Philip Conisbee, 62; former curator at LACMA, National Gallery
Philip Conisbee, a celebrated curator of European paintings at Washington's National Gallery of Art whose reputation for blockbuster exhibitions and significant acquisitions followed a distinguished tenure at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has died. He was 62.
Conisbee died Wednesday night at his home in Washington's Georgetown neighborhood after a battle with lung cancer, which was diagnosed last summer.
During his five years at LACMA, Conisbee acquired such significant works as Paul Cézanne's "Sous Bois (Under the Trees)," and he became known for the wildly popular exhibitions he co-curated at the National Gallery.
Respected for his scholarly depth, Conisbee exuded such unrestrained excitement for the works he coveted that he once described opening crates of new paintings at the gallery as being "like Christmastime."
During a 1999 exhibition of the works of French painter Jean- Auguste-Dominique Ingres, in an interview in front of a portrait, Conisbee "began with her arms and shoulders and went to her decolletage, and by the time he got to her neck, you thought he was having a love affair with her," National Gallery spokeswoman Deborah Ziska said.
"He had a real joie de vivre," she said. "Whenever he was describing a work of art or taking people on a tour of a collection, he would talk with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye as if he had some wonderful secrets to divulge."
His passions for his popular area of art resonated with museum-goers. In 1998, nearly 500,000 people attended "Van Gogh's Van Goghs," a collection of 70 masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. When it moved to Los Angeles, 900,000 people turned out.
"Philip brought to the Gallery a wealth of knowledge of European art and a great enthusiasm for sharing his insights," Earl A. "Rusty" Powell III, the director of the National Gallery, said in a statement last week. Powell hired Conisbee twice, first at LACMA in 1988, and then at the National Gallery in 1993.
Charming and funny, the bespectacled, silver-maned Conisbee was known for friendships with curators throughout the world, as well as such contemporary artists as David Hockney.
Conisbee wrote widely about art in a number of books and publications such as Art in America magazine and the London-based Times Literary Supplement.
