^{(She's the distracted-looking one in the neckscarf in back.)}

Snowbound yesterday, I read Marcia Tucker's new memoir, the bittersweet A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World. The book is bittersweet because it was completed in Tucker's absence: she'd written a draft and revised it some before she died of cancer in 2006, but she didn't have a chance to finish it. It's an unfinished, imperfect book for sure.

But it's also a quick, good read from a genuine personality: a museum director who reinvented the contemporary art museum by founding the non-hierarchically structured New Museum, with its ever-fresh "semi-permanent" collection (objects would come in for no less than 10 and no more than 20 years); who curated fearlessly and from the heart; whose early life is a tale of capture and release (her constricting life at home, her escapeeism in France); and most of all, someone who remained creative herself for her entire life. After stopping painting as a young woman, she went on to sing, do theater, and even do standup comedy. How many museum directors can you say that about?

Not one to back down from an implicit challenge, Tucker even gamely picks a favorite artist, and it's an obscure one: Tehching Hsieh, whose one-year performances will be commemorated in an exhibition starting next month at MoMA. (Here's his web site.)

One of the most fun passages in the book is a description of a man fighting with his own coat.

Several hours later, the studio door opened and I heard René's voice bid the visitor goodbye. It was my job to get his coat and show him back out. Smiling politely, I held the coat open for him to put on. He turned his back to me, put one arm into the sleeve, then followed with the other. He got the second arm into the armhole all right, but it refused to go through, and he pulled it out. I stood patiently while he made a second attempt and a third, without success. Exasperated, he turned to look over his shoulder at me, made a face, and with brute force and a ripping sound, pushed through the sleeve till his hand emerged triumphant at the other end. Then, with a wink, he was gone, trailing a faint whiff of cigarettes and wine.

A few minutes later, René emerged with a handful of wet brushes for me to clean, asking me as he handed them over, "Have you ever read any of his stuff?"

"I'm not sure," I said, shamefaced. "He looked familiar, but I didn't recognize him."

"That was Auden, the poet," René said. "I don't much like his books, but I think I'm probably in the minority."

Auden? I had helped W.H. Auden put his coat on? Auden had a hole in his lining? Auden had torn his sleeve?

Overall, the book could do with less anecdote and more insight, but Tucker is occasionally strikingly perceptive on why people in art do what they do. She realizes about halfway through the book that, for her, curating is partly a way to escape herself. It's not only that she can think and write about what other people make all the time, it's that she can try to jump right in behind their eyes.

When I was a little girl, I would daydream about what it would be like if you could be yourself but see the world through someone else's eyes at the same time... I imagined lowering myself down into someone else's body feet first, lining up my toes inside theirs, fitting my fingers one by one into the other person's hands as though into a glove of flesh, matching our belly buttons, and finally, eyeball inside eyeball, looking out onto the world with pellucid double vision, mind and body, theirs and mine, in perfect harmony.

Here's the book at Powell's.