Turmoil at Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Matthew Millman for The New York Times

The de Young Museum, in Golden Gate Park, is part of San Francisco's largest public arts institution.

Since January, each morning visitors to the venerable Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco line up to catch the newest star attraction, Vermeer's enigmatic painting "Girl With the Pearl Earring," on the first stop in its American tour.

Yet Lynn Orr, the curator who helped arrange this exhibition coup, is not on hand to see its success. In November she was abruptly fired after 29 years, a departure that is one in a series of unsettling developments that have turned what are among the most popular museums west of the Mississippi into objects of contention and anxiety.

For 15 months, since the death of John Buchanan, their last director, the museums have been without a leader. Longtime staff members have been ousted. Unhappy employees have leaked internal e-mails to embarrass management.

"They are in a state of Orwellian dysfunction," Robert Flynn Johnson, their curator emeritus, said of the museums.

Several trustees, major donors, former board members and staff members blame the powerful board president, Diane B. Wilsey, an art collector, philanthropist and a hub of San Francisco society, for creating some of the problems.

No one disputes that Ms. Wilsey helped to rescue the museums at a time of financial distress in the late 1990s, but her detractors assert that since then, she has accumulated too much influence.

Ms. Wilsey, for example, has been criticized for using museum personnel to tend to her personal collection; the Fine Art Museums' decision to exhibit her son's photography collection last summer was called nepotism.

"One person is in control," said Denise B. Fitch, a member of the museums' 44-person board of trustees who called herself a friend of two people who were fired.

In an interview Ms. Wilsey, who goes by the name Dede, denied any role in the staff firings and dismissed the notion that she held too much sway.

"No one person has authority to do anything," she said. "I serve at the will of the board, and all decisions are made through the staff. We are a public institution and we are totally transparent."

" I almost have to give 72 hours of public notice if I want to gain weight," she added.

Ms. Wilsey's supporters agree that the image of her as all-powerful is off base. "We have a very robust, transparent and efficient board," said Carl F. Pascarella, another trustee.

With an annual budget of about $55 million, the Fine Arts Museums — which consist of the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor Museum in Lincoln Park — are jointly the largest public arts institution in the city.

They are run in a private-public partnership, with the city contributing 23 percent of the budget. In the last fiscal year they drew nearly 1.6 million visitors.

But inner turmoil has been building since December 2011, when Mr. Buchanan died, leaving the institution rudderless through bitter labor negotiations, according to former and current employees and board members.

"We need a director badly," J. Burgess Jamieson, a former member of the board, said.

Not to worry, Ms. Wilsey said on Thursday, explaining that the board planned to announce a new chief within two weeks. Many of the institution's supporters and staff say that the museums have already suffered self-inflicted damage, however.

Within the past year, more than a half-dozen staff members say, they were forced out, including Ms. Orr, a respected curator who arranged for the exhibition of the Vermeer and other Dutch masterpieces. She and several other discharged staff members said that they felt that their support of the union that covers many museum employees played a role in their dismissals. Joe McDonald, for example, a staff photographer, noted that six weeks before his firing in November, he had worn prison stripes to a meeting about a new thumbprint-scan time clock.

Last month Bill White, an exhibition designer for 36 years, and his associate, Elizabeth Scott Etienne, were dismissed as part of a move to eliminate the department altogether.

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