New Daura Curator

The Georgia Museum of Art is pleased to announce the hiring of Lynn Edward Boland as Pierre Daura Curator of European Art. A formal press release will, of course, be distributed shortly. Boland specializes in 19th- and 20th-century European art, with a secondary focus in American contemporary art, and wrote his dissertation on the connections between modern European art and modern European music, specifically in the area of dissonance, the topic on which he lectured at the museum earlier this year, when he discussed the similarities between Arnold Schoenberg's atonal compositions and Wassily Kandinsky's abstract paintings.

Boland will receive his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in May (he defended in March) and start at the museum May 11. Boland received his MA from Texas as well, in art history, and his AB from the University of Georgia in the same subject. While an undergraduate in Athens, he interned at the museum in numerous departments, from membership to development, with work in prints and drawings as well.

Established at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2002 with a gift from Martha Randolph Daura in honor of her father, the Pierre Daura Center contains a collection of paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures by the Catalan-American artist Pierre Daura (1896-1976), who co-founded the important artists' group Cercle et Carré. The gift included the artist's archives, with important material relevant to modern art from the 1920s through the 1960s, and an endowment to support both the center and a Pierre Daura Curator of European Art. This gift facilitates and broadens the presentation and study of European art at the museum.

The Pierre Daura Center initiates and promotes the exhibition and study of the works of Pierre Daura and the contextualization of his oeuvre and career. The Pierre Daura Curator of European Art directs the Center as well as the museum's programming in European art: research, exhibitions, publications, and acquisitions. Primary among the curator's responsibilities is the study of the life and work of Pierre Daura. We look forward with great anticipation and enthusiasm to Boland's arrival here, upon which he will begin work on a major exhibition focusing on Cercle et Carré, tentatively scheduled for Fall 2011 once the museum reopens.