Consey Has Left Imprint in Newport : Chances That Museum Took Were Worth It

According to art world lore, the museum director who builds a glitzy new home for his institution never survives to direct it. The strain of fund raising puts him at loggerheads with his board of directors, and he gets sacked. Or he quits in exhaustion and disgust because his job is all bricks, mortar and building codes when he was looking for art, scholarship and graceful diplomacy.

At this writing it’s not quite clear why Kevin Consey is leaving the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach; all we know is that he got a job directing Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.He simply may consider it a more attractive professional proposition. Chicago is a real city. Orange County--sleek as it is growing--is still a kind of centerless geographic phenomenon.

Whatever the fine print behind Consey’s departure, it does prop up the old superstition. He will not be around when the fashionable architect Renzo Piano finishes the museum’s ambitious new 10-acre home bordered by MacArthur Boulevard and Coast Highway.

Consey’s arrival at the museum in 1983 and his leaving now, nearly six years later, mark the period of the museum’s final transformation from its beginnings in the ‘60s as a funky, idealistic volunteer operation to a decently smooth, small professional institution.

Newport’s detractors find it excessive and yuppiefied, but there is a certain aura of dawning suaveness about the place that is certainly due in no small measure to Consey’s leadership. Although he is just 37, he has been a museum director for 10 years, having started as head of a charmingly recycled brewery in San Antonio. In those days he was as slender and enthusiastic as a whippet puppy. Now he is girthy, bearded and courtly even when he has an urge to blow his stack.

Below-stairs gossip about the museum inevitably reflects the growing pains of any institution, wrangles on the board, abrupt changes in staff. But what counts in the end is what gets on stage: the exhibitions.

These days, museum directors do not personally organize many shows, but they must support the ideas of their curators and sell them to the board’s exhibitions committee. Clearly it is a crucial aesthetic role that makes up an important facet of any museum director’s legacy.

Consey, working in tandem with his curator, Paul Schimmel, forged a program with a slightly offbeat quality, which, viewed from Los Angeles, had at its best a piquant originality. Not the sort of thing likely to turn up at the County Museum of Art or the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Exhibitions devoted to such California artists as David Park, Wayne Theibaud and John McCracken gave credit where it was due. Surveys devoted to offbeat movements, such as figurative painting in the ‘50s or the second generation of Abstract Expressionism, revived interesting half-forgotten chapters in contemporary art. A show devoted to artists who attend Cal-Arts revealed the enormous international impact of the school’s aesthetic. It is hard to imagine where else one might have seen a survey of Belgian modern art or a survey of the brilliant eccentric surrealist John Graham.

Such a program has its risks. Things don’t always work, and the scholarship is sometimes imprecise. But the shows of Consey’s have nurtured the museum’s distinctive aura. Los Angeles lovers of contemporary art consider the drive down a must, despite the rigors of the freeway.

Newport’s building plans strongly suggest larger ambitions. Ambition properly directed is a quality to be admired. Its danger here is a tendency toward fashionable homogeneity. Consey’s departure will cause all facets of the museum to fall into new relationship. A talented new director could augment Newport’s uniqueness. A conventional choice could lead it into the sphere of the baseball-card museum where everyone is very pleased because the collection and the exhibitions clone those in Los Angeles, New York and Cologne.

* MAIN STORY: Part I, Page 1.