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.

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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.

In college, she conned her parents into financing a junior year in Europe by feigning a desire to transfer from the Connecticut College for Women to co-ed University of Pennsylvania to take more art courses. Her parents supposedly thought she’d be more in danger of losing her virginity stateside in the company of male students than in a nominally single-sex art-history program in Paris. Tucker promptly had her first sex—with a Frenchman named Henri, of course—on the boat to Europe. She fell in love and they moved in together in France. Mom and Dad found out and cut off her allowance. The romance ended when Henri was drafted into the French army and killed in the Algerian war. A year or so later, Tucker met a sad-sack theater student named Michael Tucker and married him. One glance at the wedding photo of the couple seated behind the bride-and-groom cake tells you that the union was doomed: Marcia gazes unhappily off to the left, with a shell-shocked Michael by her side.

After her divorce from Michael, Tucker eventually had the good fortune to meet and marry the artist Dean McNeil, 17 years her junior, and to give birth, in her mid-40s, to a daughter, Ruby. But her bad luck returned in her 60s, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent a lumpectomy (“which sounded more like a method of getting crabmeat out of the shell than a medical procedure”) and thought she was in the clear until diagnosed with lymphoma. Because of her illnesses, she was compelled to retire from the New Museum earlier than planned, and she seriously considered suicide. Characteristically, she bucked herself up, learned stand-up comedy and performed as an art-world Phyllis Diller under the name of Miss Mannerist. As the end drew near, she wrote one of the most moving last letters to friends and family you’ll ever read. (I won’t quote it here. It must be taken whole.)

Through most of her pre-Whitney life, Tucker wanted to be an artist and combined her grad-school art-history studies (she earned a master’s degree from NYU) with as much painting as she could cram into her overstuffed schedule. Inevitably, though, she had an epiphany: “I realized that I would rather be locked up in the library all weekend than spend a single afternoon facing an empty canvas.” A more radical form of that bookishness marked Tucker’s style as a curator. She was fascinated not so much by how art looked as by the envelope-pushing gestures it could make. In the Whitney’s famous 1969 “Anti- Illusion: Procedures/Materials” exhibition, what “really interested” Tucker were “blocks of ice and leaves; 16-foot-high piles of hay; 40-foot-long liquid ‘pours’ of latex paint; films that had no beginning, middle or end; an empty room whose hidden audiotape whispered, ‘Get out of the room, get out of my mind.’ ” Her favorite creator was Tehching Hsieh, the “vow artist” who lived for an entire year tethered at the wrist by a four-foot rope to another artist, Linda Montano.

Tucker was also an ardent feminist. At the Whitney, her protests that she’d worked much harder than fellow curator James Monte and yet earned less got her equal pay. She joined the activist group Redstockings and was rumored to be one of the Guerrilla Girls, those masked scourges of the male-dominated art world. Not for nothing did she earn the nickname Marching Tucker. “Although we’ve had our differences from time to time,” Tucker writes about the women’s movement, “for over 35 years it’s never once lied, stolen or cheated on me.”

In 1977 the Whitney’s director, Tom Armstrong, let her go in a rather shabby way. When Tucker was offered the dean’s job at the cutting-edge Los Angeles art school CalArts, she asked Armstrong whether he wanted her to stay or go. Stay, he said. After she had said no to CalArts, Armstrong informed Tucker that the museum was reemphasizing the permanent collection and no longer needed an exhibitions-oriented curator. The poor reception of her unengaging Tuttle exhibition was a factor in his decision. She refused to resign, insisted on being publicly fired and then started her own museum. (Little-known fact: In the beginning, all employees of the New Museum, from custodian to director, were paid the same salary—$12,000 per year—and duties were periodically rotated.)

A Short Life of Trouble is a good book about a good person. (Full disclosure: I knew Tucker, liked her and had dinner at her place a couple of times.) That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s perfect. Tucker’s reactions to the bad reviews that a good many of her shows received were often of the predictable “they just don’t get it” kind. No, critics like me got her tepidly received 1994 exhibition “ ‘Bad’ Girls”—we just didn’t want to keep it. And later in her career she got a tad— how to say it?—bureaucratesque. At the end of her memoir, Tucker mentions hiring a publicist “to strategize how to announce my forthcoming retirement to the public” (emphasis mine). Finally, perhaps because Tucker’s original manuscript was substantially pruned, by Liza Lou, an artist-writer and a Tucker protégé, the finished result reads a bit writer’s-workshoppy.

Am I carping or simply being truthful? A review of a memoir is as subjective as the memoir itself. What’s important— especially in this case—is the person who wrote it. Marcia Tucker left the art world a whole lot better than she found it. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be many of her kind coming on the scene. In this decade, the art world is much more expensive, much more market driven, much more calibrated to public relations, making it very difficult to be one of those unbeautiful people who, as she once put it, “act first, think later” and help make visible the unfashionable art that will eventually matter most. "Leader of the Pack" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's October 2008 Table of Contents.