Charles Moffett — curator focused on Impressionists

Charles Moffett, a curator who reframed scholarly understanding of the impressionists and their era in exhibitions at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington and other major museums, including in San Francisco, died Thursday at his home on Fishers Island, N.Y. He was 70.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Lucinda Herrick.

As a young curator at the Met, Mr. Moffett produced a string of impressive exhibitions, starting in 1973 with “Van Gogh as Critic and Self-Critic,” a one-room show that introduced visitors to the artist’s way of thinking by showing the works he liked and loathed, and why.

Two blockbusters followed: “The Impressionist Epoch,” organized in partnership with the Louvre Museum, and “Monet’s Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism.” In 1983, he organized the New York version of “Manet: 1832-1883,” the most comprehensive show of the artist’s work ever seen in the United States and, according to John Russell, writing in The New York Times, “one of the great exhibitions of the age.”

At the National Gallery of Art, where he was the senior curator of paintings in the late 1980s and early 1980s, Mr. Moffett mounted important exhibitions on Paul Gauguin and Cézanne. After being appointed director of the Phillips Collection in Washington in 1992, he organized small-scale, jewellike impressionist exhibitions that dealt with specific works or themes: “The Impressionists in Winter: Effets de Neige” and “Impressionists on the Seine: A Celebration of Renoir’s ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party.’ ”