The Guggenheim Foundation revealed on Wednesday that its director, Thomas Krens, would be stepping down, bringing to an end an almost two-decade-long tenure as one of the most celebrated and criticized museum directors in the world.
Few museum heads are known outside the hallowed walls of their respective institutions, but perhaps it was the famously curved walls of Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim Museum building that inspired Krens to think outside the museum box. Part art historian, part businessman, Krens, 61, became director of the Guggenheim Foundation in 1988. The following year, the Guggenheim was invited by various Austrian government and cultural agencies to collaborate on a museum project designed by Hans Hollein in Salzburg. Krens later said, “The prospect of a Guggenheim in Salzburg was not immediately self-evident to us.” Though that project never materialized, he would soon embark on groundbreaking collaborations with other similar agencies, and commercial entities, to create a series of Guggenheim satellites worldwide, in the process becoming as famous as the architects he hired to design these show stopping new buildings.
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