William Lieberman (NY Times)
Hyfler/Rosner
William Lieberman, 82, Prominent Curator, Dies
By GRACE GLUECK
William S. Lieberman, a legendary museum figure who held top
curatorial posts at both the Museum of Modern Art and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, steering major collections to
the institutions, died in his sleep at his home in Manhattan
on the night of May 31. He was 82.
The apparent cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, a museum
official said.
A power in the art world for more than 50 years, Mr.
Lieberman was at his death the Jacques and Natasha Gelman
special consultant for modern art at the Metropolitan. He
mounted more than 35 shows there.
Among the stellar works he acquired, mostly as gifts, was a
trove of 81 School of Paris masterpieces, including works by
Picasso, Braque, Bonnard, Miró and Matisse, owned by Mr.
Lieberman's friends, Jacques Gelman, a film producer, and
his wife, Natasha. The collection was bequeathed to the Met
in 1998. In 2003, the Met received 100 works from the Pierre
and Maria-Gaetana collection, assembled by the art dealer
Pierre Matisse, a son of the artist, and his wife. Mr.
Lieberman was a close friend of Mr. Matisse.
"He was a great presence in the modern museum field, and he
had a huge influence on two generations of collectors and
scholars," Philippe de Montebello, director of the
Metropolitan, said yesterday.
Mr. Lieberman had an encyclopedic visual memory and could
tell you who owned almost every important work of art in the
modernist canon and what it looked like. Mr. de Montebello
related how Mr. Lieberman would tell the acquisition
committee about works he wanted to acquire: "He would stand
in front of a painting and describe it in the greatest
detail without ever turning to look at it."
His installations were noted for his apt pairings of works
by different artists in which he saw complementary
relationships.
Not one to doubt his own importance, Mr. Lieberman had an
authoritative yet low-key manner. His conversation was
occasionally sprinkled with pungent Yiddish words. He liked
to be called Uncle Bill.
Anne Strauss, an assistant curator of modern and
contemporary art who worked closely with Mr. Lieberman for
25 years, has been named executor of his estate. He leaves
no immediate survivors.
William Slattery Lieberman was born in Paris on Feb. 14,
1923, the son of Max Lieberman, a scholar of late medieval
church history, and his wife, the former Bertha Slattery. He
was raised in Paris and New York, where he attended Townsend
Harris, and went on to graduate with honors from Swarthmore
College.
For pocket money in his teens he trotted tourists around the
British Museum and the Louvre while his father did research
in them. He was a summer volunteer at the Modern in the
early 1940's, and in 1943 he joined its department of
exhibitions and publications. He took time off for graduate
school at Harvard, enrolling in the famous museum course
taught by Paul J. Sachs. On his return to New York in 1945,
he became an assistant to Alfred H. Barr Jr., the Modern's
founding director.
In 1949 he was named director of the museum's new department
of prints. He expanded the department to include drawings,
and in 1967 he was appointed a curator in the department of
painting and sculpture. When the museum's curatorial
departments were reorganized in 1971, he became the founding
director of the department of drawings.
At the Modern he organized more than 40 exhibitions, bowing
out in 1979 with "Art of the Twenties," a comprehensive
survey of painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, prints,
posters, architecture and design that drew wide acclaim.
In 1979 he was summoned by the Met to become chairman of its
department of 20th-century art after the death of Thomas B.
Hess, who had held the job for less than six months. Mr.
Lieberman remained chairman of the department, renamed the
department of modern art in 1999, until June of last year,
when the department was given a new designation, the
department of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art.
Reporting directly to Mr. de Montebello, Mr. Lieberman was
active at the museum until his death.
In 1968 he brought off one of his great collecting coups for
the Modern. Working away at the museum on a weekend, as
usual, he answered a call from a trustee announcing that the
remains of Gertrude Stein's art collection, 38 works by
Picasso and 9 by Juan Gris, could be bought for $6 million.
Alice B. Toklas, Stein's companion, was an old friend of Mr.
Lieberman's parents.
Acting fast, he formed a syndicate of four trustees and an
outside collector to buy the estate, insisting first on
assurances that they would give the Modern whatever it
needed to fill gaps in its collection. The sale was
negotiated within 48 hours, edging out a number of other
offers.