John Elderfield

NEW YORK—This summer sees the end of John Elderfield’s time as chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. For many art-world observers, it seems like he’s been a major figure at the museum, and on the global museums circuit, for as long as we can remember. In fact he came to MoMA in 1975, and since then he’s been at the heart of a string of memorable exhibitions, many of which he discusses here. Elderfield also has gifts that not many of his colleagues in the museum world share: the ability to write catalogs that are as readable as they are erudite, for example, and an eagerness to share his enthusiasms with everyone he comes into contact with.

Elderfield, who is British (though his accent has faded to almost nothing), studied at the University of Leeds and at London’s Courtauld Institute, where he completed his Ph.D. on Kurt Schwitters, before studying at Yale University on a Harkness Fellowship from 1970 to 1972. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973, was named a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government in 1989, and was promoted to Officier in 2006. He was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 2001 and an associate fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2006. And in 2005, Time magazine named him one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year.

Last week, Elderfield spoke to ARTINFO in his office overlooking the sculpture garden at MoMA

John, I can’t believe you’re actually about to retire.

Well, at the end of July I’m going to step down from my job as chief curator, painting and sculpture. This is something that senior people at the museum have to do in their 65th year. But I’m not retiring; I’m still working on two more exhibitions. One is a collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago for spring 2010 on Matisse’s paintings between 1913 and 1917. And in the winter of '11 to '12, we’re doing a full de Kooning retrospective.

You’ve been at MoMA for more than 30 years. But you’ve had several different positions, haven’t you?

I think it’s really good to have chapters in your life. Which is partly why I’m so excited about this new chapter that’s coming up. I came here as a curator in painting and sculpture in 1975, and after five years I never thought I’d stay. But at that point I was offered the job as head of the drawings department, and that was what kept me here. I didn’t know much about drawings, but I did that for 10 years and then I had the [chief curator] “at large” position for ten years. Then the circle came around and I’ve done painting and sculpture for another five years.

What would you say are the most important exhibitions you’ve been involved in during the time you’ve been here?

In terms of large shows that define an artist, I’d say Schwitters in '85, Matisse in '92, and de Kooning, which is scheduled for winter 2011 to 2012. I’ve been involved in other exhibitions that have been as transformative as these, like the Mondrian [in 1994] and the Bonnard [in 1998], but they were done with other people. For the Schwitters and Matisse I obviously had an enormous amount of support, but they were more like solo efforts, and they’ve stayed with me.

I’ve always felt that the only justification for moving great works of art around the world is to increase knowledge—or perhaps knowledge, appreciation, and pleasure all mixed up together. The ideal museum show leaves the artist with a different identity from the one that he had before you did the show, not out of any wish to assert your own identity on the artist but in order to make a real shift in understanding.

I think that the literature on Schwitters and Matisse, and the kind of shows and writing that were done after those exhibitions, is very different than what came before. With Matisse it’s easy to plot: It’s amazing to think that in the '80s even very sophisticated people were still putting him down as some sort of bourgeois decorator, in a way which seems preposterous now. And before our Schwitters show, there was no real sense of who he was or the range of his work.