Courtesy Dan Bibb

"A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World" by Marcia Tucker. University of California Press, $27.50

Courtesy Dean McNeil

Marcia Tucker, dressed as her alter ego, Miss Mannerist. She began performing the character—who was known for the humorous career advice she gave ne’er-do-well artists—in 1997 under the name Mabel McNeil.

Books

A Master in Context

Design, Redefined

Bruce Nauman Richard Tuttle Joan Mitchell Robert Morris The Second Sex (at Auction, Anyway) Warhols Send Sotheby’s Soaring A Showdown for Doig at Christie’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949–78

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Early on, she scored a secretary’s job with William Lieberman, then MoMA’s curator of prints and drawings. When he upbraided her for not keeping his pencils sharp enough, Tucker told him he was the one who wasn’t doing things right. “You stick them up your ass,” she said, “and turn hard, that’s what does it.” Although that little shot of vitriol got her fired, another display of brashness would lead to her big breakthrough, in 1969, when she became the Whitney’s first woman curator. In an interview with board chairman David Solinger, Tucker said:

“Let me tell you why you don’t want to hire a woman. One, I won’t be able to do budgets, because, as you know, women can’t even balance their own checkbooks. Two, once a month I’ll go crazy and no one will be able to reason with me, much less talk to me. Third, and most important, no one will want to take orders from a woman, so I’ll be completely ineffectual no matter how smart I am. And of course I’ll get pregnant within the year, so your investment in me will have been completely wasted.”

Solinger was charmed; Tucker got the job. Later, having been treated abysmally in France by Joan Mitchell, whose Whitney retrospective she was organizing, Tucker said, as she and the painter were about to start lunch: “You listen to me. I’ve had enough. I can’t work this way, and I won’t. If you want the show to happen, then you’re going to start behaving, stop insulting me, and get to work. If not, then I’m finished here.”

Of course, neither Lieberman nor Solinger nor Mitchell is alive to give his or her account. Maybe Tucker wasn’t the High Noon marshal she makes herself out to be in A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World. But I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, since she did crack a few eggs in order to make omelettes during her remarkable career.

At the Whitney, she organized groundbreaking exhibitions of Robert Morris and Bruce Nauman and turned the museum’s biennial (then an annual) into the always controversial box-office smash it remains to this day. She may very well be the first American model/exemplar of the speculative —as opposed to authoritative—curator, whose exhibitions are conceived to raise questions rather than find answers. Fired by the Whitney in the wake of the 1975 Richard Tuttle show that baffled even her most fervent supporters, Tucker promptly started her own museum, again a predominantly inquiring enterprise: the New Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Manhattan, now housed in a spiffy new building on the Bowery, which she ran for 22 years. Tucker died of lymphoma in 2006. She was only 66 years old.

Tucker, née Silverman, was the daughter of a Brooklyn lawyer who, operating against “a widely held assumption—at least among the Jews—that there were no Jewish criminals,” never managed to make the big bucks. Her mother, Dora, “was a mediocre cook for whom supper was a package of frozen blintzes, the insides still chilled to a crunch, or a gray flank steak that spent its final hours bleeding wearily into our sink.” Tucker rebelled against her mother’s neuroses—which were straight out of a Woody Allen movie—by slipping into Manhattan to smoke, drink and go to Harlem clubs. At a precocious 17, she wrote in her journal, “I am now a cynical young adult (I use the term loosely) who has come into direct contact with poetry, poets, pseudointellectuals, sex, James Joyce, jazz and older men.”

But like Scarlett O’Hara, Marcia Tucker was not a conventionally beautiful woman. In her memoir, she’s certainly not afraid to say so, unabashedly confessing that she “came into” her “classic, middle-aged Jewish-lady looks early on.” She writes: “My body, by the time I was 12, pot-bellied with tiny shoulders, skinny arms and spindly, knock-kneed legs, looked like the results of an alien abduction. ... I came to add the thick glasses, constantly slipping down my big nose, to a face that already sported a mouth full of crooked teeth, wires and rubber bands.” Tucker thought herself homely enough to form an Ugly Club at school, complete with caricature-bearing membership cards.