Eye on the Frick

This was a banner year for Anne Litle Poulet. After three decades in the curatorial trenches, mostly at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, she launched a landmark traveling exhibition and landed a prestigious new job.

The exhibition, “Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment” -- featuring an 18th century French artist’s iconic images of American and European leaders -- opened in May at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Three months later, Poulet, 61, was appointed director of the Frick Collection in New York. Succeeding Samuel Sachs II, who stepped down after running the Frick for six years, she took charge in October.

The first woman to lead the venerable institution founded by industrialist Henry Clay Frick, Poulet oversees a collection that spans the Renaissance through the 19th century and a research library. Installed in Frick’s 1913-14 Manhattan mansion, the collection includes paintings by Ingres, Goya, Turner, Van Dyck, Vermeer and Whistler; 18th century French furniture, Italian Renaissance bronzes and Limoges enamels.

But 2004 looms even larger for Poulet. As the “Houdon” tour continues at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles through Jan. 25 and winds up at the French national museum in Versailles in the spring, she will settle into her new position.

“One of the things that is so nice about going to work at the Frick is that it has a superb curatorial staff,” Poulet said on a recent trip to the Getty. “I’ll be involved in selecting exhibitions and making acquisitions, but I’ll have so much else to do, and I’m looking forward to that.”

Beyond that, she wasn’t ready to comment.

But the art world is watching.

“People who work with her always feel that she is a very exciting and provocative presence,” said Getty Museum director Deborah Gribbon, who met her in Boston when Poulet was at the MFA and Gribbon was curator of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. “Anne is a great connoisseur with wonderful ideas and keen observations, but she is always willing to listen to other people.”

The Frick appointment is “a no-brainer,” said Scott J. Schaefer, who shared an office with Poulet at the Boston museum in the late 1970s and is now the Getty’s curator of paintings. “She does sculpture and decorative arts and has done paintings in the past; she encompasses almost everything the Frick does in a single, exceptional person.”

With fans like that and an impressive professional record, Poulet didn’t need to promote herself, but she had lots to say about Houdon.

A natural teacher with a warm smile and a sly wit, she exudes enthusiasm. Every question is welcome and every sculpture has a story.

“Houdon wanted to represent the great figures of his time,” she said. “He was interested in people of achievement and character.” And if he idealized them, he still made startlingly realistic portraits.

“You see every vein and the sagging flesh of an elderly man and this long, stringy hair,” Poulet said of a marble bust of Benjamin Franklin. “And yet the eyes are fantastically intelligent and wily. Houdon really captures his character.”

Another subject, John Paul Jones, was largely forgotten at his death in 1792. “In 1904, the American Navy wanted to bring him back as their founding figure,” Poulet said. “He had been thrown into a crowded cemetery and they wanted to be sure they were disinterring the right skeleton, so they measured the skull against the Houdon and found that the dimensions were exactly the same.”

Other subjects are not as well known to Americans, but they compose a fascinating cast of characters. The ravishingly beautiful Mme. Paul-Louis Girardot de Vermenoux married a Swiss banker who died when she was 19. Another Swiss banker, Jacques Necker, fell in love with the young widow. When she declined his marriage proposal, he married her son’s governess.

“When you get into portraits, you get into all this intrigue,” Poulet said.

Educated at Virginia’s Sweet Briar College and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Poulet went to Boston’s MFA in the late ‘70s on a temporary basis to organize “From Corot to Braques” and write its catalog. But she stayed on -- eventually taking charge of the European decorative arts and sculpture department, cultivating donors and building the collections considerably with pockets of strength in everything from European ceramics and French silver to English arts and crafts.

In a massive 1998 reorganization known in art circles as the Boston Massacre, Poulet was dismissed from the museum by director Malcolm Rogers. The following year, after a public outcry, she accepted an emeritus position at the museum, which gave her access to the collection.

Her interest in Houdon began in 1992, when she organized an exhibition for the Louvre on French sculptor Clodion, a contemporary of Houdon.

“At the MFA in Boston we had this superb portrait of Thomas Jefferson,” she said, referring to the image that appears in miniature on the U.S. nickel. She was impressed by the quality of his work. No major international exhibition of his work had been done, and she decided to take up the challenge.

More than a decade later, she is pleased with the result. “I was learning all the time, which is part of the fun,” she said. “I liked the fact that we were breaking new ground.”

At the Frick, she is in charge of a long-established collection and a program of exhibitions, such as “A Beautiful and Gracious Manner: The Art of Parmigianino,” opening Jan. 27 with 60 drawings and a few paintings and prints by the Italian Mannerist.

Colleagues say she will probably break new ground there too.

“I love works of art,” Poulet said. “I will always be turned on by works of art.”