Getty Center’s Kurt Forster Resigns Post

Kurt W. Forster, founding director of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, has resigned to accept an appointment at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich.

Forster, a Swiss-born art scholar who joined the Getty in 1984, will ultimately head the Zurich university’s Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, but he will initially teach the history of art and architecture, according to a statement released Thursday by the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Forster’s resignation is effective June 30. He will assume his new post around the first of the year, after spending six months on research. His successor has not been named.

During his tenure at the Getty, Forster, 56, had shaped a fledgling study center which includes a vast library and archive, imports a wide variety of visiting scholars and attempts to broaden art history’s traditional viewpoints.

“The idea is to study art from any relevant angle so the whole field is re-exposed to the full range of the humanistic disciplines. . . . We want to gather a constellation of minds that will not sit each in his own pigeonhole but swarm all over a subject and each other,” Forster said, soon after taking charge of the center, which is one of seven programs run by the trust.

Eight years later, Forster has judged the center “one of the most exciting experiments in the recent history of American scholarship,” in a printed statement.

Currently traveling in Europe, Forster could not be reached for comment, but he summed up the center’s development in the prepared statement: “Beginning with the rudiments of a small museum library, and fueled by high expectations of assuming a meaningful role in future American art scholarship, the center grew . . . to become one of the nation’s preeminent research centers for arts and culture of the past and present.”

Trust Director Harold M. Williams lauded Forster’s accomplishments at the Getty: “His vision, energy and intellect have shaped the center, making it a stimulating environment for scholarly research and debate. Through its programs and collections, the center has crossed traditional boundaries of academe and enabled scholars in the humanities and social sciences to re-examine and reassess the history of art in its fullest possible scope,” Williams said.