The Case of the Disappearing Museum Director

Three weeks earlier, during LACMA's Broad Museum of Contemporary Art press trip, Lee and I witnessed Govan's Oscar-worthy performance as he glided gracefully through a series of public appearances following Eli Broad's scene-stealing announcement that he wouldn't actually be giving his collection to the museum after all.

Although Govan has been at LACMA for less than two years, were he to return to New York (and who could blame him, after the recent Broad debacle?), he would be just the latest in a long line of museum directors who have left their institutions soon after major architectural schemes were completed. In yesterday's NY Times Museums section, Dorothy Spears listed several museum directors who decided to leave their posts soon after surviving major capital projects---Russell Bowman (Milwaukee), Anthony Hirschel (Indianapolis), Kathy Halbreich (the Walker, Minneapolis), Jay Gates (soon to leave the Phillips, Washington), Diane Douglas (Bellevue, near Seattle).

Unnamed (but alluded to, through the names of their institutions) were several whose departure after a big capital project was a retirement after a long museum career---Charles Pierce (the Morgan, New York), Harry Parker (the de Young, San Francisco) and, of course, Philippe de Montebello, who will leave the Metropolitan Museum once his successor is in place. Govan himself was also named in the article, as one who had built the Dia:Beacon, only to leave left for another major building project-in-progress at the Los Angeles County Museum.

There doesn't seem to be a single cause for this curious but common phenomenon. In some cases, tensions that typically erupt during a construction campaign cause such bad blood that a museum director's political position vis-à-vis his board of trustees becomes untenable. That was believed to be a big factor in Jack Lane's exit from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, not long after its disappointing Mario Botta building was finished in 1995.

Sometimes it's simply a case of burnout, which can affect not only museum directors, but also architecture curators, who often become in-house point men for such projects. Both Paolo Polledri, architecture curator of SFMoMA, and Terence Riley, his counterpart at New York's Museum of Modern Art, were gone in short order after their job captain duties were done. Polledri, suitably chastened, returned to teaching. Riley, however, used his construction management credentials to land the directorship of the Miami Art Museum, where he will oversee creation of a glamorous new Herzog & de Meuron building-- his central role in Yoshio Taniguchi's increasingly disparaged MoMA expansion conveniently forgotten.

Like Riley, Govan seems to relish these challenges. He seemed to suggest to Spears, for the Times piece, that he may forever be a nomad, journeying from one capital project to the next:

It's no secret I've spent my entire career in building and expanding museums.