BOSTON, MA (February 27, 2014)—Frederick Ilchman has been appointed Chair, Art of Europe at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA).  Ilchman will continue to serve as the Mrs. Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings, a position he has held since 2009. Ilchman joined the MFA in 2001 as Assistant Curator of Paintings. A specialist in the art of the Italian Renaissance, he has curated numerous exhibitions, organized international conferences, contributed to scholarly publications and lectured and taught in the United States and abroad. Ilchman’s acclaimed exhibition, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (2009), organized with the Musée du Louvre, was the first major exhibition dedicated to the competition among these three renowned artists and the emergence of their signature styles. The exhibition won several awards including “Outstanding Exhibition (Eastern Time Zone)” from the Association of Art Museum Curators and was selected as one of the year’s top 10 exhibitions by the Wall Street Journal. In October 2014, an exhibition he is co-curating, Goya: Order and Disorder, will open in the MFA’s Ann and Graham Gund Gallery. In 2003, he served as the Boston curator for the traveling exhibition Thomas Gainsborough, 1727—1788, a major retrospective organized by Tate Britain, and was part of the curatorial team for the exhibition Tintoretto (2007) at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. Recently, Ilchman curated Visiting Masterpiece: Piero della Francesca’s Senigallia Madonna: An Italian Treasure, Stolen and Recovered (2013) and co-curated the exhibition Paolo Veronese: A Master and his Workshop in Renaissance Venice (2012) at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota.

Ilchman holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum laude (1990), and a Master of Arts (1992) and Master of Philosophy (1996) in Art History from Columbia University. He will receive his Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University in May 2014. He has been awarded numerous fellowships, including the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Grant (2006), Save Venice Inc. Art History Fellowship (1999–2001), the Theodore Rousseau Fellowship, Metropolitan Museum of Art (1996–1997, 1998–1999) and a Fulbright Fellowship (IIE), Italy (1997–1998). In 2010, he was a Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York City. Ilchman has been on the board of directors of Save Venice Inc., the largest private organization devoted to preserving the art and architecture of Venice, since 2005, and now is co-Project Director. He also has served as Chair of the Boston Chapter of Save Venice since 2011. 

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