by Jon Lackman | 2 March 2006 | Museums
The Art Newspaper has synopsized and printed excerpts from William Rubin’s unpublished memoir, A Curator’s Quest: “Barr appointed him curator of the department of painting and sculpture. ‘I was walking on air,’ Rubin writes. But William Lieberman, who had joined the museum as Barr’s assistant in 1945 and became a curator in 1953, was less thrilled with the news: ‘Bill [Lieberman] had been thought by many to be Alfred’s intended successor (and some Trustees felt that he should have been).’ By the early 1970s, ‘a truly needless tension had developed between us.’ Rubin says he took Lieberman to lunch ‘to see if we could smooth things over’, but when Lieberman said, ‘Bill, I want you to be my number two man’, Rubin explained that was not the job that Barr had offered him. Lieberman said, ‘Let’s take this to the Trustees.’ When they did, a committee created a new department of works on paper and made Lieberman head; they made Rubin chief curator of paintings and sculpture. After seven years, Lieberman resigned to become the director of the fledgling department of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan.”
