Thomas Messer scans the Joseph Beuys exhibition in the courtyard of the Kampa Museum and a subtle smile hits his lips. Sitting on a bench in the shade, sipping on champagne from a strawberry-adorned flute, the 86-year-old Prague native sees something entirely different from everyone else at the table.

"A scandal," he says.

Messer is not referring to the artwork itself, a collection of free standing sculptures the artist called "multiples." Messer means the Beuys exhibition he organized as director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York more than 25 years ago — a full retrospective of the controversial artist that caused a sensation throughout the art world and had New Yorkers calling for Messer's head.

Messer's decision to show Beuys' work touched on several sensitive issues: Beuys was a member of the Hitler Youth and a Nazi bombardier in World War II, and the exhibition required an expensive redesign of a major portion of the Guggenheim. But critics most vehemently challenged the quality of the art itself.

"The public was outraged," Messer recalls. "They wanted their money back. They didn't think they should pay an entrance fee for something that was obviously not serious."

The exhibition was a critical and commercial failure, but history was kind to Messer. Within a few years, the Guggenheim was being lauded for its foresight and Beuys' work became a fixture in the postwar art scene.

So it was only fitting that the man who helped bring Beuys to the fore should preside over the current cross section of the artist's work on display in Prague. And for Messer, the story is just one of thousands the man has collected during a life that has sent him to nearly every corner of the globe to support the field he loves.

Messer has kept his ties to Prague and its art scene. He returned to Prague to visit family every two or three years throughout the Communist era. After the regime change in 1989, he served as an advisor to the Culture Ministry and the National Gallery until "changes in personnel" caused him to focus on other projects.

Chemistry and art

Messer is a true Czechoslovak. His father was born in Prague and his mother in Bratislava. With one parent an art history professor at Charles University and the other from a family of professional musicians, Messer counts his appreciation for art and music as his "spiritual inheritance."

With a cloudy economic forecast in Czechoslovakia during his youth, Messer was pushed toward chemistry, a subject in which he both excelled and hated. His abilities earned him a scholarship to the U.S. just as Germany was annexing the Sudentenland in 1938. He recalls the months spent under German occupation as the worst of his life.

The teenage Messer sailed from London Sept. 2, 1939. The following day war officially broke out in Europe, and the ship on which he was sailing was sunk by what he thinks was the first German torpedo fired in World War II. Undaunted, Messer made a second and successful journey to the States.

He intended to stay in the U.S for one year, a goal he overshot by 67 years.

Messer realized where his passion lay, so he dropped chemistry and began studying art.

Messer's life took a major detour for war. For Messer, that detour took him back to Europe, this time in an American uniform as an information officer during the last half of World War II.

He found himself in Munich at the war's end with an army jeep at his disposal.

"I got in the jeep and drove to Prague, without any paperwork, using whatever language I needed to get by," he said. Prague remained very close to his heart, but he was out of touch with his family for nearly five years. He was reunited with his family on "what is and will always be a never-to-be-forgotten day."

After the war, Messer studied art at the Sorbonne and trained his eye in the museums and galleries of Paris, where he grew an appreciation for non-objective artists, particularly Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, about whom Messer would later author a book.

Southwest and Upper Westside

Ready to start his art career, Messer jumped straight from the vibrant Parisian art scene to...Roswell, New Mexico. The town that would later gain fame among conspiracy theorists claiming it was the site of alien spacecraft was in the late 1940s a dusty small town in need of someone to head its rural museum.

The directorship gave Messer much needed experience and the opportunity to earn a Master's of Arts at Harvard, which he parlayed into a position as a curator for the American Federation of Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and director of the Guggenheim in 1961 — a post he would hold for 27 years.

Messer ushered the museum through a period in which it became one of the premier artistic showcases in the world, particularly because it gave him the freedom to display bold retrospectives of what he considered the most important post-war European artists, like Beuys.

As the popularity of the museum grew, so did the need to expand the physical dimensions of the Guggenheim's beehive gallery, which was designed by the Babe Ruth of builders — Frank Lloyd Wright.

Messer also initiated the transition from the family-funded museum running at a financial deficit to the membership-based profit-making organization it is today.

Consultation and contemplation

Messer retired from the Guggenheim in 1988 and still serves as director emeritus, but he says he has been separated somewhat from the current art scene.

"I just haven't been able to pursue it with the same intensity that I have been used to," he says. "Art has an age limit."

But Messer's actions speak louder: He still remains on the board of several art museums, lectures regularly on art at the University of Frankfurt, and — before presiding over the Beuys exhibition on this most recent Prague trip — served as a special advisor to the Serbian government regarding its plans to create a contemporary art museum.

The Guggenheim too has moved away from Messer's original goals, and has recently concerned itself with branding itself through franchises around the world, such as the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain and the Deutsch Guggenheim in Germany.

Messer is diplomatic about the shift in focus.

"I can only say that it's natural that with any change of personnel, things do switch around," Messer says. "It cannot be any other way."

Messer is glad that people want to hear what he has to say.