Krens to bow out at Guggenheim
NEW YORK -- Thomas Krens, the risk-taking museum head who led the Guggenheim organization on an international building and branding spree, will step down this year as director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, its board chairman is expected to announce today.
Krens, who has held the post since 1988, will relinquish it once a successor is found and continue supervising the last of his grand projects, construction of a Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, according to a written statement by the foundation’s chairman, William Mack.
The 6-foot-5, motorcycle-riding Krens became a lightning rod figure in the art world as he spearheaded the Guggenheim’s creation of Gehry’s swirling museum in Bilbao, Spain, which was an instant international sensation, but also initiated projects that fell far sort of expectations, such as a branch on the Las Vegas Strip.
Krens scaled back his role 2 1/2 years ago, when he turned over directorship of the flagship Guggenheim in New York to its veteran chief curator, Lisa Dennison. But Dennison announced last summer that she was leaving to become an executive vice president of the Sotheby’s auction house
The board committee that had been looking for a new head of the Fifth Avenue museum now has “redefined the parameters of the search,” according to the statement, to first find a director of the broader foundation, which oversees that museum and others in Venice and Berlin, as well as Bilbao and Las Vegas, where the Guggenheim has a joint venture with Russia’s Hermitage Museum.
Krens, 61, is a member of the search committee, which now will have a far more powerful job to offer potential candidates. “We expect interest will be high and that the candidates will be top tier,” Mack said in the statement, which also noted that Krens would still be a prime player in “the largest and most complex initiative ever undertaken by the Foundation,” namely the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which is scheduled to open in 2012 and be a third larger than Gehry’s acclaimed structure in Bilbao.
None of the principals could be reached for comment Wednesday, but in the statement Krens said he looked forward to making the Abu Dhabi project -- one of a string of museums being built there -- “a new model for a universal contemporary museum.”
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