Metropolitan Museum's Philippe de Montebello to Retire

Photo by Don Pollard, courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Philippe de Montebello

Michael Goldberg Noel Forster One Is the Luckiest Number Splatters, Drips, Tracings, and Horsehair

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NEW YORK—Philippe de Montebello, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's director of 30 years, has announced he will retire. De Montebello, who has been at the helm of the museum for almost a third of its entire history, is planning to step down by December 31, 2008, according to the museum. "To say that his decision marks the end of an era surely constitutes one of the great understatements, not only in the museum's life, but in the cultural life of the city, the state, the nation, and the world," said James R. Houghton, chairman of the Met's Board of Trustees. Born in Paris in 1936, de Montebello began his career at the Met in 1963 in the Department of European Paintings, rising quickly through the curatorial ranks. He spent his entire career at the museum, save for four and a half years, 1969 to 1974, when he left to direct the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. During his tenure at the Met, de Montebello focused on fund-raising, educating the public, building the collections, expanding the museum's programs, and enlarging and refining the museum's buildings.

SEATTLE—The University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery has appointed Sylvia Wolf as its new director. Wolf, who takes over the position on April 14, is currently adjunct curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where she also served as endowed chair and head of the Department of Photography from 1999 to 2004. Prior to the Whitney, she worked for 12 years as a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition, she has written extensively about art and has taught studio art, art history, and museum studies at colleges and graduate schools such as New York University. She succeeds Richard Andrews, who has been at the Henry Art Gallery since 1987.

MILWAUKEE—Daniel T. Keegan has been named director of the Milwaukee Art Museum. Keegan, who has served as executive director of the San Jose Museum of Art in California since 2000, succeeds David Gordon. In addition to his tenure at the San Jose museum, Keegan headed art departments at colleges for more than two decades before beginning his museum career. He takes over the position in March.

Farewells
NEW YORK—The abstract painter Michael Goldberg died December 30 at the age of 83, the New York Times reports. Goldberg, a New York School painter, was born in the Bronx and began his art studies at the Art Students League at the age of 14. After serving in the Army during World War II, he continued his studies at the Art Students League and the Hofman school and later took over Mark Rothko’s Bowery studio. He had his first solo exhibition in 1953 at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Goldberg had works in private collections and major museums, and both he and his wife taught at the School of Visual Arts. Since 1980, he spent five months of each year in Tuscany, Italy. Most of the works he produced in Italy were shown last at September at Knoedler & Company.

BOSTON—Boston museum curator Tracey Lynn Albainy died December 18 at the age of 45 due to complications from lung cancer, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. Albainy graduated from Smith College in 1984 and went on to earn a master’s degree from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in 1987 and a second master’s from the Parsons School of Design/Cooper-Hewitt Museum graduate program in 1990. She served as an intern at the J. Paul Getty Museum, a fellow with the Preservation Society of Newport County in Newport, R.I., an associate curator of European decorative arts at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, and an associate curator of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Detroit Institute of Art before becoming senior curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

LONDON—The painter and teacher Noel Armstrong Forster died December 7 at the age of 75, the Guardian reports. Born in Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, he studied physics and fine art at King's College in Newcastle (then part of Durham University). He was working toward a PhD when he decided to abandon his studies and focus solely on painting. He had his first London solo exhibition at the AIA gallery in 1964, and later, his works were shown at London’s Camden Arts Centre in 1971. A retrospective of his work appeared in the Kunsthalle in Basel in 1975. He won first prize at the John Moores exhibition in Liverpool in 1978. He taught at art schools including Saint Martins, the Slade, Ealing, and Walthamstow and lectured at the Ipswich, Camberwell, and Chelsea schools of art. He also served in the military in Singapore and Malaysia in the 1950s.