Museum Directors

Henry T. Hopkins, a distinguished museum director and educator who played a leading role in establishing Los Angeles' art scene, has died. He was 81. He had suffered from a brain tumor for about eight months and died Sunday morning at Belmont Village, a senior living facility in Los Angeles, said his daughter, Victoria Shegoian. Hopkins achieved national prominence as director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1974 to 1986, but he got his professional start at UCLA and returned there in later years.

California-based multimedia artist Mike Rogers was finishing his photographs for an exhibition in Mexico City when he got an urgent e-mail from the curator: The show had been called off. The capital's contemporary art museums were broke and shutting down. The message was exaggerated. Museums are not closing -- yet. But across Mexico City's eclectic art world, museum directors, curators, artists and performers are bracing for a round of recession-triggered budget cuts that could prove devastating.

In the museum world, there are any number of ways to spend $1 million. That's nearly as much as Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, will earn this year in salary, deferred compensation and benefits. That also happens to be how much LACMA's film program lost over the last decade -- a big part of the reason that Govan recently laid off the program's director and cut the weekend screening series, provoking an outcry from hundreds of cinéastes . In good times, eyebrows might be raised over whether $1 million a year is a fair wage for a director of a nonprofit museum.

First, President Obama held the "beer summit" with Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and police Sgt. James Crowley. Now the founders of Save Film at LACMA are planning a "popcorn summit" with Los Angeles County Museum of Art Director Michael Govan, who recently made the controversial decision to cancel the institution's 40-year-old weekend film series. Journalist and marketing consultant Debra Levine (who has done freelance writing for The Times) and corporate publicist Kathleen Dunleavy -- both dedicated film aficionados -- are spearheading Save Film at LACMA.

Saying it was an "unexpected and uncollegial" move by Dennis Szakacs -- a museum director he likes and respects -- the veteran director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego has added his voice to a chorus of critics of the Orange County Museum of Art's quiet sale of 18 California Impressionist paintings to an anonymous private collector. And the chief curator of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento has joined two small Orange County museums as institutions disappointed they didn't get to bid on OCMA's cache -- and hopeful of acquiring it if the buyer decides to donate or resell them.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that President Obama had shown no flu symptoms since returning from Mexico, where he stopped April 16-17 on his way to a regional economic summit. "The doctors advised us that the president's health was never in any danger," Gibbs said. Obama met in Mexico City with the director of the National Museum of Anthropology, who died a week later.

Sherman E. Lee, a former longtime director of the Cleveland Museum of Art whose keen-eyed collecting of old European and Asian masterpieces gave it international prestige, died of natural causes July 9 in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 90. Lee took the helm of the museum in 1958 at a propitious time, as a $35-million bequest by industrialist Leonard C. Hanna Jr. had vaulted it into the ranks of the country's richest art museums.

British Museum Director Neil MacGregor was approached to be the next head of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and has preferred to keep his London job for another five years, the British Museum said. Chairman Niall FitzGerald said that MacGregor had agreed to lead the museum through 2012. MacGregor took over in 2002.

Pickling sharks and sheep is his business, and business is good. Good enough to have enriched British artist Damien Hirst sufficiently to plunge in as a buyer rather than a seller of art, becoming the first visual artist ever to appear on ARTnews magazine's annual list of the world's 200 most active art collectors. The 2008 list -- the 18th compiled by the New York publication -- was based on interviews with collectors, dealers, auctioneers, museum directors, curators and art consultants.

Responding to a series of embarrassments in which major museums have had to return ancient artifacts obtained under questionable circumstances, America's art museum directors have adopted stronger guidelines for antiquities acquisitions -- including honoring a 1970 U.N. declaration aimed at keeping relics in their homelands. The J.