as an artist and back into the world of art and ideas and the making of art. I love being in my studio working, and I'm enormously fascinated with what I am doing and find some kind of total, complete and absolute satisfaction in it. I have no regrets. I don't regret anything. I don't regret Pasadena or Artforum or—I came to America as an immigrant with no money, and I hope I've made a significant contribution. Now I feel, as I'm getting old, it's now my turn to fulfill myself, for my [own] sake, in the most egotistical and selfish way. And it's great. I'm really enjoying it.


Date: 2011-07-27
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