Soon after, the French architectural firm BLP was entrusted with renovating it and bringing natural light back into the original three-story building, designed in an eclectic style by the architect Charles Planckaert. The idea "was to open it to the city and make it more accessible to the public", says the museum's head of collections Hélène Ferron. The central patio's glass roof has been restored and a mosaic by Giandomenico Facchina that lay behind layers of plaster has been uncovered.
"You'll also find a primer for the exhibitions," Monetta White, the director and chief executive of MoAD, tells The Art Newspaper. "You'll find a framework, some vocabulary, some definitions of the themes." Meanwhile, she points out, much of the rest of the $500,000 renovation has gone into critical infrastructure improvements visitors will hardly notice, such as lighting upgrades and a new heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system.
In the decades before the First World War, Munich was celebrated for its so-called "painter princes"-a tiny group of top-tier artists who set themselves up in grand mansions, turning out wildly popular salon paintings, mythological scenes and portraits of other A-listers. The last of these great artist-aristocrats was Franz von Stuck, one of Europe's most important Symbolist painters, who was also a sculptor, an architect and a designer.
Brian Ferriso, director of the Portland Art Museum since 2006, is resigning to become director of the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas. Oregon Public Broadcasting broke the story Friday morning, Aug. 20, citing a press release from the Dallas museum. Ferriso, who has spent the past several years guiding the Portland museum's massive, $111 million redesign and addition, will leave after the unveiling of the completed project on Nov. 20, and will take the reins in Dallas on Dec. 1, 2025.
