Thomas S. Buechner, Former Director Of Brooklyn Museum, 83, NY Times
DGH
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/arts/design/18buechner.html?ref=obituaries
Thomas S. Buechner, Former Director of Brooklyn Museum, Dies at 83
By WILLIAM GRIMES [New York TImes]
Thomas S. Buechner, who led the Brooklyn Museum through an ambitious
renovation as its director in the 1960s and who was the founding director of
the Corning Museum of Glass, died on Sunday [June 13, 2010] at his home in
Corning, N.Y. He was 83.
The cause was lymphoma, his daughter, Bohn Whitaker, said.
Mr. Buechner, a painter and illustrator on the side, served for 10 years as
the director of the Corning Museum of Glass before becoming director of the
Brooklyn Museum in 1960. At 33, he was one of the youngest museum directors
in the United States.
His signal accomplishment in Brooklyn was to oversee a decade-long program
that brought the building up to modern museum standards, with proper
temperature and humidity controls and study galleries for all departments.
Disturbed by the number of works in storage, where they were unavailable to
visitors and scholars, he transformed the space into what he called an
open-study storage gallery that put more than 1,000 paintings on display.
As part of the renovation, Mr. Buechner (pronounced BEAK-ner) created a
sculpture garden featuring architectural gems, like Louis Sullivan's
capitals from the Bayard-Condict Building on Bleecker Street, that the
museum had salvaged from demolished buildings. After a subsequent museum
renovation that lasted from 1986 to 2004, it was reopened as the Steinberg
Family Sculpture Garden.
Mr. Buechner also rescued Daniel Chester French's allegorical figures
representing Manhattan and Brooklyn, formerly on the Brooklyn plaza of the
Manhattan Bridge, and placed them on either side of the museum's main
entrance. The bridge approaches on both sides were reconfigured in the early
1960s, and the sculptures had to go.
Thomas Scharman Buechner was born on Sept. 25, 1926, in Manhattan and grew
up in Bronxville, N.Y. After graduating from the Lawrenceville School in New
Jersey, he enlisted in the Navy, which sent him to the Naval Air Corps
training program at Princeton University.
Keen to learn Spanish, Mr. Buechner went to Puerto Rico after the war and
spent a year developing promotional material for the island's tourist board.
Returning to New York, he studied at the Art Students League while working
as a night elevator operator at the Plaza Hotel to pay his tuition. He then
studied painting in Paris and Amsterdam.
In 1949 he married Mary Hawkins, who survives him. In addition to his
daughter, Bohn, of Brookline, Mass., he is survived by two sons, Thomas S.
Buechner III, of Corning, and Matthew, of Newport, R.I.; two sisters, Nancy
Lewis of Marathon, Fla., and Betsy Buechner Morris of Marblehead, Mass; and
seven grandchildren.
Doubtful about his ability to make a career as an artist, Mr. Buechner
accepted a job as assistant manager of the display department at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. When the Corning Glass Works created the Corning
Museum of Glass in south central New York State, he was named its first
director and served in the position from 1951 to 1960.
Mr. Buechner established the museum as a serious scholarly institution whose
exhibitions on ancient and contemporary glass traveled to museums around the
country. He founded two professional journals, the Journal of Glass Studies
and New Glass Review.
After resigning from the Brooklyn Museum in 1971, he returned to Corning
Glass, where he became president of its Steuben Glass division in 1973, a
position he held until 1982. He also served again as director of the Corning
Museum of Glass from 1973 to 1980.
After retiring from Corning in 1987, he returned to painting full time,
executing portraits, landscapes and still lifes. His portrait of Alice
Tully, a granddaughter of the founder of Corning Glass, hangs in Alice Tully
Hall in Lincoln Center.
His books included "Norman Rockwell: Artist and Illustrator" (1970) and "How
I Paint" (2000).