Schimmel. (PMC)

Gallerist has learned from several independent sources that Paul Schimmel, former chief curator of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, is in late negotiations to join Hauser & Wirth gallery, which, according to sources, plans to open a branch in Los Angeles.

The gallery did not respond to a request for comment, and Mr. Schimmel has not yet returned a request for comment.

Paul Schimmel and the museum parted ways last summer. His departure brought wide criticism of the already embattled museum, which has been led by director Jeffrey Deitch since June 2010, and occasioned the departure of all four artist trustees. Since Mr. Schimmel left the museum, rumors have circulated in the art world as to where he would go, and there has been talk that several top-level galleries were interested in hiring him. Sources close to Mr. Schimmel have said that he preferred to stay in L.A. He has since been working as a co-director of the Mike Kelley Foundation.

Hauser & Wirth, which is based in Zurich, also runs galleries in London and New York where, two months ago, they opened a brand new, 23,000-square-foot space in the Chelsea art district. Earlier this month, Hauser & Wirth’s London branch opened the gallery’s first exhibition with popular L.A. artist Sterling Ruby. On March 19, in conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery hosted a conversation between Mr. Ruby and Mr. Schimmel at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London.

Mr. Schimmel would not be the first high-profile museum professional to join the commercial side of the art world. In 2007 Lisa Dennison, then deputy director at the Guggenheim Museum, took a job with Sotheby’s. More recently, John Elderfield, curator emeritus at the Museum of Modern Art, took on a consulting role with Gagosian Gallery.

For its part, Hauser & Wirth would stand to gain a well-respected name in the international art world. At MoCA, Mr. Schimmel was responsible for critically lauded exhibitions like 1992’s “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 90s” and, more recently, “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981” which took place last year under the banner of the Pacific Standard Time exhibition series. He curated the exhibition "Robert Rauschenberg: Combines," which appeared at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006.

Dan Duray, Michael H. Miller and Andrew Russeth contributed reporting.

L.A. MOCA. (Courtesy Chris and/or Kevin/Flickr)

In a major reversal, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's board announced that the institution will hire a chief curator to replace Paul Schimmel, who departed from the museum in June. Previously, the museum had not planned to replace Mr. Schimmel, instead using guest curators to augment its existing curatorial staff when organizing shows. Bloomberg's Christopher Palmeri broke the news, and has a letter from the museum's board in which it acknowledges the criticism that it has faced in recent weeks.

Storr. (Getty Images)

Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, weighs in on the whole L.A. MOCA debacle over at HuffPost. He kicks off his piece by stating that he's read Eli Broad's self-help book, The Art of Being Unreasonable, and asks how someone as deft at business as Mr. Broad could be so "inept and self-defeating" at philanthropy. Ouch.

Mr. Storr continues to paint Mr. Broad and his "enabler" Jeffrey Deitch as two scheming characters in a Shakespearean tragedy whose judgment, clouded by self-interest, is causing the downfall of a great institution. ("Dismissing Paul Schimmel in favor of Deitch is like cashing in all your value stocks and doubling down on junk bonds for the sake of a long-shot windfall.") It's quite a read.

From the piece:

The on-going fiasco at MOCA is a case in point. Broad and his enabler Jeffrey Deitch are in the process of undoing the work of many committed and knowledgeable people and thereby depriving the public of Los Angeles of a great art institution. Why? Simply because they won't listen to professionals -- the curators, fundraisers and trustees with long service who are now bailing out or being driven out, men and women who actually know more about museums and have more experience running them than either Broad or Deitch, and who have proven over the last 20 years that they are capable of building a world class museum. Moroever, Broad and Deitch have botched the public relations aspects of their bad decisions in ways that make you wonder how they were so successful in other contexts.

Richard Hamilton (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)

The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art has announced that, following the departure of its chief curator, Paul Schimmel, it will withdraw from an international touring exhibition of the late British Pop artist Richard Hamilton, which Mr. Schimmel had been co-curating.

According to the report in The Art Newspaper, the exhibition was scheduled to travel to Los Angeles, London, Philadelphia and Madrid.

From the story:

A MoCA spokeswoman tells The Art Newspaper that the gallery will “not be participating” in the international touring show of the late British pop artist’s work. Hamilton died in September 2011. Schimmel, however, confirms that he will “continue to be involved with the exhibition”, which he is co-organising with Vicente Todoli, the former director of London’s Tate Modern.

Eli Broad. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

In an effort to "set the record straight" about the departure of Paul Schimmel from the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, which we reported here, Eli Broad, wrote an op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Broad, who was the founding chairman of the board of trustees of the museum (he's now a lifetime trustee there), suggests Mr. Schimmel may not have been staging shows that were popular enough or cost-effective enough considering the museum's history of fiscal woes.

From the op-ed:

Over the years, MOCA has mounted many great exhibitions. However, the museum has also curated a number of exhibitions that were costly and poorly attended, often exceeding $100 per visitor. In today's economic environment, museums must be fiscally prudent and creative in presenting cost-effective, visually stimulating exhibitions that attract a broad audience.

There has been much confusion about Schimmel's departure. For several years, he's been contemplating a change and has been a candidate for a number of positions at other institutions. Schimmel is a brilliant curator, but the board members recognized the director's right to put his own team together. When they accepted Schimmel's resignation, they acknowledged that he has left an indelible mark on MOCA's history during his 22-year tenure. They look forward to continuing to work with him — together with guest curators from around the world — to develop the world-class exhibitions that MOCA is known for. They also look forward to MOCA showing more of its permanent collection — 80% of which has not been seen in the last 10 years.

One of the fake works by a forger arrested by the Spanish police. (Photo courtesy Spanish police)

Police nab four in Picasso forgery. [The Washington Post]

Painting forger tells the Daily Mail not to overlook the little details: "‘I pride myself on my forensic expertise. I started with extensive research…the correct canvas, correct stretchers…framed in good period antique frames." [Daily Mail]

Christopher Knight on the Paul Schimmel affair: "A great art museum whose board of trustees has a combined net worth far in excess of $21 billion shouldn't have financial problems. But welcome to MOCA." [LA Times]

Damien Hirst spin painting pops up in a London Burger King. [The Art Newspaper]

Rachel Whiteread created a frieze for the facade of Whitechapel in London because she couldn't say no to giving back to the neighborhood that informed her early work. Her move to bedraggled East London was one of many that was a harbinger of change for the 'hood--she recalls: "I remember calling my mum from a phone box outside," she says, her voice on the edge of laughter, as it often seems to be. "There was blood all over it. I thought: 'Oh my God, where have I moved to?'" [Guardian]

A German billionaire to donate his Western American art collection to the Tacoma Art Museum, which according to museum director Stephanie Stebich, will place the museum "among the top 12 museums that have this breadth and quality (of Western American art)." [Seattle Times]

Myles Connor, 69, who documented his museum thefts in “The Art of the Heist,” was arrested for robbing two women outside of a convenience store. [Boston Globe]

Michael Kimmelman talks about the recent architecture of Bogotá. [NYT]

Here's an interview with Yayoi Kusama. [WSJ]

The Wall Street Journal checks in on the dire situation at the Museum of Biblical Art. [WSJ]

Documenta 13 director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev offers "Notes Towards Documenta 13. [Mousse]

Schimmel in 2011. (Courtesy Stefanie Keenan/WireImage)

With a whopping 130 artists and more than 500 artworks, "Under the Big Black Sun," the exhibition about California art from 1974 to 1981 that former Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles chief curator Paul Schimmel organized last fall, seems likely to be remembered as his swan song at the museum. (He departed last week, though he is completing work on "Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962," which opens in September.)

Just a few days before splitting with MOCA, where he’d been a curator for 22 years, Mr. Schimmel was at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., to participate in one of many panel discussions held during a weekend conference celebrating the 20th anniversary of the school's Center for Curatorial Studies. The discussion in which Mr. Schimmel took part was titled “Case Studies,” and invited curator panelists to explain how they go about assembling shows. Listening to him talk about and show slides from "Under the Big Black Sun," which opened last October as part of the Getty's "Pacific Standard Time" initiative and ran through Feb. 13, provided a window into his curating process.

Mr. Schimmel began by telling the audience at Bard that he began thinking about the show well before it was commissioned by the Getty for "PST." “I’d been noodling around with this idea,” he said, “at one point trying to do it collaboratively with [the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art].” That idea was to look at California art during 1970s pluralism, or, as he explained it, “the foundations of postmodernism, a non-hierarchical approach to both materials and critical thinking coming out of the universities.”

But no exhibition ever conforms to the shape of the first thoughts that generate it. “I’m sure this is true of all curators," he said. "You start with one idea, and it begins to evolve and move into something else.” Pluralism proved a tough topic to wrap his head around. “It was almost by the nature of what I was looking at that I went off in so many directions simultaneously,” he said. “Even as big and generous as the MOCA Geffen facility is, with close to 50,000 square feet, the show was getting very unwieldy.” And so it evolved. “It was maybe out of a sense of necessity, of starting to rein it in, that I got backed into doing a show that, at least for me, had far more political work than I’d imagined it would.” This political content, he said, started to cohere around “the sense that artists themselves [at the time]—not collectively, not as part of an organization or group, but as individuals—could make a difference. In political change, a kind of activist stance.”

Once he started to hone his idea, he was faced with a dilemma that inevitably confronts curators of big historical surveys: where to start, chronologically speaking, and where to end. “It was kind of a gift, being in California, that Nixon got thrown out of office in 1974 and Reagan, some six years later, became a new kind of monarchy,” he said. “Those seemed like good bookends.”

The show opened with the document in which Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. “I’m not subtle,” Mr. Schimmel said, laughing. “It was the first thing you saw when you walked in.” Nixon’s getting thrown out, although it was “what everyone I knew was going for” was, he said, “remarkably unsatisfying, and not the least of that was due to this one extraordinary document….You read this document, and you go, ‘Whoa, free pass! You don’t have to be responsible!’ I think this infuriated people. We’ve done all this to end up with this moral and intellectual collapse? That became the foundation for the exhibition, with its title from the L.A. punk group X that represents that dystopia of California but also that sense of rage that constituted the punk generation of artists.”

It wasn’t the only historical document in Mr. Schimmel’s show. He called up the National Archives, and got Nixon’s resignation letter. “That is the great thing about museum work: if you ask the National Archives and you tell them exactly what it is you’re doing—and I was completely clear in terms of the context—there is someone there who will say, ‘This is interesting. This is what our historical documents are for. We’ll lend it to you.’” The letter, addressed to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, reads, “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.” Mr. Kissinger wrote on it in blue pen, "11.35 AM HK.” “That short little document was the game changer,” Mr. Schimmel said. “That’s history.”

Mr. Schimmel spoke at some length about several of the artworks in his show—by Bruce Conner, Llyn Foulkes, Eleanor Antin, Bruce Nauman, Mike Kelley and Karen Finley—including a few that he managed to bring back to light. “Shows like this give you an opportunity to dig up things that people had long forgotten but that had an enormous impact,” he said, and showed a slide of Robert Arneson’s sculptural portrait of assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone.  (The famous “Twinkie Defense” is alluded to on the sculpture’s base.) It was acquired by SF MoMA in May, but when Mr. Schimmel put it on display at MOCA, it hadn’t been seen since it was shown part at the inauguration of the city's Moscone Center in 1981.

He also spoke about an artwork from that show that, he said, “I’m sorry MOCA has not purchased.” Three Weeks in May (1977) by Suzanne Lacy depicts, with red dots overlaying a map of L.A., where rapes occurred during a three-week period in May 1977, showing which cases were pursued by the police and which were not. “It was a powerful statement from one of the leading feminist artists,” he said, “but it was really also a piece of information...that provided people with an opportunity to understand how direct and explicit art can be in a political context.”

Mr. Schimmel concluded his talk with some of the show's works that related directly to the punk scene in L.A., like the zines that Raymond Pettibon was making at the time when he was better known as the brother of the guitarist for the hardcore punk band Black Flag. In conjunction with “Under the Big Black Sun,” Mr. Schimmel had the bands X, the Dead Kennedys and the Avengers perform. “The Getty sponsored a punk concert at MoCA," he said. "I thought, my God, if John Paul Getty, with his fascination with Roman and Greek antiquities and European decorative arts, had only known that, even by putting itself on the hill, the Getty could not somehow remain unscathed, untouched by Los Angeles and its culture.”

The Los Angeles Times has reported that Eli Broad, left, told Paul Schimmel that the MOCA board had voted to fire him. The museum's director, Jeffrey Deitch, right, told The Wall Street Journal that Mr. Schimmel resigned. At center, Edythe Broad, Mr. Broad's wife. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan Company)

More than two full days after news broke that the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and its chief curator, Paul Schimmel, had parted ways, the exact circumstances of his departure remain unclear, and various national newspapers are offering differing accounts of whether or not he was fired. The official line from MOCA is that Mr. Schimmel, who has declined to speak with press, resigned.

Since the story broke on Thursday morning, the Los Angeles Times has maintained in a number of stories that Mr. Schimmel was let go. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal yesterday acknowledged those reports of his firing while also quoting MOCA's director, Jeffrey Deitch, denying them: "I've been supportive of his projects and acquisitions. He resigned. He was not fired."

On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times reported that MOCA's board had voted the day before to fire Mr. Schimmel. Times reporters Jori Finkel and Mike Boehm wrote, "According to several sources, he was summoned to the office of billionaire art collector and philanthropist Eli Broad, MOCA's top funder, and told of the board's decision."

Yesterday evening, the Times noted MOCA's official line—that Mr. Schimmel resigned—while still standing by its reporting that he was, in fact, fired. This new report quotes MOCA board co-chair Maria Bell stating that Mr. Schimmel told her and co-chair David Johnson on Monday that he planned to resign, and that the official resignation came through only on Wednesday. Mr. Johnson tells Ms. Finkel, "This is something that has been a general discussion for some time." Ms. Finkel continues, "Several people familiar with the circumstances of Schimmel’s departure had told The Times he was fired. They did not want to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly about museum personnel changes."

Ms. Crow, in her piece in The Journal, offers no timetable of the resignation. She notes, "No specific reason for his departure was given, and the museum said it has no plans to seek a successor."

The fact that it took MOCA more than a day to distribute a full release about Mr. Schimmel's departure is certainly curious. Its initial statement on Thursday read in full: "Paul Schimmel is stepping down as MOCA's chief curator. It's amicable and there will be a release tomorrow." (On Thursday, The New York Times quoted that statement and noted the "contentious working relationship" that the curator shared with Mr. Deitch; the paper has not reported that Mr. Schimmel was fired.)

Lambasting Mr. Deitch and the MOCA board in a piece published yesterday, Times critic Christopher Knight, like his colleagues at the paper, maintained that Mr. Schimmel had been let go by the museum's board and that Mr. Broad had personally delivering the verdict to the curator. Mr. Knight criticized the museum for its handling of the affair:

(When [the release] finally appeared, nothing much was added to the news beyond gushing praise for the victim, though it clung to the euphemism "resigned.") That 36-hour sequence speaks not of unconventional thinking but of institutional ineptitude, indifference and even callousness. The museum was unprepared.

That complete statement, distributed to press on Friday by the museum, states that Mr. Schimmel stepped down to become an independent curator, and notes that the museum had decided to name the exhibition space at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary building after the curator. In the release, Mr. Schimmel states that he is "deeply honored."

Schimmel. (Courtesy PMC)

Update 2:20 p.m.
We've just received a statement from MOCA Board Co-Chair David G. Johnson on the matter of the departure of longtime chief curator Paul Schimmel.

The statement reads in full:

"Paul Schimmel is stepping down as MOCA's chief curator. It is amicable and there will be a press release tomorrow."

Update 12:40 p.m. 

The LA Times now reports that Mr. Schimmel has been "fired."

Mat Gleason says he obtained the story from "several high-placed sources at the museum," who described Mr. Schimmel's reported downsizing as part of a "bloodbath" that included the firing of at least three other people in various departments of the museum. In his understanding, the firings came in the wake of an end-of-fiscal-year budget meeting on Tuesday.

Original post

Paul Schimmel, the long-serving chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, appears to be parting ways with the museum. The news was first reported late last night by Los Angeles-based art writer Mat Gleason on his Coagula blog. Mr. Schimmel and the museum were not immediately available for comment, but an informed source has confirmed the move.

One of the nation's most respected curators of contemporary art, Mr. Schimmel was famed for his gigantic, exhaustive group surveys on extremely recent contemporary art, like the 1992 show "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s."

The reasons for Mr. Schimmel's departure remain unclear. Mr. Gleason's blog post would seem to indicate that he was let go. MOCA has struggled with financial issues in recent years as it fights to regrow its endowment, which shrank as it ran deficits and its investments were battered because of economic turmoil. Director Jeffrey Deitch and Mr. Schimmel have also been said to have had an acrimonious relationship.

We'll have updates as the story develops.