The hires are welcome—and long overdue. Associate curator Kristen Hileman left the Hirshhorn in 2009 to head up the contemporary art department at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her departure left a huge void in the D.C. gallery scene, where she was greatly loved for her enthusiastic participation in juries, panels, and artist talks. Few other curators from Federal City—the National Portrait Gallery’s Anne Goodyear being one of them—show the same spirit of volunteerism in D.C. I’ll put the question to Budak, Ho, and Yoshitake now—can any of y’all fill Hileman’s shoes?

The Tate Modern has appointed Dr. Achim Borchardt-Hume as head of exhibitions. Borchardt-Hume is currently the chief curator at the Whitechapel Gallery and was previously curator of modern and contemporary art at the Tate Modern, director of the Barbican Art Gallery, and exhibition organizer at the Serpentine Gallery.

Deborah Cullen has been appointed the director and chief curator of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. Cullen director of curatorial programs at El Museo del Barrio. The Gallery will move in 2016 from Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus to the Lenfest Center for the Arts at the Manhattanville campus.

Sonya Rhie Quintanilla has been named the new curator of Indian and Southeast Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Quintanilla was previously curator of Asian art at the San Diego Museum of Art and will succeed Stan Czuma who retired after 33 years in 2005.

Barbara Buhler Lynes has resigned from her position as curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and director of the Museum’s Research Center. Lynes is a foremost scholar in the life and art of Georgia O’Keeffe, publishing many books and essays related to her work. Prior to her tenure at the museum, Lynes was a Professor of Art History at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Montgomery College, Dartmouth College, and Vanderbilt University.

Carol Robbins has retired after 47 years from the Dallas Museum of Art. During her nearly 50 years at the museum, Robbins has served as Curator of Textiles, Curator of New World and Pacific Cultures and in 2006 was appointed the Ellen and Harry S. Parker III Curator of the Arts of the Americas and the Pacific.

Art Historian Daniel H. Weiss and current president of Lafayette College, has been selected as president of Haverford College starting July 2013.

Margi Conrads has been named the Deputy Director of Art and Research at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Conrads is currently the Samuel Sosland Senior Curator of American Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. Conrads received her doctorate from the City University of New York Graduate Center and is the editor and primary author of the catalogue of the museum’s American painting collection.

The Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, MI has named Lisa Melandri as the director. Melandri graduated with a degree in art history from Harvard University and previously served as artistic director for the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design of Philadelphia and deputy director for exhibitions and programs at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California.

English art critic, scholar and painter, John Golding has died at 82. Formerly a faculty member of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Golding is possibly best known for his influential book, “Cubism: A History and an Analysis 1907-1914″ first published in 1959. Though he was a leading scholar in Cubism, he was quoted in 1994 in The Guardian as saying:

I continue to enjoy looking at Cubist pictures as much as I ever did. But I have come increasingly to realize that I do not really understand them, and I am not sure that anyone else does either.

Paola Morsiani, currently curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, has been named director of the Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College. Morsiani was born in Venice, Italy and received her Laurea in art history and criticism from the University of Padua in Italy before continuing on for a MA in Arts Administration from New York University.

To wit, “Does the grammatical gender of nouns in an artist’s native language enable us to predict how those artists will personify things in their art?” co-host Mike Vuolo asks psychologist Lera Boroditsky:

Boroditsky [and Edward Segel] identified works by Italian, French, German and Spanish artists, all grammatically gendered languages, from around 1200 AD up to today. Artworks that depicted a personification of an abstract entity, things like justice, time, fame, peace, truth. Their sample size was about 800 [drawn from ARTstor] and they found that 78% of the time the gender in the artwork matched the grammatical gender of the word being personified in the artist’s native language. In other words, if in your native language death is feminine you’re far more likely to personify death as a woman.

A resolute high Modernist, he was out of sympathy with many of the aesthetic waves that came after the great achievements of the New York School, notably Pop (“a very great disaster”), Conceptual art (“scrapbook art”) and postmodernism (“modernism with a sneer, a giggle, modernism without any animating faith in the nobility and pertinence of its cultural mandate”).

Alejandro Zaera-Polo has been selected as the dean of Princeton University’s School of Architecture. Zaera-Polo has been a visiting lecturer in architecture at Princeton since 2008. On top of his work at Princeton, Zaera-Polo is also the Berlage Chair at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Norman R. Foster Visiting Professorship of Architectural Design at Yale University. Alejandro Zaera-Polo will succeed Stan Allen, the dean since 2002, who will return to full-time teaching and architectural design.

Joel Smith has been appointed the first curator of photography at the Morgan Library & Museum. Smith has been working at Princeton University Art Museum since 2005 and was named Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography there in 2011.

Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada has named Gaëtane Verna as director. Verna was previously director and chief curator at the Musée d’art de Joliette in Lanadaudière, Québec.

Sotheby’s has appointed Ryoichi Hirano as International Senior Specialist for Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art and Deputy Managing Director, Sotheby’s Japan. Hirano is the former head of the art gallery Hirano Kotoken and gallery director of the Yayoi Gallery in Tokyo.

Artforum reports that the Tel Aviv Museum of Art appointed longtime Israel Museum chief curator Suzanne Landau as its director and chief curator. “This announcement comes as a surprise to those who thought the dual position would be split between two people, a curator based locally and a director hailing from abroad, according to Haaretz. Landau will be replacing Mordechai Omer, the former director and chief curator, who died eight months ago.”

According to The New York Times, the J. Paul Getty Museum announced that Timothy Potts, former director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, will replace Michael Brand who left the museum in 2010.

Michael Brand was recently named Director of the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, according to ABC Sydney. “His first priority is to ensure the Gallery remains ‘a popular, admired and loved gallery, in a great international city.’ And one thing he’s keen to do is continue the ‘ambitious’ trend the Gallery’s had of generating its own exhibitions instead of taking packaged versions.”

On February 29, the Russian artist and historian Eliy Belyutin died. In 1954 he founded a school of painting called “New Reality” that focused on artists’ feelings and thoughts. He also wrote art-history books including two volumes on 19th century Russian art, which he co-wrote with Nina Molina.

The Noguchi catalogue raisonné begins.

Art historian Semavi Eyice was one of four to receive Turkey’s Presidential Grand Awards in Culture and Arts this year.

The Rose Art Museum is back.

So is the Musée d’Orsay, as France Today reports:

The aim of the new Orsay is to surprise visitors, to make them reflect, says [director Guy] Cogeval. “We will put the artworks into context with other disciplines: history, literature, music, even philosophy and psychoanalysis. The approach will be broader, looking for similarities, for intersections.” That’s something Cogeval has long done. As a curator, he introduced the idea of interaction with cinema as the basis for Hitchcock et l’Art, an exhibit shown in 2000 in Montreal and later at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It examined the role of Salvador Dalí’s work in the dream sequences in Spellbound. He returned to cinema in Il Etait une Fois Walt Disney; the 2006 exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris spotlighted stories and legends—the sources of inspiration for the Disney team.

“I’d like to have a major exhibit at the Orsay on the birth of cinema,” he says. “Not so much about its technical invention, but its mental invention, what made artists look forward to the possibility of images in movement. Everyone from Degas to Wagner laid the ground for it to happen.”

Users should be concerned about several problems with this solution. First of all, the old BHA content will not be available from the new provider because of copyright problems, apart from the last couple of years it was published. Secondly, the editing of the database has changed: IBA will not continue with the previous system of national editors, and the number of journals indexed has been reduced dramatically.

Engelstad notes that there are several alternatives to BHA, but is forced to conclude that “the survival of traditional art bibliographies seems quite uncertain.”

“For artists, whose calling required careful observation of the world around them, this heightened appreciation of the spectator elevated their own status and offered new opportunities. Bruegel the Elder’s Ice Skating before the Gate of St. George of 1558 is the first clear example of a scene from daily life serving as the sole subject of a work of art…

…Bruegel’s Ice Skating before the Gate of St. George and Seven Virtues mark a critical point in the development called “genre” subjects. They established an important precedent by demonstrating that art could be created from the minutiae of daily life and still display the artist’s skill and imagination. It could be based on observations of of the world around the artist and still satisfy the expectations of a demanding viewer. An art of the ordinary could amuse and entertain and, at the same time, it could be used to address more serious questions…”

Sullivan’s article explains the origins of this new mode of spectatorship in classical thought, explores its connections to life in mid-16th century Antwerp, and offers a model for resituating the origins of what is known as the Northern Renaissance. As the term itself suggests, the Northern Renaissance has traditionally been constructed for the non-specialist audience as the introduction of 15-16th century Italian motifs and figure types, and Classical architecture, into artworks produced in Northern Europe. Critical observers immediately question this construct as overly simplistic, as many of my students have when they encountered it in their texts. As an art historian whose specialty lies elsewhere, I admit that I have struggled to offer those students a satisfactory response. Sullivan’s article should serve as an reference point for addressing this gap in the survey, and be of great interest to specialists and nonspecialists alike.

• The Art Instinct author Denis Dutton has died.
• Transnationalism’s all the rage at the MLA.
• European libraries are digitizing.
• Art in America has a new editor, journalist Lindsay Pollock.
• The Haus der Kunst has a new director, Okwui Enwezor.
• The Carnegie Museums have a new president, John Wetenhall.
• BBC Radio interviews Anthony Caro, discusses Giacometti’s Studio with author Michael Peppiatt, discusses Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life with Justine Picardie, and asks V&A director Mark Jones about his decade-long tenure on the eve of his departure.

Supported by a dedicated team, he masterminded groundbreaking exhibitions such as The Surrealists On Holiday (2004), inspired by the time spent in Cornwall by Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and others in 1937, and a series of exhibitions in 2009 marking Charles Darwin’s bicentenary. In the gallery it was not unusual to see a Picasso hanging alongside the work of a local artist (Brian championed contemporary Cornish art), next to a toddler’s scribbled response … [He] was widely recognised as an authority on British portraiture, advising the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London among others. The Dictionary of Portrait Painters in Britain Up to 1920, written with Mervyn Cutten and published in 1997, is the standard reference book on the subject. Brian produced 20 books and catalogues, including The Shayer Family of Painters (1981) and Rupert: The Rupert Bear Dossier (1997) … The day before he died, he was celebrating his latest success from his hospital bed, having secured funding to buy a Tacita Dean painting for the gallery.

According to The New York Times, “Roy R. Neuberger, who drew on youthful passions for stock trading and art to build one of Wall Street’s most venerable partnerships and one of the country’s largest private collections of 20th-century masterpieces, died on Friday at his home at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan. He was 107 and had lived in New York City for 101 years.” Neuberger’s memoirs include colorful reminiscences of artists and art historians he knew. In The Passionate Collector (2003) he writes:

One July evening in 1926, I entered the Café des Deux Magots and noticed a young man under verbal assault by some pseudo-intellectuals who were baiting him … His name was Meyer Schapiro, he was twenty-one years old, a year younger than I was … In this architectural debate at the café, Meyer’s adversaries were trying to trip him up in a discussion of the flying buttress. Meyer said that this motif, revealed in the artistic rendering of a horse with its legs extended out both in front and in back, impossible in reality, first appeared in two works a thousand miles apart. The two artists could not possible have known each other, or been familiar with each other’s work. This kind of coincidence has occurred many times in history … Meyer Schapiro was a vigorous, extremely knowledgeable speaker, a fanatical salesman of ideas, and a pretty good painter as well. He came out fine in the debate and we became instant friends.

Serendipity plays an acknowledged role in science (LSD, the color mauve, krazy glue, and plastic wrap are just a few of its products), and sociologists are beginning to examine its part in humanities scholarship. The library at the Warburg Institute is one example of an institution designed to take serendipity into account. There are other libraries, however, where scholars are seated according to discipline, region, and time period, limiting the possibility for surprise findings. How has serendipity affected your scholarship? Are there ways to integrate it into the research process?