The last time I interviewed Max Hollein, 46, who has just been named to become the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s new director (effective June 1), he was in New York for the November 2014 annual meeting of the Bizot Group (aka the International Group of Organizers of Large Scale Exhibitions), for which he then was (and still is) chairman. Bizot consists of the heads of about 60 of the world’s leading museums, who convene to compare notes and grapple with hot-button issues affecting their institutions.
Photo: Städel Museum
The first time I met Max, we had a wide-ranging discussion, pegged to the 50-million-Euro renovation and underground expansion for contemporary art at the Städel Museum, one of the three Frankfurt museums of which he is currently director.
Today I again contacted FAMSF’s director-designate, asking what he hopes to accomplish at his new gig. This was his prudent reply:
In regard to more about plans, initiatives and first steps, I would have to respond like possibly everybody else: I first want to meet with the staff and the full board, get a full picture and go from there, rather than announcing more than what I have done already in my two quotes in the press release [my link, not his], which certainly give already an indication of where my mind is set.
Obviously. one can see, as an example, what we have focused on here in Frankfurt in regard to programming based on the collection, outreach and collection development.
I got a more detailed sense of Hollein’s museum management proclivities, thanks to my November 2014 conversation with him over lunch (more on that soon), after which he was heading over to the nearby Marian Goodman Gallery to see this John Baldessari exhibition (which included images of historic works from the Städel’s collection). An expanded version (with the related works from the museum’s collection) later opened at the Städel.
To appreciate the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s good fortune in luring Hollein from Frankfurt, read the rapturous, rueful praise in the farewell press release on the website of the Städel.
Nikolaus Schweickart, chairman of the Städel Museum foundation, mourned:
We hugely regret Max Hollein’s imminent departure. The Städel and Liebieghaus are thus losing one of their most successful and most visionary directors, who took both museums to entirely new dimensions—not least of all by way of expansions in terms of content and spatial facilities alike—while also substantially developing their educational mission. The Städel has rarely reached the degree of success it boasts today. That is a circumstance we owe especially to Max Hollein.
The mayor of Frankfurt, Peter Feldmann, who serves as chairman of the supervisory board of the Schirn Kunsthalle, the modern and contemporary art institution that Hollein also directs (along with the Liebieghaus sculpture collection), called his departure, “a great loss to the German cultural world.”
You can meet Max yourself, via this video introduction, posted on YouTube two weeks ago by m/Oppenheim Associates, the nonprofits’ search firm. In it, he describes the different missions of the three institutions he currently directs, noting that the Städel is “a very civic institution” that is “an anomaly” among German museums, because “it is almost entirely privately funded…through philanthropic support” and earned income, rather than through government subsidy.
COMING SOON: Highlights from our prior conversation.