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When he came to the Museum of Modern Art, he saw something deeper and broader going on with Pollock, deeper than Pollock simply being influenced by the French Surrealists - that Pollock, in his way, was going back to some of the ancient sources that the Surrealists themselves went to.

D'Harnoncourt had a kind of stature as a diplomat who could keep all the departments, all the egos, more or less in balance. He was brought in to MoMA after Alfred Barr had had a nervous breakdown, and his main job, as far as Nelson Rockefeller was concerned, was to help support Barr - which he did do; they got along well.

I think the other one on this list is Jermayne MacAgy. She was the mistress, or the master, of beautiful theme shows. Her greatest work was in San Francisco. She once did a show there around the theme of time. There's a work by Chagall titled Time Is a River without Banks. I think the phrase intrigued MacAgy - more so even than the work. Her exhibit was ahistorical, coming from any period, and cross-cultural. She included clocks and timepieces. She had a Dali with the little clocks and so on, as well as all kinds of references and allusions to time - in old and new work.

In another exhibition, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco wanted a show of arms and armor. She did a fantastic piece of drama as a set piece for it. She made a huge chessboard in the great atrium - and lined up the figures as two competing sides.

HUO: In the '80s theme-exhibition boom, many shows started to look like stage designs, with artists being used as props or works being used as accessories. How did MacAgy's theme shows avoid subordinating the work to the overall concept?

WH: She had a very sure and spare touch, for the most part.

HUO: You also mentioned her shows in terms of an almost-empty design.

WH: Yes. She managed to ignore design systems - or tried to work outside systems of taste for these shows. Early on, here in Houston, when she did a Rothko show, she went out of her way to have beautiful flowers in the entryway - living flowers, planting beds. It was just a general reminder that you don't start trying to ask why flowers are some color - you relax and enjoy their beauty. It was a very interesting reminder that viewers should not be upset with the Rothkos if there's no image there, no subject. What is the image of a flower? It's just a color, it's a flower.

HUO: If one looks at the encyclopedic range of exhibitions you've organized, it's striking that, besides the exhibitions that take place in and redefine museum spaces, you've also done shows in other spaces and contexts where you tend to change the rules of what an exhibition actually is. I'm interested in these dialectics - the exhibitions that take place outside the museum create a friction with what takes place inside the museum, and vice versa. By questioning these expectations the museum becomes a more active space. When you were a museum curator in Washington you organized the show called "Thirty-Six Hours" at an alternative space.