Job opportunity - LA
December 13 2013
Picture: LA Times
News that Scott Schaefer, above, is to retire as Senior Curator of Paintings at the Getty next year means that one of the museum world's plummest jobs is up for grabs (tho' the position is not yet open on the Getty's vacancies page). The LA Times reports:
Scott Schaefer, who has played a key role in building the collections of Los Angeles’ two biggest art museums over the last 33 years, will retire next month from his job as the Getty Museum’s senior curator of paintings.
Since joining the Getty in 1999, Schaefer has overseen the acquisition of 70 paintings and pastels and five sculptures, including “Rembrandt Laughing,” a recently purchased self-portrait of the artist as a young man; Edouard Manet’s “Portrait of Madame Brunet,” J.M.W. Turner’s “Modern Rome -- Campo Vaccino,” Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian painting “Arii Matamoe” and Jean-Antoine Watteau’s “The Italian Comedians.”
As curator of European paintings and sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1980 to 1987, Schaefer helped engineer the acquisition of 64 works, among them a “Madonna and Child” by Jacopo Bellini, “Apollo and Phaethon” by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Anthony van Dyck’s “Andromeda Chained to the Rock.”
Interestingly, the last picture mentioned, the Andromeda, was excluded from the 2004 Van Dyck catalogue raisonne as inauthentic. I've always been intrigued by it, and would love to see it, but have only ever managed to get a poor quality photograph. In its handling it is hard to see where it fits in with Van Dyck's oeuvre, but I wouldn't entirely rule it out yet.
