RICHARD OLDENBURG (1933–2018)
Richard Sandomir of the Boston Globe reports that Richard Oldenburg, the former director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 1972 to 1995, who oversaw important exhibitions of work by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso—in addition to spearheading a major $55 million expansion for the museum, among other significant achievements—has died. He was eighty-four years old and passed away at his home in Manhattan.
Oldenburg, the brother of Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, came to MoMA in 1969. He was initially hired by the museum to run its publications division. He was a well-liked man, according to the late Blanchette Rockefeller, a two-time president of the museum. Though he lacked a curatorial agenda, he did insist on weekly lunches of sandwiches and wine with his top curators. John Elderfield, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the institution, said: “They were often rowdy. Dick was often exasperated, but had the knack of bringing a meeting to a close without promising anything at all and dealing with problems individually behind closed doors—or not. He had the further diplomatic talent of not doing anything at all so that problems went away by themselves—at least, usually.”
During his time at the museum, Oldenburg increased MoMA’s annual budget from $7 million to $50 million; pushed its endowment up to $180 million from $20 million; and raised its attendance numbers considerably. “When I think of Dick and the gift he gave me and the curators, it was a sense of stability,” said Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s current director.
Oldenburg, unlike his famous sibling, never made art, and he understood that the artist’s life was not for him. “[Claes] had the free spirit which I longed for,” he told People magazine in 1984. “But I was born with an excess of caution.”
