EDMUND PILLSBURY (1943–2010)

Edmund “Ted” Pillsbury, a former longtime director of the Kimbell Art Museum whose aggressive acquisition campaign brought the museum international acclaim, died Thursday, reports the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He was sixty-six and lived in Dallas.

“There is complete devastation among his family and friends at the suddenness of his death,” said Richard Brettell, former director of the Dallas Museum of Art and a close friend of Pillsbury. “Ted was one of the latter twentieth century’s most important museum directors.”

Pillsbury was hired as the Kimbell’s director in 1980. During his eighteen years there, Pillsbury—whom New York Times art critic John Russell once characterized as “one of the most gifted men in the American museum profession”—organized some of the museum’s most artistically ambitious and academically provocative exhibitions. He also embarked on a tenacious acquisition campaign that would result in the Kimbell’s signature cache of masterpieces, including works by Rubens, Delacroix, Cezanne, Mondrian, Picasso, Manet, Monet, and Matisse.

“Ted was… single-handedly responsible for turning the Kimbell Art Museum from an institution with a great building into one whose collection matched in quality its architecture,” Brettell said.