Ask anyone how Doreen Bolger is doing after a year and a half on the job as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the question is likely to come back to the issue of frames. The Matisse frames, that is.

After a major building renovation in 1986, then-BMA director Arnold Lehman and his deputy director, Brenda Richardson, removed the original gilt frames from the museum's famed Cone Collection of Impressionist paintings and replaced them with modern metal frames, arguing that they more closely reflected the artist's intent.

Only in Baltimore could such a seemingly minor incident spark a major controversy. The frame episode quickly came to crystallize in many people's minds a perception that the BMA was indifferent to local sensibilities.

Critics complained that the new installation gave the paintings a "postage stamp" look that trivialized the art and ran counter to the wishes of the Cone sisters.

Letters of protest poured in to the museum and local newspapers. One writer likened the new frames to "poisonous mushrooms after a rain." The controversy became a cause celebre.

So it was no accident that when Bolger took over as BMA director last year, one of her first official acts was to reinstall the Cone collection in the original frames.

For Bolger, 50, it was a smart move politically. It immediately made her appear responsive to local concerns, and it seemed to represent a dramatic break with the past.

As a gesture, however, it also revealed some of the limitations on her ability to effect big changes quickly. A large institution like the BMA, with a staff of 140 people and a $9 million annual budget, is a big ship that is slow to turn around.

"I know how difficult it is when you start, especially in a place where the pieces have been in place a long time," says Walters Art Gallery director Gary Vikan. "Changing them can be painful."

When Bolger arrived, for example, the museum was still committed to shows planned years earlier, such as last year's "The Little Dancer" exhibition of Degas paintings. "Faces of Impression," the last show whose planning predates Bolger's tenure, opens this fall, but it has been in the works since 1994.

In addition to exhibitions, Bolger is also stuck to some extent with institutional decisions and priorities reached years before she came on the scene.

"Every institution is a work in progress," she says.

Vision and visitors

And there's the problem of audiences. Museums and opera are the only major institutions of high culture whose audiences generally have been increasing in recent years.

Last year more than 275,000 people visited the BMA, but that was down from the museum's record high of 350,000 two years ago. The drop is attributable in part to the lack of a blockbuster show like 1997's "A Grand Design," which alone drew 150,000 visitors. This year's attendance has remained flat as well, perhaps in part because the street construction going on in front of the museum has blocked some visitor parking.

"Our exhibitions, educational programs, how we present the art will be the most important factor in how we attract people, especially the repeat visitors," Bolger says. "We want people to develop a relationship with the museum, and the whole staff is working on that goal."

But while Bolger insists the museum's activities will not be market-driven, she must realize that on some level she will be judged as much by the number of tickets she sells as by the quality of the museum's exhibition and educational programs.

How to keep the crowds coming is a question no director can afford to ignore.

Bolger has big plans for the BMA. She wants to expand the audience, strengthen exhibition and educational programs, double membership from 7,500 to 15,000 and repair ties to the local art community, which were frayed after the museum dropped its biennial shows of regional artists years ago.

Bolger also has begun a complete redesign of the museum's galleries, including the Cone Wing, which will reopen next year. Similar overhauls of the Old Masters, African, Native American and Oceanic art collections are scheduled.

A new approach

A specialist in 19th-century American art who headed the museum at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence before coming to Baltimore, Bolger has brought a new openness to the BMA, which had come to be seen as stuffy and aloof.

Her style is marked by diplomacy, tact and a desire for consensus -- all of which have helped extend the honeymoon phase of her tenure.

"She represents a refreshing change from the past, a person who is accessible and who has helped raise morale in the city's artistic community as well as in the museum," says Constantine Grimaldis, owner of Grimaldis Gallery.

Bolger cites the museum's Degas show last fall as a model for the approach she hopes will draw more people to the BMA.

"The reason the Degas exhibition was so successful was that the design of the objects, labels and wall texts all made it easy for people to understand and appreciate the paintings," she said. "We also had things like the family activity center that gave us a way to draw them in."

"We want to show great works of art by great artists and present them beautifully in an informative and engaging way. We want to be on a path of working with quality art and learning to make it an experience for the audience."

Bolger is attempting to carry out her ambitious agenda at a time when the role both of the museum and of the arts in society is changing.

Museums are basically 19th-century institutions that were built to display the great art masterpieces of the past. The work of contemporary artists was exhibited in government-sponsored salons and in private galleries.

Today's museum has largely taken over the function of the salon as exhibitor and patron of new art. It's an art entrepreneur as well as a conservator.

The BMA's collections of masterpieces, both ancient and contemporary, have been largely donated by the city's leading families. But the days of the great collectors, like William and Henry Walters, who amassed tens of thousands of objects during their careers, are waning.

So while the BMA has continued to make important acquisitions -- such as the Levi collection of contemporary sculpture, the Scott collection of American furniture, the Dalsheimer collection of photographs and the Lucas collection of 19th-century art -- major windfalls are fewer and farther apart.

With close to 350,000 objects already in its collection, the BMA may already have most of the pictures it's ever going to have.

That means that while Bolger is certainly expected to continue courting new donors, as a practical matter she must put most of her emphasis on the museum's permanent collections.

For example, the focus of the reinstalled Cone paintings will be to document the emergence of modern art and provide an overview of Matisse's work.

Meanwhile, the African, Native American and Oceanic art collections, which for years were treated as the BMA's orphan children, will be reinstalled in ways aimed at explaining the objects in terms of their cultural contexts.

New wing blues

Bolger faces a somewhat different problem in regard to the museum's New Wing for Contemporary Art.

The new wing was originally intended to exhibit the art of our time. But since it opened in 1994, it already has come to feel more like a permanent exhibition of Pop and Minimalist art of the 1960s and '70s than a dynamic gallery that is continually evolving to reflect new developments.

Just as Pop and Minimalism represented a break with the Abstract Expressionist art of the 1950s, contemporary art since about the mid-1980s has turned in a different direction from that of its immediate predecessors.

As a result, the BMA's new wing gallery already seems dated. It has little installation art, video art or performance art space, for example, leaving unclear exactly what is being represented by this section of the museum.

Part of the problem is that the museum has yet to hire a new curator of contemporary art to replace former deputy director Brenda Richardson, who oversaw the collection during the Lehman years.

Bolger says she recognizes the new wing's shortcomings and wants to shake things up by rotating works more frequently and perhaps by setting aside part of the space for cutting-edge art.

"The contemporary wing has enormous potential, and it has to change on a regular basis," she says. "We're looking toward a lot of different things, including a project room for special exhibitions. No collection should be so permanent that nothing ever changes."

The museum has hired a search firm to recruit candidates for the contemporary curator's job. "I would anticipate by the fall we'll be able to tell you who the curator will be," she says.

Mending fences

It's not yet clear what relationship the BMA under Bolger will have with local artists, many of whom believe BMA should become a major showcase for their work.

This year, for example, Bolger agreed to be one of three curators engaged by the city to select works for the annual Artscape festival, which gave her an opportunity to familiarize herself with the local arts scene.

But Bolger also has said that she doesn't intend to resurrect the biennial shows of Maryland artists that the BMA discontinued several years ago.

"We have to be part of the fabric of this artistic community because we need to find a place and role for the BMA in a city that has an active art community," she says. "But how we can be most supportive of local artists, how we make them acceptable to a broader audience -- there's no one right answer to that."

Bolger suggests it may make more sense to focus on Maryland artists as individuals rather than as a group.

"We're having a show of Joyce Scott in collaboration with the Maryland Institute that will be curated by George Ciscle next winter," she says. Joyce Scott and her mother, Elizabeth, are prominent African-American artists living in Baltimore. George Ciscle, a former director of the Contemporary Museum, teaches at Maryland Institute, College of Art.

"I'm still in the learning stage of the process," Bolger admits. "I can familiarize myself with artists in the community by curating and jurying shows and talking with local artists. So far, I'm pretty impressed. We are also doing things with local artists, such as our artist-in-residency program, which has had splendid results."

Building bridges

Many in the local art community seem pleased by Bolger's efforts.

"It's a sea change in the attitude of the museum and its attitude toward regional art," says Megan Hamilton, director of the Fells Point Creative Alliance.

"She's made it really clear that including the regional community is important to her, and she's been much more active in efforts of the community than her predecessor. She's out and about, involved in various efforts. So we're really excited she's in town."

One clear area of improvement since Bolger's arrival has been in the relationship between the BMA and the city's other museums.

At one time, the BMA and its peers like the Walters Art Gallery were highly competitive.

For example, BMA and Walters curators rarely planned exhibitions together. Relations were so distant that it was a minor diplomatic triumph when, in 1991, a Walters curator finally succeeded in getting a duck-pin bowling game going between the two staffs.

Bolger has made a point of emphasizing cordiality and collaboration.

When the Walters presented "Masters of Light," a show of Utrecht painters last year, the BMA offered visitors a simultaneous exhibition of drawings by Utrecht artists to complement the Walters show. The BMA is planning a joint exhibition with the Walters of French 19th- and 20th-century paintings and drawings for spring 2000, and that show will later travel to Japan.

"We have a wonderful working relationship in which we are developing collaborative projects that are going to be very good for the museum and the city," said the Walters' Vikan.

"We are developing a new paradigm for our museums. I talk to Doreen all the time, and this is a quality I love about her."

Still, even Bolger's most enthusiastic supporters suggest it won't be possible to comprehensively assess her tenure until she's been here at least five years. And a number are reserving judgment while waiting to see whether the new openness is just window dressing or whether it signals a real change in direction for the BMA.

"It would be wonderful if the BMA had a more structured commitment to exhibiting artists from Maryland," says Hamilton of the Fells Point Creative Alliance. "We'll see what evolves."

Bolger acknowledges that a lot is riding on the impression she makes at the outset of her tenure.

"We are keeping our eyes on basic things -- the permanent collection, the audience," Bolger says. "When we look at an exhibition, we start with the question of whether it is a serious scholarly exhibition -- does it offer new information about ways of looking at art? -- and then what quality of art is it.

"We want to deal with important artists and focus on what kind of experience we can create for our visitors so that they will keep coming back."

Pub Date: 07/18/99