Museum Curator Ousted
Baltimore's Richardson Had Been on Job for 23 Years
By Paul Richard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 30, 1998; Page D03

Brenda Richardson, the deputy director, chief curator and key
aesthetic leader of the Baltimore Museum of Art, has been discharged
by the board there after 23 years on the job.

Richardson, 55, a perfectionist art historian much admired by her
colleagues for the rigor of her scholarship and the catholicity of her
taste, was told last Friday by the trustees that her post had been
abolished in "an administrative restructuring." She was given three
weeks to depart.

Her leaving clears the decks for Doreen Bolger, the museum's new
director, who will arrive there four days later. News of Richardson's
departure was reportedly received with anger and distress and even
public weeping by members of the staff.

"You know what it means to me to leave the Baltimore Museum of Art,"
she wrote her colleagues Wednesday. "The BMA has been my home for more
than two decades. The Museum's staff has been my heart and its
collections my soul, and I leave with great emotion and deep sadness."

The Baltimore Museum, as it now presents itself to members of the
public, is largely Richardson's creation. The museum's new West Wing,
its recent acquisitions, its scholarly publications and especially the
range of its public exhibitions all clearly bear her stamp.

Though her exhibitions there include "A Grand Design: The Art of the
Victoria and Albert Museum," Richardson is chiefly known for carefully
gauged shows of contemporary art. These include "Andy Warhol:
Paintings (1962-1975)," "Frank Stella: The Black Paintings," "Barnett
Newman: The Complete Drawings (1944-1969)," "Bruce Nauman: Neons,"
"Gilbert and George" and more than 70 others. Though regarded as a
champion of minimalist abstraction, Richardson has also shown the
portraits of Chuck Close, the "Last Suppers" of Warhol and John
Waters's films. Unlike other museum specialists in contemporary art,
many of whom waver with the shiftings of art fashion and the vagaries
of the market, Richardson is known for her ferocious dedication to the
art she displays.

From 1979 to 1997, Richardson worked in close partnership with
Director Arnold Lehman, who left Baltimore last summer to become the
new director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Lehman, responding to the
news of Richardson's departure, has told the press that he believes
the "trustees and the new director have made a tragic error in
judgment."

Bolger, his successor, in explaining the Richardson decision, has said
that Baltimore's "excellent artistic program needs to be complemented
by stronger community education programs and by greater attention to
diversity."


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