NEW CURATOR FOR NATIONAL GALLERY; WINDFALL FOR HARVARD
The National Gallery of Art in Washington has appointed Mary L. Levkoff, curator of European sculpture and classical antiquities at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as its new curator of sculpture and decorative arts, reports Carol Vogel in the New York Times. Levkoff replaces Nicholas Penny, who left in February to become director of the National Gallery in London. In addition to her work as curator, Levkoff is the author of books including Hearst the Collector and Rodin in His Time.
Vogel also reports that the Harvard Art Museum has received a windfall from Emily Rauh Pulitzer, a former curator who earned a graduate degree at Harvard. The donation includes artworks worth nearly two hundred million dollars and a cash gift of forty-five million dollars. The bulk of the money will go toward the expansion and renovation of Thirty-two Quincy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the building that formerly housed the university’s Fogg Art Museum and the Busch-Reisinger Museum. The university plans to integrate its arts holdings from the Fogg, the Busch-Reisinger, and its Arthur M. Sackler Museum there in a project overseen by the architect Renzo Piano. The art to be donated by Pulitzer includes thirty-one modern and contemporary works. Although Harvard’s art collection boasts about 265,000 objects, said Thomas W. Lentz, the museum’s director, it has “shocking gaps” in the postwar period that the gift will help remedy. Pulitzer and her husband, the newspaper scion and collector Joseph Pulitzer Jr., who died in 1993, have been major donors to Harvard for decades. Over the years, they have financed the purchase of ninety-two works of art, including paintings by Georg Baselitz, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. “Harvard is developing a really exciting program with a greater emphasis on twentieth-century art,” Pulitzer said in a telephone interview.
