He
Made
California Art
Respectable
PAUL
CHADBOURNE MILLS
Sept 24, 1924 - Sept 17, 2004
Paul Mills, the former director of the Oakland Museum, played
a key role in the Bay Area Figurative Movement, curating its seminal exhibition in Oakland in 1957.
Mills
helped shape two major California cultural institutions, the Oakland
Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, serving as director
of both. In
an interview shortly before his death in 2004, he said his work in Oakland
was his greatest contribution.
"Looking
back on my career, the most important thing was creating that
California collection at the Oakland Museum," he said. "Second
most important was creating the building," its architecturally
acclaimed home.
Focusing on California
Mills
arrived in Berkeley in 1953 to begin graduate studies in art history.
He took a part-time job at what was then the Oakland Art Museum,
which soon turned into a full-time job, and then into a crusade
to create a museum focused solely on California art.
Oakland
"had a permanent collection of sorts," he wrote of his
first months there. "There were a dozen California paintings,
good and bad, shading off to an attic full of unclaimed leftovers
from years of competitive shows."
Focusing on California made perfect sense to Mills, who was young
and eager to make a name for himself and the museum.
"We
wanted to be central to the works, the subject matter and the
research sources," he said. "That really meant doing
something with California artists."
'That
Local Crap'
The
more established museums were not interested in California paintings.
"The
Oakland Museum was built out of the back rooms of other museums,"
Mills said. "Stanford had international experts who didn't
want that local crap."
They
were happy to free up space in their storage rooms by selling
things -- cheap -- to Oakland. Mills recalled paying $175 for
the first painting he bought. He acquired one of the major wall-sized
paintings in Oakland's collection for $750 from Stanford.
Mills
proposed in 1954 that California be the sole focus of the museum.
He got support from the community, which welcomed the idea of
celebrating its heritage, but not from the art world, which thought
he was dreadfully out of time by looking back to a provincial
past.
Mills
brought a scholarly background combined with a down-to-earth manner
that together made him perfectly suited for the task of creating
a museum of California from scratch. With a hard-working band
of docents, he laid a historical foundation for the collection,
combing through old newspapers and searching out descendents of
artists.
At
the same time, Mills grew to appreciate the connection between
paintings of the California landscape and the landscape itself.
"I remember going home one night when it was just beginning
to get dark," he said. "All of a sudden the world looked
like those paintings. I was finding a genuine emotional relationship
between the paintings and the landscape."
Rewriting the History Books
When
the reimagined museum opened in September 1969 in a modernistic
new four-block home landscaped with gardens and fountains as the
Oakland Museum of California -- with separate art, history and
natural science departments -- even some of the critics saluted.
"The art section is going to realign the whole history of
art in the United States," wrote Alfred Frankenstein, the
San Francisco Chronicle's art critic. "All the books will
have to be rewritten" to acknowledge the importance of California
art. Frankenstein conceded the collection was built of "paintings
which until recently were scorned and rejected."
Finding
the Figurative Movement
Early
in his Oakland years, Mills had realized there were powerful artistic
rumblings in his own backyard. Many of the most respected abstract
painters were beginning to reintroduce realistic elements into
their work. Richard Diebenkorn had returned to Berkeley and begun
painting figures. David Park had already made the shift. Mills
saw figure paintings and landscapes appearing in other studios.
In
1957 he curated "New Bay Area Figurative Paintings"
at the Oakland Art Museum, which codified an emerging trend that
would have reverberations far beyond the Bay Area, and which continue
to be felt to this day.
The
work was happening before his eyes, so there was little reference
material for an art historian to consult. Mills decided to use
his journalistic skills, sharpened during three years as a newspaper
reporter. He interviewed the artists he invited to be in the show,
then wrote a report on his visit to each studio and published
it as a catalog of the exhibition.
"Their
conversations were different from what they wrote, which was impenetrable,"
Mills said. "It changed my whole attitude toward my work.
I used the same approach in my book on Park. I said, 'Nowhere
will you use whom. Whom is not a conversational word.'"
A
Definitive Statement on Park
Mills
took a particular interest in the work of Park. He wrote his thesis
on Park, later published as a book, The New Figurative Art of
David Park.
"With
Park, I was in a position to make a definitive statement, and
I think I did," Mills said. "Park I could read like
a book. Diebenkorn was always a problem for me."
In
fact, Mills said, two of his worst decisions involved Diebenkorn.
First was when he decided, in determining the purchase awards
in a competitive show, to buy somebody else's painting rather
than Diebenkorn's -- "a many million dollar mistake,"
he called it. The second was when he didn't buy a Diebenkorn in
the museum's rental gallery for $750.
"All
of a sudden our washing machine went out," he said. "What
were we going to do? Well, you can guess."
Causes
of All Kinds
A
year after the triumphant opening of the Oakland Museum, in 1970,
Mills resigned at Oakland and headed south to become the director
of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He would find many successes
there, too, as he once again began to build and burnish the reputation
of a museum he knew he could make better.
He
served as director of the Santa Barbara museum until 1982, then
turned his full attention to the many local causes he championed.
After
his wife Jan died in 1999, Mills came out as a gay man and became
involved in gay causes in Santa Barbara. At his death he was battling
a plan by the homo-hostile Dr. Laura Schlesinger to move her talk
radio show to the Santa Barbara Wharf.
Mills had numerous other pet projects under way in his final days
that had been postponed for various reasons through the years.
"It's an immense satisfaction to give wing to some of these
albatrosses," he said a few weeks before his death. Despite
his struggle with lung cancer, he said, "I'm actually having
a hell of a good time."
Mills
died on September 17, 2004, a week before his 80th birthday.
OBITUARY
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