Telfair Museum, Savannah, GA, originator of the “Dutch Utopia” show
It’s not nice to fool CultureGrrl.
When someone is stepping up to a higher position and seems smart, well-spoken but under-experienced, you search for things he’s done that indicate he’s ready for the Big Move.
That’s what I did when I recently interviewed Eric Lee, who ascends in March from the directorship of the relatively modest Taft Museum in Cincinnati to the world-class Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. I’m sure the Kimbell trustees asked their own probing questions before deciding he had the goods.
His prior jobs didn’t give him the munificent acquisitions budgets required to make the high caliber masterpiece acquisitions that the Kimbell is famous for. So all I could do on that subject was quote his comment that he closely follows the market and has “honed my eye.”
But I did want to hear about some exciting (if modest-scale) exhibitions, and he came up with Leon Polk Smith at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum at the University of Oklahoma and Dutch Utopia, opening at the Taft in 2010. The latter, in particular, sounded interesting because it examined the significant but under-explored influence that sojourns in the Netherlands had on American artists of the 19th and early 20th century. And it had the added bonus of featuring a significant local (Cincinnati) angle.
I wanted to
clarify a bit of information with regard to your interview with Eric
Lee, outgoing director of the Taft Museum in Cincinnati. Mr. Lee
mentioned the upcoming “Dutch Utopia” exhibition. That exhibition
actually originated with my museum, the Telfair Museum of Art in
Savannah, and will open here this October. Thereafter, we’re sending
the exhibit to the Taft, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and the Singer
Laren Museum in The Netherlands.
So I put it to Eric. Here’s what he said:
You are right about “Dutch Utopia” being organized by the Telfair. The
Telfair is circulating the exhibition, and the Taft will host the show.
In our conversation [when I] was going on about why the Taft was hosting the
exhibition, it must have come across that we were organizing it.
It did indeed. Here’s the relevant interchange, which occurred after Lee had gone on at some length about the strengths of the “Dutch Utopia” show:
Lee the interviewer: Was this your conception?
Lee the interviewee: It was my conception, along with our curators and we discussed this together. And we decided to move forward with it.
So now we’re back to knowing that Eric can talk the talk, but wondering if he can walk the walk. In our interview, he got particularly animated when I impolitely mentioned that I had the same uncertainty about him that I had about the Metropolitan Museum’s new director, Tom Campbell: Does he have the requisite experience?
I admired how Eric took me to task and leaped to his colleague’s defense:
Tom Campbell, as reported on your blog, said [about his lackluster performance at his first press conference]: Give me some time to really listen and learn more about the museum and then he’ll be more specfic in answering questions. That really is a very important thing to do and when one starts a new position like this. You do have to have some time to come up with more specific ideas.
In both cases, my attitude remains cautious optimism, with a dash of show-me skepticism.