2014 has been a banner year for me. In February I was promoted to Chair, Art of Europe at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This now means I am in charge of a team of eight curators and support staff and one of the finest collections of European paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts in North America, some 30,000 works total, including 38 paintings by Monet. In May, I finally received my PhD in Art History from Columbia University (I recommend not taking seventeen years to write a dissertation, even on an artist as interesting as Jacopo Tintoretto!). And in October I opened a large exhibition of the work of the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. I feel as if the many discussions about art back in the early 1980s with Mr. Engelland and George Knight have come to fruition. I stay in touch with Terry Murray, Stephen Higgins, and a few others in our class, but I would like to see more of my ’85 classmates.
Frederick Ilchman
1985
