UCLA

During his lifetime, curator Henry Geldzahler was known primarily as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first contemporary art curator, a role he held from 1960 to 1977. From 1966 to 1969, he also served as the first Program Director of the Visual Arts Program of the newly established National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Although Geldzahler held these prominent positions—and also enjoyed outsize celebrity and notoriety—his activities have escaped substantive analysis. This dissertation critically examines Geldzahler’s roles in the 1960s in relation to the problem of artistic autonomy. In addition to offering the first monographic study of the curator’s major spheres of work, this dissertation situates his activities as tactics of exchange that continually re-negotiated the artistic field’s imbricated structural relationship to politics, economy, and media. Geldzahler provides an alternative model that moves beyond capitulation, cooptation, and/or critique. Holistically speaking, these older frameworks for understanding the problem of artistic autonomy in the 1960s render that problem as a matter of either-or. A model of capitulation might mourn the loss of art’s purported separation and bemoan its contamination. A model of critique or cooptation may scrutinize art’s instrumentalization, and seek to reassert the independence of artistic practice through forms of so-called rejection or resistance. Yet, whether in his relationships with artists, his governmental role in arts public policy, or through his exhibition making, Geldzahler’s activity seldom settled neatly inside or outside the purview of the artist or the contours of the artistic field. Instead, his negotiations variously expanded, transmuted, undid, and/or reconstituted the status of the artwork and artist through continuous exchange with different fields of non-artistic practice. Geldzahler’s negotiating yielded a simultaneous array of effects, sometimes quite contradictory. In one sense, the curator appropriated extra-artistic forces—from politics, commerce, and mass media—to redefine the artist’s status and differently accommodate the place and value of their activity. Yet, in another sense, the curator’s tactics also at times re-inscribed fallacies or misuses of artistic autonomy endemic to a creative field that is conceived erroneously as a hermetic zone of pure art and culture. Given such contradictions, it is important to recognize that Geldzahler’s story defies easy assessment of right or wrong, critical or reactionary, conservative or progressive. Rather, his negotiations crossing various boundaries present an opportunity to more fully consider the uneven, multifaceted, and perpetually shifting structural organization of cultural production. “Friendship” and the idea of “the artist’s friend” were primary factors in Geldzahler’s negotiations of cultural production and of artistic autonomy in particular. As such, this dissertation addresses his actual friendships with artists as well as the actions and motivations attributed to friendship in general to critically assess Geldzahler’s reputation as “the artist’s friend” and his negotiation of the “virtues and vices” of friendship, to paraphrase philosopher C.S. Lewis. This study is interested to understand how friendship facilitated Geldzahler’s navigation of art’s structural relationship to political forces at the NEA and with economic, social, and journalistic forces at the Met. Ultimately, this dissertation surfaces “the curator as the artist’s friend,” interrogating Geldzahler’s model to grapple with the ways artistic autonomy—in belief or in real practice—is constructed through interpersonal negotiation and, very often, according to the complex terms of mutual recognition, affection, and partiality associated with friendship.