Displaying items by tag: fine arts museums of san francisco

After 15 months without a director, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will appoint Colin B. Bailey, a deputy director at the Frick Collection in New York, the head of the consortium. Bailey, 57, is a renowned specialist in 18^th and 19^th century French art and has been at the Frick since 2000.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the modern-leaning M.H. de Young Memorial Museum and the neoclassical California Palace of the Legion of Honor, was left leader-less after the death of its previous director, John Buchanan, in 2011. The city of San Francisco and a private board of trustees oversee the museums, which collectively are the largest public arts institution in San Francisco and one of the largest art museums in the state of California.

The announcement, which was made by the museum board on Wednesday, March 27, 2013, comes after a considerable period of tumult among the museums; the past year has included tense labor negotiations, firings of senior staff members, and scathing criticism of the board’s president, Diane Wilsey. Wilsey, an art collector, philanthropist, and prominent San Francisco socialite, has been accused of using the museums’ resources for her own benefit and of nepotism.

The museums’ recent troubles have not deterred Bailey’s excitement to join the Fine Arts Museums. His abundance of museum experience includes stints at the National Gallery of Canada, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.    

Paris’ Musee du Louvre and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the Legion of Honor and the de Young Museum, announced that they have reached a mutual agreement and will collaborate on a series of exhibitions and exchanges. The institutions will share works from their incendiary collections over the course of the next five years including antiquities, paintings, decorative arts, prints, drawings, textiles, and sculptures.

The Louvre and Fine Arts Museums have been working on the arrangement for the past two years and will celebrate its commencement with the exhibition, Royal Treasures from the Louvre: Louis XIV to Marie-Antoinette. The show, which opened on November 17 and features a collection of decorative arts from the French monarchy, will be on view through March 17, 2013.

The agreement will allow each world-renowned institution to broaden their international reach and inhabitants of each city will have a new selection of masterpieces to view. Loans between the museums may include entire exhibitions or single objects.