Marandel: From France to Detroit to LACMA

J. Patrice Marandel, named Monday as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s curator of European paintings and sculpture, is heading West with high hopes for putting his stamp on a collection that he has watched develop over the last 20 years.

“I think it’s a wonderful collection. It has grown extraordinarily,” said Marandel, a 48-year-old Frenchman who specializes in French and Italian painting of the 17th and 18th centuries. Having served as the Detroit Institute of Arts’ curator of European art for 13 years, he will succeed Philip Conisbee, who will become curator of French paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Marandel, who will assume his new position in October, praised his predecessors’ selections of European art at LACMA and the Ahmanson Foundation, which has provided acquisition funds. “Philip Conisbee and the former curators have bought very serious objects . . . and the trustees are very passionate about the objects they buy. The museum has a great tradition, and I am very happy to join it.”

LACMA Director Michael Shapiro called Marandel an obvious choice. “He was highly recommended,” Shapiro said. “I wrote to several people asking for suggestions, and his name came up most frequently. When he came to visit, we walked through the museum and he made the galleries come alive in a wonderful way.” The museum had “a strong response” to an advertisement for the position and to queries, Shapiro said. “I spoke to a number of people by telephone, but Patrice was the one we wanted,” he said.

Marandel has also won rave reviews from his peers. “It’s a marvelous appointment,” John Walsh, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, said. “Patrice is one of the most experienced people in the business, both in buying pictures and organizing exhibitions.”

Art historian Robert Rosenblum of New York University said: “How wise of the museum to appoint Patrice. He’s super fabulous. He’s one of the most delightful, witty, charming people I have ever met in my life. He’s totally international, and he’s very well versed in everything from 16th-Century French paintings to Jeff Koons.”

Marandel will make his new professional home at a museum that is struggling with a financial crisis, but he is leaving an institution that is even more impoverished. The Detroit Institute of Arts was among the first American museums to be hit by the recession, and it is just beginning to rise out of its problems with a fund-raising campaign, Marandel said.

Marandel was born and raised in Paris. He was graduated from the Institute d’Art et d’Archeologie, Universite de Paris-Sorbonne, with a diplome d’etudes superieurs in art history. He first came to the United States in 1967 for a summer internship at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and returned in 1969 with a grant from the French government as a Focillon Fellow at Yale University.

He settled in New York in 1970 and worked for two years as a researcher for the Menil Foundation, then became chief curator of the Rhode Island School of Design’s museum. He moved on to a curatorial post at the Art Institute of Chicago, from 1973-1978, then served as a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston for two years before joining the Detroit Institute of Arts.

His exhibition credits include “The Golden Age of Naples, Naples Under the Bourbons (1732-1805),” which was organized by an international team of curators and was seen in Naples, Chicago and Detroit in 1979-1981. During his Detroit tenure he also organized “Symbolism in Polish Painting (1890-1914),” which traveled to Warsaw in 1984, and collaborated on “Francois Boucher,” a retrospective of the French artist, which traveled to New York and Paris in 1986. He recently organized an exhibition of French oil sketches from the 17th to 19th centuries, to be circulated by the American Federation of Arts.