Gary Tinterow, incoming director, Houston Museum of Fine Arts
The center of gravity for consummate U.S. art museum professionals is shifting towards Texas: Max Anderson to to the directorship of the Dallas Museum of Art; George Shackelford to the senior deputy directorship of the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; and now the just announced appointment of Gary Tinterow, 58, to the directorship of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, effective early next year. He succeeds long-time director Peter Marzio, who died a year ago.
In 2004, Tinterow stepped up from his 20-year European paintings curatorship at the Met to become curator in charge of the new department of 19th-Century, Modern and Contemporary Art. He became that department’s chairman in 2008. He’s a curator’s curator, having been one of the prime movers in founding the Association of Art Museum Curators, becoming its first president in 2001.
It’s worth noting that Philippe de Montebello went from the Metropolitan Museum to the directorship of the Houston MFA, before returning to the Met and (soon after) becoming its director. But that’s an unlikely trajectory for Tinterow: Tom Campbell, who bested Gary for the Met’s top post, is likely destined for a long, fruitful tenure. Tom now has very big shoes to fill in finding Gary’s replacement (perhaps splitting the job to give a separate porfolio for modern and contemporary art, which many—myself included—believe should be under separate jurisdictions).
Here’s what I said on CultureGrrl about Gary, when he became an also-ran for the Met’s directorship (as did Ian Wardropper, now director at the Frick):
The museum’s de facto curatorial leader is second to none in what he does best—organizing superb shows of 19th-century European painting. In the past year, he has outdone himself, with back-to-back bravura outings devoted to Courbet and Turner (organized, in both cases, in concert with colleagues from two other museums). These were were brilliantly elucidated, beautifully installed revelations of the depth and breadth of these major artists’ oeuvre—so perfectly conceived and executed that I felt privileged to experience
them…When I think of the shows at the Met that have most strongly engaged me, Tinterow’s, time and again, rise to the top.
As Carol Vogel wrote in her comprehensive NY Times article on the appointment and the Houston MFA’s expansion plans, moving to Houston will be a homecoming for Tinterow, who “grew up there before graduating from Brandeis University and then going to Harvard for a graduate degree in fine art.” Tinterow once told me that one of his Texas relatives was the late Ann Richards, the feisty former Governor of that state.
Gary is quite feisty himself, as you’ll see in the CultureGrrl Video, below, from the press preview for the Met’s current Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe, an exhibition (to Jan. 2) devoted to the portion of Alfred Stieglitz’s collection of American and European modernists that was donated to the Met by his widow, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. (At Tinterow’s right is Lisa Messinger, the show’s curator.)
The Picasso charcoal that you’ll hear Gary describe as “probably the greatest Cubist drawing that exists” is here:
Picasso, “Standing Female Nude,” 1910
The show and its accompanying catalogue (which Gary humorously refers to in the video) should serve as object lessons to Fisk University on why it should fully retain, not partially monetize, O’Keeffe’s important benefaction. If it’s important to the Met, it should be important to Fisk.