Richard Armstrong with Joachim Pissarro & Jennifer Stockman

Richard Armstrong served as the Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation from 2008 until 2023. During that time, he brought the Guggenheim’s collection into the current era, cementing the museum as a global institution while keeping curators and artists at the forefront. Armstrong joined Guggenheim President Emeritus Jennifer Stockman and Rail Consulting Editor Joachim Pissarro to discuss the parallels of politics, religion, and art; the joys and challenges of spearheading one of New York’s most storied cultural institutions; and the importance of keeping the art—and the artists—close.

Jennifer Stockman: I always found it intriguing when you mentioned that you had initially planned to pursue a career in politics. It would be fascinating to learn, what was the turning point that led you to shift your focus towards the art world? Were you aware of what you were getting into? Additionally, could you elaborate on the distinctions between being a museum director and a politician?

Richard Armstrong: In 1968, it was so cataclysmic, and I was a page in the Senate. I was getting all prepped up to become a senator, I thought. It was the second year I’d been there. Then King gets killed, Bobby Kennedy gets killed. The convention is a disaster, as it might be again this time. And I realized in the course of those five or six months, this is not going to be my world. After having been close to senators for a while, I realized they may not even be my people. They were people I admired, but on average, I was finding them less than captivating. So then, after all that happened, I told my Pa, I just have to get out of the country. The same way you’re hearing people say comparable things today.

However, when I was in Washington in those years, and it was still a small southern town and hot, I was living in a boarding house, the way pages did. When you have free time, you go somewhere that’s free, that’s air conditioned. I’d been to the National Gallery a fair amount, looking around, and one day I went to the Phillips Collection, which I hadn’t really heard of previously. I saw a picture there by Arthur Dove, Flour Mill II (1938), and it was the first time I realized pictures have a language. And I—yes I wanted to be a politician, but I also thought I was an articulate, fairly good writer, and I was a word person. So there was this thing on the wall that was speaking to me. It used a language nicely.

So then I moved to France to escape from all that American chaos, first to Dijon, and then to Paris. Looking around is really integral to being in France. I was in Dijon to study Romanesque architecture. I have a taste for architecture. Then I went to Paris, I went to the Sorbonne, I joined up with the École du Louvre, and, you know, you’re looking all the time and you’re at that age when things kind of seep in, because you don’t have any defenses. So I would say the political dead end led to another path that incorporated pictures—and sculpture, which I wound up liking most of all. I think that was a fusion between the architectural tastes and the picture tastes. What could I do? I was hooked.

I went to a small liberal arts college, Lake Forest College, near Chicago, by default. I had such terrible grades. Being in Lake Forest gave me the chance to go to the Art Institute of Chicago a lot. And that was an education in itself. Not a traditional education, but a kind of physiological education. I remember the first time I walked up the back stairs there, and I saw the big black Clyfford Still. And I thought, what is that? I had never seen anything like it before. I guess the taste for politics mutated into an interest in art. The difference between those two things is largely one of social ambition. Politicians want to make things better. And artists, even though they may not want to say it out loud, are interested in a new order, that in the end leads to things being better as well. So I always thought they were parallel paths in a strange way. And there was a third path, the one my mother wanted me to follow, which was to become a preacher, because we had a very religious upbringing in Calvinism. That didn’t appeal to me. But it was there as a kind of fallback, in a way, for a belief system. Instead, I went on this art path. So religion, politics, art, I found them to be somewhat parallel.

Joachim Pissarro: This is a fascinating topic, which, of course, also speaks to me. But you know, I was at MoMA for about ten years, and I’m thinking of two people who have interwoven preaching and religion and art, and it’s Alfred Barr and Kirk Varnedoe.

Armstrong: It’s a reform impulse. You realize you’re not creative yourself, which I knew from an early moment, but instead, you think that you can help the artist articulate what it is he or she wants to say. Not in the work, but in the words. You think that you can become a kind of mouthpiece and an ally and an explicator. It’s not so different from what people say from the pulpit. I wouldn’t want to say they’re exact, but they’re not unrelated.

Pissarro: I’ve heard said that the job of someone like Alfred Barr—and maybe even as late as Varnedoe—would be very different from what being a museum director consists of today. How would you describe what you think are the principal features of being a museum director today, as opposed to one or two generations ago?

Armstrong: I always felt that the principal task is to support the curators. And from that comes a productive and interesting atmosphere that engages trustees and also appeals to an audience. But part of my disillusionment over the last few years was I was losing touch with what would appeal to the audience. I had long gone beyond my shelf life. I realized it’s imperative that somebody who’s more in touch with the new requirements lead the institution. It’s radically different. What Barr went through was really parting the Red Sea, because at that time America was nothing but bad reinterpretations of European excess, really. And he was so prescient and so capable, and so eclectic. He had a true vision. It was missionary zeal. Today, you don’t have that, really. The museum is under intense pressure to maintain itself financially and intellectually. And that creates a different atmosphere. It’s highly competitive. I mean, I think what will be interesting, and what’s coming in these new young leaders is, can they reclaim that same zeal and prescience of the earlier moment? It’s one hundred years later. And it could be that civilization reopens. And they can lead their generation into another understanding.

Stockman: Do you think with the internet and information so easily available online, and now with the advances in AI, that museums and curators are still as relevant as they once were when you began your career?

Armstrong: First of all, anyone who’s really interested in art of any kind has to have a first hand experience. And for me, that means you have to be in front of the thing. You have to have some physical familiarity with what it is. So I think the internet can be seen as an important addition, but it’ll never be a substitution. And I also find that younger people emphasize this word, authentic. It doesn’t get more authentic than seeing exactly what the artists had in mind and did. The question becomes: why is that story being told that way, by whom, and what’s his or her ambition in telling that narrative? Those are questions we didn’t ask in our time.

Stockman: What has changed in terms of attitudes towards receiving information and authority in the art world and what historical concept about art progression is no longer relevant?

Armstrong: I think we thought there was a teleological progression where things went from here to there, that there was a sequence in art. And that is long gone. Audiences today have different attitudes towards receiving information. We received it very blindly: we’ll take your word for it if you have authority. And of course, the whole notion of authority has changed.

Pissarro: I think you’re opening the gate for us. Every museum director today is facing the moment when society woke up, and facing questions of diversity, equity, inclusion, etc. How did that impact you and your curation?

Armstrong: That has a very big effect on the day to day operation of the institution, and ultimately on its decision making. But these are worthy challenges to a kind of static idea about who should be doing what, on behalf of whom.

Stockman: Following up on Joachim’s question about society waking up and how that has changed the entire museum paradigm: as the fifth museum director, you served for fifteen years. Reflecting on the time period from 2008 to 2023, what challenges and hardships did you experience, and how did the stress and sleepless nights shape your interpretation of those years? Additionally, how did these challenges overshadow day-to-day events?

Armstrong: My most salient advice to people who are coming up is you must allow yourself to experience in your daily work what originally attracted you to art and artists. Because otherwise you are in a constant waterfall of problem solving, some of which can’t be solved. One of the reasons I was forever on Fifth Avenue and not always at the office downtown is I needed to go downstairs and look at things constantly. So to me, all of those other things that happened, they were momentous, and they were heart wrenching, and some of them could not be solved by us. They were societal problems. Those are things that will keep you up at night. But you know, that comes with being a leader, staying up at night. So I felt upset and unhappy and confused. One dark cloud after another came. But I also had the light of being surrounded by things and people that I admired.

Pissarro: Let me look at the silver lining. I think there’s something super heartwarming in what you’re saying. I mean, the idea of the museum directors, as you say, facing so many dark clouds, going down to see the collection. I love that. And I have to ask you, which works were your favorite?

Armstrong: The Guggenheim owns one of the most powerful Bonnard paintings, Dining Room on the Garden (1934–35). And if I could, I always had that in my office, because to me that was a whole universe. The museum also had a 1910 picture by Piet Mondrian, Summer, Dune in Zeeland, a beach scene. In that piece, one saw all the tenderness of an artist who was being forced away from nature into abstraction. I thought that tipping point was so rich. Those were two pictures I always tried to have around. My last several months there, I had a really captivating Ad Reinhardt painting, an early one. Because to me his calligraphy opened up a different world of senses, and I felt like it satisfied me, that picture. The museum owns a lot of singular works: Francis Bacon is astonishing; Brâncuși’s King of Kings (ca. 1938); there’s a great Joan Mitchell, all the Kandinskys that you ever want to look at. Maybe more than you ever want to look at.

Stockman: How can someone ever get tired of looking at art? [Laughter] I was always amazed at how you balanced a large staff, the trustees, the community, and the artists. How did you manage to sort out all of these commitments and responsibilities?

Armstrong: I think that might have come out of my early desire to be a politician. There are so many ways that you have to balance what you want and what the artist wants to the benefit of the museum. It’s complicated, and curators are at the center of it. So you have to be allied to whatever it is they want to do. One thing that was interesting for me was there were so few people that I deeply disliked. There was a constant stream of visitors. And I always felt that it was our job to receive people and to give them what they needed. There’s a lot of ceremony in the job. But the staff part became increasingly more complicated.

Stockman: How so?

Armstrong: Economically, their work life was disadvantageous. We were asking more and more of them. Much of the staff were commuting more than an hour each way every day. And we weren’t keeping up with our peers financially. I think the time came when the devotion of the staff sort of tipped over. So that was a moment.

Stockman: I believe there has been a noticeable increase in the wealth disparity between the very affluent and of those who work for a salary. That must have been difficult to manage.

Armstrong: Well, as a society, everything is so grossly touted and measured. It’s a very quantifiable world now. There is a giant imbalance in society all through the West, that small percentage that has more than seems reasonable. How do you correct that? I don’t know. And in the museum world we have to be careful because they’re frequently the collectors and the donors. So you can’t be too out there.

Pissarro: You clearly took a lot of joy in presiding over this incredible institution. You stayed there despite the numerous challenges and the dark clouds. I want to ask you, as a museum director and as a curator, because you’re a bit of both, what is the major show or acquisition or event that you presided over that really gave you the greatest joy?

Armstrong: I had a huge awakening in the late seventies and eighties working at the Whitney, because the museum became so open to the new, and the director Tom Armstrong really gave all the young curators—Lisa Phillips, Richard Marshall, myself, Patterson Sims, Barbara Haskell, and later Adam Weinberg and Thelma Golden, all these very gifted people—such free range of power and context. Coming to the Guggenheim was a little bit different. I didn’t know that museum very well. I’d sort of boycotted the museum, I felt it had lost its way. I wasn’t happy with it. When you work at the Whitney, the Guggenheim looks like some left-handed monster from nowhere. So, at each stage of the development, different doors opened, and they each offered a different kind of interest, joy, and a sustaining feeling to them. So there wouldn’t be a single thing I’d say that really was the moment. The moment went on for so long.

Stockman: How do you think your experience over the fifteen years measures up to that original vision and the thoughts you had?

Armstrong: My discontent was based on the museum having become a kind of Kunsthalle. It wasn’t very critical either. And I didn’t like that. What I was saying during my first interview as prospective Director with the Guggenheim trustees was, let’s go back to the radical beginnings of the institution where we were so deeply allied with Abstract artists.

Now, what happened, and this was inevitable, I suppose—you discover there’s somebody like Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, from Iran. That kind of discovery is our obligation and our privilege. And even though it’s going to crowd out possible great artists from Houston or wherever, I think my eyes opened up to the global possibilities. When I look back at what happened at the Whitney, those years there allowed me to see America deeply, because I kept working on the biennial. So I was going to studios across the country and seeing lots of things. Then when I went to Pittsburgh, for the Carnegie International, I was given the possibility of going out into the world. And I did it. I didn’t do it thoroughly, but I did it. Then when it came to the Guggenheim, they were saying they were a global institution. I thought, you better get out there and prove that you are that, you know? To me, there were three stages in the awakening. That’s why when I talk about Arthur Dove I feel a little bit embarrassed, because he is such a provincial, but so deeply felt artist.

Stockman: But you can’t forget his importance either, or the movement he was part of.

Armstrong: No. But the world is so much bigger than that.

Stockman: I believe one of your great accomplishments, Richard, in my opinion, that I don’t think is appreciated as much as it should be, is that you truly transformed the Guggenheim into a global institution. Can you share how you achieved that?

Armstrong: It was definitely the central challenge. Curators have the capacity to see big and convince you of the necessity of the wider spectrum of artists. There are occasionally people like Doris Salcedo, who I knew we had to make a show of, and it came along, and it was brilliant. There were so many opportunities where if we were fair and looked around, we could really become a new forum. Look at the Asian Art Initiative and the UBS-Map program.

Stockman: Yes, those have been an unbelievable success, as well as the Middle Eastern and Latin American Circles.

Armstrong: We just had good luck. And we had support financially. The curators had the capacity to go out and make something of it. And what’s distinguishing about New York is that all the major museums have that ambition now, other than the Whitney. The Met is universal, the Modern is really global. The Guggenheim is global, but we don’t have nearly as much gas in our tank as those other two.

I think the joy in all this is our recognizing, as a society at least, that creativity has been so rampant in the modern age, and it’s available for you to go see and bring to a new audience. Think about the undiscovered Hilma af Klint. It was all there, in the exhibition. I’d seen four paintings in 1981 in Los Angeles, and they stayed in my mind when Daniel Birnbaum called and said, I’m now the head of this foundation. I said, we’ll do the show.

Stockman: That was very courageous, by the way, especially since hardly anyone in the US knew who she was.

Armstrong: The curator Tracey Bashkoff took an unknown, rambunctious body of work and made something cohesive out of it. That was an eye opener, and it was very helpful to everybody, I think. We’re doing it in Bilbao this autumn, and there’ll be different things on view.

Pissarro: It was more than an eye opener, if I may say. You rewrote the history of art. Forget 1910, the first abstract watercolor by Kandinsky. This was a woman who did it years before, and why did we never speak about that? This was a shock to the system.

I want to branch off a little bit if you don’t mind. I remember reading somewhere that Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, and I’m paraphrasing, I want to create an architectural museum that will be stronger than any art that it will contain. And I don’t know how truthful that statement is. But certainly it must have been a major challenge to work in that building. How did you cope with these challenges?

Armstrong: You have the most brilliant installation crew, the greatest lighting person, curators who understand the limitations and the possibility for opening it up. It’s a well-oiled machine. Now, that’s fairly recent, I must say, because when I used to go there in the seventies and eighties, I thought, oh my God, why don’t they paint that, there’s water dripping down here. And in the old days, when you came off the elevator, you looked up on the top ramp, and that’s where they kept ladders and paraphernalia. The Whitney wasn’t perfect, but we were a little cleaner than that.

So once the building inched forward in improvements, we had to take out a lot of things that had been added, rooms and stairwells and things that had just been patched on. And then Bloomberg Philanthropy was so helpful in getting the new lights in place. And Tom Krens had done a great job in renovating it before it got there in terms of the oculus. That really made a huge difference. Another one of our goals was to eliminate all words in the rotunda. When you walk in, it was not supposed to tell people to do this and that, it was supposed to say, look at what can happen. The building is a miracle. And the miracle manifests itself when it’s clean. So we were lucky, I think. The designers and the crew are just so pitch perfect. What’s so amazing is it recontextualizes so many pictures, that space. It’s strange, but it’s actually quite flattering. You know, Hilla Rebay when she wrote to Frank Lloyd Wright said, I want a temple of the spirit. These are weird things to say in the 1940s, but it’s because of her deep interest in Theosophy, and she was an idealist. She envisioned a new kind of museum.

Stockman: Now, it’s interesting that the age of technology was really heightening in the last maybe four or five years that you were director. How were you compensating for that? How did you think about that, and incorporating it into the program?

Armstrong: Well, again, Bloomberg Philanthropy made a big difference by offering Bloomberg Connects. Remember in the old days, you weren’t allowed to take photographs? There were those silly acoustic guides. They were so irritating. Now through Bloomberg Connects, you’ve got your phone, which you can take home with you. And you can absorb so much more information. The incorporation of real technology was beyond me. But clever. Now we have a curator for technology, which is really what we needed all along, because you need someone who’s looking at it differently. I think the museum will move forward quickly.

Pissarro: Interesting. You were the museum director, and yes, in your humble self, you always deferred to your curators, but you did have a curatorial voice. You had a curatorial vision. How did you come up with any ideas for shows? And how would you define your role? Not so much as a director now, but as a top curator?

Armstrong: I probably wasn’t a top curator, but I discovered that when I came here in 1973, for the Whitney program, because that was my way of getting out, coming here. I was an uninitiated nobody from nowhere. And I was incorporated into the scene. Edit DeAk and Walter Robinson were in the Whitney program the year before me. They brought me into the critical discourse of the moment through Art-Rite. I went to work for Nancy Graves and Al Held. Marcia Tucker thought I was okay, so she gave me things to do, and it was just such an open world. The lasting thing was I discovered that I liked being around artists. Once you discover that, you ask, what can I do to be part of this? And because I had some capacity to articulate things, I could write a little bit and I could speak and maybe put together a show or two, which is what happened. And then I drifted away from contemporary a little bit. I did a David Park show and things that interested me. Perhaps the most memorable exhibition I did at the Whitney was the Richard Artschwager show in 1988. That, for me, was a very brilliant moment with a great artist, who became a really close friend.

To be a curator, you have to be organized. At bottom, you have to be somebody who likes to reorganize everything. I’m chaotic. That’s not really the way I do things. I do things in a very sort of Impressionist way.

Pissarro: And maybe that’s what makes you a great curator. [Laughter]

Armstrong: I’m not sure about that. But I look at the really gifted curators, and you know, they’re organizers, they know how to bring data together.

Stockman: Well, there’s the research part where you must be very organized, but as far as the vision and the storytelling goes, that’s all pure creativity, which is a very different set of skills.

Armstrong: I felt capable that way. I wasn’t a very good researcher though. It was the reason I couldn’t graduate from high school and go to college. I couldn’t sit still. I read like crazy, and I tried to be an autodidact. But I could never become educated in a classical fashion. I didn’t have the discipline.

Stockman: I’m interested to follow up on the curatorial question, because I have never fully understood in all my years involved with the Guggenheim, how did you decide which shows to pursue?

Armstrong: The central issue there is does the curator really have the capacity to bring the idea into fruition? To make a show come forward into the world, you have to have an enormous passion and a capacity to really watch the animal grow. In some ways it’s instinctual, because you say: she has it, she may not have it, he doesn’t have it. And what he or she is putting in front of me isn’t worth having. So you’ve got to balance all those things out.

Stockman: But doesn’t that mean you have to have decades of work to consider?

Armstrong: Well, those shows take five or six years, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s a long gestation, very long gestation, which I think is antithetical to society today. But as you know, there’s just so much you have to peel away. I’d say those decisions are based on those kinds of criteria. One of the things I always ask myself is, will it help that curator grow? Because otherwise, what are you doing? We have such a limited time.

Stockman: How do you determine what the audience will respond to? The Guggenheim is constantly striving to present cutting-edge exhibitions.

Armstrong: You really don’t. You have to feel strongly that what you’re doing is correct, given the time and your staff and what’s available to you financially. I felt like during my time at the Guggenheim, there were only one or two things that really didn’t float. I felt almost everything that got put in front of the public was well done. And it was the way it should have been. I was very proud of that.

Pissarro: I’m wondering, what would you advise the next generation of forthcoming museum directors to do or not to do? Secondarily, we were both interested in hearing what you feel your legacy has been, or the defining features of your legacy.

Armstrong: So the first question, I would say, and this is a question of temperament, because not every director is the same, but I would highly recommend the person ally themselves with working artists, because it’s by knowing the pain and the joy of creation that you can become a director who understands what it means. Otherwise, it’s just 55,000 objects in front of you. And at that point, you can be a decorator, but you’re not really empathetic. So I would say ally yourself with working artists, they teach you everything. But there’s not a single one of them that can teach you all of it. You need multiple exposures.

The second thing, what’s the legacy? The museum was faltering in my opinion, and it suffered from a mixed integrity. And I do feel that what we were able to do in that fifteen or sixteen years was reestablish the fact that it had integrity. That’s what mattered to me.

Stockman: And certainly at the beginning of your tenure, you addressed many of the sensitive issues, and the Guggenheim needed to heal.

Armstrong: Well, you know, I came in the wake of somebody who was willing to break many eggs to make the omelet. I’m not really that way. Maybe I was petting the chickens as they laid the eggs.

What’s crucial is that the opportunity remains open for all and not closed. And that’s the central obligation that we have to one another. Then it isn’t only the play toy of the privileged. While I stumbled into this, it needs to be a wide open door so many different kinds of people can have these opportunities.

Stockman: And there’s no other place where all these communities can convene. Instead of a museum being a stagnant place where people quietly look on without commenting or taking pictures, it can serve as a gathering space, particularly for young people, as that is what young people enjoy doing.

Armstrong: One thing I always say is there’s no need for data. The museum is a site for opinions and feelings. Therefore it can be a catalyst to your own dreams. You don’t need to know the artist’s name or when the work was made, as long as it’s right side up. That’s all you really need. From that, you can have all the creative misinterpretation that you can imagine. And that’s good.