Museum's guiding light was artists' champion

JAN VAN DER MARCK | 1929-2010: MCA's first director created new frontier beyond canvas

Jan van der Marck at the Museum of Contemporary Art's first site on Ontario, under construction in 1967.

April 29, 2010

BY MAUREEN O'DONNELL Staff Reporter - Chicago Sun Times

CHICAGO - Jan van der Marck, first director of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, brought Christo here to wrap the museum and believed so strongly in his artists that he once engaged in a public tussle with an astronaut.

Mr. van der Marck, who was 80, died of cancer Monday at his Michigan home.

The Netherlands native brought a combination of glitter and gravitas to the museum when it opened in 1967. Two years later, Christo wrapped the building in thousands of feet of tarp -- his first museum wrap in this country.

"He was very brave and extremely inventive," Christo said Wednesday.

Mr. van der Marck said the museum "should assume a frontier stance" and back artists who were pushing beyond oils and watercolors and turning to objects and kinetic sculpture.

He recalled Chicago's go-go years in an interview with David Walsh, arts editor of the World Socialist Web Site. "Mies van der Rohe was still alive," he said. "There were big thinkers at the University of Chicago. Hannah Arendt, I met her, Harold Rosenberg, whom I met a great deal, Saul Bellow."

He was involved in a memorable ruckus with Frank Borman when the astronaut headed Eastern Airlines. Plans were afoot to display James Rosenquist's 47-by-17-foot "Star Thief" at Eastern. Borman said the painting, with its giant floating head and bacon strips, didn't resemble anything he'd seen in space.

Mr. van der Marck championed the painting. "He really made an impression on me, standing up on that," Rosenquist said.