COOPER-HEWITT DIRECTOR LEAVES FOR RCA; HARVARD ART MUSEUM CREATES NEW POSITION

The New York Times’s Robin Pogrebin reports that Paul W. Thompson, the director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, is stepping down to become the new president of the Royal College of Art in London. During his tenure, Thompson has overseen an effort to expand the museum’s Carnegie Mansion, a sixty-four-million-dollar project that will create 70 percent more exhibition-gallery space, a new library, and additional classrooms for the museum’s master’s program. Thompson said the museum has completed 65 percent of the fund-raising. In an interview yesterday, he added, “It’s such a wonderful job in the art and design world, I really couldn’t say no.”

In other news, Dave Itzkoff reports in the New York Times that it’s no mystery why the Harvard Art Museum has named a new position in honor of Patricia Cornwell. The best-selling crime-fiction author whose books include the Kay Scarpetta novels, Cornwell made a commitment of one million dollars to the museum’s Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. The institution will use that money, as well as a matching grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to endow a position called the Patricia Cornwell Conservation Scientist. In a statement, the museum noted that the new position will provide it with “an enhanced capability to analyze works of art” and allow it to “employ sophisticated forensic applications to studying works of art.”