As the Frick Collection in Manhattan prepares to start a new chapter in its renovated Gilded Age mansion early next year, the board on Thursday selected as its next leader Axel Rüger, the secretary and chief executive of the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
In the spring of 2025, Rüger, 56, will replace Ian Wardropper, 73, who will have served as director for nearly 14 years of one of the great private collections of European old master paintings and decorative arts.
“He brings steady, strategic insight, as well as a proven ability to inspire and guide dynamic teams to great achievement,” Elizabeth M. Eveillard, the board chairwoman, said of Rüger, in a statement. “As we prepare to embark on a new era for the Frick, I am confident in his ability to steer us well.”
The selection is likely to surprise some observers, given that Wardropper, in announcing his departure last January, said that it would be great if his replacement came “from within” and that he hoped that Xavier F. Salomon, the deputy director and chief curator, would “be one of the candidates.”
Calling leadership of the Frick “an irresistible proposition,” Rüger, in the statement, said, “It’s an exciting time to reopen, develop exciting programs for loyal visitors, and welcome new audiences.”
The announcement is the latest changing of the guard at the nation’s major museums, which have included new directors at the Guggenheim, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Earlier this month, Glenn D. Lowry, the longtime director of the Museum of Modern Art, announced that he would step down.
These leadership transitions have the potential to remake cultural institutions at a time when the job description has grown increasingly complicated and demanding and concerns about diversity have grown more urgent.
Given heightened consciousness around appointing more museum leaders of color, the Frick’s appointment may be seen by some as a missed opportunity for change.
As an American institution, the Frick will present Rüger with a new set of challenges, especially the necessity of private fund-raising — compared to Europe’s government support — and a board of trustees, as opposed to the Royal Academy’s complex structure (the museum is governed by its council, made up of Academicians and external members). The Academicians include artists like Tracey Emin, Isaac Julien and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Programming at the Royal Academy has been strong of late, including its current show on modernist art made in Ukraine and upcoming shows on Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael, as well as on Kerry James Marshall.
At the Royal Academy, Rüger oversaw the redevelopment of the Royal Academy Schools and organized the exhibitions “Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists From the American South” last year and a retrospective of the British artist Michael Craig-Martin, which opens Saturday.
Before joining the Royal Academy in 2019, Rüger served as director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and its sister institution, the Mesdag Collection, in The Hague, which showcases the art of the 19th-century painter Hendrik Willem Mesdag and his wife.
At the Van Gogh Museum, Rüger increased the audience by a third and expanded the building by adding a new entrance hall and conservation studio.
Rüger previously served as curator of Dutch paintings 1600-1800 at the National Gallery in London, where his activities included the reinstallation of the Dutch paintings collection.
Wardropper oversaw the Frick’s controversial expansion of its Fifth Avenue home, during which the museum temporarily took up residence in the modernist Breuer building on Madison Avenue.
“My goal is to leave the institution in good shape programmatically and financially and that will be the case,” Wardropper said last January. “I’m hoping I can turn it over to somebody with fresh ideas.”
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