Museum Role Fits a Former Art Dealer

Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Jeffrey Deitch at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.


Jason Schmidt Courtesy of Deitch Archive
Jeffrey Deitch, sitting in the center wearing a yellow suit, at a farewell dinner held in his honor in May by Deitch Projects. Mr. Deitch recently began his new job at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.


Monica Almeida/The New York Times
James Franco and Mr. Deitch on the set of “General Hospital.”


Deitch Archive
A portrait of Mr. Deitch done by Robert Longo in 1980.


Deitch Archive
Mr. Deitch, the art dealers Barbara Jakobson and Leo Castelli, and the artist Laura Grisi in 1988.

“HERE we go, folks. Page 133. And — action!”

Midnight had come and gone in a huge, light-flooded plaza near the West Hollywood branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art, a place that on this crisp June night was filled, quite surreally, with open-air sets for “General Hospital.”

In the middle of one set Jeffrey Deitch, a small, trim man in a double-breasted navy suit with a little makeup dabbed on his cheeks and forehead, stood encircled by television cameras, preparing to play a character called “Jeffrey Deitch, director of MOCA” — a role he had just taken on in real life as well after a decades-long career as a high-profile New York art dealer.

The sprawling soap-at-the-museum operation was Mr. Deitch’s idea, the first public art event he had overseen since taking the helm at the Museum of Contemporary Art three weeks earlier. It involved filming a series of scenes set there, starring Mr. Deitch’s friend James Franco, the actor and budding artist who strangely took a part on “General Hospital” last year in what he has described as a guerilla performance-art piece. The new scenes are his return to the show and renew his efforts to smuggle a little conceptual-art contraband into middle-American living rooms (where, if he does his job right, the art aspect might go unnoticed).

That the museum had become a soap opera set was pure Deitch, for better or worse: stuntlike, crazily experimental, scrambling high and low culture, risking ridicule and seeming not to care much when it rains down on his head.

And the shoot was a perfect emblem of the issues and anxieties raised by the choice of Mr. Deitch last January as the institution was emerging from deep financial turmoil and surprised the art world by picking a gallery owner to join the museum leadership ranks, which generally elevate from within.

No mega-dealer like Mr. Deitch, 57, had ever made the transition to running a nonprofit museum, and his selection has been parsed endlessly for what it says about the boundary between museums and art selling, a once-bright line that is becoming increasingly difficult to see. (In the 1950s James J. Rorimer, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, warned a young Thomas Hoving, who would later succeed him, “If you become an art dealer, you’ll never be able to work in a museum.”)

Mr. Deitch agreed to close his gallery, Deitch Projects, and cease all commercial activity before taking the job, a switch that will mean a considerable loss of income for him. But his selection nonetheless set off alarm bells about possibilities for conflicts of interest and cronyism. He made headlines almost immediately by saying that he would not rule out the possibility of selling works from his own huge personal art collection or his former gallery’s inventory during his directorship, in order to meet financial obligations in New York, where he still owns two buildings in SoHo and rents art-storage warehouses. He has also dismissed as childish the notion that he pledge not to show artists whom he promoted and befriended at his gallery.

So the “General Hospital” event was as much a political statement as it was a performance piece. Mr. Franco had originally approached Mr. Deitch with the idea of staging the soap in New York at his gallery. When it became clear the gallery would be closing, Mr. Deitch simply proposed doing it at the museum instead (where an exhibition based on the project will be mounted this year). Like many of his projects through the years, this one would not have had much profit-making potential in a gallery. But Mr. Deitch knew that the very idea of shuttling a show so readily between his two worlds would not sit well with some people, including a few of his new employees.

“There are, naturally, people on the staff who are not comfortable with what I’m doing,” he said, driving down Melrose Avenue to his soap-opera star turn.

Even before officially taking the job, he began looking for ways to attract new audiences and support for a museum still trying to right its finances. He conceived and fast-tracked a retrospective on the work of Dennis Hopper, who died on May 29, organized by Mr. Deitch’s friend Julian Schnabel and opening next Sunday. He canceled a show that curators were already working on but that he believed to be redundant. And he is working to put together a major exhibition about the influence of street art, a movement that was central to the identity of Deitch Projects in recent years.

“I think it’s kind of unprecedented,” he said of his flurry of plans. “I’ve hit the ground running. And there’s no time to lose here. We’ve got to make an impact.”

During more than three months after his selection by the museum, Mr. Deitch allowed a reporter to tag along and observe, at least to an extent, as he prepared to assume the new role and wound down his 14-year-old gallery, a process that involved consolidating art-storage warehouses (six at one point), finding new spaces for artists working in studios he had rented, and dealing with complex real-estate litigation. (His gallery building on Grand Street in SoHo was destabilized after its next-door neighbor began sagging.)

The transition was made much more complicated by the kind of gallery Mr. Deitch ran. It had moneymakers on its roster but also a couple of garage bands’ worth of young artists whom Mr. Deitch supported, more as patron than dealer, with the considerable money he made brokering huge sales in the secondary market — a skill aided by his Harvard M.B.A.

“There are millions in advances that I’ve given to artists over the years,” he said, in exchange for promises that they would repay him if they became successful. It is a testament to the loyalty he fostered that, even now, almost none of the artists he represented have announced publicly that they are joining other galleries, though some will end up with the gallery’s former managing director, Suzanne Geiss, who will be a private dealer and manager, and with two other former directors, Kathy Grayson and Meghan Coleman, who have opened a SoHo gallery called the Hole with Mr. Deitch’s blessing and the help of his connections.

While some gallery owners might be able to hand the keys to a trusted lieutenant upon leaving, Mr. Deitch’s departure removes the center of gravity for a group he had put into orbit around him, in a slightly nostalgic attempt to recreate in microcosm the more freewheeling art world of the 1970s and 1980s in which he came of age. (He opened his first gallery as a college student in 1972 in a rented hotel parlor in Lenox, Mass., and sold out the first week. Later he talked his way into his first official art-world job, as a receptionist at the prestigious John Weber Gallery in SoHo, by offering to work free.)

Only a few weeks before Mr. Deitch’s move to Los Angeles he presided over the final opening at Deitch Projects, for a show by the celebrity street artist Shepard Fairey, an event that drew so many people it closed down a block of Wooster Street. Besides a few “This Is Your Life” figures from Mr. Deitch’s New York career — Fab 5 Freddy, Debbie Harry, the graffiti artist Lee Quiñones — the crowd was composed mostly of people not often seen in New York art galleries. A motorcycle gang member in a leather jacket approached Mr. Deitch and shook his hand, saying, “Thank you for your years of service.”

Standing later on the edge of his loft office high above the scrum, in a pale red seersucker suit that lent him the air of a song-and-dance man, Mr. Deitch said: “People keep asking, ‘Why does this man in his 50s want to be surrounded by all these kids?’ But I was just a kid myself when I started in the art world. This has always been my kind of crowd.”

The next night he was feted by his staff and friends at a dinner at a sweltering loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that he had rented for Ms. Geiss. Mr. Deitch sat next to his pal Jeff Koons and submitted with a bemused, fastidious smile to the night’s entertainment, the bawdy chanteuse Bridget Everett, who mussed his hair and came close to sitting in his lap as she serenaded him. Her song echoed the sentiment many of his New York friends had been expressing, more or less: “We’ve got tonight, babe. Why don’t you stay?”

Late last year, Mr. Deitch said, when he began considering whether to stay or to take the museum’s offer, the decision was not simply about whether he wanted to run the institution. In 2008 he had opened a new, hangar-sized branch of his gallery in a former soda warehouse on the water in Long Island City, Queens, and proceeded to turn it into something that was almost a museum in itself, one dominated by performances and other generally unsaleable art, like a final show of paintings by Josh Smith done directly on the walls and primered over at the end.

“In terms of closing things down, this is what I feel the sorriest about,” Mr. Deitch said one morning as he walked around the space, which will be taken over by the Gladstone Gallery, mostly for art storage. “In the end the debate for me came down to whether to go to a public museum or to liquidate some of my assets and create a museum of my own, maybe here.” He said he chose the former because working for an established public institution would make it possible to collaborate with more artists, and because he sees Los Angeles as a paradise for museum experimentation — the kind of city that would hire Jeffrey Deitch to run a museum.

Maria Bell, a co-chairwoman of the museum’s board, said it was not a decision made without some misgivings. “A lot of thought was given to it,” she said, “and I will say that there were times when people took pause and wondered whether we could do this.” But the board was enticed by Mr. Deitch’s populist philosophy and his conviction that contemporary museums sometimes needed to act first and ask questions later. “Why not be nimble enough to add programming that can be done in a shorter time, to be tapping into the contemporary art world as it’s happening?” she said.

As for concerns about conflicts of interest if Mr. Deitch has to sell works from his own collection, Ms. Bell said the board spent “untold amounts of time discussing it.” But in the end she said she considered it an “external problem” of perceptions, not an internal one that the museum had many concerns about, calling Mr. Deitch a man of “unbelievable personal integrity” who had made huge financial sacrifices to come to the public sector. (The museum has not disclosed Mr. Deitch’s salary and benefits; his predecessor received almost half a million dollars a year.)

“We think he’ll really build our constituency and bring more people to the museum in new and exciting ways,” she said.

In the meantime he has given up his New York apartment on the Upper East Side, a studio rental that became famous in the art world because it was so tiny, spartan and completely devoid of art. He now lives in a rambling Spanish revival house, also rented, that once belonged to Cary Grant in the trendy Los Feliz neighborhood here, with a kidney-shaped pool. From his balcony he can see the Hollywood sign to the north and, to the south, the tennis courts of his new neighbors, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. (“I wanted the whole Hollywood fantasy,” he said, taking in the view on a picture-perfect Angeleno afternoon.) He might even hang some of his own art collection on the walls.

Old New York habits die hard, however, and Mr. Deitch initially planned to get by in Los Angeles without a car, cobbling together cab and subway rides. He gave up, of course, and now drives a rented gray Lexus, in which he looks very much the part of the important museum director he was asked to play on “General Hospital.”

The soap opera gave him only a couple of lines to speak that night, but Mr. Deitch nailed them with a trace of Method-acting naturalism, and as the cameras pulled back the director on the set gave the new extra from out East a thumbs up.

“Love it!” he yelled. “That’s a move on.”