Once again, Krens is defending the way he runs his museum, so his smile is a little weary. “I sometimes feel personally attacked,” be says. “I can’t believe that intelligent people wouldn’t support what we’re doing.” But ever since he arrived in 1988 -a former college art teacher armed with an M.B.A. -his ambitious plans have been denounced by critics. In his first four years, he spent $47.3 million expanding and refurbishing the museum’s famous Frank Lloyd Wright building on Fifth Avenue -in New York. He opened a $10.6 million branch among the trendy galleries in SoHo. He’s trying to open a big new space in Venice. And he has cut an amazing deal with the Basque government in northern Spain: to build a Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, paid for by the Basques, and to lend it art and expertise, in return for $20 million. These costly projects-and the publicity surrounding them-have spread the impression that Krens loves dealmaking more than art.
“In my more sober and reflective moments,” Krens says, “I can see that the press might have an obligation to be skeptical.”
Well, yes. Some of the deals have been bungles. The museum paid $30 million for the minimalist art collection of Italian Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, and Krens auctioned off three fine paintings by Kandinsky, Modigliani and Chiagall to raise the money. Then some of Panza’s pieces turned out to be literally conceptual-nothing but the artists’ construction plans.
Real-estate mogul Sam LeFrak pledged $10 million to the Guggenheim in 1993, then took $8 million back when New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission blocked Krens’s promise to put LeFrak’s name on the outside of the building. One board member, collector Elaine Dannheisser, was so irked by the courting of LeFrak that she stormed off the board in 1994. Last month the rival Museum of Modern Art announced that Dannheisser had given it 75 major artworks.
Attendance at the Guggenheim dropped by 25 percent in 1994, but went up at every other major New York City museum. Early that year, the Guggenheim cut the hours at both branches, closed its library and fired 10 percent of its staff.
Like anybody living beyond his means, the Guggenheim put the deficit on the tab. To pay for construction on Fifth Avenue and in SoHo, the museum floated more than $50 million in tax-exempt bonds. Although, as one financial expert says, the board got “a helluva good deal” on interest rates, the Guggenheim’s revenues couldn’t begin to service the debt, let alone pay it off. Krens’s critics had nightmare visions of the sheriff hauling off Kandinskys or foreclosing on Wright’s beehive building. Krens’s solution? Pack the board with rich guys who’d write big checks. A month ago, the chairman of Deutsche Telekom signed up. He joined the heads of Fiat, Seagram, Olivetti, Warner Bros. and Lufthansa. Deutsche Telekom and the enormous Italian power company ENEL are funding the SoHo branch’s transformation into a high-tech multimedia gallery. The Hugo Boss menswear company is contributing $10 million over the next five years. Board member Peter Lewis gave another $10 million to rehab the auditorium in the Wright building. And new board chairman Ron Perelman, the Revlon/Marvel Comics billionaire, has doubled his personal commitment to $20 million. Perelman insists that “the Guggenhieim has gifts pledged to pay the interest and the principal” on the bonds. Whew.
Krens is too cool to wipe his brow in public. “He’s a bit-how would you describe Tom?-he has a little bit of attitude,” says Perelman. “But he’s very good. He could be in any business. He could be an investment banker. In retrospect, he took a lot of risks. But all the things he did not only had to be done, but were brilliant.” So brilliant, in fact, that Krens is still suspected in the art world of not really liking art enough, and preferring to hobnob with corporate types. The fear, of course, is that corporate logos will begin springing up inside the Guggenheim like patches on a pro’s tennis shirt. But so far the quid pro quos have been fairly benign. For the Hugo Boss factory in Metzingen, Germany, the Guggenheim created an art library and provided posters from exhibitions at the museum. “Tom and I were having some cigars and some brandies in his office, thinking up this concept,” recalls Boss CEO Peter Littmann.
Meanwhile, some of the Guggenheim’s penny-pinching has bruised its reputation in the art world. When the museum postponed a big show of abstract art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the shows next venue, suddenly faced a nasty hole in its calendar. And when it canceled a show on conceptual artist Helio Oiticica that was coming from a Kunsthalle in Rotterdam, that museuam faced a hole in its budget. “Afterward, there was no project that we wanted to tlak to the Guggenheim about sharing,” says the curator, Roland Groenenboom, a bit icily.
The Guggenheim’s one unqualified triumph-artistically as well as financially-may turn out to be its new museum in Bilbao. It was a chance for Krens to give his favorite architect, Californian Frank Gehry, practically carte blanche. Gehry’s daring, curvilinear building could be the Wright rotunda for the 21st century on a gargantuan scale. When the museum opens in June 1997, it will be the size of four city blocks and 165 feet high. At the end of this ear, the Guggenheim will begin installing $500 million worth of art from its collection. From then on, according to Perelman, it’s up to the Basques to lure visitors to their out-of-the-way corner of Europe. the Guggneheim will still get paid.
Fifth Avenue, SoHo, Venice, Bilbao: Krens maintains that having more gallery spaces ensures that more of the stellar collection gets out of storage and on view. Critics say it’s a shell game that endangers all the art that has to be crated and shipped. Traditionalists who think museums should be run by art historians are put off by Kren’s spreadsheet bravado. But Kathy Halbriech, director of the Walker, admits, “I think we’re all a little jealous of Krens. More power to him as long as the art is great.” Finding a balance between showing great art-which the Guggenheim owns in abundance-and making a museum a powerhouse is tricky. Under krens, the Guggenheim franchise has been stretched to the max. so far, his strategies seem mostly to be working. Now it’s time to put the spotlight back on the art.
