Interview of Caroline Liebig

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE FEBRUARY 1971

GALM:

The first question I would like to ask is, when was your first association with the museum? At that time it would have been the Museum of History, Science and Art.

LIEBIG:

Yes. It was in the late fall of 1939. I was asked to help form a group, a kind of "friends," group at the museum, by a woman who is the mother of a friend of mine—Mrs. [Franklin] Booth. She was on the Board of Governors, and she thought I would be a good person because I represented a younger generation than herself and was interested in art and was full of energy at that time.

GALM:

What happened after the invitation was extended? What did you go about forming?

LIEBIG:

Mrs. Booth and Miss Louise Upton—who was really the art head of the museum at the time, she was called the chief curator of art—and I made lists of people that we thought were somewhat interested in art, and asked them if they would join a new group to support the museum. We had nothing to offer them. It was simply hoping that they would try to help the museum. The whole philosophy now of groups of "friends" is to give them benefits and so on. We had nothing to offer them, and so we didn't get very many members very quickly.

GALM:

How many do you think that you started out with at that time?

LIEBIG:

Oh, I don't know. I think for a long time it hovered around a hundred, or a hundred and fifty. Then later on we had to hire a professional person to drum up membership. She had come from the Chicago Art Institute and had done that kind of thing for years. Oh, it was a hard-sell type of telephone request for people to be members. And gradually she built up membership that way.

GALM:

Do you recall what her name was?

LIEBIG:

No, I don't. It could be easily found out though, because she was with the museum a long time. There had to be a central person on the job all the time, and after she finally left, another woman was employed to do the same thing; but it wasn't a very warm or personal or certainly not a very art-oriented way to drum up interest. But of course she got a lot of people that we didn't know. Our friendships had covered perhaps more or less the same terrain, though including different age levels.

GALM:

"What was the name of this group, its official name?

LIEBIG:

It started being called the Museum Patrons Association. Then that word "patron" quite quickly became very old-fashioned and unpleasing in its suggestion, so it was dropped and it was called Museum Association. Then quite quickly its real work, and its real identity, were in a group called the Museum Association Executive Committee. I think, perhaps in the beginning, that started rather small and then later there were probably twenty or twenty-five members in it. It had a lot of power as it developed, because as the membership became larger it began gradually getting a little money, you see; and we became very fortunate in some of the people that joined this. There was a very influential architect of the period named Reginald Johnson; he was on it. Carl Dentzel, who is now the director of the Southwest Museum, was on it. An artist—and this has not happened for a long time, that an artist has served on anything really at the museum—an artist named Ed Biberman was on it. He was rather far-out politically; he felt that artists should have more of a part to play than they ever have had. The opposition point of view was always that, how are you going to choose them? You know, if you choose this one you'll have to have that one; you have a conservative, you have avant-garde and so on. A decorator, very important at the time in town, named Harold Grieve, and his wife Jetta, were both on it. Then Magi Ewing, who was a professor of English for a long time at UCLA, did a very important thing. He decided that we needed some money, not just these dribbling-in bits of dues, so we had a small drive. At the time we thought it was marvelous that people gave us a hundred dollars apiece. We all had a few friends that did do that. We were not of course aware that later on enormous sums would be raised for the museum. So it [the Museum Association] flourished, considering that it was the beginning of the war. I think it flourished quite encouragingly. Of course the executive committee was very critical of the sluggish Board of Governors, who at that time were mostly men interested in birds or, vaguely, in science or California history.

GALM:

These were the "bird people" that you speak of in your autobiography.

LIEBIG:

Yes; and there were professors of history at USC. I remember one dear old professor who later on, when I was on the board myself, would really go to sleep through the meetings. And that was not unsymbolic. [laughter] The association was really eager to have a little power and it didn't have very much; but as it grew and there was more money, it began having the power of influencing the other group, anyhow.

GALM:

What role did the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors play at this time?

LIEBIG:

Well, there was always one supervisor as a regular member.

GALM:

Of the Board of Governors?

LIEBIG:

Of the Board of Governors. He counted as one of the fifteen. That practice went on until, well, as I remember, it went on until the breakup into two museums, the Exposition Park museum and the new art museum.

GALM:

What then was the real aim of this organization? Was it one of acquisition also, or not?

LIEBIG:

Not directly. It was to stir up interest and to get people to go to the museum, to go to openings, to help raise money for the annual exhibition of Los Angeles artists of the vicinity, to go to lectures and Sunday concerts that were held at the museum. I remember openings were very badly attended in those days. One time when Sports Illustrated was first established they wanted to have an "Art in Sports" exhibition, so it was arranged. They arranged it for the big rotunda in the old museum, and only seven people came. So we were really just filling a vacuum, I think; and I think that if we hadn't been there, the museum may never have wakened up. It might have gone on like that forever—that's exaggerating—but the men, "the bird boys" in control then, were perfectly satisfied with, jogging along. So I think it was, well, partly what women did, because although this executive committee consisted of both men and women, inevitably the women did the main part of the work they had the time.

GALM:

When you first started this organization was it a prestigious thing to be involved in?

LIEBIG:

Yes, it always had a little prestige because Mrs. Booth had prestige—she was an aunt of Norman Chandler of the Times; she'd been a Miss Otis—and I got a lot of the Junior League girls in it, so it had a social prestige, of a modest nature.

GALM:

What was it as an organization competing against, if you can say competing, on a social level?

LIEBIG:

Well, it wasn't competing against anything, because there weren't very many big organizations here at that time. It was a different city altogether, you know. That was just when it was changing. This was a very local community where—I don't say everybody knew everybody else, but there was much more a feeling of that kind than there is now.

GALM:

Do you remember what this money, the hundred dollar donations, went towards?

LIEBIG:

Well, part of it paid the salary of the woman that we employed to encourage membership.

GALM:

Well, this would have been in 1939. Then in 1940 you were invited to be Southern California voluntary chairman for the first National Art Week. Now that came out of WPA?

LIEBIG:

Yes, it did. It was really the last of the national movements that flowed from WPA, because, you see, the war started shortly after that, so all of that kind of government force went into the war. But it was a good idea; it was an idea to use the work of the artists that had been developed in the WPA programs. And I thought it was quite successful.

GALM:

What did the show consist of?

LIEBIG:

Oh, it was enormous. It had various categories: paintings and sculpture and prints. In the WPA project there had been a wonderful thing called the Index of American Design that had gone into American Indian arts, and copies had been made of folk arts—if you can use that term in America. So all of that had stirred up a lot of activity in small places; and this was to be a big regional show, you see. We covered all of Southern California. Some of the people who had made murals for post offices and had made fantastic glazed-tile mosaic murals for schools and so on, these artists had been developed and then they continued working, so that you didn't buy murals from post offices but you bought things that artists had been encouraged and paid to create. I don't know what would have happened if the war hadn't come; it might have been more important later. I believe they followed it up in a much less widely publicized way the next year; but 1940 was the only year that really amounted to anything. And in that period, you see, the newspapers were willing to publish a great deal about it; whereas a couple of years later the country was in the war, and there wouldn't have been any possibility of the kinds of people who were working for it doing that, or for the publicity.

GALM:

Now what was your function then as chairman of this Week?

LIEBIG:

Well, I had to coordinate all of the volunteers and I had to, or I did, go around with the two professional painters, heads of it, famous [Stanton] Macdonald-Wright and Lorser Feitelson. We had to encourage and get these people, the creators of the art, to cooperate. It was quite complicated. For instance, when we went to Ojai we'd have to find out who would send what sculpture to the show. There was a great deal of coordinating, in getting the artists. Then we had to get the dealers to promise to have shows that would run in the same week of the big show, which was held in a huge building on Wilshire and Western. We had to encourage the dealers to show some of these Southern California-produced works of art, so people not only came to the Center and bought them, but they went to their favorite neighborhood dealer and bought things. Merle Armitage, celebrated impresario and book designer, had professional charge of all the publicity. He was a past master at that—made it all seem very important and very dynamic. Artists came to the opening, and people met the artists; and I had a lot of Junior League girls as beautiful hostesses. And we sold some paintings! Luring the week, we had the painter George Biddle from Mew York come out and give a very good opening talk. He had been deep in the movement during most of the decade of the thirties. And it went off with a great deal of eclat, really.

GALM:

Was it very well attended?

LIEBIG:

Oh yes. We also made money. It was a success.

GALM:

What was the art scene in Los Angeles at this time? What did it consist of?

LIEBIG:

Well, it was very active. There were some good dealers; there was some very important collecting going on. There were very few shows at the museum, so that played a modest part in the art world then.

GALM:

So what was really the impetus?

LIEBIG:

Well, there were good art schools and good heads of the art schools and teachers. They had an influence. The dealers had an influence and they all knew each other—the art schools and the dealers and the collectors and the artists. Of course, it was much smaller and simpler and, in a way, much more comprehensive in its effect than nowadays when the Los Angeles art world is large and scattered and has really so many centers.

GALM:

Why don't we speak about some of the people who were collecting at that time. Whom do you recall as important collectors?

LIEBIG:

Well, I recall as the most important collectors, certainly the most important as far as being nationally known, Mr. and Mrs. Walter Arensberg. The Eddie [Edward G.] Robinsons had a magnificent collection of primarily French impressionists. Mrs. Walter Maitland had a smaller collection than either of those other people, but it included the kinds of things of high quality that the others both had. She had the School of Paris and she had also surrealist things, mostly European. Then the actor, large English actor—

GALM:

Charles Laughton.

LIEBIG:

Charles Laughton had a very good collection. All of these people, of course, knew each other, and all of these people were extremely generous in showing their collections. I think that this is one thing that is nice to remember: everyone who came here from away, every art lover, was sure to see all those collections. The people also had parties—big parties, little party and it was very educational because they let students come. Ruth Maitland would go to the greatest trouble digging out things from the closets and showing them to people, and enjoying showing them to people. I don't think they felt that it was a burden.

GALM:

In other words they were more approachable perhaps than collectors now?

LIEBIG:

Well, I think the times were so much simpler. I mean nowadays I think people sometimes are rather frightened at showing their collections.

GALM:

For fear of theft.

LIEBIG:

Theft and so on.

GALM:

Or damage.

LIEBIG:

I think people are still remarkably good about showing their collections.

GALM:

Was there any common thread in the way these people began their collecting here? Was there anything that was typical of Los Angeles collecting?

LIEBIG:

No; except that none of the people that I mentioned were originally from Los Angeles. I think that's very typical of California. The Arensbergs were from the East. Ruth Maitland was originally from Ohio and had lived on a ranch in Colorado. Eddie Robinson was an actor from the East, and his wife was an actress from the East. Of course Laughton was an Englishman. So that probably is in a way typical of California.

GALM:

So they had already begun their collecting perhaps even before they arrived, or not?

LIEBIG:

I think the Arensbergs had. I don't know about the others. I doubt it. I think at least they increased the tempo of their collecting here, and I think there was that feeling. I know that the Arensbergs advised Ruth Maitland. There was an excitement about getting things out here [ from Hew York] and trying them out and sometimes sending them back. Of course occasionally they bought things here, but most of the things came from Europe originally.

GALM:

Was it that the local dealers were not able to really provide the works that they wanted?

LIEBIG:

Well, one local dealer did begin providing them, in the field of pre-Columbian things. That was Earl Stendahl, who had been a very good local dealer in California painting, that kind of eucalyptus-tree painting. But he became one of the first people to go down to Mexico and import (for himself at first) at that time very unusual and rare pre-Columbian things. I mean people hadn't really seen them, as they have this past generation. So all of these people began collecting a few pre-Columbian things, and I remember Ruth Maitland bought some Chumash Indian things from Mr. Stendahl. I think that there was always some buying from the local dealers, but of course the masterpieces, the Matisses and the great Renoirs and so on, didn't come from here, although Mr. [Dalzell] Hatfield did have that kind of thing, and I'm sure he sold to people here, as well as to Texans. But, in general, I think the pictures came from away from here.

GALM:

Now you mentioned that, of these collectors, most of them were from another part of the country, or even from out of the country. What were the Angelenos hanging in their homes at that time, as far as art?

LIEBIG:

Well, I think the Angelenos had, since the beginning of this century, been hanging pictures of the landscape of California. Carl Oscar Borg painted very good pictures of the live-oak trees of the San Fernando Valley—which just rolled along empty at that period, you know, round hills that were green in the spring and yellow. Then there was a man named Wachtel who was a painter of the mountains, and they said that he always had a pink sunset glow on his mountains; and his wife Marion was a good water color painter. There was then a loyal following of the local painters. Then, later, and in the period we're talking about, there was an active group of fresh young men who saw things with a fresh eye; they were awfully nice young men. Many of them were the products of the Chouinard Art School, and the best known was Millard Sheets. He had a great following of pupils who painted as nearly like Millard as they could. Then there were very good men named Phil Dike, Phil Paradise, and Barse Miller. He was a very good, well-known teacher. He left California later. They were expert watercolor painters. They painted wet watercolors without any gouache. They were pure watercolors. And they got larger in scale. As the men developed, the paintings got a little larger, but according to present standards they were pretty intimately scaled, and they sold very well.

GALM:

There must have been interest though in the masters and

LIEBIG:

You mean the old masters.

GALM:

The old masters or the French school?

LIEBIG:

The only other woman who was on the Board of Governors later when I joined was a woman who had married into an important pioneer family here, and she [Mrs. Fred H. Bixby] had been buying very good French impressionist paintings. She bought a beautiful water lily picture by Monet, and an excellent Mother and Child by Mary Cassatt, which we now have in the museum, because Katharine Hotchkis, Mrs. Bixby's daughter, was very kind and after her mother's death gave them to the museum. But I think that Mrs. Bixby was unusual. Then there were some people like Mr. and Mrs. Alan Balch who bought important old masters, of the Dutch and Italian schools, and they bought things like Greek glass and beautiful examples of Persian pottery; and the museum now has these. Of course, all this time Mr. [William Randolph] Hearst was collecting. I would hardly call him an old Angeleno, but he lived here. He was collecting on an absolutely amazing scale. Nothing ever was like that. So the scene, the whole general scene, from little watercolor painters to Mr. Hearst's activities, was a lively one, really. There were lots of painters. It was a period of many, many painters. Of course, now there are lots of artists, but there are not as many painters—they do other things. I won't go into that; it's a more varied scene, but at that time there were lots and lots of painters.

GALM:

Now when you say "at that time" do you mean the thirties?

LIEBIG:

I mean the thirties and forties, yes.

GALM:

And you feel that it was the schools that were a real influence?

LIEBIG:

Well, there were lots of influences. I think that the Los Angeles Times art critic, Arthur Millier, was a very definite influence. He was a man of charm, and he wrote very well, and he was open-minded about things. He wrote about every kind of thing that was displayed, and was a friend of the collectors. So it wasn't just the schools.

GALM:

But at this point the museum had little influence?

LIEBIG:

Oh yes, very little. There was one marvelous man who was generous to the museum; he was almost the first man to ever give the museum anything. His name was Preston Harrison, originally from Chicago, and he was buying European things right from their source, from the artists themselves. So they were often very slight, not the best examples—but they were genuine. However he made it a condition that this collection of his would have to be kept together and hung in, well, the two biggest and best rooms of the museum. So there they were for over ten years, and it was pretty bad. Then he died, then his son died, then his wife died, and then we took the pictures out, because there was no other place in the museum to have an exhibit. We still own the things; there are some good things—a lovely Marin watercolor, some French things by famous names, some early sort of Ashcan School American things. But now they're scattered where they should be and put away when they're not needed, not there every minute. He was an influence, a definite influence, and he was on the board of the museum. There was another family who collected paintings of high quality and gave them to the museum, old masters, Barbizon School landscapes, also Oriental textiles—the two Mabury brothers and their sister Bella, who was on the board. And Mr. Balch, who collected, as I say, in a very civilized cosmopolitan way, was on the board of the museum. Mr. Hearst never was.

GALM:

Do you know if there ever was any thought of including Mr. Hearst on the board?

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes, I'm almost sure he must have been invited, because his son (later on in my day) was on the board, and now his grandson is on the board. There was always, you know, someone representing the Times and someone representing the Examiner. So I'm almost sure he must have been invited. I don't want to Jump ahead to the time of the late forties when Dr. [William R.] Valentiner came and the whole art world here changed. I don't think at the time that we're talking about now, the late thirties and early forties, that Mr. Hearst was in any direct contact with the museum.

GALM:

One thing that we haven't discussed is your own interest in art and how it began?

LIEBIG:

Well, I always liked to look at things, beautiful landscapes and people and things, but I saw very little art as a girl here, because there was very little public art to behold here, because even Mr. Preston Harrison's things weren't hung up at that time. But one thing that I remember, and many of us remember, as our first sight of art was at the World's Fair in San Francisco in 1915. I was talking to some contemporaries the other day and we all remember the great Zuloaga and Sorolla pictures, Spanish pictures, and that was the opening, you see, because we hadn't seen anything. Then there was an enormously influential teacher at the girls' school here, Marlborough School, a teacher of the history of art. She influenced everyone who ever was her pupil, and they remember, still remember, things Miss [Anna McConnell] Beckley said. She really has a kind of immortality—Miss Beckley. She was a Catholic convert who worked in the city library, and she became a friend of Mrs. Caswell, the principal of the school. She was hired to be a teacher, and to teach mythology, medieval history, and art history; and she and Mrs. Caswell wrote a book together. This woman got all of the girls excited. She described the popes as if they were friends, you know, the popes of the fifteenth century, that kind of thing. And she got us all reading [Bernhard] Berenson's books; they were our textbooks—Venetian painting, Florentine painting. That, I think, was a great eye-opener for me, as well as for many other people. Then I went to Smith College and took art history. Then I was invited to go with the [Sir Joseph] Duveens to Europe, and that was of course the real beginning.

GALM:

YOU, of course, have mentioned some of the experiences with the Duveens in Europe in your autobiography. Of that trip, what would you say would have been the outstanding moment or place that you were at?

LIEBIG:

Well, if you mean in the realm of art, of course it was being taken around Florence for four or five days with Mr. Berenson as the docent, for Dorothy Duveen and myself, an amazing experience. He, I imagine, was told by Sir Joseph Duveen that he had to do it, so he did it very graciously and seemed to enjoy it. He was especially eloquent on the subject of Botticelli, I remember.

GALM:

Can you remember some specific scenes that you might use to describe him?

LIEBIG:

He was a tiny little man, and I can remember one day going into the hotel suite and seeing him bent over a large, dark Italian painting with a little tiny magnifying glass. It was quite a striking scene. He, of course, was employed as an expert and he was seeing whether this picture brought in by a Florentine family was genuine, worth Duveen's attention. And I remember his beautiful house, which has been given to Harvard now, I Tatti. Those days in Florence were a remarkable experience for me to have, well, it was gust a new universe, you know.

GALM:

Did you return much to Florence after that? Did you ever have any occasion to approach him again?

LIEBIG:

Ho, never. I did go back several times. Oh, I never would have dared. Ho, I never thought of going near him. But I can see the whole place and his library and the way his books were placed and the pictures were placed over the bookcases, all as clear as if I saw it now.

GALM:

Getting back to your involvement in the art scene in Los Angeles, you continued then with the Museum Association.

LIEBIG:

Yes. I was working hard in the Red Gross, so I wasn't really very active in those years of 1942 to 1946, but it kept going along. Then, in 1947, I was asked to be on the Board of Governors, and by 1948 I remember I was very actively going to meetings and so on, although I was not at all a power on the board at that time. I simply sat and listened and watched some of the old men slumbering. That, you know, was a period of a very somnolent board.

GALM:

Were there any other women on the board at that time?

LIEBIG:

Well, there was Mrs. Bixby, but she became ill and didn't go to very many meetings. There were two other youngish people. One of them was William Sesnon, who was asked to be a member at the same time I was, and the other, Jack Garland, whose father had been on the board before him. We were all about the same age and knew each other outside the museum.

GALM:

The membership was still fifteen at this time?

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes. And it was supposed to be half people who were interested in art and half in the other things. There was a very intelligent and very nice person named Albert Ruddock who was one of the people who was interested in art, and he did buy art and give it to the museum. He later became the head of the Caltech trustees and gave them enormous sums of money. He was always generous with the museum, too. The reason he left the board was that he moved to Santa Barbara. But he was, I think, the person that kept things moving along then. He, at that time, was president of the Associates, which was the name of the Board of Governors sitting with one hat on, which was their hat when they were a group that was legally designed to receive money and hold that money and not let it flow into the general fund of the county. If you gave money to the Board of Governors, it would go right into the huge general county fund and be lost.

GALM:

So it was just a legalistic title, in a sense.

LIEBIG:

It was a very important thing and it was a very clever idea of Mr. Balch's in the thirties. He wanted to leave a bequest, he and his wife, to the museum, and he didn't feel that the [county] supervisors were the best people to leave money for art to, and so this was a safeguard. So we would have one meeting with Mr. George Martin as the president of the Governors and we'd have another meeting with Mr. Albert Ruddock, as the president of the Associates. We would discuss the appropriate things, you see.

GALM:

It was the same fifteen members.

LIEBIG:

Same fifteen people.

GALM:

Going back a little bit, to the Museum Association and those members—was the idea of that organization to support only the art interest of the museum, or supposedly was it to support the museum as a whole?

LIEBIG:

Yes, it was probably supposedly to support it as a whole, but the interest was always in art; and as it got bigger and bigger, it became more and more concerned with art.

GALM:

How did you go about raising the money, do you recall? Was there something specific, you know, that became an annual benefit?

LIEBIG:

No. Raising the money was just person to person and definitely pointed toward one thing in those early years and that was toward prize money. The very important art show at the time was a show to which anyone in Southern California—or maybe it was a certain number of miles from the center of Los Angeles—could show. It was prepared for months ahead; the judging was done very carefully in very many categories, and the catalog was carefully worked out. It was very important because the people who won the prizes—there were several prizes in each category—not only won money, but at that time, they were publicly featured and they usually then had a little success afterwards and became monetarily better off. And the opening night was always very exciting.

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO FEBRUARY 1971

GALM:

We were discussing this show of local artists. Do you recall what the actual title of the exhibition was?

LIEBIG:

Yes, it was called the Exhibition of Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity. One prizewinner who became famous later was Sister Mary Corita. She'd never before shown publicly, and she had a color lithograph in the show that won the first prize. I remember the night—all the other prizewinners were there—and a young woman-went forward to get hers, not Sister Mary Corita but her own sister, whose name was Dorothy. Afterwards I said, "Oh, what a shame she couldn't come." At that time, of course, the nuns weren't allowed to rush about and receive prizes. But the sister said, "I'll give it to her in the morning."

GALM:

Do you remember what first prize amounted to?

LIEBIG:

I don't remember the amount of money. Well, the whole thing was done with a lot of spirit. One time I remember because there was a photograph taken of Merle Oberon, who presented the awards. I think that was a very pleasant period at the museum because a lot of people came to the openings with a personal connection because a relative was receiving a prize. I remember when Edgar Ewing won the first prize for oil painting one year and how excited his wife Susanna was. I regretted very much when this annual show was given up later on.

GALM:

What was the period of these exhibitions?

LIEBIG:

Oh, the period was a long one. I think it went through perhaps 1954. One year Jimmy Byrnes, who was the curator in charge of it, invited some famous New York painters to send things, not in competition, but it made a marvelous show. We had a very large catalog. Then the museum bought some of these things. I remember that we bought a Baziotes from the abstract expressionist group, just starting. So perhaps it got a little beyond itself, because when the new director of the art department, Marvin Ross, came, he felt that too much attention and time had been put on the show, that the catalog had become too elaborate, that the money could be better spent. And maybe he felt that these local people weren't worthy of all of these prizes. I don't know. He was from the East, and he didn't want to continue it.

GALM:

When did it start?

LIEBIG:

When did it start? I don't know—before my day. It was a tradition.

GALM:

Did it come out of the WPA or do you think it was even before that?

LIEBIG:

I don't think it had anything to do with the WPA. I don't know, but I know that when I first had any contact with the museum it was one of the physical facts of the museum, and it was the real reason behind the beginning of the Junior Art Council, because we needed some new group of people to raise the prise money. It always had to be just simply begged for from people that were vaguely interested.

GALM:

"What was the county's role in the museum at that time? In other words, were they paying for salaries and so forth?

LIEBIG:

They always paid for salaries, and they always paid for maintenance; and they were very loath to pay for purchases, or for getting exhibitions here from other places. You see, those are the things that the county really couldn't afford to do. I'm not criticizing. And they, of course, had built the building down there, which was an expensive building. As time went on, of course it was obvious we had to have shows in the museum. One thing happened—and I remember the date of this, it was 1946, right after the war—there was an enormous traveling show that went all over America called the Berlin Masterpieces. They were the pictures that had been recovered after the war, paintings which had been stolen by Hitler, Goering, and all those people, and all the pictures that had been hidden in the salt mines by our American armed forces. All of these pictures had been gathered together to show in the United States. The very large exhibition was handled by the Army, so that instead of just guards in the museum when these priceless things were shown there, there were soldiers around. The crowds—there's never been any exhibition in Los Angeles, I think, that had the crowds that that one did. How I'm not sure at this moment whether that's true, but certainly at the time, there had never been anything to approach it. And it proved, very definitely, there was a public here for good art exhibitions, big ones, not just little choice shows, tiny shows of treasures for the kind of thing that of course there wasn't the money to finance in those days because art exhibits, even then, were expensive. Now they've reached astronomical figures as far as expenses go, but even then they were expensive. That showed there had to be built up a museum that had the strength to put on exhibitions, because I imagine that the govern ment took care of the insurance and transportation for that show.

GALM:

What expense would the museum have incurred in that?

LIEBIG:

I don't imagine very much. I remember there was a good catalog which was probably made by the govern ment. I don't imagine the museum had much expense. That was before I was on the governors so I don't know. But it was an indication to everybody that this town had almost an unbelievable number of people that would stand in line to see something of first quality.

GALM:

How did the Board of Governors react to this revelation?

LIEBIG:

Well, I wasn't on it then, I don't know; but I think that there had always been a few people like Mr. Balch and Mr. Ruddock, who were well-traveled people and people who had a good deal of money themselves, who knew that we had to expand. Mr. Ruddock was also one of the first people who realized that we had to have a big music center. And I don't think there was ever any reluctance to try, because it was inevitable, and it was inevitable that more people would come to live here. They were coming like mad in those days, rich people and people in business. Of course the next thing that happened was that right after that, Dr. Valentiner was hired as the art director-consultant of the museum, and he immediately made contact with Mr. Hearst, and we began getting treasures every month. It was thrilling to see. Mr. Hearst and Dr. Valentiner would go through our meager collection and find out what we needed most, and then Mr. Hearst would have his people buy, at auction, things for the museum. And he gave us things he already owned, too. So it was a glorious period until the death of Mr. Hearst.

GALM:

Do you remember who approached Dr. Valentiner?

LIEBIG:

I think George Martin and Mr. Ruddock. That was the year before I was on the board, so I don't know. But they were the probable people, their jobs being president of these two sections—I think they were the ones. You see, Dr. Valentiner was the director for art, but the overall director was Dr. James Breasted, so, in a way, Dr. Valentiner didn't have any of the boring administrative duties. He could try to build the museum.

GALM:

Was the director of the museum usually someone in either the history or the science areas?

LIEBIG:

Well, this man James Breasted had written his Ph.D. at Princeton on some Egyptian sculpture. His father was a famous Egyptologist, and Jim was interested in history. He had an unfortunate personality for the job and left after five or six years.

GALM:

Now there was a group that began in Los Angeles around this time called Arts in Action.

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes, that was a small, romantic attempt (by people who knew nothing about having stores) to have a little shop, or a little outlet for artists. I suppose you'd call it an outlet for goods that were consigned by the makers of the things. One of the people was paid as a manager, Elena Rex; she was by profession a weaver. She was an assistant to Dorothy Liebes, who was very famous at that time as a weaver and an innovator in textile design. This was a rather ludicrous little group—we all put some money in and we all lost a little money, I think after one year. I think it could have succeeded If other people had been involved instead of the ones who were. It wasn't the times that were wrong; it was the people who were trying to do it.

GALM:

Where was this shop located, do you recall?

LIEBIG:

Yes, I do. We rented a place in a now-destroyed establishment that was very much like the Farmer's Market is now; except it was smaller, and there was a good restaurant—Perino's had a little branch there—and it was an attractive place with patios and so on.

GALM:

This, then, was the Town and Country?

LIEBIG:

Yes. Town and Country Market, it was called. Of course, the display was beautifully done and I remember some lovely suede sandals that looked like things that people wore much later on. I think maybe it was a little ahead of its time.

GALM:

So it was really much like the arts and craft shops that we have now, or that were a little more popular in the late fifties?

LIEBIG:

Maybe. It didn't look much like tilings do now, because it was uracil more staid and orderly. It didn't look a bit like a psychedelic boutique, but it was sort of avant-garde for the period.

GALM:

Was there much of an avant-garde group?

LIEBIG:

These people, Mrs. Maitland and Mr. Arensberg, etc., were sort of off in dream worlds. They were not people to have anything to do with stores. Beatrice Wood was a potter and had sold things by herself (and still has a studio with a store attached in Ojai). She was probably one of the more, well, useful members of this group.

GALM:

How large a group was it, do you recall?

LIEBIG:

Oh, probably about ten.

GALM:

Would you call it the Bohemian group?

LIEBIG:

Well, these people were not Bohemian, but they were very open to avant-garde art.

GALM:

In 1950 James Byrnes became curator of modern art. Is this an important appointment?

LIEBIG:

It was a very good thing for the museum. Dr. Valentiner discovered Jimmy. Of course everybody on the board had enormous reverence for Dr. Valentiner. He had an enormous reputation as an art historian, and he had been at the Metropolitan and then he'd been head of the museum in Detroit for a good many years before he came here. You see this was sort of semi-retirement coming here. Dr. Valentiner sponsored Jimmy Byrnes. And Jimmy Byrne s's wife had the very first art gallery on La Cienega. She was very avant- garde in her taste in art. That was a healthy wind to blow around in the museum. And Dr. Valentiner, although his expertise was in the field of Rembrandt and Leonardo and so on, was a very early collector of many modern painters. He had a great eye for them, for the promising young and the unusual and so on. So that was a very good thing for the museum. Another good young person that was paid by the museum in those days was named Morton Levine. He was the public relations person for a while; he was a brilliant young man who later went on to become a professor of anthropology. At that time he was a friend of Jimmy Byrnes. It was very encouraging for me and for other people who were working around the museum to have these people there, because you know the place was filled with stuffed animals and so on, so this was a nice change to have people interested in what was going on in the contemporary, right-then field of art.

GALM:

Now you must have had a public relations position before, didn't you? Or was this a new position?

LIEBIG:

Oh, we had a position—it was always kind of a half-time position. Usually we'd get some worn-out person through the county, or some old newspaperman that couldn't care less about art but was just eking out a half-time job. Morton Levine really was very alert to what was going on in modern art, literature, music, etc., and very sad that we had no scope because we didn't have very much money. He just had hopes and ideas that were not put into actuality.

GALM:

Was the curator of modern art a new position?

LIEBIG:

Oh yes, that was new, because before that there had only been Miss Upton, who was a lovely person, but she was an old lady from Worcester, Massachusetts. Dr. Valentiner was the big time, and then these two young men were the present day. That was very good for the museum. There had been a lot of sad, wispy old people floating around always in the so-called art world. These were different kinds of people, Morton Levine and Jimmy Byrnes, and other people of that kind who were on various committees and began being part of the museum world, the fringes of it, you know.

GALM:

How did the acquisition scene fare at this time?

LIEBIG:

Well, we occasionally got something from Mr. Ruddock. We hardly ever bought anything. We began to be given lots of things a little bit later when Ric Brown came. He was the most marvelous stirrer-up of gifts. Each year before Christmas we'd have a couple of hundred thousand dollars' worth of gifts that he would get, not from one or two people, but he would just go out and get things from many sources. He'd make people buy things and give them. But that was a little bit ahead of this period. So during this period we had this beautiful trickle of things from Mr. Hearst always, but it was not a period of many presents. I could forget things, you know, but I don't remember any wealth of gifts rolling in.

GALM:

Did Mr. Hearst ever make any special requirements in connection with his gifts? Or were they more just outright gifts?

LIEBIG:

Well, the gifts came three ways from him. They came from himself, they came from the Hearst magazines, and they came from Marion Davies. I suppose this was because of taxes.

GALM:

But there was nothing to restrict their exhibit or how they were to be exhibited that you know of?

LIEBIG:

I don't think so. He hardly ever came to the museum. He'd come at odd times for a few minutes with Dr. Valentiner. I never laid eyes on him.

GALM:

In 1950—Leonardo da Vinci show.

LIEBIG:

Yes. Dr. Valentiner, through his connections, got that show together. Of course there are very few real Leonardo paintings in the world, and I don't think there are any in America, maybe one or two. So we didn't have any paintings, but we had some drawings and we had followers and precursors and that kind of thing. And people came to look at it. The feature of it was the actual building of many of the mechanical inventions of Leonardo for which he had left, enormously intricate patterns for blueprints. And these had been built by a man who was kind of a genius in his own way. The public was interested in them—I never was.

GALM:

Was this a local man who did this?

LIEBIG:

I think he was. I think that there were several people who specialized in it, because it seems to me later on I saw some in Italy that had been done there, more or less the same kind of thing. I really don't know. I think he was local.

GALM:

Well, in the period from 1940-1950 you had mentioned the Berlin paintings, and you had mentioned the exhibit for Sports Illustrated, and then of course in 1950 the Leonardo da Vinci show—do you recall any other what you would consider important exhibits?

LIEBIG:

There was a large Van Gogh show, somewhat later. That was another one of those enormously popular things; teeming masses came out for it.

GALM:

Do you think that was postwar, then?

LIEBIG:

Oh, I know it was, yes. It was the period of activities and luncheons and so on given by the executive committee of the association, and crowds of people coming to the museum, and again proving that the public was very large here when they knew what was to be seen and it was something they'd heard about before. Dr. Valentiner had a Rembrandt show and a Frans Hals show. They were, of course, better because there were some real paintings.

GALM:

Mow these shows, for instance like the Van Gogh, would that have been a show that had originated, say, at the Metropolitan or in the East and had then come here?

LIEBIG:

Yes, that one came here from somewhere else. The ones that Dr. Valentiner originated never went anywhere else. They were his shows and they were shown here. Undoubtedly the Van Gogh show traveled all over the United States.

GALM:

At this point, say, in 1950, had there been any talk of a separation of the Museum of Art from the Museum of History and Science?

LIEBIG:

Well, there had been talk. I remember talking about it with Mr. Harvey Mudd, and with Mr. Ruddock. I remember our saying, "Wouldn't it be wonderful to have it on Wilshire Boulevard, where the tar pits are?" And other people said, "Oh that would be impossible. That's science's park, you know." It was such a remote possibility that there wasn't much talk about having another museum then, because the Exposition Park museum really wasn't very old, and it was very roomy for a while. Then it got too little, as our present one already is too small.

GALM:

So when would you say that the first real rumblings for the new museum came about?

LIEBIG:

Well, you mean serious rumblings.

GALM:

Yes.

LIEBIG:

Oh, not until after Ric Brown came, which was in 1954.

GALM:

In other words there may have been passing comment about it, but not any really concentrated effort?

LIEBIG:

No, because it was obvious that it would cost an enormous sum of money to build, and until the reality of getting permission to use part of that park, there was also the fact that the land would have to be bought; and land has always been expensive around here. So I don't think anybody thought it was a possibility; it was just hope. My feeling was just hope that we'd have more shows. In those days the good shows would go to San Francisco, usually. I remember way back in 1937 going to San Francisco to see a Cezanne show and then later a big Matisse show that was circulated around the United States and went to San Francisco. So I think that hopes were really modest to have some things come here. I don't think people were bold enough to think we could have a large art museum, separate.

GALM:

What was the reason that the shows didn't come here, or that Los Angeles didn't get the shows?

LIEBIG:

Money.

GALM:

Just money?

LIEBIG:

Well, certainly money. And aside from money, I think there wasn't anyone who really cared desperately about it, or who even knew how to go about it—until Dr. Valentiner came. He had the know-how. But he was an old man, and he was a person who was very much interested in acquisition. Now he did something awfully clever. In two weeks one time, he assembled an entire collection for the DaSylvas. Of course, he knew where everything was, and he went around, went East for two weeks, and came back with a big, varied, high quality, modern collection which they gave to the museum! That was the kind of thing he could do. The DaSylva collection contains a famous Degas, the picture of Two Sisters, among other treasures. We had an opening night for that and the movie people all came. I remember that was a very gay night. And as these shows did come, the ones I've mentioned, there were opening nights, and the people from the Museum Association Executive Committee would put the flowers on the tables, and supply the food and coffee. At that time there was a county rule that you couldn't drink alcohol in the museum, so it was coffee and cookies.

GALM:

No champagne.

LIEBIG:

Not in those days.

GALM:

Did the county exercise any control over the selection of the personnel?

LIEBIG:

Well, the rule has always been that the Board of Trustees—it was called [Board of] Governors then—hired the director of the museum, and then the director hired everybody else. So, no, I don't think the supervisors ever did. They used to have schemes of picking out the governors on a geographical basis, but they never got to do it. You see they could have said, "Well, now we'll have two people from Supervisor X's district, and one from Y's," and so on. That really wouldn't have done, because as it turned out, you see, the people—naturally—who are appropriate people didn't live in every supervisor's district. They were apt to live in two or three of the five, you know.

GALM:

I neglected to ask—does the board appoint its own members when vacancies occur?

LIEBIG:

Yes, it's what's called, you know, a self-perpetuating board.

GALM:

And are they filled immediately or not?

LIEBIG:

Oh, it's terribly complicated because of the staggered terms, and now that there are thirty members, of course it's more complicated—they're in several sections and terms of five years. Then they run out, then they're reelected; or then they die and they're replaced. It's nothing that I could describe to you in one sentence. It's a very rigid, methodical system.

GALM:

When you were appointed in 1948, what was your length of term, the length of appointment?

LIEBIG:

Well, I think; in those days it was just sort of forever, but now it's for five years.

GALM:

Then in 1952, Dr. Valentiner left the museum. This was when Jean Delacour came in.

LIEBIG:

Yes. He wasn't replacing Dr. Valentiner; he was replacing Dr. James Breasted.

GALM:

Oh, as the director.

LIEBIG:

Dr. Valentiner was unwilling to take any new responsibility. He didn't leave at that exact moment. He sort of tapered out and became less active and so on, and then he did leave; and when he was tapering off he would go away, go to Europe, go to New York—he was away a great deal—and the museum was just simply in a vacuum as far as the art part of it went, because there was just nobody in authority there. Nothing was moving. I remember sitting around with James Byrnes and Morton Levine, and we just were almost stagnant. I think, really, the reason was that the executive committee and the association were sort of losing impetus too at that time. It was a dangerous period of stagnation.

GALM:

Was there fear you might revert back to—

LIEBIG:

I don't know. I think it was just—well, if you've been on committees and been around a place that isn't moving ahead, with no real dynamic action taking place, It's rather discouraging, and after all the town was moving along. There were a lot of other things to do.

GALM:

How would you describe Delacour's period of directorship?

LIEBIG:

Well, he was supposed to be interested in art, as well as science—he was a world-famous ornithologist—but he really wasn't interested in art at the museum. And he liked the status quo. That was the period when I got the Junior Art Council started because the museum just desperately needed some fresh blood. You see, he as the new director hadn't supplied what it needed at all. He was off with his cronies in the hills concerned with birds, and I don't think he was a very active director of the whole museum. So the question of this five thousand dollars for the annual prize money came up in 1952, and there really just didn't seem to be anybody to give any money, or anybody who wanted to go out and try to get it. So I asked my children's friends to come over here one afternoon. I picked the ones who had had art training, or studied art at school or college, or I knew had taste and interest in the aesthetic part of life. I had twelve of them, some of my daughter's friends, some of my son's. My daughter was here; my son took a picture of us all. It worked like a charm. It was like magic the way those young women responded; and not only did they raise money, but they made the whole place come alive. It was a period in Los Angeles when there wasn't much competition, I suppose, for newspaper space. We had a great deal of publicity. The girls were all from twenty to thirty, and they were good-looking, and their names were well known; they put on marvelous tours of houses that were architecturally interesting and that had works of art in them. People were terribly curious about seeing each other's houses and there hadn't been anything like that done.

GALM:

Do you recall whose idea it was, initially, about the house tours?

LIEBIG:

Yes, it was a girl named Joan Swafford. Her name is now Joan Kent. She now lives in San Francisco. I always thought that that was one of the great things that ever happened to the museum, the idea of the art and architecture house tours.

GALM:

Do you recall whose house was the first one toured?

LIEBIG:

Well, there were always five or six houses. The houses were always chosen so that there would be one small house, one house of a famous person, one modern house, one old colonial—well, you know. Mostly, as the years went on—they had them for nine solid years and then later revived them—the houses became more and more filled with modern paintings. It was extraordinary how many houses there were to choose from, for years. The girls would all be hostesses and there would be parties in connection. It was a very, very fine way to publicize the museum.

GALM:

Did the Junior Art Council sort of respect a certain age when one became too old for the council?

LIEBIG:

Yes, they eventually changed their name to the Art Museum Council; they didn't leave the organization. Well, another very interesting, revealing thing that they did immediately—and this was Jimmy Byrnes's idea—was to catalog local art collections. The museum had never documented the collections in this town. You know, people would come here and say, "I'd like to see a collection of Dada, say, or the paintings of the middle thirties in California." No one would have any idea where they were. So as people came here to live, the museum would have a vague idea that so-and-so had come from Germany with a fine collection of Rembrandt etchings, but I don't think it had really kept up at all with the influx of people with art. So, at this point, Jimmy Byrnes had enough knowledge to know where to start. Then I think one thing led to another. The girls were informed how to behave. They'd go through houses and they'd measure the paintings; they would find the provenance of the paintings; they would, of course, know the painter and the subject and so on. This has been done now, all these years—and it's been almost nineteen years and I think that's been a very, very good thing all the way around, because the collectors themselves liked that. They liked to feel that what they own is listed and filed in the museum. They liked to meet the people, the volunteers who work at the museum, because most of these were attractive people to meet, and the collectors were themselves interesting; and the whole thing had a kind of a charm, as well as a thoroughly practical museum purpose. And, as the years have gone by, they've returned to collections, you see. As the collections have gotten bigger and bigger, or changed character completely, they have kept up with it. I've always thought that that was a fine thing.

GALM:

Has the museum ever published anything in relationship to this, or isn't it publishable?

LIEBIG:

I don't think it's ever published anything. As a matter of fact, it may not be the kind of thing that should be published. It's there, and if you need it, you can find out about it. Of course, some collections are sold, some people move away.

GALM:

So it's still definitely a function of the—

LIEBIG:

Of that group, now called the Art Museum Council.

GALM:

Of the beginning twelve people in the Art Museum Council, who have gone on to become very important with the museum?

LIEBIG:

Oh, I was thinking the other day. Now the present chairman of the UCLA Art Council, Jackie, Jacqueline Leisure, Mrs. Hoyt Leisure, was one of them. Caroline, or Mrs. Robert Rowan, was one of them. She is head of the Pasadena women's committee, and her husband, Robert Rowan has been the president, and was really the prime mover in building the museum. She's now a big collector of pop art, and minimal art. Then Glenn Candy Cooper, who later on became the founder of the Docents at the museum, was one of them. She was still at Wellesley on September 3, 1952. I think she was the youngest. And Virginia Weaver, who became the president of the Museum Association Executive Committee, first president of the Junior Art Council and later was asked to be on, and is on, the Board of Trustees, was one of them. I could think of others if I had a moment, but those are enough to give you the idea. Oh, the enthusiasm was just enormous from the beginning. One of them, Mary Griffith, thought of the idea of having an art rental gallery. It had been tentatively started at, I think, the Museum of Modern Art. So that was studied. People, when they went East, would go and study and find out about things. The Art Rental Gallery has grown into quite a business. And, of course, as the time has gone on, the rentable objects have become more and more strange; now they're really very, very avant-garde indeed. That's been a very fresh breeze, too, all these years, the rental gallery. It hasn't made a great fortune for either the artists or the museum, but there's always been a profit.

GALM:

Can you determine why the Junior Art Council got off to such a great start?

LIEBIG:

I just think everything was ripe for it. La Cienega was just beginning to be art gallery row. The A.M.C. had tours on La Cienega. The volunteers really helped that street, I'm sure, because this new, fresh wind was blowing at the museum. Then, in about two years after we started, Ric Brown came to town, and the A.M.C. adored Ric Brown and he adored them, and that helped their success. They had a sort of a prestige—I do think this is funny—but for a while for the first five years or so, when the girls got married they would put in their engagement announcements that they'd gone to Stanford and they'd made their debut at Las Madrinas and they were members of the Museum Junior Art Council. Well, it was a sort of the in thing at that time, and for some years after.

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE FEBRUARY 10, 1971

GALM:

Last time we ended by speaking of the Junior Art Council. That brought us up to about the year 1952, which would have been the year when Marvin Ross came as director. Could you describe his period as director of the museum?

LIEBIG:

Yes. He came from the Walters Gallery in Baltimore, which is a private museum in that it was founded and almost everything in it was collected by Mr. Walters. Marvin Ross had been there some time. He had become an expert in enamelling, that kind of thing, decorative arts. When he came to our museum, he threw himself very ardently into trying to get some connections for our museum with the eastern museums which he knew. The first thing he did was to get the Metropolitan to send out an exhibition of arms and armor. Then, he got the Museum of Modern Art to send us a very large retrospective of Rouault. He also was helpful with the local collectors—I remember he got things from Marion Davies. Mr. Hearst was no longer alive but she was. Oh, then he became very busy, so that he insisted on having an assistant. Mr. Sesnon, who was president of the governors, went to New York and consulted with Mr. [James J.] Rorimer at the Metropolitan, who suggested Richard Brown. He was then at the Prick in New York, and he was beautifully educated—his Ph.D. was from Harvard—and he had worked at the Fogg Museum at Harvard. The reason that he wanted to look around for new horizons was that there was not much chance of his advancing at the Prick. I think the next person above him was his own age. So he accepted the position of assistant to Marvin Ross—Marvin Ross came in the fall of 1952 and Ric Brown came in the fall of 1954.

GALM:

Now whose suggestion was it to bring in Mr. Ross?

LIEBIG:

It was Dr. Valentiner's. He had known him in the East.

GALM:

What has been the usual procedure that the museum goes through in picking a new director?

LIEBIG:

Well, in the period of trying to find a director before 1952, it was not very easy to find a director willing to come here. Several people turned us down. Then after Mr. Ross left, there was no doubt that Ric Brown was capable of filling the job. After Ric Brown left, there was a good deal of searching about, and then it was decided that the best person again would be the man who was in the assistant position, the deputy director, Kenneth Donahue.

GALM:

Now is this search conducted by a special committee of the governors?

LIEBIG:

I think after Ric Brown left there was a committee. I don't think that it's ever been a very clear-cut method here, really. I think that this kind of choice Is probably accomplished in different ways in different museums. And it's always difficult.

GALM:

But then of course when you had not only a great collection, but better buildings, then it became less difficult.

LIEBIG:

Yes, I think If we had asked anyone from away from Los Angeles to come, it wouldn't have been at all the same as, well, ten years before, because we not only had a new building, but we had some money. You see before, in all those years we'd had to spend for acquisitions only twenty-five thousand dollars a year from the county, and not a great deal, although it increased, from the Balch bequest. And after all, most museum directors want money for acquisition. You can't depend entirely on gifts and bequests. So that made it more desirable. And then Los Angeles had grown, and the art world here was less provincial, I suppose.

GALM:

You had mentioned that Mr. Ross was responsible for perhaps better relationships with eastern museums.

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes, and then, you see, after he left, Ric Brown could carry that on, and that put us in a much, better position to receive traveling exhibitions. Then we got to the point where we would have exhibitions in partnership with one or more other museums. I think the first one we had in any kind of partnership was when Mr. Ross was here; we had one with the San Francisco Museum, a Dufy show, a retrospective. Later on, we had joint exhibitions with New York museums and the Chicago Art Institute.

GALM:

Previous to this time, the museum really didn't have much association with museums outside this area?

LIEBIG:

Well, we didn't have, as an equal. We were secondary, you know.

GALM:

The Renoir show, was that under Mr. Ross's direction?

LIEBIG:

Mr. Ross started that, but when it opened he had gone and Dr. Brown was the director. The Renoir show had been put on with a large public relations firm helping us. Everybody helped put that on—masses of volunteers and the staff. It was a new departure, because we were going to charge for it. We'd never charged; that was an idea that we got from the eastern museums. So we put more money into it, and then made money. It was very popular.

GALM:

Do you recall what the initial charge was?

LIEBIG:

I don't recall. I think it was fifty cents.

GALM:

Was there quite a bit of discussion in making this sort of precedent?

LIEBIG:

No, I don't think so, because it was a precedent in the United States; and, of course, we got then into this business of borrowing things from all over the world and having to pay shipping costs and insurance—and insurance, even that long ago, was expensive. Now it's just astronomically expensive. In this Cubist show, we spent enormous sums on the insurance. Lots of people think that there won't be that kind of show in the United States very much longer because the expense is too great for any museum, or even a group of museums. The Renoir show was the first time we got into that kind of big-time operation.

GALM:

Did the Renoir show travel anywhere else besides Los Angeles?

LIEBIG:

Yes, it did. And, I don't remember, there was another museum. But we could find that out.

GALM:

We can insert that later. Then, in 1953, the Costume Council and Fashion Group was formed.

LIEBIG:

Yes.

GALM:

Could you speak a little bit as to how that came about.

LIEBIG:

Well, the Fashion Group helped form the Costume Council. That was the way it was. The Fashion Group is a national group of professional women in the field of fashion, and there was a local chapter which offered to help us get started. One or two women had found out that there were a few barrels full of Civil War uniforms and old jet-beaded dresses and things like that stored in the museum. They wanted to bring these things to light and to have places to display them—a library, workshop, etc.—more or less based on the Metropolitan and the Brooklyn museums, which had the best ways of handling that kind of thing. So one of the women went to see Supervisor Roger Jessup, which must have been a funny meeting because he was not inclined along those lines. He was a—

GALM:

Dairy farmer, wasn't he?

LIEBIG:

Dairy man, yes. But he came to the meeting, and at that time I was a member of the Board of Trustees and also Mary Valentine, so he asked us to do something about it. Therefore we had the responsibility of starting it. It went very well. The Fashion Group got Mr. Henry Dreyfus, who was an industrial designer, and is now a trustee to redesign some rooms in the old museum, and he did a beautiful job. Mr. Delacour, who was the director of the museum, was a Frenchman, and he had known in London a Polish woman who was—in 1953—living here. Stephania Holt had been a designer herself, and she was married to Hungarian, Eugene Holt, who was a textile expert. Mrs. Holt was a woman of really fine taste, a very critical woman—which was good, it kept our quality high from the beginning. Mary Valentine and I made up a list of people that we knew—she was from Pasadena and I from Los Angeles—and we decided the best way to do it was to start with people who we thought were interested in clothes. The textiles came a little bit afterwards. I mean, the obvious way to go out and form a membership was starting in with the costumes. We did so, and we had a very successful benefit ball after about a year. Of course, as we got more members, we got more dues, and we have been very prosperous. There were I think a hundred women to start with; now there are nine hundred and seventy. So it's been a very profitable venture for the museum, and it's also spread interest in the museum among people who perhaps were not followers of the fine arts. And in the course of time we've developed an excellent textile collection. We bought part of Mr. Loewi's great textile collection; we bought precious little fragile things from, oh, all the civilizations, really. We've been given beautiful French dresses of the haute couture. We bought a nineteenth-century collection—well, really the turn of the nineteenth century, 1810 and all that period—from Mrs. Langley Moore, a woman in England who had treasured them for years. It's quite a famous collection. Our present curator, Mary Kahlenberg, has just come hack from India, where she was asked to go for about ten days to do some studying of Indian textiles. She went to a place called the Calico Museum, which is famous for cotton prints, and she's writing papers on that. So we have a scholarly approach, and we have also a side which is entertainment for the members. Every month there are lectures.

GALM:

Now this woman you spoke about, the initial curator, who was that?

LIEBIG:

Stephania Holt.

GALM:

And you feel that perhaps because of her being the first curator, a scholarly approach was established from the very beginning?

LIEBIG:

Yes. I think the quality approach. We were pressured to make it more of a service for the local dress manufacturers, perhaps. We did also try to get the department store people interested in helping us financially, but none of that came to much, really.

GALM:

So the acquisitions that are made by the council, are these from the dues and membership?

LIEBIG:

Yes, you see in the council, now, the members have to pay the museum dues as members of the museum, which is twenty-one dollars, and then they pay fifteen dollars to the C.O. They paid most of Mrs. [Mary] Kahlenberg's expenses to India. And we sent Mrs. Holt abroad to Europe several times, and she had the most marvelous connections—strange mysterious Polish men in Paris—and she'd get marvelous things from the eighteenth century, old wispy fabrics from early Egypt. She was a remarkable woman and I think hard to follow. But now we have a promising young woman.

GALM:

Have you done any collecting of your own, of fashion?

LIEBIG:

Well, I have given some of my mother's beautiful French dresses of the 1920s and my own to the museum. I would hardly call it collecting; they were just things that I had from my trousseau.

GALM:

So you have never really done it consciously other than retaining things that you loved?

LIEBIG:

That's right. I did happen to have some beautiful Chanel and Vionnet dresses to give the museum, things that are really classics, great, great treasures compared to clothes nowadays I think.

GALM:

When you retained them, was it with [any idea in mind], or couldn't you bear to throw them away?

LIEBIG:

Well, they were too beautiful just to give away casually. I suppose I couldn't bear to part with them. I think that's true of many people. People who give dresses to museums almost always give wedding dresses or ball dresses. You see, they haven't worn them frequently and they're in good condition—I remember Mrs. Holt was overjoyed to get a very handsome riding habit one of my friends had, that had been made by a famous English tailor, because of all the seams, it was valuable for students to examine. You see the costume department, I mustn't forget to tell you, has always been a research place for local students in the art schools here, and people in the movies, and dress designers. So these things are used, looked at and studied. For instance, when they were making the movie of My Fair Lady, Cecil Beaton came to the museum and took away several of our costumes, and copied or adapted them. That's one of the uses in Los Angeles of a costume department.

GALM:

Then, in 1955, Mr. Ross resigned from the museum. What was the reason for this resignation?

LIEBIG:

Well, I suppose you could say it was his personality and his wife's.

GALM:

Was it a difficulty in his performing his duties as director, or was it more?

LIEBIG:

No, he did well, and he tried very hard.

GALM:

Then, in 1956, the Lust for Life benefit—I wonder if you could speak a little bit about that.

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes. That was interesting for several reasons, and I think probably the most interesting reason was that we, the Junior Art Council, worked with the UCLA Art Council, together, and divided the profits. The UCLA Art Council has always benefitted from our art council because they've used our members. After Junior Art Council women had been president, and then their terms ended, they usually went on to the UCLA Art Council for several years. Mr. [Frederick S.] Wight said to me I remember in the beginning, "Why, it's so lovely; they get such fine training from the museum and then we get these fine remarkable women." However, it's always been very friendly, and at this time there are several women that are working on both groups. But that was the first, and only, time that we had a benefit that each profited from. Of course, it's always a large thing to put on a movie opening. It's a big job, and with the party afterwards—a very big job. This was an enormous success, and all these people were attractive and made things gay and made the party a good party.

GALM:

Can you think of some of the things that made it much different from any other movie premiere?

LIEBIG:

Well, it was just a natural to have a movie on Van Gogh. It was, you know, just made for an art museum, a good picture.

GALM:

Then, in 1957 a rather important event as far as new membership on the Board of Governors—that was when four men were named to the Board of Governors.

LIEBIG:

Yes. I think that was probably the most important thing that ever happened at the museum because three of the four men were involved in the art committee—at that time the board was really divided into the science and the art groups—and became very helpful on the art side. One was an attorney, Mr. Maynard Toll, who has helped in all sorts of intricate legal arrangements. The other two, Mr. Edward Garter and Mr. Norton Simon, were the people who were really back of the idea of starting the new museum—I mean, building a separate art museum away from the Exposition Park complex.

GALM:

Now, whose suggestion was it to make these gentlemen members of the board?

LIEBIG:

Well, I think it was Pic Brown's and Joseph Koepfli's and mine. I was very active at that time on the art committee. I was the chairman of it for years and years, and I was the second vice-president for years and years. We, the committee, had really dominated the board meetings because we knew what we wanted, which was, of course, money, from the meager sums that we were allotted; and I think we got really more than our share of the Balch income at that time, because the science people didn't seem to need or want very much money then. And we wanted it. I was very aggressive at that time and very, let us say, helpful, as a volunteer to Ric Brown. Joseph Koepfli is a very intelligent person, and he felt that if we had these three men—he wanted Maynard Toll as well as the two businessmen—that it would start us on a new path to a bigger and better museum. And it did. Mr. Garter is a highly respected local businessman, and he knew just where to turn for help, financial support. Mr. Simon, by that time, had a remarkable collection, but it was just the beginning of what it is now. It was small then, but the quality was very high—due to Ric Brown, who from the moment he came to town had developed Mr. Simon as a collector, helped him and stimulated him. Although these two men [Simon and Carter] never have gotten along together, oddly enough, I think they're the two that have made the present.

GALM:

At the time that they [Simon and Carter] were brought onto the board had they had much association in other areas?

LIEBIG:

No, because at that time, although Mr. Carter was on the University of California Board of Regents, Mr. Simon was not. He was appointed later by Governor [Edmund G.] Brown. So I don't believe they knew each other.

GALM:

Do you know whether they would have known each other in Republican circles?

LIEBIG:

No, because I don't think Norton Simon was a Republican then, and Mr. Carter's never been particularly involved in local politics or national politics.

GALM:

Had you and your husband known them socially, either the Carters or the Simons at that point?

LIEBIG:

No. I mean, I knew them slightly.

GALM:

I believe you had mentioned that you and Mrs. Simon are good friends.

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes, I like her very much, but I didn't know her until after he had become a board member.

GALM:

So it was through that association.

LIEBIG:

Yes.

GALM:

So, it was in that same year [1957] while you were in Rome, that you heard about the offer of Mr. Simon.

LIEBIG:

Yes. Mr. Simon had told Ric Brown that he would give a million dollars if it would be matched by another person or the public. Ric Brown wrote an absolutely lyrical letter of «joy to me when I was in Rome (I've still got the letter). That really started things moving.

GALM:

Do you remember the date of that letter?

LIEBIG:

Well, it was about the end of October, 1957. The men had been on the board about six months.

GALM:

But this couldn't have been made public knowledge at this time, could it? Or was it?

LIEBIG:

No, I don't think it was.

GALM:

When was the first time that you were able to make public announcement concerning the new museum?

LIEBIG:

Well, I remember the first money raising I did. I went with Mr. Koepfli in the spring of 1958 to Mrs. Schweppe, a woman who soon afterward died. We were very modest in our demands. Then, in that same year of 1958, in the fall, Mr. Howard Ahmanson, because he was asked by Ed Garter, promised two million dollars and immediately gave it for the future museum. Then came a highly efficient and professionally helped fund drive that went on for several years.

GALM:

So these two large gifts formed the nucleus for the future money raising?

LIEBIG:

Well, then it started, and a scheme was outlined people who gave a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars would have a room named after them in the new museum, and people who gave twenty-five thousand dollars would have their names on a marble wall. Of course, lots of people criticized this; but, from time immemorial, that's the way people have been recognized, by having their names permanently listed somewhere. Mr. Ahmanson wanted his name not only on a wall, but he wanted a building named after him, which Ric Brown objected to because it made the buildings three instead of one large building, you see. It affected the design.

GALM:

In speaking of the design, do you recall the discussions on the selection of the architect?

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes. They went on for months. They were very acrimonious, and we had the very interesting experience of interviewing some of the best-known architects of the time from the East—Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, Edward Stone, and even the great Mies van der Rohe came out here. But no agreement could be reached; so in the end a local architect, William Pereira, was chosen, and he devised the three-building plan.

GALM:

By this time, did you realize that you were going to have to go to three buildings in order to satisfy the wish of Mr. Ahmanson?

LIEBIG:

I think that we realized that right in the beginning, probably before the architects ever came out here.

GALM:

So this would have been a directive that they would have received in their thinking, in their designing?

LIEBIG:

It' s hard for me to answer that. I don' t know. But I imagine that they knew about it.

GALM:

In selecting the final architect, what were some of the points of disagreement with some of the other architects?

LIEBIG:

Well, some of us didn't like the style of Edward Stone. People thought Mies van der Rohe was too old and that most of the work would be done by his Japanese assistant, because his headquarters was in Chicago. Philip Johnson—I don't remember why people didn't like Philip Johnson. Maybe he scared everyone because his schemes would be so frightfully expensive. And I don't know why Eero Saarinen wasn't considered more desirable. I thought his scheme was very good.

GALM:

In other words, these gentlemen all did present a scheme. You didn't judge them just on past work.

LIEBIG:

It wasn't just anything down in detail, in black and white. They all went to look at the site, which by that time had been given—I mean, we'd been allowed by the donor of Hancock Park, where the La Brea tar-pits park is now, to use over six acres of the precious oily terrain where the prehistoric monsters had sunk and which was still being excavated.

GALM:

It's still today.

LIEBIG:

And they were very stingy; they just gave us the minimum that we'd need. Of course, we had lots of trouble with oil seeping up; and any architect who undertook that building had a difficult job, because it was built on squashy terrain, as the Prudential Insurance Company building was.

GALM:

Were there any other possible sites, or was this just too ideal?

LIEBIG:

This was too ideal. Yes, through the county, we could have had a patch very near where the Music Center is, down there. But we didn't think that would be good for a museum.

GALM:

You mean the area that you would have received?

LIEBIG:

That was before the Music Center had decided [to build there], and apparently that Bunker Hill property had been somewhat leveled and was available, but it didn't seem appropriate to us. I don't think there was ever any controversy about that. We just felt this was a marvelous location.

GALM:

Now you mention that it is built upon fossil ground. Were there any objections that the building was done in this area that was rich with—

LIEBIG:

I think the reason that we got the patch that we did was that it was unoccupied by a pond; I don't think anything of consequence had ever been found there (when we built the museum there was a sort of utility building there). But later on, we were not allowed to continue with, the idea of a garage on the opposite corner, because by that time people had begun to hue and cry against cementing over green spaces. I think people were right. So we've never had a good public parking place.

GALM:

This is sort of jumping ahead, but is there any possibility for future expansion, that more land will be made available?

LIEBIG:

I doubt it.

GALM:

Was expansion considered in the initial architect' pi an?

LIEBIG:

You mean spreading out over more of that park?

GALM:

Either that or within the six acres that the museum now occupies.

LIEBIG:

Well, I'm not sure I can answer that. I mean, I know that one of the parts of the terrace on which the museum is built is a formal garden now, and that is a very strong place which could have a building put upon it, a tall building. It wouldn't look very well, but it could be done.

GALM:

Now, is that the terrace behind the Ahmanson Gallery?

LIEBIG:

Yes, it is.

GALM:

You had mentioned Mr. Ahmanson and Mr. Simon and the gifts that they had given. Then there was also a gift from Mr. [Bart] Lytton. When did he make his gift?

LIEBIG:

Well, it was in this period. And what happened was tragic because he couldn't finish paying what he had promised to pay—his firm failed—so that finally the building had to change its name from Lytton Gallery, leaving two halls still named for him and his wife because they had given some money. Then Bart Lytton died. Soon a new angel came along in the form of Dr. Armand Hammer, so the building's name was changed to Frances and Armand Hammer Building.

GALM:

At what period did that come? In other words there was a transition period when it was known as the Exhibit Hall, or the Hall for Traveling Exhibits?

LIEBIG:

Yes, then Dr. Hammer. It's called the Dr. Armand and Frances Hammer Gallery. I'm not quite sure when the name was changed.

GALM:

When did Mrs. Bing—

LIEBIG:

Mrs. Anna Bing Arnold gave the building before it was opened. I mean, she promised to build it; so it was always known that the third building would be called the Bing Building, to honor her first husband.

GALM:

Had she been active with the museum before, or not?

LIEBIG:

No. Ric Brown got her interested, and it was one of the great things he did. Then later, after the museum opened, the new museum, she was asked to be on the Board of Trustees.

GALM:

And continues.

LIEBIG:

Oil, yes, she's been a most generous person. I think, as things stand now, she has given more money than anyone ever has to the museum. She continues in all sorts of remarkable ways. She not only gives works of art—she gives magnificent ones—and not only free concerts and exquisite concerts, but she will pay parts of salaries of people. She'll do anything that's needed.

GALM:

When did she come to California? Hadn't her husband been in New York real estate?

LIEBIG:

Yes, and I think they came here about 1930, and their son grew up here. It seems to me it was about 1930.

GALM:

So this was sort of a latent involvement.

LIEBIG:

Her husband had collected paintings, works of art, and she had been an actress. And then, by the time she came to give so much to the museum, she was married to a USC professor of English Literature; so there was a great aesthetic interest always in her life.

GALM:

You had mentioned that professional help was brought in for the money raising. There was another function that you had sought professional help for, and that was to split the museum. Were there problems to achieve this?

LIEBIG:

Well, it seems to me that it tapered along for a long time, I say "tapered" because it kept being discussed and never finished up until long after we had moved into the new museum. I don't know why we needed help, if we all understood what had to be done.

GALM:

What had to be done?

LIEBIG:

Well, I've tried to explain to you about the Museum Associates and the Museum Governors being the same people.

GALM:

Right.

LIEBIG:

The science people were still involved in the Museum Associates after we moved into the new museum, which was sort of sloppy. It wasn't good organization. So finally, they withdrew from the Associates and the money was divided—and they took their half of the Balch money, you see—the Associates became the art people only, and now the Associates exists really only to handle money. That reorganization matter hung on for a long time, and it was one of the things that made Mr. Simon very impatient that it hadn't been tidily accomplished earlier.

GALM:

Who really had to act? Was it the board itself who had to act in order to accomplish this, or was it county approval also?

LIEBIG:

No, it was the board.

GALM:

About this time you were also appointed—is that an appointment as second vice-president or are yon elected to that position?

LIEBIG:

Well, for years it had been done by the nominating committee, the way many nonprofit boards are formed.

GALM:

What was the role of the second vice-president in this particular organization?

LIEBIG:

Now, you mean the old organization at the old museum?

GALM:

Yes.

LIEBIG:

Well, as it turned out, I was the art chairman for many years, and I never did what the first vice-chairman did unless everybody was sick, which was to preside and do what the chairman does. But it happened I was the art chairman and therefore in the beginning—this was queer organization—the volunteer councils sort of dangled from me. If you saw a chart, the councils would be dangling from the second vice-president, art chairman; and that was bad organization. When we finally got settled in the new museum, these councils were not related to the board in that way.

GALM:

So what was the new relationship?

LIEBIG:

Well, now there are six councils and they are under what's called the Membership. You see, the times I've mentioned first were a long time ago when things were numerically small. When we moved into the new museum, we had six thousand general members all over the museum, including the council members.

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO FEBRUARY 10, 1971

GALM:

Mrs. Liebig, you were talking about the tremendous increase in membership, and I don't believe we got on the tape the number that it increased to.

LIEBIG:

Well, it increased from six thousand to twenty-seven thousand. And I think a great many of those people drove past the museum in the two years that it took for it to be built and saw on the fence erected around it the sign, "This is going to be the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—become a member for $10," something to that effect. Many people had never been conscious of the art in the old museum down in that mixed Museum of History, Science and Art, and, of course, also many people were newcomers at the time and driving by every day. I think that was the most simple way to get new members. They didn't all come that way, but undoubtedly some of them did.

GALM:

Was the La Brea park used a great deal before the museum?

LIEBIG:

Well, there were some benches, and people would come and sit there as they do now in parts of the park. I don't know whether you've ever walked through it.

GALM:

Yes, but it's not a total afternoon experience as it now is with the museum there. I think there are many people who enjoy the museum, but then enjoy the park, too, at the same time.

LIEBIG:

I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say a "total afternoon experience."

GALM:

Well, what I'm saying is, combining an outdoor pleasure with an indoor pleasure.

LIEBIG:

I don't know whether the people who used to sit on the benches come to the museum or not, or whether they now go and watch the excavations that have been reactivated lately. I have read that some of the people that excavate suddenly go into the museum—after they have dusted their hands off. [laughter] I don't really know.

GALM:

In 1960, an honor came to you through the Los Angeles Times. You were named a "Woman of the Year." Did this come as a surprise to you.

LIEBIG:

Yes. Yes, it did.

GALM:

And how were you informed of this? What is the procedure?

LIEBIG:

It seems to me I got a letter from Norman Chandler.

GALM:

Saying that you had been named?

LIEBIG:

Yes, I think so. At that time, again, this was all in a simpler time, and the award party was held at the Norman Chandler house. Otis had just been made the publisher, so he came to his parents' house; in the large music room, it all took place. I think I got the invitation from Otis—it wasn't Norman—because he had been made the publisher.

GALM:

In your autobiography you speak of the award, though, as being a bit anti-climactic.

LIEBIG:

Well, at that time, I think that many of us who were struggling, really working hard on the museum' getting ahead, felt that we didn't get enough support from the Times; so that, perhaps, I was less jubilant than I might have been a while before this rival money raising started. You see, it's a big tool to have a large metropolitan newspaper that you can use. The Music Center could use it.

GALM:

If one doesn't have that, what other means did you have to use?

LIEBIG:

Well, we tried very hard to get good newspaper coverage, and it certainly was the best newspaper; but we didn't get the space that the music activities got. The museum in some ways had been very fortunate. In the period of 1952, when the Junior Art Council started they got remarkably extensive coverage—partly, I imagine, because the members were photogenic. But I think the Times changed from 1952 to 1958, say, when we all started money raising; because, after all, we drew from the same people—not completely, but the big donors were the same.

GALM:

What was the general reaction among some of these large donors. Did they choose to give to both, or was it one or the other?

LIEBIG:

Mr. Carter had been very active in the music world, and Mr. Koepfli, and I think that they probably appealed to people as civic givers rather than specific art or music givers. I think they were trying to build up the city, which had been so criticized for being behind in both music and art. There were people that could afford to give. And, of course, they worked out schemes of giving on the installment plan, naturally. So if you go down and look at their [Music Center's] marble walls, and then go and look at our marble walls, you see again and again the same names.

GALM:

I don't know whether you can answer this, because it deals with the Music Center. Did they decide from the beginning their buildings would receive the names of some of the major donors?

LIEBIG:

I don't know when they decided that.

GALM:

When was the groundbreaking for the actual museum?

LIEBIG:

Let's see. It was in the fall of 1962.

GALM:

Were you present for it?

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes, and it was rather touching. Captain Hancock, who so generously said we could have part of his park which he'd donated to the county for science for our museum, was there, and his little granddaughters did the groundbreaking with little shovels. That was rather nice.

GALM:

Was this a morning or an afternoon?

LIEBIG:

It was in the afternoon. I think that I should say a little bit about the two people who persuaded him to give us the land—

GALM:

I was going to ask who approached him.

LIEBIG:

—because without their good offices, who knows what would have happened? Well, one of them was Douglas De Coster who was an assistant county counsel for many years in Los Angeles, attended all Board of Governors' meetings and had known Captain Hancock for years. The other was Dr. [Rufus] von KleinSmid, who had been president of the University of Southern California, who had been president of the old museum years before, and who also was a very good friend of Captain Hancock. These two elderly men flew up to Santa Rosa where Captain Hancock was living on his ranch, and they must have been spellbinders because they came home with a "yes." That was a big victory.

GALM:

Do you remember exactly when their visit was?

LIEBIG:

No, I don't.

GALM:

And it just required one visit?

LIEBIG:

Yes.

GALM:

Now, in 1963, there was the "Treasures of the Versailles" show. That would have been in the old museum.

LIEBIG:

Yes, that was a remarkable show. It was beautifully put on. The old museum looked as if it were a formal French garden, and it was rather impressive because the French ambassador Alphand came out for it. It was actually a French government-sponsored exhibition that went to one or two other museums in the United States. The curator of Versailles also came to the opening. From our side, great effort was spent on having a gala dinner and opening night. It was a very brilliant occasion.

GALM:

Was there quite a bit of competition from other museums to get this particular show? Or how did that work?

LIEBIG:

I don't know how that happened. Mr. [Sidney F.] Brody knew the head of the Versailles museum and, I think, the French ambassador. I think Mr. Brody had something to do with getting it for us.

GALM:

More so than Mr. Brown, Ric Brown?

LIEBIG:

I don't know.

GALM:

Then that same year [1963] there were two new councils formed.

LIEBIG:

Yes.

GALM:

Could you speak a bit about those—for instance, the Docent Council?

LIEBIG:

The Docent Council was started at the old museum by a few volunteers working with Miss Frances Nugent, who was the paid docent of the whole museum—she could talk on any exhibition. And Virginia Weaver, Mrs. Stuart Weaver, who has been a remarkably helpful person always, since she started being on the executive committee of the association in 1948—anyhow, Virginia Weaver and other people worked with Miss Nugent. There was very little organization in the beginning. It was sort of haphazard—women of goodwill, interest in art, and so on. Then, Glenn Candy Cooper really made it efficient and got new people, perhaps more of a group of people, including a lot of Junior League members. Before they had been individuals who'd come to the museum all by themselves and said, "Can't I do something? Maybe I could help teach these school children, or do something." But she really organized it and made it into a very serious council right from the beginning. The people have been very earnest, and more and more as the time has gone by, they have become women with excellent backgrounds in art. They've studied art extensively at college; they have painted; they have lived in foreign countries and know other languages; and they have been teachers. They are remarkable women, and there are so many of them; and they are so utterly dedicated and work so long and hard that I know that Mr. [Kenneth] Donahue thinks they're the best museum docents in the United States—which is the world, because they don't have them, of course, in Europe. They keep on being educated by courses by local professors and so on. There is something called a VCAM in the United States, which is Volunteer Council Art Museums, I think, and when our docents go to VCAM meetings they always feel themselves to be well trained and competent.

GALM:

"What are some of the duties that they undertake at the museum?

LIEBIG:

Well, they undertake to guide and teach thousands of public school children who come in busloads in the morning. Now, at this point when the Cubist show is taking place, I remember, I think last week, I saw eight or ten huge yellow buses filled with children—they do that all morning, then in the afternoon they have adult tours. And in this particular show they have sixty or seventy people to talk to at a time—try to explain, in this case, a difficult art school, the Cubists. I'm always amazed when I hear the tail ends of their talks; they are very able in getting along with the public, for one thing.

GALM:

Do you know whether their lectures or their talks are prepared individually or prepared by the council?

LIEBIG:

They're prepared individually—though there is a professional woman who works with and for them. But they also have people—for instance, if some Russians come, there's a woman who was born in Russia who can be called up, and she comes over and talks to them in Russian. There are a lot of Spanish-speaking people who help, and Japanese-speaking. It's really a perfectly remarkable group.

GALM:

What is their present membership? Do you know offhand?

LIEBIG:

Well, I think it's under three hundred.

GALM:

And then also about the same time the Contemporary Art Council was formed.

LIEBIG:

Well, that's a completely different kind of an organization. These other groups pay small sums as membership dues. This group is really a group of collectors who pay five hundred dollars a year; so, you see, it's not very big—I should think it numbers between fifty and a hundred. They use their money for acquisitions, and they sometimes buy very expensive things that take several years to pay for. They also use the money for awards to young artists, and this is very important. Of course, we don't give scholarships as the UCLA councils do, but there are awards. Lately they've been urging the sponsorship—and helping with them—of small, simple little shows that are held in one room on the fourth floor, for instance, for some avant-garde revolutionary young person who I don't suppose could be given a large show because he's young and just starting. Or somebody who's changing his style like [Richard] Diebenkorn lately. They had a show of about ten of his things. This kind of thing keeps people going to the museum because there's something new to see all the time. I think it's a very good idea. And, you see, they are not expensive shows that have costly catalogs; they print small leaflets, and I think that the Contemporary Art Council has encouraged that because they have a curator they are very fond of, and proud of, named Maurice Tuchman. They have put on very interesting evenings which are called the Meetings of the Education Committee of the Contemporary Art Council, and they take place at different members' houses. At these, appear artists who are in town, or local artists, who for some reason or other are at that moment in the public eye, talk to them, informally, with refreshments. I've been invited as a member of the board to these entertaining evenings which keep everyone alert to what's happening now. For instance, they've had several people from the new art school, Cal Arts. One man was a painter, going to be a teacher there; one man was a New York critic who is going to teach art history there—that kind of thing this year. Their last guest I heard was Robert Irwin who was about to have a show at UCLA—exceedingly avant-garde, it hardly is an objective show at all. He spoke as a mystic really rather than an artist. But this is all awfully interesting, and the group keeps itself stimulated this way.

GALM:

Who was responsible for the initial organization? Do you recall?

LIEBIG:

Not one person; no, I don't. One of the people who was in it in the beginning was Taft Schreiber, who is a collector of modern art; he's on the trustees now. Then there's been from the first a brilliant writer, Michael Blankfort, now also a trustee. The Contemporary Art Council's president now is Joanne Phillips who, with her husband Gifford Phillips, collects art.

GALM:

Did this organization or council fill a real need or a vacuum that had occurred?

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes, I think so. And, of course, when the Pasadena museum began its drive for a new museum and its building fund and its whole new program, some of the people in the field of the contemporary left our museum—either quarrelled with somebody at our museum, or felt that not enough has been done at our museum for the right-now contemporary art. So this committee is valuable because it holds the interest of some people who might otherwise be lost to us.

GALM:

What is your feeling?

LIEBIG:

Oh, my feeling is that our museum will be—to use the only terms we can use in comparison—our museum will be the Metropolitan Museum and the Pasadena Art Museum will be the Museum of Modern Art in this area.

GALM:

And hopefully there won't be a Guggenheim Museum?

LIEBIG:

Oh, I don't know.

GALM:

Or should I say a Norton Simon Museum?

LIEBIG:

Yes, you can say that. I have just read since I spoke to you last week about the new museum out at Malibu, the J. Paul Getty Museum. That's going to be classic art, and at the present it's going to be in a beautiful villa that's copying something from Pompeii. That will contain among other things the collection that Mr. Getty has of French furniture, which is supposed to be better than in Versailles. That's all out there, so that may be the great decorative art museum; and we'd be the fine arts museum; and the Pasadena would be the modern. However, I think we should always keep a toehold with the modern so that someone coming here who didn't want to go to Pasadena could see some good representative contemporary works at the LACMA.

GALM:

So, in other words, this council is a very important council within the museum.

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes, indeed it is. We have this brilliant man, Maurice Tuchman, who's put on the Arts and Technology show, at Osaka at the World's Fair, which will come here this spring.

GALM:

The pre-Columbian exhibit also was in 1963. Was this the first major pre-Columbian exhibit that the museum had done?

LIEBIG:

Well, I believe you're talking about the Masterpieces of Mexican Art. It wasn't just pre-Columbian; it covered fifteen hundred years and it stretched up to the present. It was a vast show, a Mexican government show. It went to Europe first, and Ric Brown spent two months in Copenhagen getting the catalog translated into English and so on and so on. It was a vast undertaking, and it was undertaken at the time when everyone was busy with the new museum. The show filled the whole old museum and I don't know how it was ever accomplished.

GALM:

You must have done a lot of personal work on that?

LIEBIG:

No, I don't remember doing any personal work on it, but the museum was in a state of chaos because the offices were all moved around. It was a bad time. You see, there were not enough employees.

GALM:

I have a note here that in 1964 you resigned from the museum Board of Governors.

LIEBIG:

No, I resigned from the science end of things, not from the art end of things. But Toy that time the names had been juggled around so that lots of people mistook my resigning from the science part of it and thought I had resigned from the whole thing. That was a mistake; it was a matter of semantics. I wanted my place taken by a man who was deeply interested in birds and in California history, a man who held the place not very long because he died. Anyway, I meant well.

GALM:

Who was that gentleman?

LIEBIG:

His name just goes right out of my head. He was a newspaperman, and I'll think of his name in a minute. [Ed Ainsworth.]

GALM:

In 1964 Norton Simon purchased the Duveen brothers' what was left of the Duveen brothers' collection.

LIEBIG:

Yes, he purchased the building and everything in it in New York.

GALM:

What did this mean to the museum at that time?

LIEBIG:

Well, some of the things were put on loan. Of course, there were old masters, and there was some remarkable furniture, tapestries. Of course, we all longed to have it, not just loaned but given.

GALM:

Was it a terribly unexpected move upon his part?

LIEBIG:

Well, first I remember Ric saying he was going to buy what he called Lord Duveen's private collection, and then it turned out that what he was going to buy was the business, the whole remnant. The man who had been running it for years was very old, and I suppose he wanted to have cash instead of an art dealership and a mass of works of art.

GALM:

Had you seen the Duveens since the European trip?

LIEBIG:

You mean since the 1921 European trip?

GALM:

Yes.

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes, I saw them in 1955. Dorothy and her second husband came here just before my daughter's wedding, I remember; it was an inconvenient time. Then, in 1957 my husband and I went to her place in England. Several years after that, her mother, Lady Duveen, came to California for the first time, and she wanted to see the Huntington Gallery, which her husband had been responsible for—not only the works of art but the furniture, everything in the house part of the museum, so I met Lady Duveen and took her there. It was very interesting to see her sitting looking at the Blue Boy and so on. She was not as beautiful as she had been in 1921, but she was still a very pleasant woman.

GALM:

Had she been active in her husband's enterprises

LIEBIG:

No, she was just a beautiful, beautiful wife.

GALM:

Another honor came to you in November of 1964 when you were informed by the Art Museum Council that a gallery would be named after you.

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes, that was marvelous for me, such a wonderful surprise. Well, they had made a lot of money on an auction that they had held, of things that had been donated and some duplicates that the museum itself had offered. Somehow they had persuaded Peter Wilson to fly from London at his own expense—he was the head of Sotheby's. I think he probably wanted to look over the California scene—but, anyhow, he came and put on this professional auction, and the A.M.C. made over $90,000. Well, when it came to designating rooms to donors—of course, they didn't have the required hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars—but Ric thought that they deserved to have the graphic arts rooms. The exhibition rooms, I think, are three and sort of meld into a hall; and in back of those are the offices, the library, the workshop—wonderful, really wonderful quarters on the third floor. So they named this gallery the Caroline Liebig Gallery, and it's written up on one of the walls. I was covered with confusion because I felt that it would confuse the public, or make the public think that I, Caroline Liebig, had paid a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to the museum, and of course I hadn't. So I wanted a little plaque put up—and I had innumerable arguments with Mr. Sesnon about that—explaining, or stating, or in some way making it clear; but everyone said that was silly.

GALM:

In other words, you just didn't want to receive financial credit for something.

LIEBIG:

That's it. And one woman I had gone to school with many, many years ago, I met there one day; she was not informed about the hundred and twenty-five thousand dollar rooms and so on, and in her innocence, thought I owned everything in the room and had given the things, which were beautiful Renaissance drawings. Well, that, of course, was beyond belief. I finally did, though, in 1970} give them something, and it was very nice the way it happened. They had a show of Rembrandt's etchings and, I think, of some Rembrandt drawings that Norton Simon loaned. I believe it was Rembrandt's birthday or death day. Anyway the museums of the United States were all celebrating with Rembrandt shows. I had inherited an excellent Rembrandt etching from my aunt, and I'd always thought that I would will it to the museum. I now thought, "Well, this is a golden time to give it," because I had always felt a little conscience-stricken, you know, about this money angle. So that was nice. I gave it; and it was hung up; and then it was put on the cover of the museum calendar, and I felt it was sort of pleasing to me to be able to do it, to make up in a small way.

GALM:

Which aunt was this?

LIEBIG:

Well, originally my uncle William Kerckhoff bought the etching and willed it to his wife, and his wife willed it to her sister, Jose, and then I inherited it.

GALM:

Then, the following spring, the museum opened. Could you describe what that opening day meant for you?

LIEBIG:

Well, there were six opening days, and for the week, all controversies seemed to have been forgotten, and all was happiness and great gaiety. The first event was the large dinner for three hundred and twenty people. I remember that number because I did all the table seating, and that's a lot of people to place. It was remarkably successful. (Katie Gates managed it as she has for several years done all the parties. She's a perfectionist, so that there was no worry. We used to have terrible debacles occur at our events but never since she took over. ) It was very gay; there were people from all over the world there. The next night, there was an enormous reception of two thousand people that was for the membership, and all of the councils were involved in that. That was lavish and very enthusiastically received. Then, there was a concert in the Bing Auditorium by [Pierre] Boulez, who was considered the last word in musical conductors—an avant-garde affair. Next came a movie premiere of The Train, the only event which was money making; people did have to buy expensive tickets for that. It took place in the Bing Auditorium, and then there was a supper party afterwards in Pauley Hall, very elegant. On the next night came a great dinner of lenders to the Bonnard show, which was the opening show, and, of course that entailed people from New York and Paris and so on, too. Some of them had stayed over; some of them came to both dinners. These dinners were very formal with receiving lines and so on. The next day, Mr. Garter had a party at the Japanese gardens, which he had recently given to UCLA, for all these out-of-town people who were still around. By this time the weather was getting to be very cloudy, and everybody thought, "Oh, it's going to rain; it's going to rain for Monday night," which was the big, general opening and had been planned so carefully by so many people. Molly Hartzell and Mr. Lawrence Morton, the impresario, had been working for months on planning these beautiful trumpet, horn effects from the roof—Handel's' Fireworks Music.

GALM:

And the fireworks.

LIEBIG:

Then, the glorious fireworks. Of course, if it had rained that would have been sad; but it was a balmy evening, suddenly a balmy evening, and it was all beautiful, and everybody seemed radiantly happy. Then, the next morning, it started raining. It poured rain for ten days, just as if we were with Noah and the ark, it rained so hard. Wasn't that lucky? It really was a miracle because in rain everything would have been so difficult. As it was, it was beautiful seeing people eddy across the plaza, you know, sipping champagne. So it was very lucky for us that no rain spoiled it.

GALM:

You mentioned that the show that opened the museum was the Bonnard show. This, I'm sure, must be a very important decision—what to open a new museum with.

LIEBIG:

Yes.

GALM:

Do you know how this decision was made?

LIEBIG:

Well, it was made in an odd way, because the man who was Ric Brown's assistant, James Elliot, had been preparing this show for years. He'd gone to France, and he'd worked up a catalog and so on, gotten all the lenders. It was a complicated show to arrange because there had been a long controversy about Bonnard's will. The family and the mistress and the French courts had tied all these pictures up—for years. So, in a way, the Bonnard show in Los Angeles had been postponed, and then it suddenly seemed to be ripening and it seemed to be possible that it would be ready in time. A lot of people thought it was a funny way to open the museum, but it was an exquisite show.

GALM:

How ready was the museum when it did open as far as its hangings?

LIEBIG:

It was ready. It was paid for and ready. Things had been frantically done at the last minute. For instance, one of the trustees, David Bright, hadn't liked the terrace planting, so he had seen to getting twenty-eight beautiful, large perennial pear trees planted in great containers on the plaza, which added very much to the beauty of the whole effect. We had marvelous plants all over the museum that had been carefully selected, and their containers carefully selected, and no expense spared; and, oh, the museum looked so beautiful and pristine, but within a few weeks the public, the children, the tramping around took all the bloom off. It was heartbreaking to us. But they did it.

GALM:

It's still a glorious building, though.

LIEBIG:

It was so sad, though, to see these—oh, the walls were as if they'd been kicking them. The children would get in the elevators and run up and down in them, working them themselves.

GALM:

It really took very little time for this?

LIEBIG:

And I had such a funny feeling, you know, because I'd been so close to it, and I had been on that committee that had ordered all the expensive modern inside furnishings—not only the cases and the display arrangements, but the chairs, the Mies van der Rohe chairs in the members' lounge, and one of those was stolen. Oh, those things matter an awful lot when you've been near them, you know, getting ready.

GALM:

As though it was almost your own home, in a way.

LIEBIG:

Yes.

GALM:

You had mentioned that during the opening of the museum, animosities and misunderstandings were halted or dismissed for the time being; but then in April of that year was the Kienholz exhibit.

LIEBIG:

No, that was the next year, but as soon as the opening was over, we started having all sorts of trouble Well, the first thing that happened, which was a terrible shock, was that Mr. David Bright, who had been exceedingly active in getting the show on the road, died. He just suddenly died, of a heart attack, in New York; and I think that one reason he died was that he'd worked so hard on our museum. But our troubles were many, and one of them was that we didn't have enough employees—we didn't have enough guards to take care of the museum; we didn't have enough maintenance men to keep it clean; and we didn't have nearly enough clerical staff. In the next six years, there has been a constant adding to the number of employees.

GALM:

How is this accomplished? Do you have to get approval?

LIEBIG:

Oh, it's awfully hard, and from now on I don't think we'll ever get another employee because the county, you see, pays for them. And you've heard what happened just yesterday in the earthquake.

GALM:

Oh, you mean the millions of county money that would have been lost in damages.

LIEBIG:

Yes. And the county's really very hard up now. But, anyhow, in the period right after the opening in the spring of 1965, we immediately realized that we didn't have enough employees.

GALM:

Mrs. Liebig, you also wanted to talk about two other councils that were created as part of the museum structure.

LIEBIG:

Yes, the Art Museum Council, the former Junior Art Council, helped by having a committee start a graphics council which would work for Miss [Ebria] Feinblatt, the curator, and focus interest in that field, which fortunately was becoming an interest in the United States and in Los Angeles at the time. And interestingly, as this developed, the first membership was almost entirely made up of Europeans—oh, the languages you could hear at their meetings—and of people who'd come to live in California with a collection of etchings, for instance. Then the council developed, and now they have—I can't believe it—they have five hundred members. They have auctions; they make money by having prints made especially for openings, such as a print that was made for our opening of the Giacometti show, which rather oddly, and in a way sadly, took place on the very night that Giacometti died in Europe. That was a wonderful print. They are very expansive. They have lecturers; they bring lecturers from away from here, from the East. They have a lot of educational meetings concerned with the techniques of prints. And I feel that they are really helping the museum, that department, enormously.

GALM:

Now you mentioned that the original Graphics Council members were mostly European. Could one perhaps make any observations from that fact about American interest in graphics? Do you think that there was a lack of it?

LIEBIG:

I think it just happened because Miss Feinblatt was born in Germany. I think one friend led to another and groups to groups; I can't really explain it, except that it's interesting to see the different types of people in these different councils.

1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE FEBRUARY 18, 1971

GALM:

Mrs. Liebig, today I thought we would start with a discussion of the Service Council since last time we did end with a discussion of the Graphics Council. How did it come about?

LIEBIG:

Well, in a different way from the others. It started as an unorganized movement of individuals who wanted to do something for the museum. In the year 1964, when they wanted to do something, they were put to work wrapping china, glass, and all sorts of breakable things for the [move to the] museum. We didn't have enough paid people to do this packing, and these women did it so beautifully that when the move finally took place only one little bowl was broken—and it was mendable. The woman who was sort of in charge of this amorphous body of volunteers was Verna Steinmetz, a member of the Art Museum Council. After the move to the new museum, many of these people were put in information booths. They were sort of homeless waifs, so Verna and I thought, why not make a council out of them? They were not homogeneous as the other groups had been, because their purposes were different one from the other, and they didn't know each other; but that didn't seem to matter. They did things as different as helping with the catalog for the great government of Japan show. One of them knew how to read and write Japanese, and she helped Mr. Kuwayama. One of them is a former research librarian from MGM who knows all sorts of things about reference libraries. They are people of varied backgrounds. Many of them are business women. So a council was started, and it's worked very well. They don't go off on trips to San Francisco together yet, as the Contemporary Art Council does, or the Art Museum Council, but they are beginning to have little gatherings at collections and occasional parties. And they are doing the most marvelous job of selling memberships to the people who come to the exhibitions, especially when they come to a popular exhibition and have to wait in line for a couple of hours. These volunteers rush out and say, "If you belong to the museum, you can go in that short line." Then when we have a beautiful catalog—which are given away free to the membership, but which cost three or four dollars to buy and sometimes run out because there is a demand for them—then these clever Service Council women say, "See, if you were a member of the museum, we could give you a Cubist catalog." Well, anyway, they have helped increase the membership very much. It's gone shooting up again. We had a great decline. I can tell you. about that a little later because I think Rex Stead was the one that really got it back.

GALM:

So, how many women would you say belong to the Service Council as compared to, say, some of the other councils?

LIEBIG:

I think there are over two hundred now. I may be wrong on these figures; I should have looked them up.

GALM:

So is this council less a—

LIEBIG:

It's not a money-making or a fundraising council. It and the Docents raise no money.

GALM:

Perhaps a little less social than the Docents, or isn't that an important factor, really?

LIEBIG:

Well, its women are young and old, and all kinds of women are in it. I think during the early days of the Junior Art Council, it was that way, but I don't think that nowadays any of them really is.

GALM:

So the new museum opened and you continued for a year, but already there had been stirrings regarding the directorship of Ric Brown. When would you say that things first went amiss?

LIEBIG:

Oh, right after the opening.

GALM:

And how was this shown?

LIEBIG:

It was so sad really because here was a board that had raised twelve million dollars and done almost everything he wanted, and suddenly we could do nothing that pleased him. He became a changed man, kind of a megalomaniac. He became extravagant, and impatient with, any advice, and he had a little clique around him of curators and sub curators and secretaries and so on, that one of the museum people who wasn't in it called "The Club." And these people yessed him and encouraged him and he became very difficult; his temper became bad; and the people that had been fondest of him, even, couldn't get along with him. Of course, a couple of the people on the board he hadn't liked for years. I think he was under a terrible strain all those years, and I think some of the members of the board were, too. The president of the trustees was Edward Carter, who was also the president at that time of the UC Regents, and that was the year of course when their troubles started in the fall of 1964 in Berkeley. So it was a hard time. I think many of the people at the museum had had disruptions in their personal lives, so that, I imagine, everybody was on edge. But things just went from bad to worse, and there just didn't seem to be any possibility of a meeting of the minds. He refused to have an administrator—a separate, strong administrator—to be a kind of a co-equal, you see; because he was not an administrator, and in the beginning he hadn't been the head, and also everything had been on a so much smaller scale. You see, immediately when we got into the new museum, we got many more employees and everything became larger, including the amounts of money that we were coping with. He was not an administrator, and he wouldn't admit it. He was very vain and, of course, a brilliant man in some ways. And, he was a dynamic, very charming man, and so the public, who knew nothing, was all on his side, as well as the newspapers, after he said he was leaving.

GALM:

Was any of this foreseen during the building phase of the museum?

LIEBIG:

No. I, don't think anyone ever dreamed of such things until the summer of 1965. That was when everything began getting really—beyond repair, you might say.

GALM:

Now who of the trustees would be considered his major friends?

LIEBIG:

Well, his major friends—the people that he helped with their collections and with whom he had traveled—were Norton Simon and David Bright. David Bright died within weeks after the museum opened; and Norton became extremely disappointed and impatient with Ric. He, I think, had demanded too much of him. But at this point, well, Ric lost Norton's advocacy.

GALM:

We haven't spoken too much of David Bright. Do you feel that—this is an "if" question—but do you feel that if David Bright had not died that he may have been able to hold things together for Ric Brown?

LIEBIG:

No, no, no. He was not a power with, the other important businessmen on the board.

GALM:

I know he was very active in the building of the museum as a supervisor.

LIEBIG:

Yes. He had a very good collection and he took Ric abroad. Ric went abroad with several rich people, and I think that was one reason he lost proportion about money. He became very extravagant in his ideas for the museum, ridiculously so.

GALM:

Now when you say "extravagant," can you be perhaps more specific?

LIEBIG:

Well, for one thing, he thought that we should spend on entertainment sixty thousand dollars a year, which was just all out of line, you know. He had lost a sense of perspective and proportion, I think. But now he's got a job where he has an unlimited amount of money to spend on building a museum and filling it with works of art which he's been buying for five years. So I think, probably, he's much happier.

GALM:

Had his relationship with Howard Ahmanson ever been on a good level?

LIEBIG:

No, he couldn't stand him.

GALM:

Ric Brown couldn't stand, or perhaps both equally.

LIEBIG:

Well, of course, the other man was enormously rich and had so much power that Ric Brown didn't bother him. And then Howard [Ahmanson] died. Oddly enough, if Ric had had patience—Ahmanson was dead within three years of the museum's opening.

GALM:

So you feel that perhaps the suddenness with which Los Angeles became a major museum also played a part in the personality change? Or is it hard to pinpoint?

LIEBIG:

I don't know. He had a difficult life in every way. I think it's very hard to try to analyze It, though, of course, many people did try. But I think that without him, and without that particular board which raised so much money, we wouldn't have had a museum, at least not nearly as soon. So, although this period was extremely unpleasant and sad, it didn't stop the museum from going ahead.

GALM:

How did the Assyrian reliefs figure into the total scene?

LIEBIG:

Well, that was really afterwards that that came to light. Well, briefly—I hope you have plenty of tape because this can't be too brief—the Assyrian reliefs had come from a little town in England where they'd been for a couple of centuries in a big warehouse, a wooden barn-like structure, and we'd had them sent to us sort of on approval.

GALM:

Consignment?

LIEBIG:

Well, not consignment, because we couldn't make up our mind, let us say, whether to buy them or not. And that was one of the things that infuriated Ric, because he blamed Ed Carter for not coming down and deciding about it. So when he made this connection with the Kimbell Foundation in Fort Worth, he let the agent sell the reliefs to them without saying anything to us, and then there was a threat of a lawsuit. Finally, the Kimbell Foundation let us buy them back. It was very disagreeable. The reliefs are very, very important. And I think Ric was right; I think it was infuriating for him to have had needlessly to wait so long.

GALM:

Do you feel It was a matter of price? Were you speaking about money or what?

LIEBIG:

We were speaking about money. They were terribly expensive. I don't remember; I think they cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and I think Anna Bing Arnold finally paid for them.

GALM:

Were you allowed to buy them back at the same price that you would have bought them originally?

LIEBIG:

I don't remember. I wasn't on that committee and I don't remember the details; but we got them back and I think there was no profit involved.

GALM:

So this was something that happened after Ric Brown was on his way out, so to speak?

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes. He already had resigned, and then he had to stay here for about three months afterwards, which was a bad period, too. I believe the whole thing came out in public about the first of December, and he didn't leave until the end of February; so I believe that was when this came to light.

GALM:

Well, would that bring us then to the Kienholz exhibit?

LIEBIG:

Well, I think it does bring us to that; because, again, that was a matter that we hadn't been told about, and it was very infuriating to suddenly find out that Ric had given Maurice Tuchman permission to schedule this show. Whatever you think of the Kienholz works, it certainly was an obviously very controversial show, and not the kind of thing a brand-new museum would want to have. The supervisors and especially Mr. [Warren] Dorn felt that it was a terribly dirty show that would influence children as certain movies are supposed to. Really, the man [Kienholz] was a moralist; and these scenes inside the whorehouses and the backseats of automobiles and the filthy decor of his pieces (they were things you could walk into) were so revolting that they were sort of moral sermons against evil. I don't think they were art, and I don't think we should have had them, certainly not at that time. I don't think they were good enough for the museum. They looked like, oh, things out on an amusement pier; they were really not museum caliber.

GALM:

What was the thinking of the group that brought them in?

LIEBIG:

I think that the man Kienholz was a friend, a pal, a local artist, a friend of these young curators who were there at the time, Ric's clique. (All of them have now left—for good jobs, I must say). Oh, I think also they did it just to bedevil the board; they knew that it would make the board furious. But then the board was immediately in the papers again as being—well, I don't know what we were considered at that point—but we fooled the public; we did not stand up for the supervisors and we said, "It's our board privilege to have whatever shows we want, and you supervisors have no authority to make us close that show and take it away." So, gradually, I think we got back a little of our good name, because we did stand up against these silly statements of the supervisors. The cartoonists had a heyday, and there were some very funny cartoons; Mr. [Paul] Conrad did several terribly funny ones. It was a storm you could see on the front pages. I don't think that it did us any good, and I don't think that that whole period was at all good for the museum; but, somehow, in time, we got over it.

GALM:

Was this a difficult decision for the board to arrive at?

LIEBIG:

No, no. After all, the board has never felt that the supervisors were aesthetic experts in any way.

GALM:

So it was not really a defense of Kienholz but a defense of their own right to make the decisions regarding exhibitions?

LIEBIG:

That's right. I don't think anybody really liked the Kienholz show. They stood in line for an hour to see it.

GALM:

Curiosity seekers.

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes, it was one of the things you had to see.

GALM:

So this was the last involvement that Ric Brown had with the museum?

LIEBIG:

Yes. Of course, he had left about two months before. I think he came back and looked at it.

GALM:

Now you mentioned that some of the curators also eventually left.

LIEBIG:

Yes.

GALM:

Did they leave at about this time?

LIEBIG:

No, all a little later.

GALM:

But not because of duress upon the board's part but because of better offers?

LIEBIG:

Oh, no duress. They had offers.

GALM:

Not necessarily better offers.

LIEBIG:

I don't think it's important to go into them or what happened to them except that they are doing well.

GALM:

Except for the fact that it did, in a sense, break up "The Club."

LIEBIG:

Oh yes, it was never the same again.

GALM:

Then a new director was named for the museum.

LIEBIG:

Yes. There was a good deal of looking around, and then, in the end, as so many institutions do, the second in command was asked to take over, and that was Kenneth Donahue, who had come as an old friend and choice of Ric' s to be his assistant. He had been at the museum—he was such a quiet man, I don't remember exactly when he came—probably about a year before the new museum opened.

GALM:

Do you think it would be important to mention any of the people that were under consideration?

LIEBIG:

No, I don't think so.

GALM:

You had mentioned earlier that one of the things that Ric Brown was not was an administrator; and that the board had felt that possibly there should be another position made, an administrative position. Was this still considered after Kenneth Donahue became director?

LIEBIG:

No, It wasn't. There is a man who is the person who deals with the county; he came from the county and understands all the complexities of the finances. But he is not the top authority. Then Mr. Donahue realized, of course, he needed somebody to help him; so, in 1967, his old friend and choice came as his assistant and that was Rexford Stead.

GALM:

And where did he come from?

LIEBIG:

Well, he came immediately from Florida, hut he had had a great deal of experience. One of his important experiences was being the assistant to the most famous expert on Iranian art,. Persian art, in the world, Arthur Upham Pope. Rex had studied under him and then been his assistant, so he's an expert in the field of Iranian works of art. He's also a highly civilized man; I think he's been a great asset to the museum. He is gifted as a writer, and that has helped very much in several ways. Bulletins, catalogs at the museum, had never been done very well. A monthly calendar of events had been done really amateurishly and never well, and when Rex came along, he revamped that and made it a very pleasing and illuminating little communication for all the members. He thought of ways to get information—for instance, about our travel program—in the calendar in a succinct but tempting way. He put on the cover any fine gift that had been given, and it sort of pleased people who had given the gifts and so on. He could speak very well. I even heard him make an awfully good speech in Leningrad one time, at a place called the House of Friendship. The museum had a tour to Russia and central Asia, and he went along because of his knowledge of Iran, and also because he had to see the people in Russia at the Kremlin and some people in Egypt about a great show that our museum and Boston was going to have.

GALM:

You had said that there had been, a decline inthe membership?

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes. It went from twenty-eight thousand down to twenty-one thousand, partly because we raised the dues.

GALM:

Now at what time would have this declined?

LIEBIG:

The museum—I think I mentioned—had a sort of a billboard effect on the fence during the building phase, saying "Join the museum for ten dollars." Well, then we had to raise the dues, because it cost more to—what would you call it—service the dues.

GALM:

Mailings and so forth.

LIEBIG:

Yes, and these catalog gifts, and opening night parties, and so on. Therefore, they were put up to eighteen dollars; then there was a fall off. Then they were put up to twenty-one, and now there's been a big pickup again, and it's back to twenty-eight thousand, which is quite a membership—a lot of people I mean. I think there are only two museums that have more; I think one is the Chicago Art Institute, and the other is the Metropolitan. So that is a very important part of our museum, and we do many things to make people want to belong. These catalogs get better and bigger and more full of color pictures all the time; also the privilege of taking trips all over the world—in some museums, you have to pay for that privilege, two or three hundred dollars, but our museum gives it as a service to its members.

GALM:

I would like to get into that, too, but in what way did Rex Stead encourage this membership growth?

LIEBIG:

Well, in getting it, actually, efficiently run. You see, it's a very tricky business because people join at all times of the year, so there's an enormous amount of paper work and clerical know-how. Finally, I think, hers got a person working on it, doing it specifically, who is very competent—that's part of it. And then at the meetings of the Membership Affairs Committee, he's always emphasized it and gotten everybody interested in enlarging it.

GALM:

Now you also spoke about his writing. Does he have a staff of writers, or does he do most of the writing himself?

LIEBIG:

Oh no, he hasn't any staff. Now lately, this calendar—I'm sorry to hear this—is going to be done by the public relations department; because I don't think they can do it as well. He has a style and a way of doing things, good taste. Anyway, I think that the museum just couldn't get along without him.

GALM:

When did the travel program become a part of the museum?

LIEBIG:

I don't know. It was when we were in the old museum.

GALM:

It had already started then?

LIEBIG:

Yes, because after the breakup of the museum into two, they continued their travel program. We have, of course, a person, Dorothy O'Donnell who does nothing but take care of ours, and she has a couple of secretaries. That's a complicated business, too; it takes someone who understands it.

GALM:

Did that become much more ambitious after the new museum opened?

LIEBIG:

Oh yes. It started very timorously. One reason it started timorously was that the hundred and twenty-five people from Atlanta in their art travel program had been killed in a crash. I remember how afraid we were about our first tour. But we've never had any trouble so far.

GALM:

Was the Iranian and Russian trip the first after the opening of the new museum?

LIEBIG:

Oh, no, that wasn't until 1969 in the fall. I think it was the most daring because the itinerary was so exotic—Turkey and Iran and Afghanistan and the far eastern part of Russia.

GALM:

What was the show that was to have come from Egypt?

LIEBIG:

The Egyptian show was to consist of the greatest treasures that are in the Cairo museum, things which had never left the country. I think that the reason it didn't come off was that the troubles with Egypt were building up again. But this magnificent catalog has been printed, and whether we will give it to our members or wait and use it if this show can ever be revived, I don't think has been quite decided.

GALM:

Who was bringing together this show?

LIEBIG:

It was part of the Boston Museum's centennial year, which was last year, the same year that the Metropolitan had one. We got in on It. I suppose they needed a third museum, and we had become sort of friendly with them because of the [Nasli and Alice] Heeramaneck collection, and our Mr. Pal, Indian curator had worked for them, and all of that kind of thing.

GALM:

During these first years after the museum opened how did the collection itself grow?

LIEBIG:

Well, that's a rather hard question to answer. As far as our buying anything, there was a great deal of discussion about what our field of specialization should be. We know that we are going to receive—and now I'm not speaking about Mr. Simon, but another very good School of Paris collection. So it seemed that the modern things were not what we should spend our own money on. Of course, European old masters are almost impossible to get and almost impossible for any museum to pay for. So the idea came about that we should specialize in Hindu or Indian art in a way to balance what San Francisco is doing in the Chinese and Japanese field, and we were able to buy, at enormous expense over a period of many years, the Heeramaneck collection, a private collection of a dealer in New York, who had sold many things to Boston. Boston has the greatest collection in the United States of that kind of thing. There are also some very good pieces in Cleveland and in Kansas City, but Boston is the place. So that was done, and we also have now a remarkable young man, a Hindu, who has a Ph.D. from Cambridge in England as well as one from a university in his own country. He also is going to be given enough money to write books and so on, and that's a great thing for us. As a result of that, in the fall of 1970, there was a symposium here. People from all over the world came, experts in this field, and gave papers, and some of us who don't know anything about Indian art went to learn just a little from listening. I don't think I learned very much—I couldn't give you a small lecture on the subject—but I learned something. People came from the Victoria and Albert in London, and from all the American museums, and a museum in Holland, and many, many people from India who had been paid for by the John D. Rockefeller III Foundation. A man from that foundation came. They were very learned people, and they were given a nice welcome. And that is the kind of thing that is making our museum really a first-rate place.

GALM:

The decision to go into this area of acquisition and strength would have been a decision by the trustees, but was this fostered by Mr, Donahue?

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes. Much of his time, of course, is given to that kind of thing. Now another thing that he's given much of his time to is the creation of a first-rate laboratory for the cleaning and conserving and taking care of any kind of—

GALM:

Restoration work.

LIEBIG:

Yes. And that was really done at the insistence of Norton Simon. A portion of the second floor of the Special Exhibitions Gallery was taken away from exhibition space and made into a highly technical lab. Expert Mr. Ben Johnson heads it. I listened to him talking about Mughal prints to this symposium, and I could just see these East Indians thinking, "Oh, what will the Americans do next," you know, because we have these very expensive machines. One man, Mr. Stanton Avery, recently gave us a complicated machine which I think cost a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. So that, again, is another step toward our becoming a first-rate museum.

GALM:

The museum has now been open almost six years. What has been the general type of exhibition, or has there been any pattern?

LIEBIG:

Well, in the field of contemporary art—in the first year, Mr. Tuchman put on a marvelous retrospective of the whole New York school of abstract expressionists. That was a remarkable show. Then, in 1967, he put on something called Sculpture of the Sixties. That was all over the big sculpture terrace because the things were vast and heavy, unwieldy—some of them had to be practically made on the spot—of course the show was inside the building, too. And then Tuchman started on his great project of Art and Technology, a show that in every way has been complicated. First, he had to persuade about twenty-odd industries, local and branches of national ones, to let artists go in and work with all the machinery and equipment and do things that these artists could never have done in their own little lofts, you know. It was really a complicated job. Then, when everything was going along well and it was going to be shown here, last year the museum had an invitation to send it to the World's Pair in Japan. I think it was a mistake myself that it went to Japan. Now it's going to come here next May; but I think it is going to be a little anti-climactic because a good deal of similar work has been shown in the interval. If it had been here two years ago, I think it would have made much more of an exciting impression. But it has been very interesting to hear about, and to see his movies of, and to realize the innumerable hurdles he and his helpers have gone over. I think it'll be very good, but it seems to me too bad that it was handled that way. I don't think that any prestige that he and the museum achieved was worth it. In Japan it was just one part of a great chaotic show—which people had to rush through at top speed.

GALM:

The time of exhibits and shows does play an important part.

LIEBIG:

Oh, it's very, very important. I've been on the committee on exhibitions for several years—it's now been given up and everything's in the hand of a committee called the Operations Committee—it's been very interesting to know how long these things take. For instance, the show that's now on, which is going to the Metropolitan next week, was over two years in the making. And that's the way you have to plan.

GALM:

Plus the time in the unmaking of the show, I suppose—to get everything back to loaders and so forth.

LIEBIG:

Oh, it's very complicated.

GALM:

What has been the relationship of California artists to the new museum—in particular, Southern California artists?

LIEBIG:

Well, they've always said that the museum didn't do enough for them. They have, off and on, wanted to have artists on the board, and the question has always been, "Which artist would be eligible?" I don't think it's ever been a practice of museums to have artists on boards. They felt, I believe, that the museum hasn't had enough one-man shows, and that since Maurice Tuchman has been the curator of contemporary art that he's been very, very prejudiced in favor of certain kinds of contemporary art. And, of course, we have always been bombarded by advocates of what used to be years ago called "sanity in art" and now is called, well, just conservative art, old-fashioned naturalistic art. The artists have clubs and groups, and they write letters and occasionally go to the supervisors and so on. But I think that the curators feel very jealous of their prerogative to choose what they think is first-class or interesting. Now a kind of compromise has been worked out, so that small shows are held on the fourth floor, and these are inexpensive to mount, because things don't have to be shipped. They don't have huge catalogs that are published by the thousands. They dispense small brochures or even kind of leaflets. They are really rather exciting and they are very good showcases, especially for the people who have never shown anything; and they get a lot of young people into the museum. Well, they show exotic things, you know—motion and lights and so on.

GALM:

Has there been much purchasing in this area by the museum?

LIEBIG:

Some, and there have been gifts. There are several people that give in this field, and of course the Contemporary Art Council gives. For instance, at the big sculpture show, they bought several huge and expensive things which they are paying for still, I think.

GALM:

Some of these pieces that still remain outside?

LIEBIG:

I'm not sure about that. One of the pleasant things that happened was that the Art Museum Council bought in 1966, really ordered, a piece of sculpture to be made by Calder for one of the pools which was near the terrace where people lunch and could be seen from the Members' Lounge and also from the Board Boom. It was a lovely pool which later had to be filled in because of oil oozing up; it was too expensive to keep cleaning it. It was picturesque, but it had to be filled. Anyway, that was where Mr. Calder placed the sculpture. Oh, it was all very exciting. He came here from France for the installation, and he was entertained by the girls. He called his sculpture Hello Girls. It's now out in front of the museum—still in a pool. You can see it going by on Wilshire.

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO FEBRUARY 18, 1971

GALM:

Mrs. Liebig, we were speaking of how long it takes to bring about an exhibition, and you had mentioned the fact that the Art and Technology exhibition had gone to the World's Fair and is due to come back to Los Angeles. What are some of the shows that go the other direction, in other words start here at the museum and then go out?

LIEBIG:

Well, one that's now at the Whitney Museum in New York started here last summer and was put together by Larry Curry, the curator of American art. It's a large retrospective of John Marin, which the current Time magazine says is very good. Well, we thought it was good, too, when it was here.

GALM:

You had mentioned Time magazine. Do you feel that perhaps the outside art world Is tending to be more respectful of the museum? Or do you see a change in the eastern criticism?

LIEBIG:

Now, this Time article bothered me, because it would be nicer, I think, if Time magazine had written about the Marin show in Los Angeles last summer than now in New York.

GALM:

In other words, you feel that people will think of it more as the Whitney show?

LIEBIG:

Sure. You have to read the article to find out that it started here. It was in a sentence but wasn't in a headline. I think that that is too bad, and I have a feeling that when the big Cubist show, which is still here, gets to New York, it will get more play there than it did in national magazines while it was here. Bat we're getting along. And when I think of the fact that Ric Brown was able to get the editor of the Apollo magazine in London to come here for our opening, as well as the heads of the National Gallery, and the big art dealers like the Wildensteins from Paris as well as, of course, the heads of the eastern museums—Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia—I think that those are all important things and that we've done awfully well in the last six years.

GALM:

How has the Board of Trustees changed during these past six years?

LIEBIG:

Well, several people have died; we've had new members. We have able Mrs. Howard Ahmanson; we have Hal Wallis, who's a movie producer, has been for many years. I think that now we're going to change in a different kind of way, because we're going to have some members of the minority groups, including, I hope, Mexican-Americans; and I'm sure we're going to have some blacks, not only on the Board of Trustees but on the various councils. The councils are at work now, very earnestly at work, trying to find women who would be appropriate and who would like to he on a council. They, for instance, couldn't seem to find any Japanese people that would he interested. You always think of them as having such aesthetic talents, and we see them at the museum. It's rather interesting.

GALM:

How was this brought to the museum's attention?

LIEBIG:

Well, I think the black participation was brought to the museum's attention by groups of the blacks and letters from them; and they also have asked to have shows. The show that is at the museum at this very moment in the graphics department is of three very talented Negro artists, but they don't feel that that's enough, and it isn't.

GALM:

I know that there is a feeling among blacks that American museums represent Western culture; whereas, there is definitely an African culture, also, to be represented in public museums. Do you think that this will present a problem with directions that the museum wants to go?

LIEBIG:

Well, I think it will present a problem in that they are insistent upon having a curator right now, and there isn't anything to be a curator of in the museum now. And the county is not allowing any new jobs—the county is very hard-pressed, and its budget has been cut. Ours has been stringently cut. Yes, I think there are problems; but I think since Franklin Murphy has become trustee president, very capable and skillful, and sincerely for this, it will all come to pass soon that more will be done for the blacks. I'm not sure of a curator [position]. I think the one thing that we've already started doing is to make it possible for the men who now work at the museum—you see, forty-seven percent of our employees already are black people though they are not in the curatorial field; they are mostly guards. But many of these guards are studying at night and want to go into the other fields of the museum, and that is being made possible. Also, we have a man in a very responsible position called the chief of operations, Mr. Ingram, who is a black; and, in a way, I would call him the head of the personnel of the sub curatorial people.

GALM:

Has the Chicano community been actively involved in the new museum? Or do they want an interest?

LIEBIG:

No, they haven't. I think it's surprising. At the time we had the big Mexican government show, they came to dinners—the people that were officially at the head of the Chicano communities. We also see them all the time viewing things at the museum, but they've never been, so far, at all involved. And I think that's too bad. I hope something can be done about that.

GALM:

Is this again an area where perhaps the councils can be most influential?

LIEBIG:

They can try. I don't know how this will be done. After all, there's a huge population. Naturally, it would take people that want to do it. I think it's something that these people—the volunteers, the professionals, everyone in the museum—are going to have to put their minds on.

GALM:

What about the involvement of youth in the museum And when I say youth, I mean under twenty-five.

LIEBIG:

Well, again, there's a spin-off of the Art Museum Council. Now they have a junior group that consists of girls in high school, and they love coming to the museum. They come to the Saturday morning plays that are given for children, and they usher, and they show the children around afterwards, and they are learning to be hostesses. At the time of the 1970 VCAM convention,. when volunteers from all over the United States' came to our museum, these young girls were in evidence and made little speeches and told the delegates what they were doing. And I think it's going to be the next council. You see, a council doesn't start just ready-made; it has to be a committee first. There are going to be several new councils. I think there will be an American art council soon, and a classics council, an Oriental council, maybe a medieval council. I think that these fragmentary bodies are very important to the museum. And somehow, maybe, there can be a council that would be a Chicano council. I don't know whether that would be a bad way to do it, but I feel that special interest people have a loyalty to their little group and in that way they are not just interested in a big vague abstraction, "the museum." It's so big now that It isn't like the old days when people were right in there, as Ric Brown used to say, "meddling." Bat you can meddle in your own little group.

GALM:

Do you see the physical plant presenting a problem to the growth of the museum?

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes. We had the most marvelous scheme almost brought to fruition. The county was going to buy the May Company appliance store, going to close off the little street, Ogden from Wilshire, for a whole block. We'd have the whole May Company parking edifice and lot; we would have had the whole building, which is strong enough to be added to, story upon story. And then the plan all collapsed because when Orbach's moved across the street, the May Company decided they'd keep their property. That would have been marvelous. I don't know what the solution is. I think we are probably going to have to have parts of the museum outside the present building, in rented places.

GALM:

You mean located in other areas of the city?

LIEBIG:

No, nearby. There is just not enough room for things now—office space and so on.

GALM:

So, actually, the problem exists now.

LIEBIG:

Oh, yes, we haven't nearly enough space.

GALM:

Is there much in storage?

LIEBIG:

Yes, there certainly is. We have a great many of Mr. Simon's things down there.

GALM:

Are these things that will eventually be shown in the near future?

LIEBIG:

Yes, some of them. He now has so many works of art it's almost getting to be like Mr. Hearst's collection. When the show of Mr. Simon's possessions is given in about two years, it's going to necessitate five catalogs, five book-size catalogs—two for the paintings alone, and then, of course, he has sculpture, a lot of which is now on our terrace, the plaza. He owns magnificent old master drawings, prints.

GALM:

Have you heard how this show is going to be physically handled?

LIEBIG:

Everything in the museum is going to be taken out.

GALM:

So it will be in the Ahmanson?

LIEBIG:

The Ahmanson and the Hammer buildings. It's going to be quite a show.

GALM:

Will it be a traveling show? Will it go beyond Los Angeles, or is it hard to say?

LIEBIG:

I'm not sure. I think that part of it may; I think that's been discussed. I don't think it's been decided. But I think that since Franklin Murphy has been the president, this plan has matured, and I think that he is certainly the person to see that it is carried out beautifully. The catalogs will be scholarly and perfect in printing and every other way. Also, he's a good friend of Mr. Simon, and I think he will know how to please him, and perhaps be the one that will finally persuade him to do more than lend his things.

GALM:

Did Dr. Murphy become president of the board after his leaving UCLA?

LIEBIG:

Yes, he has been president only since the first of July.

GALM:

I don't believe I've asked how the president is selected?

LIEBIG:

Well, as in many nonprofit institutions, there is a nominating committee of five or seven.

GALM:

And there is a term for president?

LIEBIG:

Yes, there is a term for everybody now, and the term for president is two years and it can only be renewed once, so that there's four years, really. Mr. Brody was president for four years. So, this four years will encompass the dates of the Norton Simon show. And I think the real thrust of the next couple of years is to do this beautifully.

GALM:

How much of a personal statement can a president of the board make during his term of office?

LIEBIG:

I don't quite know what you mean.

GALM:

In other words, is there opportunity for the president to make his term, say, that much different from the preceding term?

LIEBIG:

Yes. Dr. Murphy's is entirely different from Sidney Brody's. Because Mr. Simon had such a prejudice against many committees, large committees, he insisted on having just one very powerful committee on which there are only eight people; and that committee is going to decide on practically everything, such as exhibitions, and I'm sure on new space for the museum. I think that it's highly centralized now, and there will be many fewer people involved. In a way it's a shame, because there are so many people now who have done a lot for the museum—well, take Mr. Carter, who's not on this, you see. It's very limited.

GALM:

What is the name of this committee?

LIEBIG:

It's the Operations Committee.

GALM:

This, again, is perhaps something difficult for you to state, but what has your involvement with the museum meant to you? What do you feel your major contribution as a Board of Trustees member has been?

LIEBIG:

Oh, I think keeping it alive and keeping certain people interested in it when it was at its zero point in about 1951 or 1952; then, of course, I think the Junior Art Council, which I founded without ever dreaming how well it would develop. That, however, did turn into a pattern, not only in our museum but at UCLA and Pasadena. At our museum these councils have been invaluable because the enthusiasm and the interest of the people has spread. It's made the whole museum life exciting to the population. In the olden days, the museum was filled with sort of dreary, elderly, unenthusiastic viewers who seemed to have nothing else to do—now it's just teeming with young people, and at every age level, very intelligent people, very experienced, sophisticated people. And I think that the councils had a good deal to do with this. So, I think what I have been is a catalyst. I think women have been very important in our museum. I think Katie Gates raised two million dollars all by herself—that's an awful lot of money. We all raised money, but that's amazing. Anna Arnold, who came in on the board after we moved to the new museum, has been more generous financially than anyone has been. Virginia Weaver has done so much, more or less along my line. And there have been others—Camilla Spear and Lil Weiner. All three were presidents of the Junior Art Council before they came on the board. I think there have been at the museum dozens of very valuable women, and I think there will continue to be. I don't think they've been over appreciated, but I think they've been appreciated. Now that I'm getting old and lazy, I look upon them with absolute wonder, at all their verve and at what they accomplish.

GALM:

So it's been a very rewarding involvement?

LIEBIG:

Oh yes, enormously rewarding.