Posted on Tue, Sep. 23, 2008
Art Museum names a new curator

In its first curatorial hire since the death of longtime director Anne d'Harnoncourt, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has named Peter D. Barberie curator of photographs.
Although he comes from a post as lecturer at Princeton University, Barberie, 37, is something of an Art Museum insider. He worked as a curatorial fellow there starting in 2003 just after the museum acquired the Julien Levy collection, cataloging its 2,500 photographs. He organized the exhibition "Looking at Atget" in 2005 and co-organized "Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery" in 2006.
He replaces Katherine C. Ware, who is leaving this month to become photography curator of the New Mexico Museum of Art.
Barberie, who has lived in Philadelphia since 2003, said that in July he was about to take a teaching job in Toronto when a call from the museum made him change course.
"It was a thrill because this is sort of a dream come true. I love the PMA and am very proud of my curatorial training there," he said. "I hoped that someday I would be back there as a curator."
At Princeton - where he received his master's and doctorate - he taught undergraduate courses in art history and advised seniors on theses concerning Brancusi, the Barnes Foundation, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.
In his new job, which begins Oct. 1, Barberie will curate shows in the Levy Gallery, now housed in the museum's Perelman annex across the street from its main building, and will develop the photography collection. (The museum declined to disclose his salary.)
With 30,000 pieces in hand, what's left to do?
"It's a big collection now, with strong examples of most periods and places," said Barberie. "And we also have great, deep holdings of artists such as Strand and Stieglitz. But one of the objects I would like to get is a 19th-century American landscape. It would be great to get a super example of that. I would love to find a world-class daguerreotype, the first process of photography, which was short-lived because you couldn't make more than one copy.
"Philadelphia was such a tremendous place for early photography, it was really the American city that embraced the medium. I would love to collect more Philadelphia material, early Philadelphia material but also the creative work going on in the city today."
His essential ambition?
"The Philadelphia Museum of Art has one of the greatest collections of modernist art in the world, and I want the photography holdings to reflect this as much as paintings, prints and sculpture. The 2001 acquisition of the Julien Levy Collection brought many great modernist works, and I look forward to building on that. We also have great photographs from other times and places, but inevitably there are certain holes to fill. I want the photography collection to be one of the greatest anywhere, because that is worthy of the museum."
Barberie says his interest in photography was first sparked by a professor. As an art history major at the University of Connecticut (he grew up near Hartford), he took a course with William E. Parker, "who was a photographer himself of some note who would have these rollicking evening lectures on the history of photography." He ended up at Princeton doing a doctoral dissertation on the French mid-19th-century painter, engraver and photographer Charles Marville.
The thing Barberie finds so compelling about photography is that it "doesn't always fit comfortably in the art world. I like the messiness of it, that it is part of so many things outside of art."
In this way, he is in sync with his partner, Virgil Marti, the Philadelphia artist whose fluorescent "Bullies" wallpaper and a dozen other works can be found in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and who has spoken about the sometimes-fuzzy divide between art and interior design.
In developing the collection, Barberie will spend time cultivating what he categorizes as a "surprising" number of local collectors. And as for his eye, and the question of what makes a great photograph, he says that in a way he waits for photographers to answer this question for him.
"I don't have a set conception of what makes a great photograph. I have to be open-minded, to have my mind changed constantly."
But then he concedes, "I love photography's ability to document a subject over a long period of time and many geographical spaces, so you can have a comprehensive picture of a subject. I'm thinking of Atget documenting Paris over a 30-year period."
Barberie says that as much as he enjoys putting together exhibitions, he is particularly enamored of writing about art. When the Morgan Library and Museum in New York acquired a group of 67 Irving Penn photographs, he wrote a brief essay for the collection's brochure and pointed out the adversarial relationship the celebrated Vogue portraitist had with his subjects. Particularly funny is his description of Salvador Dali, "who usually dominated photographers and the portraits they made of him," and who "sits stylish and defiant but somehow ensnared on a heaped rug, a bit withered-looking, as though artifice, Dali's oxygen, were too rare in Penn's studio."
The writing in essays, brochures and news releases - these are aspects of a curator's job whose importance Barberie gleaned from d'Harnoncourt. "Attention to detail, every detail of an exhibition or installation, was certainly something I learned from her," he said.
"What I really learned from her," he added, "is that working at an art museum as a director or a curator is a civic responsibility. She really saw herself as a citizen of Philadelphia and the museum as one cog in the wheel of the city. It's the idea that I'm not just a curator with other curators to impress, but the work I do needs to be relevant and useful to the broader city."