Getty Museum director named Wheaton commencement speaker
March 10, 2000
Author and art historian John Walsh, director of the internationally renowned J. Paul Getty Museum, will deliver the keynote address at Wheaton[base ']s 165th Commencement, which will be held at 10 a.m. on Saturday, May 20, 2000.
Walsh was appointed director of the Getty in 1983, where he has overseen the dramatic growth of collections containing some of the highest quality works of art worldwide and the conception and construction of an architecturally stunning new and larger museum. Under Walsh[base ']s directorship, the Getty has acquired a number of important and internationally significant works including Irises by Vincent van Gogh and Michelangelo's drawing, The Holy Family with Infant.
At the commencement exercises, Walsh will share the dais with artists and honorary degree recipients Denise Jefferson [base ']65, Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn. Jefferson is the director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance School and Mason is a celebrated painter of abstract art. Kahn, who is married to Mason, is also a painter, focusing on abstract interpretations of landscape.
In 1998, Walsh was named vice president of the J. Paul Getty Trust in addition to director of the museum. Before joining the Getty in 1983, Walsh was curator of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and served as visiting professor of fine arts at Harvard. A graduate of Yale and Columbia Universities, Walsh spent a year at the University of Leyden in the Netherlands as a Fulbright Graduate Fellow. After completing his Ph.D., he served as lecturer and research assistant at the Frick Collection in New York, then became associate for higher education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and began teaching part time at Columbia. Before accepting his position at the Museum of Fine Arts, Walsh was a full-time professor of art history at Barnard College and Columbia University.
Walsh is the author of many articles and catalogues in his field of specialization, Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. He has also published two recent books, Jan Steen, The Drawing Lesson and The J. Paul Getty Museum and Its Collections: A Museum for the New Century.
Walsh is a trustee of the Claremont Graduate University, a member of the governing board of the Yale University Art Gallery, the Smithsonian Council, the American Antiquarian Society, the Century Association and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as president of the Association of Art Museum Directors in 1989-90. Walsh is married to Wheaton alumna Jill Galston Walsh [base ']60 with whom he has three children. They live in Santa Monica, Calif.