Douglas Druick’s passion for Art Institute pays off
BY KARA SPAK Staff Reporter/kspak@suntimes.com November 28, 2011 12:41AM
Douglas Druick, the new head of the Art Institute. | Jean Lachat~Sun-Times
Article Extras
Updated: December 29, 2011 8:00AM
Douglas Druick was 12 years old when he hopped a Montreal bus for a Van Gogh exhibit at the city’s Museum of Fine Arts.
That’s when the magic happened.
“The big moment for me, it’s cliché almost,” Druick, now 66, said. “I went to [the exhibit], and I was totally blown away.”
Five decades later, he still remembers seeing Van Gogh’s art created in the spring of 1888, when the artist moved to Arles, France.
“There was one flowering tree that I remember stopping dead in front of,” Druick said. “I almost have a photograph in my mind of myself in the gallery looking at that particular picture. It was this flowering tree against a blue sky.”
In August, Druick was named the 11th president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, the landmark that has provided its share of magical moments since 1879. For Druick, it’s the culmination of a career at the Art Institute that began more than a quarter century ago.
Steady, focused, absorbed and engaged, he is described by friends and colleagues as a man who had opportunities to leave the Art Institute but stayed because he loved the museum.
Soft-spoken and intense, Druick — whose name rhymes with Buick — was the curator completely immersed in his exhibits, the boss politely greeting a museum security officer while walking through a gallery, the co-worker who took the time to attend a colleague’s baby shower.
His knowledge of art is encyclopedic, his sense of humor quick and dry.
“I think people can be intimidated by his intelligence and position,” said Sarah Guernsey, the Art Institute’s director of publications. “The guy is cool. He’s not a boring, fancy-tied museum director. He is interested in all sorts of different things.”
Ian Wardropper, director of the Frick Collection in New York, worked with Druick at the Art Institute until 2001, when Wardropper left for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Douglas is very serious and very rational,” Wardropper said. “I think that’s probably what people think of first is his high seriousness. When one gets to know him, he’s got a wonderful, subtle sense of humor.”
Druick’s ascent into the art world wasn’t a linear path from his tween Van Gogh experience to heading up one of the world’s most storied art collections. And his selection as the leader of the museum was never a sure thing despite his years of working there.
’It’s always a thrill’
When Druick was a child, his family traveled from their Montreal home to New York City, where his grandmother lived. The trips included a visit to the Met, and the first stop was the Egyptian galleries. There, Druick dreamed of being an archeologist who could “go and unearth treasures.”
He also remembers seeing a Pierre Auguste Cot painting on one of these museum trips and thinking “That’s art!”
“It showed two people essentially with no clothes on running, because it’s starting to rain,” he said. “One of them is holding this diaphanous piece of material to cover themselves. In other words, pure fiction to get two attractive young people running nude through the forest.”
He studied medicine at McGill University, but a summer researching gastric ulcers made him think about switching to law. He graduated with degrees in English and philosophy, never taking an art history class.
A master’s degree in English in Toronto — “where I just read, read, read, read, read, you know, had fun” — followed, and then three months in business school.
“I couldn’t imagine applying it to anything beyond the case studies that we were given,” he said.
He wanted to pursue something research-driven that wouldn’t necessarily lead him to a university job. He thought about art, how much he enjoyed visiting galleries with a roommate when he was studying in Toronto.
“I loved works of art because of their beauty,” he said. “I also loved the fact that works of art circulate in the great big world. Dealing with art is both dealing with its history as well as the creative and aesthetic dimensions of it. It’s also dealing with issues of ownership and availability — the business side. So I thought, you know what? That sounds like a good thing to do.”
He studied art at Oberlin College and spent a summer interning at the National Gallery of Canada. He joined a doctoral program at Yale and spent a year in Paris working on his dissertation on Henri Fantin-Latour, who has two paintings in the Art Institute.
The National Gallery hired him as curator of European prints while he was working on his doctorate. His dissertation on Fantin-Latour led to his first big international exhibition, opening at the Grand Palais in Paris.
At last, he found his vocation.
“It was a great thrill,” he said of the opening night of his first exhibit. “It’s always a thrill.”
‘He would live, breathe,
eat his subject’
In 1985, James Wood, the former president of the Art Institute, recruited Druick from the National Gallery of Canada to the Art Institute as the curator of prints and drawing.
In the years that followed, Druick became known for advancing the scholarship of art as well as making it accessible to the most novice of viewers. In 2006, Druick’s role was expanded to include leading the department of medieval to modern European painting and sculpture. “What I’ve been trying to do over the years is to develop the collections so that the stories we tell are richer, more complex and ultimately more engaging,” Druick said.
Druick curated “Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840-1916” (1994), “Seurat and the Making of ‘La Grande Jatte’” (2004), “Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre” (2005) and “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South” (2001), among others.
“The exhibitions that can be credited to Douglas’ tenure were some of the biggest and most impressive exhibitions that have happened in the last 25 years,” said Sally S. Block, executive director of the Association of Art Museum Curators. “Many of these shows have traveled all over the world.”
James Rondeau, the chair and curator of the Art Institute’s contemporary art department, considers Druick a mentor. The two worked together on “Jasper Johns: Gray” in 2007.
“I came in as a junior [curator] but he was someone very, very open to discussions across the range of staff,” Rondeau said.
From the inside, for more than two decades, Art Institute staff members saw Druick manage two departments, turning out a parade of exhibitions.
“The thing that I admired about Douglas is the intensity of his research,” said Wardropper. “He would just live, breathe, eat his subjects for a couple years and then would turn out these marvelously deep catalogs, just beautiful shows.”
No detail was too small for his attention, said Guernsey.
“A great thing about Douglas is that he can do these fancy, high academic catalogs,” she said. “He can also write the perfect label” to connect visitors to the art.
‘Earned the trust
and respect of the staff’
Gloria Groom, 19th century European painting and sculpture curator, has worked at the museum for 25 years, often closely with Druick.
“Even before he had this opportunity to become a candidate as director, I saw him looking beyond our department to the [entire] museum,” she said. “I saw that happening years ago. You can get so immersed in your project and department, and I saw him making decisions based on the larger picture and helping bring us into it.”
Druick is the first insider to be promoted to lead the Art Institute. For years, museums of all types turned to business leaders to head the organizations. Art Institute staffers weren’t sure whether a curator from within or outside the museum, or a curator at all, would replace president James Cuno, who left in June to lead the J. Paul Getty Trust.
In the months leading up to Druick’s promotion, colleagues were cheering on one of their own.
“I don’t mean to be Pollyanna, but this is someone who has been here so long and has earned the trust and respect of the staff,” said Rondeau. “People felt really good and really supportive [of Druick’s appointment]. That was really genuine.”
Guernsey, the publications director, agreed.
“I was thrilled that they chose to hire someone from within,” she said. “He loves the museum, he knows the museum, he is completely dedicated to what we do.”
Since August, Druick ended rotating gallery closures, started cross-department staff meetings and is working on projects to enhance online access to the galleries and exhibits.
He wants to increase attendance to special exhibitions, to create a sense of urgency that the Art Institute is offering something extraordinary for a limited time.
“I think when we go through all this effort, bringing things from around the world, investing all the time, obviously it’s a natural inclination to want to be able to share it with as many people as possible,” Druick said.
He wants others to experience what he saw as a boy who encountered Van Gogh’s vision of a flowering tree.
“Nothing beats being in front of the work of art,” Druick said.
Comments Click here to view or make a comment