Malcolm Rogers, director of the MFA, Boston. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The careers of Malcolm Rogers of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and James Welu of the Worcester Art Museum reflect the oftentimes controversial changes that have taken place over the past thirty years in the American art museum world. Rogers and Welu have pursued quite different career paths to their directorships and employed very different policies to achieve their common goal of engaging as many people as possible with the visual arts. They reflect the divide between the progressives and the traditionalists, competing philosophies about the nature, function, and purpose of art museums in America. The progressives believe that these changes have addressed the new financial and cultural realities of the twenty-first century. The traditionalists feel that art museums are being transformed into glitzy, dumbed-down pleasure palaces that aim to turn a profit.

In every quantifiable respect, the success of Malcolm Rogers and James Welu as art museum directors is undisputed: stable, thriving institutions with balanced budgets, growing endowments, booming attendance, improved membership figures, expanding facilities, and spectacular fundraising achievements. They have also defied the odds of survival. Mimi Gaudieri, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors in New York, cites a survey completed in 2000 that puts the average tenure of an art museum director in this country at seven years, with more recent data suggesting that tenures are growing shorter. Every museum professional interviewed by this writer views the trend with alarm for what it reflects of the increasingly complicated and thorny relationship between directors and boards of trustees, as well as the increased pressure placed on directors to produce quantifiable results in an ever-shorter period of time. Malcolm Rogers and James Welu, however, have directed their museums for fourteen and twenty-two years, respectively, and are likely to remain in their positions for the foreseeable future.

Where they differ, in the minds of museum professionals, is in those unquantifiable areas of museum operations: curatorial culture, the scholarly standard of exhibitions and publications, the fulfillment of their educational mandates, and collection development. To veteran art museum director Michael Botwinick (Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Newport Harbor Art Museum, and, currently, the Hudson River Museum), differences in approach and philosophies are inevitable.

“It’s hard to generalize about art museums because they tend to be sui generis. To survive and prosper, a museum director has to adjust to the specifics of his institution—its collection, board of trustees, curators, staff, physical plant, endowment, sources of support, history, and its community. There are many different ways of running a museum because no two situations are the same,” says Botwinick.

It was Philippe de Montebello who set the gold standard for the traditionalists. Over the course of his extraordinarily long, distinguished, thirty-one-year career at the helm of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he has largely resisted the tides of change and run America’s preeminent museum of art in an entirely traditional fashion with unprecedented success.

Ironically, de Montebello was brought to the Metropolitan not to continue business as usual, but to reverse the museum’s course after the tumultuous upheavals of his predecessor, Thomas Hoving. Hoving had been installed as director with the mandate to shake up the place. Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times recently described his approach to change as that of, “a mad genius who transformed the slumbering Met into a public spectacle: exciting, but lurching from one debacle to another. The modern museum as an insatiable, acquisitive, blockbuster-besotted, mass entertainment palace emerged, with a celebrity impresario as director.”

For many, Hoving’s enduring legacy was the blockbuster special exhibition concept that emerged from his phenomenally successful Tutankhamun show at the museum in 1976. Its success inspired a legion of imitators. Many museums shifted their emphasis to special exhibition programs as the economic engines of their operating budgets, and embarked upon an unprecedented expansion of facilities, staffs, operating budgets, and financial/managerial expertise to manage the pursuit of ever-larger audiences and income.

Worcester Art Museum Director James Welu at Gala Auction. Photo: Norm Eggert.

Traditionalists deplored these trends as serious threats to time-honored museum values and standards, as pandering to popular culture, and as an insidious takeover by corporate business thinking. They found their bête noir in Thomas Krens, the entrepreneurial director of the Guggenheim Museum, who, so it was said, regarded the permanent collection as product, a slumbering, non-performing asset to be circulated through an ever-widening global network of franchise museums, all advised and programmed by the flagship museum in New York for a tidy sum. It was every MBA’s synergistic wet dream, but for many curators and directors, it was a nightmare.

De Montebello was certainly no enemy of change or growth in abandoning the progressive approach of Hoving and Krens. He doubled the physical size of the museum, vastly improved its infrastructure; balanced its budget, and greatly increased its endowment, admissions, income, and memberships. At the same time, he also raised the scholarly level of the museum’s exhibitions and publications by enhancing the curatorial culture of the institution. For thirty years, he preserved the support of his trustees, the respect of his 175 curators, the support of the public, and the admiration of his peers.

Transforming the Museum

Malcolm Rogers is an extremely affable man of ready wit, easy smile, and understated sense of humor. He runs the Museum of Fine Arts from a modestly appointed office that stands in some contrast to the magisterial throne rooms one frequently encounters in other large museums. Even in this sedate setting, one senses that Rogers is a man of inexhaustible energy who thoroughly loves his job. He was not the most obvious candidate to succeed the series of distinguished scholars (Perry Rathbone, Jan Fontein, and Alan Shestack) who had led the MFA in recent years because he did not fit the classic profile of an art museum director: graduate degrees in art history, extensive university teaching experience, numerous scholarly publications, and years of curatorial experience developing that reservoir of knowledge and insight called connoisseurship. Instead, his graduate work at Oxford was in seventeenth-century British literature.

Rogers found university life “a shade contemplative” and moved to the National Portrait Gallery in London to run the museum’s library and archive. Within a few years, he was elevated to a curatorial position overseeing seventeenth-century portraits, and in 1983, was made deputy director, a position he held for the next nine years. During his tenure, he became an acknowledged expert in this specialized field. He acknowledges that the NPG was essentially a historical museum, whose artworks were acquired and considered more for their documentary value than their aesthetic qualities. The job was “to untangle the stories behind the works of art,” a task for which a broad knowledge of British history and culture was essential.

But in 1994, the Museum of Fine Arts was not looking for an eminent scholar. It needed a problem-solver. And the problem was huge. It was public knowledge that the institution was cash-strapped as a result of $3–4 million in operating deficits that neither the administration, nor an increasingly desperate board of trustees, seemed capable of addressing. With his literary background, one can well imagine Mr. Rogers in his London study, contemplating the situation in Boston much as Gulliver pondered the feckless academicians of Lagado.

MFA director Malcolm Rogers with artist David Hockney. © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Rogers put the museum’s financial house in order and thereby cemented his relationship with the most influential members of the board of trustees. This laid the groundwork for his unprecedented success in raising almost $500 million for the expansion and reorganization of the museum, an achievement that his peers term “astounding and miraculous,” particularly in a city not known for its philanthropic largesse.

This enabled him to survive one of the most controversial events in American museum history: the “Boston Massacre” of 1999. Among other things, this entailed the reorganization of the entire curatorial structure along geographical, rather than chronological or cultural, lines; the immediate departure of two esteemed senior curators of decorative arts, Anne Poulet and Jonathan Fairbanks; and the angry resignation six months later of Theodore Stebbins, the senior curator of American painting. The reorganization made international news and sent shock waves through the American museum community. Explained by Rogers as a necessary step in creating a “one museum” culture at the MFA, the move was viewed by many as a repudiation of long-established curatorial roles and prerogatives. Within museums, curators were often treated like powerful princes in small city-states, operating with a degree of programmatic and fiscal autonomy that could put them at odds with the vision of a director. As one senior curator informed Malcolm Rogers early in his tenure: “Museum directors come and go. Curators are forever.” You get the message.

Since the curatorial reorganization, a number of exhibitions featuring guitars, sports cars, commercial photography, and cartoon characters at the MFA have elicited scathing critical reviews and charges that Rogers is dumbing down the museum, a critique to which Rogers answers: “Our audience is intended to be broad. We are not an institution where curators put on exhibitions for other curators. As museums have become more inward-looking to the profession, there is more and more peer pressure to be academic at the highest standards, but also academic in your tone, which isn’t necessarily the tone that reaches the audience that our founders envisioned. We have to talk to people in their language. We have to address some of the issues and preoccupations that people broadly have today; otherwise museums will be seen as irrelevant ivory towers.”

The general public, however, has responded by attending these exhibitions in droves. Although sources close to the board and the curatorial staff report unhappiness and dismay with both the reorganization and the exhibition program, there is little doubt that Malcolm Rogers remains firmly in control. As Michael Botwinick pointed out, “As long as any director retains close ties with core members of the board, keeps his house in order, continues to grow the museum in attendance, in fundraising, and in other quantifiable categories, he will not be seriously challenged by his board. In these circumstances, a change of director takes place only with a change of leadership on the board.”

Worcester Art Museum director James Welu guides a tour through the galleries.

A Study in Contrast

James Welu is in the unusual situation of having spent his entire career at the Worcester Art Museum. And he has no plans to leave anytime soon. Born and raised in Dubuque, Iowa, he completed his undergraduate work at Loras College in 1966 and graduate work in studio art and art history at Notre Dame. After teaching for several years, Welu decided to pursue a doctorate at Boston University.

“All of a sudden, I saw art history as this unbelievable springboard for learning about the world. My world was visual because I was always an artist, but art history also included learning about music, philosophy, history, and literature,” he said.

While completing his dissertation in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting, Welu came to the Worcester area to teach at Clark University and at the Worcester Art Museum, whose collection was particularly strong in his field and gave him the opportunity to teach with original objects. He joined the museum staff as assistant curator in 1974, served as chief curator from 1980 to 1986, and was then presented with the unexpected opportunity to become director.

Some twenty-two years ago, James agonized with me over lunch about the impact this transition would have on his scholarly work and about his lack of managerial experience, needed to address a dreadful financial situation at the museum, similar to what Malcolm Rogers would later inherit in Boston. But at this critical juncture in its history, the Worcester board made a huge leap of faith by offering the job to a dynamic, young scholar, instead of a seasoned administrator. In retrospect, Welu says, “I was probably so naïve to take this job because I loved this museum, and the board had confidence that passion about art would get us through. And it did.”

Welu was mentored on a weekly basis by a business executive on the board, sent to numerous management training courses, and given the opportunity to learn on the job, a pattern of transition from curatorship to administration far more typical twenty years ago than today. To everyone’s delight, Welu turned out to be a talented fundraiser. Welu, as is his style, downplays his personal role and attributes his success to “the fabulous story there is to tell about the museum, not just its history of pioneering accomplishments, but what the curators and staff are doing on a daily basis—exhibitions, acquisitions, conservation, classes for children.”

But there are other factors at play. In public, museum directors are expected to extol their trustees’ passion for art, their selfless commitment to the institution, and their wisdom in knowing the difference between management and governance. In private, though, directors often bemoan the board members’ ignorance about curatorial work, their large egos, and their meddling in the daily business of managing a museum. It’s likely that this negative stereotype does not apply to Worcester—not only because of the leap of faith the board made in Welu’s selection and the nurturing support it has provided him over the years—but also because it has allowed him to remain directly engaged in exhibitions, publications, and education.

Philippe de Montebello in the Department of Paintings Conservation examining the recently acquired Madonna and Child, ca. 1300, by Duccio di Buoninsegna, tempera and gold on wood. Portrait by Joseph Coscia, Jr., Chief Photographer, The Photograph Studio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This was not a point of negotiation during his selection, but a result of felicitous necessity. Worcester does not have enough curators to cover all of its collections, and Welu has retained oversight of Old Master paintings. He has also organized major, scholarly exhibitions; published extensively; and taught on a continuous basis. This direct engagement is important to Welu because, he says, “I think it makes me a better director because then I am more passionate when I’m connected with the art and education here. It’s the constant learning that gives me my energy. I’m not so sure I would be good at the MFA or the Met where I might not have the opportunity to work on a day-to-day basis with the art and the people.”

Welu’s arrangement is very much in the European style, according to Peter Sutton, director of the Bruce Museum. “European directors often keep their oar in the art history water, whereas the American mold, increasingly, is that once you sit down in the directorial chair, you are an administrator and your job is not structured so that you have any time to do any of your own scholarship. American boards are skeptical if you do it. They think, ‘Why is he wasting his time with a book?’”

It is an arrangement that can give a director enormous authority and credibility and can defuse the tense, sometimes adversarial, relationship between directors and curators so much in evidence elsewhere. As Sutton further points out, it is also the arrangement characteristic of the tenure of some of America’s most successful and respected directors: Philippe de Montebello at the Metropolitan, the late Anne d’Harnoncourt at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the late Sherman Lee at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

If pressed, Welu can easily recite the figures that document the museum’s significant success in all the quantifiable categories. But the statistic about which he is most enthusiastic is that the enrollment in the museum’s school has grown from 120 students in 1970 to 7,000 today, a significant portion of which attend on full scholarships.

Standing on a balcony with James Welu, overlooking the museum’s forecourt and its glorious mosaics from Antioch, we were accosted by a boisterous group of teenagers waving school assignment sheets. “Where’s the chicken painting?” they demanded. Welu, instantly transformed from serious, dignified museum director to patient, caring teacher, inquired about the assignment and described the location and meaning of every chicken painting in the place (along with numerous other wonders), before the students, eyes growing large as saucers, roared off to continue the hunt. “Cool.”

It is unclear whether the progressive or the traditionalist approach to museum management will prevail, even as we witness the implosion of the Guggenheim global empire and what that implies for its underlying principles. For Michael Botwinick, however, the key issue looking into the future of the American art museum is “whether senior curators will or will not be the next generation of museum directors. The great test of this generation will be the increasing number of trustees who will start thinking about museum collections as non-performing assets, instead of thinking about [them] as an asset. There is no question in my mind that that is the next battleground.”

Raymond A. Liddell, a former vice-director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, teaches literature and art history at Emerson College and the Art Institute of Boston.

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