Frick Collection appoints new chief curator

June 21, 2000
Web posted at: 1:36 p.m. EDT (1736 GMT)

(CNN) -- The Frick Collection in New York has tapped a Canadian museum official to become the second chief curator in its 65-year history.

Colin B. Bailey, who has been deputy director and chief curator at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, is to join the staff October 2. He replaces Edgar Munhall, who recently retired.

"I find absolutely thrilling and irresistible the opportunity to work among the incredible treasures that comprise The Frick Collection," said Bailey, a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century French painting, and an authority on Renoir.

The collection, which includes works by Rembrandt, El Greco, Titian Vermeer, and Whistler, contains masterpieces ranging from the early Renaissance to the late 1800s. It is housed in a mansion built by steel and railroad tycoon Henry Clay Frick.

Bailey, who has held posts at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, recently was guest curator for The Frick Collection's exhibition "French and English Drawings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries from the National Gallery of Canada."

"We anticipate benefiting from the wisdom and energy he will offer The Frick Collection as a scholar and esteemed colleague," Frick Director Samuel Sachs II said.

The museum also appointed Barbara O. Roberts as conservator. Roberts, who replaces Sveteslao Hlopoff, has worked extensively with private collectors and major public institutions.

The Frick Collection
National Gallery of Canada

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