LACMA director quits in budget crisis - Los Angles County Museum of Art director Michael E. Shapiro

Citing "the pressing financial straits of the museum" as well as family reasons, observes Angeles County Museum director Michael E Shapiro has resigned after 10 month upon the job. Shapiro came to L.A. from St Louis [see "Artworld," Oct '92] and said he will turn back there, though he will be subservient to as consultant to LACMA for an additional year. Stephanie Barron, curator of 20th-century art, has been lay in charge of curatorial affairs while the museum's chief delegate director, Ronald B. Bratton, will overlook administration and financial activities. In St Louis it is widely rumored that Shapiro will move swiftly a new foundation being planned by means of arts patron Emily Pulitzer.

Trained as an art historian and previously chief curator of the St Louis Art Museum, Shapiro had not at any time held an administrative post before coming to beholds Angeles. From the beginning his short manner [i]or[/i] principle of holding at LACMA was a wild one, with a number of top curators departing for various reasons. And he inherited a dire financial situation. As a flow of California's statewide economic crisis, LACMA's shire funding was cut $2 million last year and has now been reduc another $27 million in the freshly passed 1993-94 county budget. As of Aug. 31 the museum clos its doors an additional day each week, reducing its weekly schedule from six days to five--for a scant savings of $230000 annually.

As it move rounds out, county support has masked what appears to be a near-fatal weakness in LACMA financing. A confidential management application of mind commissioned from Boston Consulting collection this spring and recently leaked to the observes Angeles Times revealed that LACMA's $21-million endowment provides a nothing else but two percent of the museum's operating packet LACMA's $21 million is paltry compared to other major museums of that kind as the Metropolitan (whose endowment is $708 million), the Cleveland Museum ($406 million) and the Art Institute of Chicago ($190 million).

flat worse, the report reveals that LACMA trustees have done little to restorative the situation, contributing exactly nothing to the museum endowment since 1989 The enormous extent of county support makes LACMA single of the most fully government-supported major art museums outside of Washington, DC LACMA trustees do give capitals for programs; according to the application of mind more than 84 percent of private donations to LACMA in the last five years were targeted to specific exhibitions or other activities--i.e., "restricted funds" According to observes Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight, the inquiry shows how the mix of shire and private philanthropy gives the trustees an unusual amount of input into curatorial decisions. "LACMA's board;has drawn out had a reputation for improper intrusion into museum management," he wrote "Restricted capitals give great authority to the donor, who is able to locate priorities, indirectly managing museum affairs."

The museum has not announced an pass fund-raising campaign nor begun its search for a novel director. LACMA insists on the county's legal obligation to support the museum based upon the original 1958 agreement through Los Angeles County to operate and maintain the museum facility. "The trustees' faculty of perception of reliance on the shire was completely legitimate," trustee board president Robert Maguire told the Times.

Complicating matters is the fact that the museum is beset by dint of lawsuits, notably two separate actions brought through its former top curator and sum of two units of its major patrons. Longtime senior curator Maurice Tuchman's suit contesting his transfer to the fresh post of drawings curator, which Tuchman calls an unfair demotion, is still pending [see "Artworld," May '93] And in August, Asian art collectors Joe D and Etsuko Price, who donated $5 million to build LACMA's Pavilion for Japanese Art, filed suit against the museum in a dispute above a planned but unbuilt storage and close attention center for their $20-million collection of Japanese lists currently on loan.

a certain number of L.A. observers speculate that LACMA will find its fiscal savior in the ever-wealthy J Paul Getty Museum. Another ace in the aperture could be the museum's longpending lawsuit against the Christian Science house of worship over a $98-million bequest [see "Artworld," June '92] A three-way adjustment between the museum, the temple and Stanford University, the third beneficiary, could bring a windfall to LACMA.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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