Leah Dickerman Joins MoMA, Farewell to "New York Times" Architecture Critic Herbert Muschamp

NEW YORK—Management musical chairs at Bonhams, new curators for the Museum of Modern Art and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and the passing of Spanish painter and sculptor Pablo Palazuelo were part of the art world's ever-changing landscape this week.

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NEW YORK—Parkett magazine has appointed Bettina Funcke as its senior U.S. editor. Funcke’s previous experience includes working as an editor at the Dia Art Foundation, writing for Artforum, writing texts for catalogues, and curating lectures on the visual arts. 

NEW YORK—The Museum of Modern Art has appointed Leah Dickerman as a curator in its Department of Painting and Sculpture. She will join the museum in early 2008, succeeding Joachim Pissarro. Dickerman is currently acting head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where she also served for six years as associate curator and co-curated the 2005 exhibition “Dada,” which also appeared at the Centre Pompidou and MoMA. She has taught art history at Stanford University and at the University of Delaware.

LONDON—Bonhams auction house has shuffled its senior management staff in Europe and the U.K. Matthew Girling, currently the company’s deputy chairman and global head of jewelry, is moving to the chief executive officer spot in Europe. He will remain global head of jewelry but relinquish the deputy chairman title. Colin Sheaf will become chairman of Bonhams’ new consolidated U.K. board, but he will also remain in his position as deputy group chairman and chairman of Bonhams Asia. Pippa Stockdale, currently the managing director of the Knightsbridge location, is becoming managing director for London, taking on responsibility for both of Bonhams’s London salerooms. Shahin Virani will take on the new role of group operations director in Europe.

RIDGEFIELD, Conn.—The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum has appointed Merrill Falkenberg as curator. Falkenberg comes to the Aldrich from the Parrish Art Museum, where she served as curator of art since 2005. She also served as associate curator at the San Jose Museum of Art and taught art history at Vassar College and the San Francisco Art Institute. In addition, she has lectured on contemporary art, published a number of catalogues, and completed several research assistantships, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Farewells
NEW YORK—New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp has died of lung cancer at the age of 59, the Times reports. Muschamp’s “wildly original and often deeply personal reviews made him one of the most influential architecture critics of his generation,” according to the newspaper. He wrote for the Times from 1992 to 2004, championing then-new talent such as Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and Jean Nouvel. Born in Philadelphia, Muschamp studied architecture at Parsons School of Design, became a regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory, and eventually went to London to study architectural history and theory at the Architectural Association. Later he taught at Parsons and became the director of its graduate program in architecture and design criticism. In addition to the Times, Muschamp wrote for Vogue, House and Garden, Artforum, and The New Republic. 

COLOGNE, Germany—The architect Oswald Mathias Ungers, know for building museums in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Cologne, and Berlin, has died of a lung infection at the age of 81, Bloomberg reports. One of Germany’s most influential postwar architects, he was selected through a competition in 2000 to restore the Pergamon, the largest of five museums on Berlin’s Museum Island. The restoration was slated to be completed in 2010. Unger taught architecture in Berlin and Dusseldorf in Germany, and at Cornell University, the University of California and Harvard University in the United States. He also collected art and wrote books on architectural theory.