MOMA curator accepts position with Institute for Advanced Study

Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator of of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art, will join the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in January. He is an accomplished art historian whose work focuses on the history of modern art.

Varnedoe's work as curator at the museum — a post he has held for 15 years — is the most recent step in a long and accomplished career.

"Kirk Varnedoe has singularly shaped the way the world sees and thinks about modern art," said MOMA director Glenn Lowry.

Varnedoe's doctoral thesis was the first successful effort to put the drawings of Rodin, a French sculptor, in chronological order. It was so significant that its core results were published when Varnedoe was 25 years old, before his dissertation was finished.

He went on to work at MOMA, where he investigated the debate over the political and ethical implication of Western artists' engagement with non-Western art. He worked to organize an exhibition called "Primitivism in Twentieth-century art" that was so well-received it led him to be appointed adjunct curator the following year.

In 1984 he received a MacArthur "genius" fellowship — one of the most prestigious awards in all of academia. He used the grant to write a book entitled "A Fine Disregard: What Makes Modern Art Modern."

The Institute for Advanced Study is a private, independent center founded in 1930 to support advanced scholarship and fundamental research across a wide range of disciplines.

...Though not a part of the University, it has close ties with Princeton. The Institute's most famous scholar was Albert Einstein, who served on the Institute's faculty while living in Princeton.

...The Institute has no formal curriculum, degree programs, schedule of courses, laboratories or other experimental facilities.

...Members of the faculty are free to pursue their own scholarly work. Most of the faculty visit the Institute on temporary one-year fellowships, but a few — including Varnedoe — are given permanent appointments that allow them to do scholarly work under no pressure, taking as long as they like. The Institute supports them indefinitely, and they are allowed to set their own pace.

"The only obligation on your agenda is to read and select applications for visiting scholarships," Varnedoe said. "The Institute encourages you to be as public an intellectual as you want to be," he explained. "The primary duty is to do your own work."