Changes signal new directions at MFAH
Impending retirement of power couple of conservation prompts hiring of fast-rising star
Achanging of the guard is imminent at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s internationally prominent conservation department.
Power couple David and Zahira (Soni) Véliz Bomford, the conservation department chairman and senior paintings conservator, respectively, are retiring at the end of March. MFAH director Gary Tinterow has hired Per Knutås, an up-and-comer from the Cleveland Museum of Art, as the new head of conservation.
The transition signals the growing attention to modern and contemporary art that will be displayed in the museum’s new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, which is due to open next year. Artists in recent decades have led conservators into a new frontier, vastly expanding the types of materials that must be preserved, including time-based mediums such as video. The MFAH has been actively acquiring such works for more than a decade now and continues to collect. “It’s changing every day,” Tinterow said, “but Per’s delight with it will serve us well.” Knutås is a “full-spectrum conservator” with entrepreneurial energy, he added, “who has shown that he is adept at assessing the institution’s needs, finding resources and executing plans.”
He said the much-loved Bomfords were “absolutely the right people at the right time” when he coaxed them out of their first retirement six years ago to help develop the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation Center for Conservation, which opened in October atop the MFAH’s Fannin Street Garage. David Bomford had worked over the decades with many of the great masterworks of Western art at the National Gallery, London, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, where he was acting director.
Elevating the museum
Bomford said that after working nearly 50 years in the museum world, he felt he had reached a “landmark” that was an appropriate place to finish. He elevated the MFAH conservation staff ’s existing strengths, scholarship and scientific research; and during his tenure, the department became a leading resource in disaster response for museums across the nation.
Working double duty as the MFAH’s curator of European art, he also organized spring’s major exhibition “Vincent van Gogh: His Life in Art,” which opens March 10. That collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo caps a six-year string of major exhibitions he led, including “Spectacular Rubens,” “Habsburg Splendor,” “Michelangelo and the Vatican,” “Hidden Layers” and most recently “Tudors to Windsors.” Bomford also helped secure significant acquisitions, ranging from secular and religious medieval masterpieces to Old Master and Impressionist paintings and neoclassical sculpture — all of it now installed in redesigned galleries.
Véliz Bomford, a scholar of Spanish painting, has also pro- vided important scholarship and insight. Most spectacularly, she discovered, identified and restored Diego Velázquez’s early-17th-century masterpiece “Kitchen Maid” (c. 1620), which had gone unnoticed for decades in the museum’s collection. She also is deeply involved with the technical research and treatment of the museum’s Franz Kline paintings, a project that has expanded into a collaboration with a half dozen of the nation’s top museums.
She also led efforts to preserve “The Contribution of Negro Women to American Life and Education,” an important 1953 John Biggers mural sited in Third Ward’s Blue Triangle Community Center, after it was severely damaged during Hurricane Harvey.
Going back to England
At the end of March, the couple will return home to London, where they have five children and seven grandchildren — the most important factor in their decision.
Knutås, a native of Sweden who has lived in the U.S. since 1998, arrives in July. He will oversee a staff of about 16, setting conservation and scholarship priorities across an encyclopedic swath; the collections of the MFAH and its house museums, Bayou Bend and Rienzi, comprise about 70,000 works.
As the chief of conservation in Cleveland, Knutås has led an only slightly smaller staff, with excellent facilities; and last year he established an important center for the study of Chinese paintings and the first postgraduate training center for that discipline. “Per is a remarkable young fellow who has had a very quick climb in the world of conservation,” Tinterow said.
He is not a curator, however. A new curator of European art will be hired later.
Knutås said he was honored and excited to join the MFAH’s team. He also wants to dive into Houston’s larger art scene, hoping to dialogue with the city’s many working artists about processes that can inform how conservators of the future will work.
“I’m obviously following somebody very great in our field,” Knutås said. And the lure of the new center, which is one of the largest facilities of its kind, didn’t hurt.
“Oh, my god, it is stunning,” he said, “not only visually but from a practical standpoint with its layout and facilities. The possibilities there are endless.”