When he began teaching art history courses while completing his graduate studies at Columbia University in 1995, Frederick Ilchman quickly realized something.
"The first semester … we did the trip to the Metropolitan Museum and I brought the class there and we talked in front of the paintings and the sculpture and had a great time," said Ilchman. "When I got the class evaluations at the end of the semester, they all said that the museum visit was the best class. So then the next semester, I did two museum visits … and that began to tell me something: that working around original objects could be my life's focus."
Since then, Ilchman, now the Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), has devoted his life to the study of art. In his role at the MFA, he has organized and curated major exhibitions, including the critically acclaimed "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice," which closed at the MFA this past August.
After completing his graduate work at Columbia, Ilchman received two grants that enabled him to conduct research and live in Venice, Italy from 1996 to 2001. He was then hired by the MFA to be a curator for the Art of Europe Department.
In Boston, he took an active role in the museum's exhibition process and several years after joining the MFA he proposed an exhibition on the 16th century Venetian painter Tintoretto to the museum's director, Malcolm Rogers.
As is the general practice, before Ilchman made his proposal to Rogers he put together a fully conceptualized plan of the exhibition, complete with all of the works of art that would need to be borrowed from other museums' collections. While Rogers was interested in the idea, he wanted Ilchman to make the exhibition more innovative than just a single artist show. Faced with a dilemma that is commonly experienced by museum curators — whether to do a show of a single artist or of an entire group — Ilchman decided to suggest something different: an exhibition with some of the focus of a single artist show and some of the context of a multiple artist show.
This idea led to a focus on three artists: Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese — some of the most influential painters of the Italian Renaissance. As with any major exhibition, even after the proposal was approved, the next several years were spent refining the checklist of works, negotiating loans from other museums and coordinating logistics and finances.
During this process, Ilchman worked with his colleagues in the Art of Europe Department at the MFA and at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, with which the MFA partnered to stage the exhibition.
"Our contacts in America helped the Louvre get things and the Louvre's contacts in France helped us get things," said Ilchman. "That's the kind of cooperation that makes a big difference."
Although he declined to speak about the specific costs of the show, Ilchman stressed that bringing a work of art from Europe can be pricey. "You have to be sure you really want it in the show," he said. Ilchman also said that a significant expense was involved in reconfiguring the gallery to house the paintings.
"The museum rarely makes a lot of money out of something like this," said Ilchman. "We do an exhibition because it's important to bring to the public and to advance scholarship, not to just drive your bottom line."
In March 2009, "Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice" opened to critical acclaim. It was comprised of over 50 paintings from museums in Europe and the United States and among its many memorable aspects was a painting by Tintoretto displayed on the gallery's ceiling.
Although the painting had been customarily displayed on museum walls, it was originally created for a ceiling and the curators planned accordingly by creating a new frame and a temporary ceiling display the work.
The exhibition has now moved to the Louvre in Paris, but Ilchman is already at work on his next project, a major exhibition of the Spanish artist Goya for the spring of 2012. "I've got to think of something that's going to make as much impact as putting a painting back on the ceiling, so I've put my thinking cap on," said Ilchman.
