Betty Winckler Dead at 82 : Services Held for Museum Organizer

A memorial service was held Monday in Newport Beach for Betty Winckler, who led a group of 13 female volunteers in 1961 to form what became the Newport Harbor Art Museum. Mrs. Winckler died June 15 in Irvine after a long illness. She was 82.

Now an internationally known contemporary art museum, the Newport Harbor started out as the Fine Arts Patrons Pavilion Gallery on the second floor of the Balboa Pavilion. Mrs. Winckler served as its president until 1968, when the gallery changed its name and hired a professional staff. She remained on the board of trustees until 1981, subsequently becoming a trustee emeritus.

Born in 1906 in Long Beach, she attended Pomona College and UC Berkeley. After working in pottery in the 1940s, she studied painting with Rex Brandt and Phil Dike. Her late husband, Richard, owned Dick’s Dock, a Newport Beach boatyard.

In “The Audacious Years,” the museum’s catalogue of its first decade, Mrs. Winckler wrote: “In 1961 the movement (in Orange County) was under way for a cultural center. There were already well-organized groups supporting music, drama and dance, but an interest in the fine arts was not yet articulated.

“Some of us had been organizing and hanging shows in the (Newport Beach) City Hall and were aware of the need for a sustained program of museum-caliber exhibitions. . . . If we were to present exhibitions of museum quality, we realized that we had to obtain expert advice from professional museum people. . . . We did not want to be amateurs!”

Advised by prominent art professionals, the Fine Arts Patrons--as Mrs. Winckler’s group was known--originated such noteworthy exhibits as a retrospective of American painter Morris Graves (1963), “California Hard-Edge Painting” (1964) and work by Los Angeles painters Joe Goode and Ed Ruscha (1968).

Mrs. Winckler is survived by two sisters, Marjorie Conley of Long Beach and Frances Graham of Westminster, and two sons, Richard T. Winckler of Los Gatos and David C. Winckler of Sacramento.

The family asks that donations be made to the museum’s Betty Winckler Memorial Fund, which will support educational programs in the new building the museum will occupy in 1992 at MacArthur Boulevard and Coast Highway.